Month: November 2016

Enlarge / Artist concept of the Space Launch System. (credit: NASA/MSFC)

With a new presidential administration promising to review its human spaceflight activities, NASA on Thursday continued to signal a willingness to consider alternatives to its exploration systems—the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and related ground systems developed at Kennedy Space Center to support their launch later this decade and in the 2020s.

In its latest request for information (RFI) released Thursday afternoon, NASA seeks solutions from industry and academia to maximize "the long term efficiency and sustainability" of its of exploration systems programs. Essentially, NASA wants ideas on how best to cut the production and operations costs for its SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which presently consume more than $3 billion annually in development costs. However, the RFI also offers respondents the opportunity to submit ideas about rockets and spacecraft that might compete with NASA's own vehicles for exploration funds.

Specifically, the document requests responses about: "Competing exploration services in the mid-2020s timeframe and beyond if the market demonstrates such services are available, reliable, and consistent with NASA architectural needs." Ars understands this to mean that if private competitors such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, or other companies produce less expensive rockets and spacecraft within the next five to seven years, NASA will consider using them in lieu of SLS and Orion.

Enlarge / The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you've been having touchscreen problems with your iPhone 6 Plus, Apple has a fix for you if you're willing to pay for it. The "iPhone 6 Plus Multi-Touch Repair Program" is for phones that are either having trouble registering touchscreen input or that are have flickering displays as a result of "being dropped multiple times on a hard surface and then incurring further stress on the device."

Unlike past iPhone repair programs—a list which includes the power button and battery in the iPhone 5 and the camera in the iPhone 6 Plus—Apple is charging a $149 service fee to replace iPhones affected by the problem. Even then, Apple says your phone needs to be "in working order" and can't have a cracked or broken screen. If you have previously paid for a repair related to these problems, Apple says that you can contact the company to be reimbursed for whatever you paid beyond $149.

Based on Apple's description of the problem, it sounds like this could be a fix for a problem that iFixit and independent iPhone repair shops brought to light a few months ago. Colorfully dubbed "Touch Disease," iFixit says that the problem is caused by touchscreen controller chips that can come loose from the logic board. The controllers in question were moved from the logic board into the display assembly in the iPhone 6S, which iFixit speculates is the reason why later variants of the iPhone 6 design aren't susceptible to the same problem.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 10: President Barack Obama talks with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)

Of all the hot-button issues chucked around during the Presidential election, healthcare landed as the top priority of Americans in a post-election Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday.

About 21 percent of the 1,782 Americans polled said that healthcare should be the primary focus of President-elect Trump’s first 100 days in office. Jobs came in as the second most pressing issue, selected by 16 percent. Immigration came in third, picked by 14 percent. The online poll, conducted from November 9 to 14, drew from all 50 states and had an accuracy of three percentage points.

Though the poll doesn’t reveal what Americans want changed about the country’s complex healthcare system, it may signal frustration with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), President Obama’s signature piece of healthcare legislation. Trump vowed during his campaign to quickly repeal and replace the law once in office. But since being elected, Trump has walked back that plan, saying he would consider preserving some Obamacare elements. Namely, he's gone on record as tentatively wanting to prevent health insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions and allowing children to stay on their parents’ plans until the age of 26.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

On Thursday afternoon, Tesla announced that its investors and SolarCity investors agreed to a $2.6 billion all-stock merger of the two companies. The decision passed with an 85 percent vote of approval.

SolarCity shareholders will receive 0.11 Tesla shares for every share of SolarCity stock they own.

The deal had been a topic of some controversy since Tesla announced the proposed in June. Investors were suspicious of Tesla adding more debt to its books and were uncertain why Tesla had to buy SolarCity. Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent the interim months convincing shareholders that the deal would be mutually beneficial and would create “cost synergies” for both companies—SolarCity panels would be able to be sold alongside Powerwall stationary storage batteries and Tesla vehicles at the same storefront, for example.

Enlarge / Smashed-up debris from the Chicxulub impact. (credit: ARae@ECORD_IODP)

When we look at the surface of other rocky planets, we see them pitted with the scars of violent impacts. Our own planet is not immune to these; Earth just heals better. Plate tectonics and an active atmosphere smooths over the inevitable nicks and dings. An academic side-effect of this resurfacing is that it is hard to study things like large impact craters here on the Earth.

Even though the primary force was downward, large impact craters actually sport a peak in the middle of the bowl. Really large craters get a raised peak ring instead. The basics here are understood: under the extreme conditions of a large impact, some of the rock in the center rebounds upward like the sploosh that follows the entry of a rock into a pond. But why does that singular peak turn into a raised ring in the biggest craters? That has been hard to figure out, and without examples of these craters to work with on the Earth, explanations have been difficult to test.

There is one huge impact crater with a peak ring here, though: the Chicxulub crater at the edge of the Yucatán Peninsula, left by the dinosaur-killing impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period. The Chicxulub crater is now mostly buried beneath the seafloor and hundreds of meters of limestone. But it was targeted for a major international drilling effort earlier this year, and the first study from that effort (written by a large team led by Imperial College London’s Joanna Morgan) tests explanations for the crater’s peak ring.

Enlarge / Like those glaciers? Here's how to keep them.

The stated goal of recent international climate negotiations include keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above preindustrial conditions. The Paris climate agreement included emissions limits that everyone recognized would be insufficient to meet that goal, but it was meant to get all countries on the path of controlling their emissions and set the stage for a progressive tightening of standards over time.

Talks going on in Marrakech are the first to take place after the Paris agreement went into force, and the US chose them as the stage to reveal just how much tighter its limits could be. And even as Donald Trump is preparing to roll back progress on emissions, the Obama Administration described plans for cutting carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

The report notes the US has now severely weakened the link between economic growth and carbon emissions. Over the last seven years, the economy is up by 10 percent, while energy-driven emissions are down by nine. It also argues that placing ambitious limits on future emissions is the best strategy for further economic growth: "Pursuing high-carbon strategies (or business as usual) will lead to large and possibly catastrophic damages to the future US and global economies." Starting sooner rather than later, the US argues, will help us avoid sudden economic jolts and the need to retire assets before the end of their useful lifetime.

It took nearly 10 years, but authorities have finally targeted and taken down What.cd, which had risen to become the Internet's largest invite-only, music-trading torrent site.

The news was confirmed by the tracker's official Twitter account on Thursday via two posts: "We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Olena_T)

SpaceX has detailed ambitious plans to bring fast Internet access to the entire world with a new satellite system that offers greater speeds and lower latency than existing satellite networks.

The private spacecraft company founded by CEO Elon Musk filed an application Tuesday for satellite space station authorizations with the US Federal Communications Commission. SpaceX recently said that its satellite service’s commercial availability date has not yet been determined, but the application’s technical description mentioned 2019 as a possible time for launching satellites into orbit.

SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 satellites into low-Earth orbits, with altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of 22,000 miles.