Month: July 2018

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Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share.

Friday marks the formal start of Best Buy's "Black Friday in July" sale, a mild response to Amazon's Prime Day event in which the popular electronics retailer discounts a bunch of items across its store.

In his unending attempt to satisfy the deals gods, the Dealmaster scoured the sale into the wee hours of the morning last night and can safely conclude that the deals here aren't as far-reaching as Amazon's selection on Prime Day. As is generally the case with hyped-up sales events like this, most of what's advertised is either not really a discount or not worth buying in the first place.

Enlarge / Conspiracy theorist and talk show host Alex Jones.

Facebook took action against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones late Thursday when it banned the InfoWars host from using his account for the next 30 days. According to a report from CNET, Facebook banned Jones after it determined four videos on his pages violated its community standards.

Those four videos have since been removed from Jones' channels. It's unclear exactly which videos they were, but it's likely at least some were the same videos that YouTube removed from its site just days ago. One of those videos, titled "How to Prevent Liberalism," which showed a young boy being pushed to the ground by an adult male, is no longer hosted on InfoWars' Facebook page.

However, Jones' recent video in which he attacks Special Counsel Robert Mueller and mimes shooting him remains up on Facebook. The company still claims that the video doesn't violate its community standards.

Enlarge / Congress has recognized the promise of reusable rockets. (credit: SpaceX)

Less than a year and a half has passed since SpaceX first flew a used first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, but this achievement has already shaken up the glacial process of lawmaking and military budgeting. The final version of the defense budget bill for fiscal year 2019 will make both a symbolic and a significant policy change when it comes to reusable rockets.

The conference report from the US House and Senate calls for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program of the Department of Defense, commonly known as the EELV program, to be named the "National Security Space Launch program" as of March 1, 2019. No longer will the military rely solely on expendable rockets.

Moreover, the report says the US Air Force must consider both expendable and reusable launch vehicles as part of its solicitation for military launch contracts, and in the event that a reusable launch vehicle is available but not selected, report back to Congress with the reason why. The US House has already agreed to the conference report, and it should be taken up in the Senate next week. After that, it will need the president's signature to become law.

Enlarge / This southern reef escaped bleaching, but other areas were not so lucky. (credit: Rick Stuart-Smith, Reef Life Survey)

In a heat wave, humans sweat and try to avoid heat exhaustion. But in a coral reef, a wave of warm ocean temperatures can trigger a very different response from ours. Corals host single-celled, photosynthetic symbiotes called zooxanthellae that provide food in exchange for shelter. During a heat wave, the corals are forced to kick the zooxanthellae out (lest the coral be poisoned by their stressed excretions), losing the corals' source of food as well as the majority of their color—hence the name “coral bleaching”.

If the warm water stays too long, the corals starve and leave behind lifeless carbonate skeletons. Young corals may repopulate the area in time, although algae will often claim the abandoned structures in the meanwhile.

The last few years have hit Australia’s Great Barrier Reef pretty hard, with a massive bleaching event in 2016 and persistently elevated temperatures giving no respite—part of a trend in a warming climate. A team led by the University of Tasmania’s Rick Stuart-Smith hit the water almost a year after the bleaching to get a first look at the recovery process.