Month: July 2016

Update, 7/17 (10:45p ET): SpaceX will livestream its launch attempt (above) this evening at 12:45a ET. Our original story from 7/15 appears below.

One of the most persistent criticisms of SpaceX has been the rocket company's inability to meet its launch commitments. Talk to any of Elon Musk's competitors in the rocket and spacecraft business, and they will all say the same thing—SpaceX isn't meeting the demands of its customers. Too much pizzazz, too little substance, and so on.

To some extent, this jealousy-tinged criticism is valid. In 2014, the company had about a dozen missions on its books, and it launched six times. Last year the company had as many as 17 launches planned, but an accident on June 28, 2015 forced it to stand down for nearly the entire second half of the year. SpaceX ended up making six successful launches in 2015. However, this year the company is off to a good start with six successful missions completed so far and a seventh launch planned for 12:45am ET Monday (5:45am BST) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

This flight of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket seeks to deliver the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station with its payload of 1.7 tons of supplies as well as an International Docking Adapter. This adapter will allow crewed versions of the Dragon Spacecraft and Boeing's Starliner to perform automated rendezvous and docking maneuvers with the station beginning in late 2017 or early 2018.

The fabled SNES-CD peripheral may have never actually made it to market in the mid-'90s as planned. But that hasn't stopped homebrew developers from utilizing the magic of emulation to make software designed to run on the near-mythical "Nintendo PlayStation."

It's been a long and weird road to get to this surprising point in emulation history. After a seemingly one-of-a-kind "SFX-100" prototype of the SNES-CD was found and disassembled last year, an apparent working version of the system's BIOS found its way to the Internet in March.

Armed with that BIOS file (and some additional sleuthing on components, memory, and IO mapping for the CD-ROM add-on), the latest version of low-level SNES emulator no$sns is actually able to simulate how games would have run on the SNES-CD prototype.

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast's Internet Essentials program that provides $10-per-month Internet service to low-income families has been expanded to make about 1.3 million additional households eligible.

Comcast created Internet Essentials in order to secure approval of its acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011 and has decided to continue it indefinitely even though the requirement expired in 2014. Comcast says the 10Mbps plan has connected more than 600,000 low-income families since 2011, for a total of 2.4 million adults and children, and provided 47,000 subsidized computers for less than $150 each.

Advocates for the poor have complained that the Internet Essentials service is too hard to sign up for, in part because of problems with the application process but also because it's usually only available to families with kids in school. That latter issue is what Comcast addressed today, announcing that "adults without a child eligible for the National School Lunch Program will be eligible to apply for Internet Essentials." Previously, pilot programs gave access to some low-income seniors and low-income community college students, but this is the first time that Internet Essentials will be available to adults without children nationwide.

(credit: Chuck Grimmett)

There may finally be some clarity to the long hazy debate on exactly how much marijuana is in an average, pre-rolled joint. The answer, according to two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, is 0.32 grams.

That number is far lower than some reports, which have been as high as a gram. But the number generally falls within the range of the many estimates that have come before it, which is typically between 0.30 and 0.75 grams.

Nailing down the average amount in a pre-rolled joint may not seem all that important to some, as many users now use vaporizers. But Penn drug policy expert Greg Ridgeway, one of the researchers behind the new estimate, argues it is. "It turns out to be a critical number in estimating how much marijuana is being consumed [nationwide], how much drug-trafficking organizations are putting on the market, and how much states might expect in revenue post-legalization," he said in a news release.

(credit: Universal Pictures)

It’s a common perception that less-educated people have more children. The idea causes much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over the possibility that human populations might become stupider over the course of generations. But it’s actually pretty difficult to confirm whether there really is a reproductive trend that would change the genetic makeup of the human population overall.

Jonathan Beauchamp, a “genoeconomist” at Harvard, is interested in questions at the intersection of genetics and economics. He published a paper in PNAS this week that provides some of the first evidence of evolution at the genetic level in a reasonably contemporary human population. One of his main findings is slight evolutionary selection for lower education—but it’s really slight, just 1.5 months less of education per generation. Given that the last century has seen vastly increased education across the globe, and around two years extra per generation in the same time period as Beauchamp’s study, this genetic selection is easily outweighed by cultural factors.

There are other important caveats to the finding, most notably that Beauchamp only looks at a very small segment of the global population: US citizens of European descent, born between 1931 and 1953. This means that we can’t generalize the results to, say, China or Ghana, or even US citizens of non-European descent.