Month: January 2018

Enlarge / Vice President Mike Pence, center, listens to NASA Deputy Chief Flight Director Holly Ridings, right, and NASA Flight Director Rick Henfling during a tour of the Mission Control Center in Houston in June. (credit: NASA)

As the head of the recently established National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence is the most important person in the United States when it comes to determining space policy. In this role, Pence oversees the development of US military, civil, and commercial space efforts.

The Trump administration has come into office at a time when new space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin are challenging dominant aerospace industry companies, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. A key difference between the new competitors is that they're willing to invest more of their own funds into developing launch vehicles—both SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin's New Glenn rockets have been substantially funded by private money. Successful flights by these vehicles may raise questions about why the federal government should spend billions of taxpayer dollars on traditional contractors for other heavy lift vehicles.

Early next month, the first of these privately funded rockets, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, should finally make a test flight from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If successful, the Falcon Heavy, with a lifting capacity of 54 tons to low-Earth orbit, will become twice as powerful as any rocket in operation today.

(credit: Craig Sunter / Flickr)

This week, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) released a report on the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions of each state between 2000 and 2015. The good news? CO₂ emissions dropped in 41 states, with Maine taking home the prize for the greatest percentage decrease in emissions (by 25 percent). Ohio, meanwhile, showed the greatest absolute decrease, using 51.7 million fewer metric tons of CO₂ emissions in 2015 than it did in 2000.

The bad news? Nine states saw increases in CO₂ emissions over the same period. Nebraska was one of the worst offenders, with a 22-percent increase in carbon emissions between 2000 and 2015. Though Nebraska's population grew by roughly 200,000 in those 15 years, Kansas also welcomed about 200,000 people into its state between 2000 and 2015, and it cut emissions by 17.2 percent. (Kansas' success is probably in part due to the state's embrace of wind, where "wind energy has grown from less than 1 percent of net electricity generation in 2005 to 24 percent in 2015, making wind the state's second largest power provider, after coal," the EIA writes.)

The EIA cautions against evaluating these emissions numbers as a direct reflection of how green a state is, though, because the agency only counted energy-related emissions in the state they were created. That doesn't account for exporting energy across state lines. If one state uses only renewables but buys a considerable supply of electricity from a coal plant in a neighboring state, the neighboring state bears the burden for all those emissions.

Enlarge (credit: Brigham Young University)

All sorts of 3D-imaging technologies tend to get lumped under the label "hologram." But there's actually a variety of distinct technologies that can create the appearance of depth. Now, we can add another to the list: the photophoretic-trap volumetric display. The device uses one set of optical hardware to control the motion of a tiny sphere and a second set to illuminate the sphere as it travels. Provided the sphere can be kept moving fast enough, the result is a true-color image that has real depth since it's built from light reflected from different locations.

The downside is that a single sphere can't cover all that much ground in the amount of time our brain needs to construct an image. As a result, photophoretic-trap volumetric display is currently limited to either small images or showing only part of an image at a time.

The recent work, from a team at Brigham Young University, is a variation on volumetric displays. These involve projecting a changing image onto a moving reflective surface. If the change in the image is properly matched to the changing location of where it's projected, the result will be the appearance of depth, since the light you see will actually be reflected at different locations. On the plus side, this doesn't require the viewer to wear any hardware, and multiple people can view the image at the same time, each seeing it from the appropriate perspective.

Enlarge / Saddle up, heroes, there's adventuring to be done. (credit: Owen Duffy)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

When I was five years old, I discovered The Legend of Zelda on my cousin’s state-of-the-art Nintendo Entertainment System. It was unlike anything I’d played before. Where other games laid down unambiguous missions and linear levels, this one handed me a sword and a handful of hit points, then asked: “So what are you going to do?”

I’ve appreciated that sandbox sense of freedom in games ever since, and it’s something that Near And Far, a campaign-driven board game from designer Ryan Laukat, strives to emulate. A sequel to his 2015 release Above and Below, Near and Far casts players as heroes embarking on perilous quests across a series of fantasy realms. While that might sound like the premise for at least a million other tabletop adventure games, Near and Far comes with a level of style, imagination, and originality that elevates it above the generic orc-stomping titles on the market.

Enlarge / A large portion of these two Tibetan glaciers suddenly collapsed in 2016, breaking apart and sliding downslope. (credit: Google Maps)

The melting of glaciers around the world is one of the hardest to ignore impacts of climate change (unless you don’t believe your eyes). While worries about rising sea levels are focused on the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, the loss of small mountain glaciers comes with its own consequences. A pair of studies published this week highlight two such impacts—one extremely common, one extremely unusual.

Peak runoff

The first study, by Matthias Huss and Regine Hock, looks at the effect shrinking glaciers have on local water supplies. Glaciers help sustain rivers downslope through the drier months by providing a constant stream of meltwater, like a frozen water tower that collects in the winter and rations it out over the summer.

For a while, a shrinking glacier will contribute even more meltwater runoff to the river, but there comes a point when a smaller glacier can't keep up. Once it produces less meltwater, it’s downhill to “peak runoff” from there. This process has already been observed at a number of glaciers, but a global picture had not yet been painted.