Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station, Unit 1 (credit: Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

South Carolina’s state-owned utility Santee Cooper announced recently that it would have to walk away from its 45 percent share of two nuclear reactors being built at the Summer nuclear plant in Fairfield County. The decision to abandon the Summer project was essentially a death knell for the unfinished reactors—SCANA Corp, the 55 percent owner, couldn’t complete the project on its own and Santee Cooper had tried selling its share to Duke Energy years before to no avail. Without generous government assistance, Santee Cooper stood to lose billions.

But with the reality of an abandoned nuclear project on the state’s hands, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster says he’s in talks again with Duke Energy—as well as with Southern Power Co. of Atlanta and Dominion Energy of Richmond, VA—to sell “some or all” of the publicly-owned utility, according to South Carolina’s Post and Courier.

Santee Cooper also told the paper that it had recently heard from two potential buyers interested in taking over the utility’s portion of the Summer nuclear plant, and a spokeswoman said that the company was reaching out to other potential buyers as well.

Essential

What ever happened to the Essential phone? I've been asking myself that question for weeks. Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, went public with a new smartphone company in May to great fanfare, and its first product, the Essential phone, looked like a slim bezel wonder with a quirky front camera placement that cut into the screen. The body was titanium and ceramic, the specs were high-end with a Snapdragon 835, and it was yet another phone with a wacky modular accessory system. Rubin himself promised that the device would be released by June 30, but that date came and went without a peep from Essential. Then July passed. Now it's August.

Now, it seems like Essential is finally ready to launch. Company president Niccolo De Masi promised The Wall Street Journal that an "exact" release date will be announced next week. Rubin took to Twitter to show off some pictures of the assembly lines, where you can see the body being milled out of titanium.

Enlarge / It's not clear how impactful Anthroplex was in sculpting this radio host physique. (credit: Infowars)

Alex Jones and fans of homeopathy may have something common.

Jones’ wildly popular supplements sold on his Infowars.com site are nothing more than humdrum vitamin blends that have little-to-no data supporting touted health benefits—basically the same as the vitamins found in any pharmacy or health store, according to independent lab testing. But there are two key differences: the far-right talk show hosts’ supplements are far more expensive and they tend to be weaker than garden variety supplements. Reminiscent of the extensively watered-down treatments used by homeopaths, Jones’ supplements were often diluted such that even if those vitamin and herbal blends did offer some health benefits, the doses would likely be too small to be effective.

That’s all according to an independent lab analysis performed on several of the supplements by Labdoor, a San Francisco-based lab that tests dietary supplements. The analysis was done at the behest of BuzzFeed News, which reported the results late Wednesday.

Enlarge (credit: Facebook)

Facebook has been amping up its video efforts recently, particularly by acquiring rights to live sports and reportedly experimenting with its own original content. Now we have confirmation of that original content plus a new service from the company: Facebook Watch. According to a blog post by Facebook's Director of Product Daniel Danker, Watch is a new tab in Facebook that lets users view all kinds of original videos and shows on Facebook's mobile, desktop, and TV apps. These new shows are made of live and recorded episodes and all "follow a theme or storyline."

Watch will slowly roll out to users in the US, but for now it's limited to a small group of testers.

Let's take a look at how Watch is laid out in the Facebook app. According to the images in the blog post, Watch has its own tab, denoted with a YouTube-like play button icon, on the main menu next to the Feed tab. It's broken down into two main pages: Discover and Watchlist. The former is where users can find new shows to watch, either based on what they've watched before or what their friends and family are watching. Facebook explains that Watch is personalized in this way, and you'll get video and show suggestions under different headers like "Most Talked About" (which highlights shows that "spark a conversation") and "What's Making People Laugh" (which lists shows that many people have reacted to with the "Haha" reaction).

Enlarge / That's gotta hurt. (credit: HBO)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the already aired episodes in season 7 of Game of Thrones.

With the seventh season of HBO's Game of Thrones at its halfway point, Westeros is at war yet again. In the last two episodes (episodes 3 and 4), the forces aligned with Daenerys Targaryen and Cersei Lannister have met upon the fields (and seas) of battle at last. Things have not gone entirely according to plan for either side.

In fact things have gone so wrong, so fast that I thought it might be time to convene the Ars Technica Board of Fictional Military Historic Analysis—with its charter members, Jon Nichols and Steve Skaggs, two special operations professionals now in the private sector—in order to dive in on the biggest blunders and curious command decisions from both sides.

Enlarge / With 200 kW of solar power, the VASIMR engine could be used as a lunar tug. (credit: Ad Astra Rocket Company)

Almost everyone recognizes that if humans are truly to go deeper into the Solar System, we need faster and more efficient propulsion systems than conventional chemical rockets. Rocket engines powered by chemical propellants are great for breaking the chains of Earth's gravity, but they consume way too much fuel when used in space and don't offer optimal control of a spacecraft's thrust.

NASA recognizes this, too. So in 2015, the space agency awarded three different contracts for development of advanced propulsion systems. Of these, perhaps the most intriguing is a plasma-based rocket—which runs on Argon fuel, generates a plasma, excites it, and then pushes it out a nozzle at high speed. This solution has the potential to shorten the travel time between Earth and Mars to weeks, rather than months.

But to realize that potential, Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company must first demonstrate that its plasma rocket, VASIMR, can fire continuously for a long period of time. The three year, $9 million contract from NASA required the company to fire its plasma rocket for 100 hours, at a power level of 100 kilowatts, by 2018.