Month: January 2016

(credit: Flickr)

A combination of holiday sales and the launch of Windows 10 weren't enough to slow the decline of PC sales, which have fallen to their lowest levels since 2007. Shipments declined by as much as 10.6 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to analyst firm IDC. Fellow analyst Gartner had similarly dire numbers to share: 75.7 million PCs shipped for the quarter, down 8.3 percent on 2014.

Overall sales for the year were just as bad, with IDC estimating shipments fell 10.4 percent to 276.2 million units, and Gartner pushing the slightly less terrifying number of 299.6 million units for an 8 percent fall.

The only manufacturer to show any growth for the year was—you guessed it—Apple, which managed to grow 2.8 percent according to IDC and 5.8 percent according to Gartner. Everyone else's sales shrunk, although Lenovo—the number one PC vendor worldwide—at least managed a mere 3.6 percent fall compared to the 6 percent-or-larger drops seen by HP, Dell, Asus, and Acer.

Ron Bastien holds an aerogel tile that flew into the tail of a comet, captured dust particles, and survived to tell the tale. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

HOUSTON, Tex.—Building 31 on the campus of Johnson Space Center lacks the Tower of London’s majesty and history. No Queen’s Guard stand outside. But this drab, 1960s-era building is nonetheless where NASA keeps the crown jewels of its exploration program. Inside various clean rooms, curators watch over meteorites from Mars and the asteroid belt, cosmic dust, samples of the solar wind, comet particles, and, of course, hundreds of kilograms of Moon rocks.

In late December, Ars spent a day visiting these collections, including the rarely accessed Genesis Lab. While our request for a Moon rock keepsake was sadly rebuffed, we nonetheless got a VIP tour of every astromaterial NASA has collected from other bodies in the Solar System and beyond. With Senior Space Editor Eric Berger providing the words and Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson capturing the photos, we can now offer an unprecedented look at how NASA protects its rarest and most valuable off-world samples.

Antarctic meteorites

To start, we wanted to see the famous Mars rock.

We take a BMW 7 Series for a short drive to play with its gesture control. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

BMW's UI designers evidently believe gestures are the future. The i Vision Future Interaction concept we showed you Monday is built around gesture control, as is a remote parking system that BMW is developing for the i3. (Take that, Tesla Model S!) But neither of those are production-ready, unlike the system in the 7 Series.

A DARPA artist's rendering of the Northrop Grumman concept for TERN, a "tail-sitter" drone that takes off and lands vertically on smaller ships' flight decks. It could fill a major gap in the capabilities of the Littoral Combat Ship.

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Back in the 1950s, the US Navy was looking for a way to give destroyers and frigates an effective way to take on enemy air attacks—a sort of "first responder" aircraft that could take to the skies to hold off hostile aircraft until carrier-based fighters arrived and give those ships the ability to strike over the horizon at enemy ships. The answer they came up with was a "tail-sitter" propeller fighter aircraft that took off like a helicopter and transitioned into winged flight.

While several experimental aircraft were developed, including the General Dynamics Corvair XFY-1 "Pogo" and the Lockheed XFV-1 (also known as the "Salmon"), these aircraft with counter-rotating propellers were never deployed—mostly because they couldn't match the airspeed of the jet aircraft they would likely face in combat, and the Navy was afraid pilots wouldn't be able to handle the complexities of landing the things on a small, pitching deck. The Navy instead focused on missile defenses and carrier battle group tactics, and they depended on helicopters to provide smaller ships with the ability to reach out further—to strike at submarines, provide gun spotting, and (with the MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter) shoot up less robustly-defended targets on the ground and on the sea.