Month: October 2017

Enlarge / SpaceX launches the Air Force's X-38B space plane in September, 2017. (credit: SpaceX)

The increasingly warm relationship between the US Air Force and the rocket company SpaceX appears to be approaching full-on bromance levels. The latest words of lavish praise for SpaceX have come from Gen. John W. Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command, which oversees launch operations for the US military and national security sectors.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Raymond said the potential savings from reusable rockets like the Falcon 9 booster now being flown and reflown by SpaceX are irresistible. “The market’s going to go that way. We’d be dumb not to,” he said. “What we have to do is make sure we do it smartly.” It would be "absolutely foolish" to not begin using them, Raymond said.

Before the military can fly its satellites and other payloads on a previously flown booster, the US military has to certify that SpaceX's "flight proven" boosters are reliable enough. That process already appears to be underway. "I don’t know how far down the road we’ve gotten, but I am completely committed to launching on a reused rocket, a previously flown rocket, and making sure that we have the processes in place to be able to make sure that we can do that safely," Raymond told Bloomberg.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Anadolu Agency)

A few days to cool off and think things through may be enough to prevent hundreds of homicides each year, according to a new study in PNAS.

A study tracking handgun laws on wait periods over a 45-year period found that a delay in obtaining a firearm after purchase reduced gun homicides by 17 percent. That breaks down to about 36 homicides per year for the average state. As of 2014, such laws in 16 states and the District of Columbia prevented about 750 gun homicides per year. If all 50 states required a wait, around 910 more lives could be spared, the authors report.

“Waiting periods would therefore reduce gun violence without imposing any restrictions on who can own a gun,” according to the authors, led by Deepak Malhotra, a negotiation and conflict-resolution expert at Harvard Business School.

Enlarge / Google's Pixel Visual Core, an SoC designed for image processing and machine learning. (credit: Google)

Google's newest flagship smartphone, the Pixel 2, is nearly out. The company has been talking a big game about the 2's camera and calling it, definitively, "the best smartphone camera." But Google has been keeping a huge secret under wraps: the Pixel 2 has a custom, Google-designed SoC dedicated exclusively to camera image processing. The SoC is not active yet, but Google claims it will make the Pixel 2 process photos faster and more efficiently than ever.

In addition to the usual Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, the Pixel 2 is equipped with the "Pixel Visual Core," an extra, second SoC designed by Google with hardware-accelerated image processing in mind. At the heart of the chip is an eight-core Image Processing Unit (IPU) capable of more than three trillion operations per second. Using these IPU cores, Google says the company's HDR+ image processing can run "5x faster and at less than 1/10th the energy" than it currently does on the main CPU.

The Pixel Visual Core is currently in the Pixel 2, but it doesn't work yet. Google says it will be enabled with the launch of the Android 8.1 developer preview. At that time, the chip will let third-party apps use the Pixel 2's HDR+ photo processing, allowing them to produce pictures that look just as good as the native camera app. The chip isn't just for Google's current camera algorithms, though. Google says the Pixel Visual Core is designed "to handle the most challenging imaging and machine learning applications" and that the company is "already preparing the next set of applications" designed for the hardware.

Just over two years ago, Microsoft unveiled its Surface Book hybrid laptop: a tablet with a detachable hinged keyboard base. It was a compelling concept, with Microsoft pulling off some clever tricks. The base contained a battery, boosting the life of the tablet portion substantially, and could optionally contain a discrete GPU, too. A little under a year ago, the Surface Book was partially refreshed: a new base was offered with a bigger battery and a faster GPU. The tablet portion, however, was left unchanged.

Today, Microsoft unveiled not only a full refresh of the system—both tablet and base are being updated—but a whole new version of the machine. Surface Book 2 (Microsoft is using numerical version number suffixes here, even after abandoning the practice with the Surface Pro) will come in two sizes. There's a 13-inch model, same as before, but this is now paired with a 15-inch version.

The broad concept of Surface Book remains the same. The screen half of the "laptop" is in fact a tablet computer, containing the processor, memory, mass storage, and a battery; the "keyboard" half is a larger battery, some expansion ports, and, optionally, a discrete GPU. The systems look essentially the same as the old versions, too, with the 15-inch version looking for all intents and purposes like a scaled-up version of the 13-inch one.

Ron Amadeo

Welcome to year two of Google Hardware. In 2016, Google jumped into the Android hardware space with its first self-branded device, the Google Pixel. Google's software prowess shined on the Pixel 1, offering up exclusive features like the Google Assistant, the best Android camera thanks to advanced software processing, fast day-one OS updates and betas, and the smoothest, best-performing overall build of Android. The killer software package made it the best Android phone of the previous generation.

The Pixel still represented Google's first foray into smartphone hardware, though, and it didn't offer anything special in the hardware department. It was a bland-looking iPhone clone. It had the same specs and basic design as everything else. The Pixel even skipped water resistance, which had become an expected feature at that price point. Google said it wanted to make its own hardware, but it didn't actually build special hardware.