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Enlarge / SpaceX landed its latest booster on August 13, after the JCSAT-16 mission. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX has been running out of room in its facilities in Florida as it lands rockets by sea and air, so it would like to begin reusing some of these first-stage Falcon boosters as soon as possible. The first step was finding a customer, and now SpaceX has done that. The Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES said Tuesday that it intends to launch a geostationary satellite, SES-10, on a reusable rocket in the fourth quarter of this year.

“Having been the first commercial satellite operator to launch with SpaceX back in 2013, we are excited to once again be the first customer to launch on SpaceX's first ever mission using a flight-proven rocket," said Martin Halliwell, Chief Technology Officer at SES. "We believe reusable rockets will open up a new era of spaceflight and make access to space more efficient in terms of cost and manifest management."

SpaceX has not yet specified how much it will charge for launch services on one of its flown boosters, but industry officials anticipate about a 30 percent discount on SpaceX's regular price of $62 million for a Falcon 9 launch. The company has not shared how much it is spending to refurbish and reuse a Falcon 9 stage, nor has it offered much public information about the extent to which the vehicle's engines have had to be tested and prepared for a second flight.

Enlarge / A virtual baby identical to those used in the study (credit: Australian Science Media Centre)

Babies can be a drag. Their utter helplessness and disappointing lack of communication skills often leaves new parents sleep-deprived and playing frantic guessing games amid ear-piercing cries (mostly from the baby). Such exhausting pains of parenthood should be enough to deter any unprepared teen from getting frisky too early—or so the makers of an infant simulator called “Baby Think It Over” seemed to think. But those makers may have their own reconsidering to do.

The life-like dolls are needy and a bit creepy to boot, but completely lousy at deterring teens from getting pregnant, according to the first randomized, controlled trial on the popular sex education tool. In fact, the study, involving more than 2,800 Australian girls between the ages of 13 and 15, actually hinted that the dolls may increase the risk of teen pregnancy.

Of the 1,267 teens that had to care for, burp, change, and feed the robot babies over a weekend, 17 percent (or 210 girls) had at least one pregnancy by the age of 20. That’s a slight jump from pregnancy rate of the 1,567 girls in the control group, who received a standard school curriculum on sex education and parenting. Their pregnancy rate was just 11 percent (or 168 girls).

Intel’s tick-tock model may be dead, but the PC industry still demands new hardware every year. Many PC models are refreshed once a year or so, and that means that the PC makers need new stuff to put into those computers whether or not the laws of physics want to comply.

Enter “Kaby Lake,” the first of Intel’s post-tick-tock processor architectures. Kaby (rhymes with baby, named for a lake in Canada) first appeared on Intel’s public roadmaps in mid-2015 when the company realized that Cannonlake and its attendant 10nm manufacturing process wouldn’t be ready in time. No major architecture has changed, and Intel is still using a tweaked version of its 14nm manufacturing process, so most changes are relatively minor and built to serve a particular market niche.

As usual, Intel is releasing the Kaby Lake processors in waves. Today, we’re getting dual-core low-voltage processors, the kind you’d find in thin-and-light consumer laptops. The first Kaby systems are slated to ship in September, and you’ll see lots of new laptops at IFA next week. Desktop CPUs and other higher-performance chips, including those with Intel Iris GPUs, will be announced in January around CES.

Enlarge / VMware Fusion 8.5 for Mac, with tab support. (credit: VMware)

Today, VMware announced upgrades to its desktop virtualization products for Windows, Mac, and Linux. But this time existing users won't have to pay for the new software.

VMware and its rival Parallels have been charging for upgrades every year, and last year both companies required users to upgrade if they wanted VMWare and Parallels to fully support Windows 10. But none of the operating system changes this year are likely to break anything in last year’s virtualization software. This makes it hard to convince customers that they should pay again.

VMware has heard complaints from customers about the yearly paid upgrades. Customers say, “ah, geez, you’re going to charge me to upgrade every year because you added OS support," according to VMware Product Line Marketing Manager Michael Roy. “We hear that loud and clear,” Roy told Ars.