Month: April 2018

(credit: Megan Geuss)

Third-party watch faces for smartwatches allow users to express more of themselves while also letting them have a bit more fun with their tech. The Apple Watch already has a number of Apple-made watch faces, many of which are customizable, but third-party developers haven't been able to make their own. A report from 9to5Mac suggests that might change soon, thanks to code found in watchOS 4.3.1 hinting at third-party watch face compatibility.

The interesting log message states: "This is where the 3rd party face config bundle generation would happen." It's part of the NanoTimeKit framework in the wearable software beta, which gives developers access to watch face components. While the feature doesn't appear to be active yet, it seems to refer to an inactive developer tool server that may allow communication with Xcode on macOS.

It's unclear if Apple would make this feature active in watchOS 5, the next version of the Apple Watch's software that's expected to be announced at WWDC this June. Even if Apple doesn't announce it as a feature in watchOS 5, the mere mention of it means it's possible that the company would allow third-party developers to create clock faces for its wearable sometime in the future.

Wednesday update: SpaceX had to scrub Monday's launch attempt due to an unspecified issue with the Falcon 9 rocket's guidance, navigation, and control system. However, after engineers with the California-based company looked at the rocket, it has been declared ready for flight. The 30-second launch window opens at 6:51pm ET (22:51 UTC). Weather conditions in Florida at the launch site are nearly perfect.

The webcast (above) should begin about 15 minutes before the launch window opens. Read below for more background on today's mission, which will attempt to send a cool new planet hunter into space for NASA.

Original post: The wildly successful Kepler Space Telescope was designed to observe faint stars and monitor them for brief dips in brightness that would indicate the passage of an object—most commonly a planet. However, the Kepler telescope was only able to resolve stars only in one specific area of space, about 0.28 percent of the entire sky, so it spied few nearby exoplanets.

Enlarge / The politics of getting to Europa are anything but straightforward. (credit: NASA)

LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif.—At one end of the conference room, four large window panes framed a view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Outside, ribbons of greenery snaked across the hills, a vestige of spring before the dry summer season descends upon Los Angeles.

Inside, deep in discussion, a dozen men and women sat around a long, oval-shaped wooden conference table. They were debating how best to send a daring mission, known as Europa Clipper, to Jupiter’s mysterious, icy moon Europa. Although hundreds of scientists and engineers were already planning and designing this spacecraft, the key decisions were being made in this room on the top floor of the administrative building at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It will not be cheap or easy to reach Europa, which lies within the complicated gravitational tangle of Jupiter and its dozens of moons, 600 million kilometers (~3.7 million miles) from Earth. But the payoff, scientists feel, is potentially incalculable. Beneath Europa’s ice, perhaps just a few kilometers down in some areas, lies the most vast ocean known to humans. With abundant energy emanating from the moon’s interior into the ocean, scientists speculate life might exist—probably just microbes, but why not something krill-like, too?