Month: February 2018

Enlarge / Apologies, dear reader: My week with the Kia Niro involved lots of bad weather, so I never got a chance to shoot it. Instead, you will have to make do with Kia's press shots. (credit: Kia)

My first encounter with a Kia Niro was a brief affair. What should have been a very short drive stretched to half an hour after a wrong turn or two. But being late to return didn't seem as important as enjoying the Maryland countryside and the little hybrid's relaxing and economical performance. After all, when was the last time I managed to get 40mpg driving anywhere, in anything?

The Niro I got lost in at the Washington Automotive Press Association's annual rally intrigued me, so I was glad to schedule a week with one with the hope of finding out if that first impression was accurate. As it turned out, the answer was: mostly. Along the way, it made a very convincing case for itself.

It looks like a crossover—a vital attribute if you want to find a buyer in 2018—but it's not lifted up into the air, so the handling is completely car-like. The interior isn't particularly luxurious, but it is well-appointed and spacious. With prices starting at $23,340, it's not particularly expensive either, and it doesn't use much gas—although in a diet of mainly city driving, I was unable to match that initial surprising result.

Enlarge / The Pixel 2 cameras. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is opening up the Pixel 2's Google-designed machine learning SoC, the Pixel Visual Core, to third-party apps. The first apps to take advantage of the chip are Snapchat and Facebook's pile of social media apps: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. With the February Android security update for the Pixel 2, each app will get to use Google's HDR+ photo processing in their own pictures.

With the launch of Android 8.1 Oreo, Google enabled the Pixel Visual Core in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL and added a "Neural Networks API" to Android. The new API allows apps to tap into any machine-learning hardware acceleration chips present in the device, of which the Pixel Visual Core is one of the first examples. Google's HDR+ photo algorithm is one of the first pieces of software written for the Pixel Visual Core, and now it's open to more apps than just the Google camera app.

Google's HDR+ algorithm takes a burst of photos with short exposure times, aligning them to account for any movement and averaging them together. The result is a noticeably better image, with less noise and higher dynamic range. The images are also upsampled to provide more detail than you would otherwise get with a single 12MP image. HDR+ is so good that the Android modding community has taken to porting the Pixel-exclusive Google Camera app to other devices, where using HDR+ instantly improves the output of the camera.

Enlarge / Charter's gigabit service is available in these eight markets and will spread across the ISP's 41-state footprint this year. (credit: Charter)

Charter's cable network extends to about 50 million homes and businesses across the US, and nearly all of them should have the opportunity to buy gigabit-speed cable Internet by the end of 2018. So far, prices for the service range from $105 to $125.

"By year-end, we'll offer gigabit services in virtually everywhere we serve at all 50 million passings," Charter CEO Tom Rutledge told investors in an earnings call Friday. The number of residential units among those 40 million locations is somewhere above 40 million.

An earnings call transcript by Seeking Alpha is available here, and Rutledge's remarks were pointed out by news site Stop the Cap.

Enlarge (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

We've now developed a healthy-sized catalog of planets orbiting in the habitable zone of distant stars. But we don't have the slightest idea whether any of them are actually habitable. That's largely because, at these distances, it's extremely difficult to get any sense of what the planets are made of and what their atmospheres are like. And the greenhouse potential of the atmosphere can make the difference between a frozen world like Mars and an out-of-control hothouse like Venus.

But at least in the case of one nearby star, scientists are slowly narrowing down the options. TRAPPIST-1 has at least seven planets, all small enough to be Earth-like, with several inside the star's habitable zone. In two papers released this week, teams of scientists have narrowed down what their atmospheres might look like and provided a greater sense of their composition. The results suggest that at least one planet has the potential to be a watery world.

In the air

The first study, which appears in Nature Astronomy, looks at the atmospheres of several of the planets, but not directly. Instead, it relies on the Hubble to observe the star's light as a planet passes in front of it. A tiny fraction of the photons will have passed through the planet's atmosphere on their way to Earth. Any colors of light that are absorbed or scattered by the gases in the atmosphere will be missing from that fraction, making it possible to infer the atmosphere's composition.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—On the second day of the Waymo v. Uber trade secrets trial, US District Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Waymo, allowing an internal due diligence report to stand.

Late Monday, several hours after the first day's trial, in court filings, Uber lawyers asked the judge to exclude a slew of materials and deposition testimony that was made public for the first time on Monday evening, arguing that they constituted inadmissible "hearsay."

Among others, these items include drafts and notes that eventually formed the due diligence report that Uber commissioned after a star self-driving engineer, Anthony Levandowski, abruptly left Google in January 2016. Several months later, Levandowski's company, Ottomotto, was acquired by Uber for $680 million.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—On the second day of the Waymo v. Uber trade secrets trial, US District Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Waymo, allowing an internal due diligence report to stand.

Late Monday, several hours after the first day's trial, in court filings, Uber lawyers asked the judge to exclude a slew of materials and deposition testimony that was made public for the first time on Monday evening, arguing that they constituted inadmissible "hearsay."

Among others, these items include drafts and notes that eventually formed the due diligence report that Uber commissioned after a star self-driving engineer, Anthony Levandowski, abruptly left Google in January 2016. Several months later, Levandowski's company, Ottomotto, was acquired by Uber for $680 million.

Enlarge / A view of the Falcon Heavy rocket on Monday, from one-quarter of a mile away. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars Technica)

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA—Today may finally be the day. After nearly a decade of development, the Falcon Heavy has finally reached the launch pad and undergone all of its preflight tests. All that remains is to fuel the three boosters and light 27 engines.

Weather at the launch site is fine today, with mostly sunny skies and light winds. The official forecast calls for an 80 percent chance of favorable weather conditions at the time the launch window opens at 1:30pm ET. (UPDATE: The opening of the window has been delayed until 3:45pm ET due to upper-level wind concerns. However normal fueling operations have begun and the clock is counting down to a launch. The launch window closes at 4pm ET.)

Plenty of things can go bad with the maiden flight of a rocket, of course. That is especially true considering the Falcon Heavy's structure—three boosters strapped together. In an interview with Ars on Monday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the company had tested as much as it could on the ground. But certain elements can only be tested in flight.