Month: February 2017

Enlarge / A draft of a forthcoming GAO report raises concerns about turbopumps in the Falcon 9's Merlin engines. (credit: SpaceX)

A draft of an Congressional report into NASA's commercial crew program has found technical problems with both SpaceX and Boeing's efforts to provide transport to the International Space Station. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the forthcoming report from the US Government Accountability Office focuses most closely on issues with turbopumps in SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

The newspaper says the report has found a "pattern of problems" with the turbine blades within the turbopumps, which deliver rocket fuel into the combustion chamber of the Merlin rocket engine. Some of the components used in the turbopumps are prone to cracks, the government investigators say, and may require a redesign before NASA allows the Falcon 9 booster to be used for crewed flights. NASA has been briefed on the report's findings, and the agency's acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, told the newspaper that he thinks “we know how to fix them.”

A spokesman for SpaceX, John Taylor, said the company already has a plan in place to fix the potential cracking issue. "We have qualified our engines to be robust to turbine wheel cracks," Taylor said. "However, we are modifying the design to avoid them altogether. This will be part of the final design iteration on Falcon 9." This final variant of the Falcon 9 booster, named Block 5, is being designed for optimal safety and easier return for potential reuse. According to company founder Elon Musk, it could fly by the end of this year.

Absent an actual hands-on session, this is our best look at Firefox OS on a TV so far. (credit: Panasonic/Mozilla)

Mozilla has laid off a team of about 50 people working on bringing Firefox OS to "connected devices" and is ending its attempts to build a commercial platform for such devices reports CNet.

Firefox OS originally started life as Mozilla's attempt at a smartphone platform. The ambition was to create a free and open source platform that used Web technology to build applications, suitable for low cost phones in emerging markets. Although a few products did materialize, Firefox OS was rapidly squeezed out by Android, so just over a year ago Mozilla repositioned the operating system. Instead of being a smartphone platform, it was aimed at devices such as smart TVs.

While devices from Panasonic did ship, Mozilla doesn't appear to have made much of a splash in this market either.

Enlarge (credit: Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Microsoft has formally asked the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security to grant it and other companies an exemption to the Trump administration’s executive order that restricts entry or re-entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. The order, which was signed last Friday, affects immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles "enjoined and restrained" the president's executive order for the time being—following similar temporary restraining orders that other judges have also issued in recent days in related lawsuits filed elsewhere. While the executive order is theoretically halted for the time being, the various restraining orders around the country don’t provide any predictable, long-term solution as of yet, legal experts say.

"This is very disruptive to a business model," Lenni Benson, an immigration law professor at New York Law School, told Ars, noting that many companies are starting to ponder what the long-term ramifications of such a ban are, especially if it is eventually upheld in court.

Enlarge / OxyContin 80 mg pills. (credit: Liz O. Baylen)

Last year, it was refrigerated trucks. Now, it’s “temporary storage” in funeral homes. The Coroner’s Office in Montgomery County, Ohio, has been so overwhelmed by the death toll of the raging opioid epidemic that it has had to turn to makeshift morgues to keep up.

“We’re running at full capacity,” Kenneth Betz, director of the coroner’s office, told The New York Times in a phone interview. “We’ve never experienced this volume of accidental drug overdoses in our history. We now call funeral homes immediately," he said.So far in 2017—just 33 days into the year—the Coroner’s Office has already handled 163 accidental overdose deaths. That’s more than half the yearly totals of overdose deaths from 2015 and 2016. In fact, in the last decade the number of yearly overdose deaths has quadrupled in Ohio and surpassed deaths from car crashes.

And the state is not alone—in fact, it may not even be the worst off. West Virginia had the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in 2015, reaching 41.5 per 100,000, according to the CDC. Ohio came in tied for third with Kentucky, at 29.9 per 100,000. New Hampshire was second with 34.3 per 100,000.