Month: October 2017

Enlarge / Kinda striking, don't you think? (credit: Mark Walton)

The Surface Dial, a hockey-puck-sized controller designed for use with Microsoft's Surface Studio desktop computer, is the palette to the Surface's pen. It clicks, double clicks and rotates, adding contextual menus and smooth navigation to apps such as Maps and Adobe Photoshop without the need to reach for a mouse. Unfortunately—despite some third-party alternatives—there's nothing as slick as a Surface Dial available to creative types at home on a Mac.

That's where the Logitech Craft comes in. Priced at a substantial £179, the Logitech Craft is a premium keyboard armed with a "crown," that allows for the same clicks, double clicks and twists that make the Surface Dial so compelling, without the need to splash out on a Surface Desktop to go with it. While there are some odd limitations to the crown's functionality, at least at launch, it's a compelling companion to the keyboard and mouse.

It helps that the Craft is beautifully made. The main body is constructed from a sturdy matte grey plastic, while a heavy aluminium bar at the top adds weight, a comfortable tilt (although it's sadly not adjustable), and the crown itself, which sits just above the escape key to the left of the keyboard. The Craft is a heavy thing with solid rubber feet that, once placed down on a desk, reassuringly stays put.

Enlarge / UTUADO, PUERTO RICO - OCTOBER 06: Jose Javier Santana holds a Puerto Rican flag he found on the ground after Hurricane Maria passed through. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle )

After Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico on September 20, the nation’s drug supply and hospitals should brace for their own beating in the next two to three weeks, head of the US Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb warned in an interview with Reuters Tuesday.

With more than four dozen FDA-approved pharmaceutical plants, Puerto Rico manufactures 10 percent of drugs prescribed in the US. The list of drugs made there includes 13 of the world’s top-selling brand-name drugs, such as Humira, the rheumatoid arthritis drug, and Xarelto, a blood thinner for stroke prevention, the New York Times reported. Some of the medicines made there are made nowhere else.

“Some of these products are critical to Americans,” Scott Gottlieb told a congressional panel last week. “A loss of access could have significant public health consequences.”

Enlarge / The Falcon 9 first stage being used Wednesday first flew in February, 2017, on the CRS-10 space station supply mission. (credit: SpaceX)

Fresh off a successful launch on Monday from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, SpaceX will go for a second mission in three days on Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With a two-hour launch window that opens at 6:53pm ET, SpaceX will attempt to launch the EchoStar 105/SES-11 communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. Weather conditions in Florida look fine this evening

The highlight of Wednesday's mission is the company's re-use of a previously flown first stage booster. This rocket first flew in February, when it launched a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station and subsequently returned to a landing zone along the Florida coast.

This is only the third time SpaceX has launched what it terms a "flight proven" booster. Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES has been one of SpaceX's most faithful customers, having previously employed a used booster. SES has repeatedly demonstrated confidence in the rocket company's ability to make reusable launch technology safe. And with three successful reuse flights, it will probably become easier for SpaceX to find customers for future "flight proven" rockets.

Enlarge / AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS - APRIL 22: Electric car from Car2Go fleet charges batteries near Dam Square on April 22, 2017 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. As of 31 December 2016, there were 113,636 highway legal light-duty plug-in electric vehicles registered in the Netherlands. (Photo by Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the fractured Dutch government announced a coalition of several leading parties and put forward a roadmap for the Netherlands’ future. Besides reaffirming country's support of the EU and offering tax and immigration plans, the coalition said that it wanted all new cars to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2030. The coalition also called for more aggressive emissions goals in general—specifically, a 49 percent reduction in the country’s CO₂ emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030, according to EU Observer.

The Netherlands is hardly the first country to float a fossil-fuel-burning vehicle ban. France has said it wants to ban the sale of gas and diesel vehicles by 2040, and China and the UK have followed suit (although China has not yet articulated a timeline for its ban). California’s governor has also floated the idea of a zero-emissions mandate for cars sold in the state.

The Netherlands, like France, also called for the closure of all coal plants within the country by 2030 and for increased use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) to help the country reach its 49 percent CO₂ reductions goals.

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Welcome to the first episode of our new anthropology video series, Ancient People Did Stuff. We thought of naming this series something portentous like Amazing Origins or Ancient Wonders, but the fact is that our real, scientifically-verifiable history is pretty mundane. Most of the time, humans were doing ordinary things like hunting, farming, building houses, and, well, using the toilet. That's why we called the series Ancient People Did Stuff.

It's a humble title, slightly goofy, and a reminder that our distant ancestors were mostly just puttering around. More importantly, it's a nod to the realities of science, because the vast majority of what archaeologists excavate is debris from everyday life. And that's what the series is about: what regular people were doing during the long, strange history of our species from the Pleistocene to the present.

Enlarge / Still looks Kindle-ish. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon launched a revamped version of its Kindle Oasis e-reader on Wednesday. The new device will remain the highest-end model in Amazon’s popular Kindle series, but it comes with a host of tweaks compared to the previous Oasis, which launched in early 2016.

The reader now has a 7-inch e-ink display, a full inch larger than its predecessor. Amazon says that display will still sport 300 pixels per inch, so text should be just as sharp as before.

Perhaps the most welcome news for Kindle diehards is that the new Oasis is waterproof. Amazon says the device is IPX8 rated, which means it should survive being dunked in more than two meters of water for up to 60 minutes. Though it’s lamentable that such waterproofing is still limited to Amazon’s priciest Kindle, the addition is long overdue; competing manufacturers like Kobo have sold waterproof e-readers for years now.