Month: February 2016

The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SES-9 satellite is ready to go. (credit: SpaceX)

Are you ready for round two? On Wednesday, SpaceX delayed the launch of a commercial communications satellite, SES-9, to a geostationary transfer orbit out of an abundance of caution. The company said it wanted to ensure that liquid oxygen temperatures are as cold as possible to maximize performance of the vehicle. So it's going to try the launch today at 6:46pm ET. Weather is better as well, with an 80 percent chance of "go" conditions when the launch window opens.

As with other recent launches, SpaceX will try yet again to fly its booster back to an automated ship in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. However, because this is a high orbit (about 35,000km above the equator) and will require a heavy vehicle with more fuel and more speed, returning safely back to Earth is far from a sure thing. Additionally, at 5,300kg, this is the heaviest payload SpaceX has attempted to deliver to a geostationary orbit.

Still, the company says it will make another attempt at a historic first, landing an orbital rocket on a sea-based platform. "The first stage of the Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the 'Of Course I Still Love You' droneship," SpaceX said in its press kit. "Given this mission’s unique GTO profile, a successful landing is not expected."

Enlarge / Apple argues that it would take an unreasonable amount of effort to code "Government OS" for the feds. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's official legal response to the ongoing encryption dustup between it and the US government was released earlier today, and in it Apple makes many of the same arguments it has made since CEO Tim Cook posted his first letter to customers on the matter last week. But it goes into greater detail on several points, and it includes a section on the specific resources Apple would need to devote to writing the so-called "Government OS" update that would allow investigators to unlock the iPhone 5C in the San Bernardino case.

To recap, Apple says the court order is asking it to do three things: to disable the optional iOS feature that will erase a device after 10 incorrect passcode attempts; to allow passcodes to be entered rapidly and electronically so that investigators can unlock the device via brute force; and to remove the software-imposed time delays between incorrect passcode attempts. This software "simply does not exist today," and Apple says that creating it would "require that Apple write new code" rather than simply disabling features that are already there.

For starters, Apple estimates it would take between six and ten Apple engineers between two and four weeks to design, code, validate, and deploy the software update. "Members of the team would include engineers from Apple’s core operating system group, a quality assurance engineer, a project manager, and either a document writer or a tool writer," according to Apple's motion.

(credit: Sean Gallagher)

At its Build developer conference last year, Microsoft announced four "bridges" designed to help developers bring applications into the Windows Store. Three of these—for porting Web, Win32, and iOS applications to Windows (codenamed "Westminster," "Centennial," and "Islandwood," respectively)—are still around. But the company confirmed on Thursday that the fourth bridge, Astoria, intended to help bring Android apps to Windows, is no longer in development.

Early builds of Windows 10 Mobile included a version of Astoria, which essentially did exactly what it was supposed to: it enabled Android apps to run on Windows phones. But last November, the Android layer was quietly removed, with Microsoft saying that it was "not ready yet."

Thursday's announcement suggests that it's never going to be ready. The company writes, rather peculiarly, that choosing between Astoria and Islandwood "could be confusing" and that having two systems for porting non-Windows applications was "unnecessary." Accordingly, Islandwood is the only bridge, and Astoria is being abandoned.

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (red) colonizing the small intestine (intestinal epithelial cells are blue and the mucus layer is green) of an antibiotic-treated mouse. (credit: Molecular Cytology Facility at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)

When it comes to the human body’s trillions of microbial inhabitants, sorting the good from the bad is critical. Antibiotics are powerful weapons for obliterating nasty, disease-causing germs, but they can also take out microbial chums as collateral damage. The loss of those invisible allies can have long-term, cascading health effects, including opening opportunities for invasions by enemy microbes, such as Clostridium difficile and Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE).

Fixing such a culled, out-of-whack microbial community in the human body—a condition called dysbiosis—is hard. Scientists still don’t have a firm hold on the recipe for a “healthy” microbiome, let alone know how to mend one that appears imbalanced. The closest researchers have come to such a feat is with the use of fecal transplants to restore gut communities—essentially a wholesale replacement of a wrecked microbial community with a functional one.

But now researchers may be on to a way to prevent dysbiosis in the first place.

Actin fibers, labeled in green, moving across a collection of myosin. (credit: Nicolau lab, McGill University)

Quantum computers get a lot of people excited because they solve problems in a manner that's fundamentally different from existing hardware. A certain class of mathematical problems, called NP-complete, can seemingly only be solved by exploring every possible solution, which conventional computers have to do one at a time. Quantum computers, by contrast, explore all possible solutions simultaneously, and so these can provide answers relatively rapidly.

This isn't just an intellectual curiosity; encryption schemes rely on it being too computationally challenging to decrypt a message.

But as you may have noticed, we don't yet have quantum computers, and the technical hurdles between us and them remain substantial. An international team recently decided to try a different approach, using biology to explore a large solution space in parallel. While their computational machine is limited, the basic approach works, and it's 10,000 times more energy-efficient than traditional computers.