Month: March 2016

Scott Kelly is all smiles after landing in Kazakhstan earlier this month. (credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA)

Just 10 days after landing safely back on Earth, astronaut Scott Kelly has announced he will retire from NASA at the beginning of April. Kelly has been with the space agency since 1996, and he has flown two shuttle missions in addition to serving two stints aboard the International Space Station.

Kelly holds duration records for both the longest US spaceflight, 340 days, as well as most cumulative time in space by a NASA astronaut, 520 days. He hopes those records are fleeting, however. “Records are meant to be broken,” Kelly said Friday. “I am looking forward to when these records in space are surpassed.”

Although he is retiring from NASA, Kelly will continue to participate in the follow-up research that will monitor his health after he returned from space, including regular medical check-ups at Johnson Space Center, MRIs, blood draws, and other procedures. The goal is to understand how his body changed during the long duration flight so that NASA can better mitigate against the health hazards posed by long spaceflights.

(credit: US DHHS)

Genetically engineered mosquitoes that have been under regulatory review for the past five years have passed one of the last remaining hurdles to gain approval for release in a field trial, the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday.

Oxitec’s OX513A Aedes aegypti mosquito would pose no significant threat to the environment or to people in Key Haven, a community in the Florida Keys where the company proposed the trial, the agency announced in a preliminary finding. The initial judgment of “no impact” from the environmental assessment will be followed up by a 30-day window for public comments. Then, the FDA will make a final decision. If the agency confirms the preliminary green light, the mosquitoes could be released shortly after.

“We look forward to this proposed trial and the potential to protect people from Aedes aegypti and the diseases it spreads,” Oxitec’s Chief Executive Officer Hadyn Parry said in a statement.

Our view from press row. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

AUSTIN, Texas—In his keynote address to the 2016 South By Southwest conference, President Barack Obama responded directly to a question about cybersecurity in light of the ongoing Apple v. FBI case with answers that appeared to favor the American government's current position. President Obama even called out Edward Snowden's disclosure of classified documents in 2013.

When asked by moderator and Texas Tribune founder Evan Smith where he came down on the question of digital-device privacy versus national security, President Obama began his response by saying, "I can't comment on that specific case." Yet the President's lengthy response revolved around that case's core issues of encryption to a point that it appeared unmistakably related.

President Obama began his response by reminding the audience that law enforcement agencies can obtain a warrant, show up on a citizen's doorstep, and "rifle through your underwear to see if there's evidence of wrongdoing"—and they've been able to do so well before smartphones were invented.

A Dell laptop running Ubuntu. (credit: Dell)

We really liked the updated Skylake-powered Dell XPS 13, and its bigger brother, the XPS 15, was also pretty great.

But if you're looking at those machines and thinking "well the hardware is nice, I just wish they came with Linux," Dell has some good news. The company's "Developer Edition" program has just been updated to include the newest Skylake systems.

The Developer Edition XPS 13s are slightly different from the Windows versions, as they use Intel Wi-Fi adaptors (instead of Dell-branded parts). Otherwise little has changed, save for coming with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS instead of Windows 10. The range of configurations available is also rather narrower. Currently, only the i7 processor is available with the beautiful 3200×1800 touch display. This can be had with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD, or 16GB RAM and 512GB or 1TB of SSD. Dell says that later on an i5 model with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and the 1920×1080 non-touch display will be available.

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is touting several improvements in its already industry-leading forecast model. (credit: ECMWF)

The European forecast model already outperforms all of the world’s other global forecasting systems, including the North American GFS model. The most overt demonstration of the European model’s superiority came in the week before Hurricane Sandy’s devastating landfall in 2012. Out of more than a dozen computer forecasts, only it showed the storm veering along a path toward the East Coast of the United States instead of staying harmlessly out to sea.

Now the world’s best forecast model is getting better, and not just by a little bit. An upgrade that went live this week provides dramatic improvements to the resolution of the model, both for its deterministic forecast as well as the ensemble model runs that are used for forecasting conditions a week or more in the future. “What the European modeling community is doing is just amazing,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell, told Ars. “This is the golden age of weather forecasters. It’s an absolute wonder of computer modeling technology.”

Maue lives and breathes computer forecast models every day when he converts the raw output from global forecasting entities, including the meteorological agencies of Europe, Canada, Japan, China, Brazil, and the United States, into graphics that depict weather conditions around the world. Many of the weather maps shared on social media sites bear the Weather Bell imprint.

(credit: cristian)

When it comes to cholesterol, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

High-density lipoprotein (HDL), the molecular packages that scavenge excess amounts of cholesterol from around the body and ferry it to the liver where it gets broken down, has long been considered “good” cholesterol. That’s in contrast to the “bad” low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol packages that deliver the waxy substance throughout the body where it’s used for the production of cellular products, such as membranes and hormones. Too much LDL—or not enough HDL—and cholesterol can end up getting stockpiled along blood vessels, which hampers blood flow and leads to coronary heart disease.

Thus, heart disease prevention efforts have largely revolved around lowering LDL and raising HDL. However, clinical trials and animal experiments that raise HDL levels have produced mixed results. And in a new study, researchers find that having naturally high levels of HDL can actually be bad.

Can you turn a Dyson vacuum cleaner into an improvised threat to US troops? DARPA may pay you to find out. (credit: Bethesda Softworks)

In an effort to understand the kinds of improvised weapons, devices, and systems that could be used against US forces in the field today, the Defense Research Projects Agency's Defense Science Office is preparing for an alternative sort of "improv" performance. DARPA is inviting researchers, developers, and hardware-hacking hobbyists to join in, and the goal of the planned jam session is to discover ways that off-the-shelf commercial technology could be modified to be used against the military by its adversaries.

The US military has dealt with a wide range of improvised weapons and tools in the hands of adversaries over the past decade, including cell phone activated improvised explosives, off-the-shelf software used to intercept drone video feeds, and USB drives laden with malware that ran rampant on computer networks in Afghanistan. Today there's growing concern about how commercial and consumer drone and robotics technology, Internet-of-Things devices, and other burgeoning technology could be used to spy on, harass, impede, or even kill members of the military.

IEDs made from artillery shells captured in Baghdad are the last generation of improvised threats. DARPA wants to know what the next is. (credit: US Army)

So today, DARPA officially unveiled Improv—a program that will fund "innovative research proposals for prototype products and systems that have the potential to threaten current military operations, equipment, or personnel and are assembled primarily from commercially available technology," according to the announcement.