Month: January 2017

SpaceX

On Saturday SpaceX triumphantly returned to flight after an accident last September, launching 10 Iridium satellites into an orbit 625km above the Earth's surface. As a bonus, the company also demonstrated its increasing mastery of rocket landings by bringing the first stage booster back to a drone ship off the California coast. SpaceX has now successfully landed seven rockets back on Earth.

This flight was essential for SpaceX because the Falcon 9 rocket lies at the core of every aspect of SpaceX's business. Mission success means that the company can now move forward with its lofty ambitions for the year 2017, which include a long list of tasks to ensure a bright future for the rocket company in Hawthorne, California. Here's a look at the company's to-do list:

DETROIT—One of the home team, Ford had a few things to announce at this year's North American International Auto Show. Its best-seller, the F-150 truck, got a mid-life refresh, and the company announced that it's finally reintroducing the smaller Ranger truck to the US in a couple of years. The Bronco SUV will be reborn, too, a year after that.

But some of the more interesting developments at the Blue Oval have been underway for a while now, as the company grows beyond car making into that ever-present buzzword, "mobility." Ford is working on self-driving technology, a range of plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles, and ride-hailing services. It's even found time to make a Le Mans-winning supercar. We sat down with Raj Nair, Ford's Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Product Development, to find out a bit more about those different programs and how Ford's business is changing:

We sit down with Ford's Raj Nair at NAIAS. (video link)

(credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO))

A new paper in the journal Nature challenges the leading explanation for the Moon’s formation. The predominant idea is that the Moon was created after a planetary body roughly the size of Mars collided with the early Earth. The debris it sent up later coalesced into the Moon. But researchers are now revisiting the largely discarded idea that a series of smaller impacts with the Earth may have collectively built the Moon.

Moon history

The giant impact hypothesis was first proposed in the 1970s. When computers became powerful enough, we found that it worked in simulations. A glancing blow from a Mars-sized planetesimal leads to a disc of material around the young Earth that, over time, coalesces into the Moon. And planetesimals were readily available in the early Solar System, flying around on weird orbits which made collisions with planets very probable.

In terms of its mass, angular momentum, and iron content, the Moon formed in these simulations was very similar to the real one we observe. But over the years, researchers kept running into difficulties with this model.

Enlarge / A Toronto man made this cyber-samurai whip his hair... at my heart. (credit: HAL Laboratory, Inc)

The industry of people watching other people play video games is serious bucks—and for many people, it's still seriously confusing. Game-streaming has become a pop-culture line dividing one generation from the next. It separates kids who subscribe to PewDiePie's YouTube channel from people who have no idea what a "poo-dee-pie" is.

I think of myself somewhere in the middle—a young-ish man who is savvy about game-streaming services like Twitch and Beam but rarely logs into them. Typically, I'd rather play games than watch them being played, but my major exception is classic gaming. Sometimes, I like to load an old, known game being played by a whiz kid, perhaps as background noise while cooking or getting ready for bed. I like the quick-hit fix of digital nostalgia without having to re-learn the tough classics.

More and more over the past few years, I have watched a particular niche of Twitch and YouTube streamers dedicated to these games: speedrunners.

Enlarge (credit: Z-Man)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

Have we reached "peak Cthulhu"?

The Etsy crafting marketplace's 5,381 Cthulhu-themed items suggest that we have. (If you don't believe me, consider this "May Cthulhu devour this house last" bit of framed embroidery.) Even if we confine ourselves to the narrower world of board games, we can choose from titles like:

NES Launch: Donkey Kong (1983) This port of the arcade original, one of three titles to launch alongside the Famicom in 1983, was far from a perfect recreation, but it still represented a huge leap from the competing versions on systems from Atari and Coleco.

In 2014, the US announced a new effort to understand the brain. Soon, we would map every single connection within the brain, track the activity of individual neurons, and start to piece together some of the fundamental units of biological cognition. The program was named BRAIN (for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), and it posited that we were on the verge of these breakthroughs because both imaging and analysis hardware were finally powerful enough to produce the necessary data, and we had the software and processing power to make sense of it.

But this week, PLoS Computational Biology published a cautionary note that suggests we may be getting ahead of ourselves. Part experiment, part polemic, a computer scientist got together with a biologist to apply the latest neurobiology approaches to a system we understand far more completely than the brain: a processor booting up the games Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. The results were about as awkward as you might expect, and they helped the researchers make their larger point: we may not understand the brain well enough to understand the brain.

On the surface, this may sound a bit ludicrous. But it gets at something fundamental to the nature of science. Science works on the basis of having models that can be used to make predictions. You can test those models and use the results to refine them. And you have to understand a system on at least some level to build those models in the first place.

A look at some of the highlights of the 2017 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

DETROIT—Once the crown jewel of the US auto industry, the annual North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) has lacked a bit of its usual luster in recent years. Like November's Los Angeles Auto Show, Detroit has felt the effect of many OEMs instead choosing to annually exhibit their work at the wider-reaching Consumer Electronics Show.

That said, there was still plenty to see in Detroit this year. We encountered replacements for best sellers like the Toyota Camry, BMW 5 Series, and Ford F-150. Kia grabbed plenty of attention on the eve of the show with its sporty Stinger GT. And, of course, there were concept cars. Whether outlandish or almost production-ready, these event staples lurked almost everywhere we looked.