Month: August 2016

Nelson Piquet Jr takes me for a ride in his Global Rallycross Ford Fiesta. (video link)

WASHINGTON, DC—Red Bull Global Rallycross (GRC) paid its annual visit to the nation's capital this past weekend. As a form of racing, rallycross has been doing something few other series have managed in recent years—it's growing new fans and appealing to kids who, by and large, are more interested in getting the latest phone than a driver's license. With that in mind, we spent a couple of days at RFK Stadium watching the action and talking to some of the drivers to find out what makes this flavor of the sport so successful.

A brief primer: the cars all start life as regular production cars—Volkswagen Beetles, Ford Fiestas, and so on. They're eventually stripped down and highly modified. Highly turbocharged two-liter engines pump out more than 600hp, driving all four wheels. The tracks are a mix of tarmac and gravel and include dramatic jump over a dirt ramp. And the races are fast and furious, a series of short heats with plenty of opportunity for door-banging and paint-trading.

(credit: Didi Chuxing)

Uber and its primary Chinese on-demand car service rival, Didi Chuxing, have finally buried the hatchet in a landmark deal.

The California startup has been reportedly spending at least $1 billion per year to try to dominate the massive Chinese market, while Didi Chuxing has spent similar amounts of money trying to stave off its American rival.

According to a Monday press release, the Chinese startup will obtain "all assets of UberChina" for operation on the mainland. Earlier this year, Apple invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update is out this week, and it offers an interesting mobile feature aimed not at Windows Phone, but at Android: mirrored Android notifications. The idea is that when a notification pops up on your Android phone, it should also pop up on your Windows PC, allowing you to then deal with your notifications remotely on the PC. For now most of the features come with a well-deserved "beta" tag, but it's worth a look to see where this feature is and how much more work needs to be done.

Beaming Android notifications to your PC isn't a new idea—third-party apps like Pushbullet and AirDroid can already do it, but it's still interesting that Microsoft has introduced its own first-party implementation (it's also a tacit admission that Microsoft's own mobile platform is quickly fading). The way all these services work is to basically "become a really big smartwatch." The services plug in to all of the remote notification capabilities Google originally introduced for Android Wear, but they're available to any app that is granted the proper permissions. We'd expect our ideal notification service to be able to do everything Android Wear can do with a notification, just inside of a PC app instead of a watch.

In Android 4.3, Google added a Notification API, which can mirror the entire notification panel to another device. Apps can sign up to be a Notification Listener Service, which allows the remote app to dismiss notifications on the phone and to remotely press the notification action buttons. These are things like "Archive" or "Delete" for e-mails and "Reply" for e-mails, IMs, and SMSes. The transportation of these notifications all happens at the OS level and requires no developer support.

Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO and the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, in an interview on September 29, 2015. (Photo by David Orrell/CNBC/NBCU, Photo Bank via Getty Images.) (credit: Getty Images | CNBC)

Amid intense scrutiny, lawsuits, harsh federal sanctions, and criminal probes, Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes will finally present data on her struggling company’s blood testing technology.

She will present today at 4:30pm in a special session of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s annual conference, being held this year in Philadelphia.

The presentation couldn’t come at a more dire time for the company, which has seen a staggering number of setbacks in recent months. The most prominent of those include federal regulators banning Holmes from the clinical blood testing business for at least two years and shuttering one of the company’s labs. Theranos has seen its valuation drop from $9 billion to around $800 million. Its commercial partner, Walgreens, also backed out of its contract and shut down 40 of the companies' joint “wellness centers.”

(credit: Getty Images | aledettaale)

Google Fiber started examining Nashville, Tennessee, for a possible deployment more than two and a half years ago, it confirmed plans to build in January 2015, and it started serving a few apartment and condominium buildings in the city in April of this year. But further progress is being slowed in part by difficulties obtaining access to utility poles, and legislation designed to solve the problem is being resisted by incumbents AT&T and Comcast.

Nashville Scene has a thorough article on the controversy, with quotes from the major players. Google Fiber needs access to thousands of telephone poles and must cooperate with the area's other Internet providers to install their wires. Most of the poles are owned by Nashville Electric Service, the local utility, while AT&T is the second biggest owner of utility poles in the city.

When Google notifies the owner that it needs access to a pole, the owner "will then notify each telecom company that it needs to send a crew to the pole—one after another—to move their equipment and accommodate the new party," Nashville Scene wrote. "The process can take months, even if contractually mandated time frames are followed. Google Fiber officials and operatives working on their behalf suggest that’s not always the case."

For most of the last five years, NASA’s space launch system has been largely a PowerPoint rocket, consisting of designs on computers and disparate hardware in various stages of development across the United States. But now the massive SLS rocket is starting to come together, and senior NASA managers are optimistic about its future.

“This is an amazing period of time in US spaceflight,” Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, said last week during a meeting of the agency’s advisory council. “I’m starting to see a real shift from just kind of hardware development to almost a flight cadence. The volume of work is just amazing.” He added that with “roughly” two years to go before the first launch of SLS and the Orion spacecraft, the agency is beginning to test flight hardware.

Barring further delays, the maiden launch of SLS will occur between September and November 2018. Until now NASA has been mostly designing and building individual components of the massive rocket, which will have an initial capability to heft 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit but may eventually grow into a 130-ton rocket. However, now the focus is turning toward testing that hardware and, later next year and in 2018, beginning to integrate it for launch.

Spread it with fire (credit: USDA)

Tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial infection, is currently the most deadly single pathogen in the world. How did this bacterium become a global scourge? A recent paper published in PNAS posits that when early humans began to utilize fires, they generated conditions ideal for the emergence of TB. If this hypothesis is correct, it could have serious implications for the study of emergent infectious diseases and how they interact with cultural and technological advances.

Evolutionary data, including whole genome sequencing, suggests that TB first became a human pathogen tens of thousands of years ago during the Neolithic period on the continent of Africa. It’s thought to have come from land mammals (especially bovines). There is also data suggesting that, in the Americas, TB hopped into infected humans from sea mammals. For the purposes of this paper, however, the authors chose to focus on the Africa-based ancestors of modern TB.

For an environmental pathogen to become an endemic human disease, it must first undergo a series of profound evolutionary transformations. The pathogen must adapt to the biological environment of their human hosts and must be able to readily move among them. The authors of the new paper discuss ways in which fire may have promoted these necessary transformations.