Month: June 2018

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast has agreed to pay $155 million in back taxes to Oregon in order to settle a nine-year property tax dispute. Comcast will also drop its attempt to secure a tax break that Oregon created as part of a failed attempt to bring Google Fiber to the state.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced the settlement with Comcast yesterday, noting that the legal battle "likely would have continued for many more years because several distinct and complex legal questions were in dispute." Oregon accepted the $155 million payment despite previously arguing that Comcast owed $200 million.

"The cable TV company's fight with Oregon tax collectors dates to 2009, when the state changed its methodology for assessing Comcast's telecommunications equipment," The Oregonian wrote.

Enlarge / Anchored to a Canadarm2, NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman participates in the mission's first EVA in 2010. (credit: NASA)

After more than seven years, Garrett Reisman will leave his position at SpaceX as director of crew operations. The former astronaut says he will remain as a consultant at the company but could not pass up a job to teach human spaceflight at the nearby University of Southern California. His first day as Professor Reisman was Monday.

In an interview, Reisman said he has relished the experience of working at a dynamic company like SpaceX. “I’ve done three spacewalks, so I’ve done a lot of exciting things,” he said. But highlights such as the first flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket, or the first landing of a first-stage booster, were equally thrilling experiences. He watched that first landing in December 2015 from the SpaceX headquarters amid a crowd of thousands of employees. “I was in that throng of people jumping up and down,” he said.

Are you crazy?

Since leaving NASA in 2011, Reisman has played a senior role in the development of SpaceX’s Dragon 2 spacecraft, which will carry humans to the International Space Station in a year or so. Having both lived on the space station, and then later visited on space shuttle Atlantis to assist with its final construction, he provided an astronaut’s perspective to the company.

Enlarge / There's more than one way to light a cat video. (credit: Marco Verch)

Some people hold the mistaken idea that the only way to solve climate change is to go back to a stone age style of living—maybe bronze age if we’re careful. While that’s not true, describing the necessary changes to our energy system can leave you imagining that we need an all-out moonshot—or several.

There has even been criticism of whether the scenarios that limit global warming to 2°C are plausible, given that they rely on large-scale, active removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere. But an interesting new scenario published this week shows that even greater climate progress could be achieved without a single carbon capture plant, all while improving the global standard of living. The key to the new plan is efficiency.

The 2015 Paris Agreement affirmed the international intent to limit global warming to 2°C and added a new goal to stay under 1.5 °C. But accomplishing this is increasingly unlikely without a drastic change in emissions trends. While improving efficiency has always been an important part of the puzzle, a study led by Arnulf Grubler of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis shows just how far you can take it if you really dig into what it means to be efficient. Their answer is that it can get to you 1.5°C.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Hixon)

As if the Easter Island statues weren’t enigmatic enough, a few of them are wearing hats—6.5-foot-wide, 13-ton cylinders of cindery red volcanic rock called scoria. The hats are as much an enigma as the statues themselves. For starters, archaeologists aren't actually sure they're supposed to be hats at all.

Their shape—ranging from a straight-sided cylinder to a tapering cone, with a smaller cylinder on top—is similar to a style of woven grass hat that some historians say was once popular in New Caledonia. Carvings found on some statues in Hawai'i could represent similar hats, if you look at them from the right angle. But that same general shape could also represent a traditional Polynesian hairstyle for men of high rank: long hair bound up in a topknot, called a pukao, which is what gives the hats their name.

Archaeologists still aren't sure which version, hair or hat, the statues' builders intended, or why fewer than a hundred of the island's several hundred statues, called moai, seem to have been visited by a giant milliner. The hats, or topknots, could be a sign that some statues (or the people, spirits, or gods they represented) were a much bigger deal in Rapanui religious life than others. Maybe the ones with the red hats are just prehistoric Linux fans.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

SAN JOSE—Just three years after the release of the first Apple Watch, Apple announced the fifth iteration of its wearable operating system at WWDC 2018.

Unlike iOS updates, most watchOS updates haven't brought drastic changes to Apple's device in terms of look and feel. WatchOS 5 doesn't radically alter the experience of using an Apple Watch, but it does add a number of helpful features across different use categories like fitness, communication, and general life organization. We spent some time demoing the software update to learn more about the changes.

Workouts and Activity

My colleague Samuel Axon and I were immediately excited by the announcement of workout auto detection. (Auto detection allows the Apple Watch to know when you've been working out even if you haven't officially started a workout on the watch.)

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

SAN JOSE—Just three years after the release of the first Apple Watch, Apple announced the fifth iteration of its wearable operating system at WWDC 2018.

Unlike iOS updates, most watchOS updates haven't brought drastic changes to Apple's device in terms of look and feel. WatchOS 5 doesn't radically alter the experience of using an Apple Watch, but it does add a number of helpful features across different use categories like fitness, communication, and general life organization. We spent some time demoing the software update to learn more about the changes.

Workouts and Activity

My colleague Samuel Axon and I were immediately excited by the announcement of workout auto detection. (Auto detection allows the Apple Watch to know when you've been working out even if you haven't officially started a workout on the watch.)