Month: September 2016

A schematic showing the Tiangong-2 space station, along with its launch vehicle and the crewed spacecraft that will visit it later this year. (credit: Xinhua)

China will take its next step toward a large space station on Thursday, when it intends to launch the Tiangong-2 laboratory into orbit. The 8.5-ton, 10.4-meter-long facility will launch from the Jiuquan launch center in the Gobi Desert, aboard a Long March 2-F rocket. The launch is set for 10:04am ET (15:04pm BST) Thursday, and live video may be available at this link.

This space station, "Heavenly Palace 2," will be China's second after it launched the similarly sized Tiangong-1 laboratory in 2011. Following this week's launch, China plans to send two taikonauts to Tiangong-2 in four to six weeks aboard a Shenzhou-11 spacecraft. They will live there for about a month, testing out the lab's life support systems and performing scientific research. According to China's official news service, Xinhua, those experiments will involve areas of medicine, physics, and biology, as well as quantum key transmission, space atomic clock, and solar storm research.

As part of its robust space plan, China intends to scale up to a full-size space station during the next decade. To help lay the groundwork for that station, Chinese space officials have said they will launch the country's first robotic resupply mission, Tianzhou-1 ("Heavenly vessel"), in 2017, to the Tiangong-2 lab. The larger, modular station China is planning may have a mass of about 60 tons. That would be considerably larger than the Tiangdong laboratories but still moderately sized compared to the 420-ton International Space Station.

For many science journalists, a week would not be complete without one or more trips to the Eurekalert website. Put together by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Eurekalert is one-stop-shopping for press releases about the latest scientific findings, aggregating material provided by scientific journals, research institutions, and more.

If you're an established science journalist, you can also sign up for access to news before it's news. Log in with the right credentials, and you can see press releases and, in many cases, entire research papers up to a week before they're unleashed on the public. You just have to agree to never publish anything about the work until a specific date and time—the information is under an embargo until then.

Late Tuesday night, however, access to the site vanished, replaced by a notice that the site had been hacked and that the hackers had started leaking embargoed press releases. Only two releases made it out before access was pulled, and if those are anything to go on, the hackers have absolutely no sense of what makes for cutting-edge science.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

After trying something new with the Blaze pseudo-smartwatch, Fitbit's most recent endeavor is an upgrade to one of its most popular devices. The Charge 2 has already booted the Charge HR from Fitbit's website, and rightly so since it's essentially a refined version of the original tracker. Launched with the new style-conscious Flex 2, the $150 Charge 2 lies smack in the middle of Fitbit's family in terms of price and features. It does everything the Charge HR did, with a larger display and new swappable band options, and it can now also track estimated VO2 max and guide you through interval training exercises. But are those new features enough to persuade current Charge HR users to upgrade? Should new users give Fitbit a try with this device?

Design: Familiar, with more choices

With its 1.5-inch OLED display and attached band, the Charge 2 looks much like a stretched-out Fitbit Alta. Unlike the Charge HR, the Charge 2 has interchangeable bands so you can detach both sides of the band from the center module and replace them with differently colored and textured options. While it doesn't have the ostentatious jewelry options that the Flex 2 has, you can get the Charge 2 in black, purple, blue, and teal, as well as two "special edition" options, one with rose gold accents on the module and a lavender band and one with black module accents and a black textured band.

Enlarge / A LinkNYC user making a phone call on the kiosk's tablet. (credit: LinkNYC)

The operators of free Internet kiosks in New York City plan to disable Web browsing on publicly available tablets after reports of "lewd acts," such as people watching porn and masturbating.

LinkNYC kiosks have been replacing New York pay phones, offering free Wi-Fi access and a tablet that can be used by anyone who doesn't have their own mobile device. But LinkNYC announced today that it "will be removing Web browsing on all Link tablets while we work with the City and community to explore potential solutions, like time limits."

The tablets will still offer free phone calls, maps, and access to emergency services. New Yorkers can also continue to connect their own devices to LinkNYC Wi-Fi hotspots. But browsing on the publicly accessible tablets is being restricted after some disturbing reports.

Add former Secretary of State Colin Powell to the list of high-ranking Washington insiders whose leaked e-mails are rankling their peers with just weeks to go before the US presidential election.

DC Leaks, a site that researchers at security firm ThreatConnect have linked to the Russian government, has published 26 months of Powell's e-mails, spanning from June 2014 to last month, news organizations reported Wednesday. The trove, which contains highly candid comments lambasting presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, are part of a new batch that's separate from Powell e-mails leaked a few years ago. Powell aides reportedly confirmed the new compromise, telling The New York Times that the leaked messages "are his e-mails."

In the e-mails, Powell describes Trump as a "national disgrace" and portrays the candidate as someone who is unfit to be president.

Pluto's moon Charon (colors enhanced). (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

Last year’s close-up photos of Pluto from the New Horizons probe were a revelation, but don’t forget the dwarf planet’s proportionally sizable moon Charon. The surface of that world presented its own puzzles of geology and history.

For starters, Charon sported a dark and dusty red cap at its illuminated northern pole. A later image taken looking back at the moon's dark southern pole, dimly lit by “Pluto-shine,” showed that the pole was also darker—perhaps due to a similar reddish cap. The early hypothesis was that, similar to dark regions of Pluto’s surface, this cap was a thin residue that solid organic compounds formed from reactions of gases catalyzed by incoming solar radiation and charged particles.

There's just one problem with this idea: Pluto is the one with the gases, not Charon…