Month: July 2018

Enlarge / An artist's view of the Starliner spacecraft en route to the International Space Station. (credit: Boeing)

One of the biggest rivalries in the modern aerospace industry is between Boeing and SpaceX. Despite their radically different cultures, the aerospace giant and the smaller upstart compete for many different kinds of contracts, and perhaps nowhere has the competition been more keen than for NASA funds.

In 2014, both Boeing and SpaceX received multibillion awards (Boeing asked for, and got, 50 percent more funding for the same task) to finalize development of spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the commercial crew program. Since then, both companies have been locked in a race to the launchpad, not just to free NASA from its reliance on Russia to reach space but also for the considerable esteem that will accompany becoming the first private company in the world to fly humans into orbit.

A narrow margin

Although both Boeing and SpaceX have established various launch dates—first in 2017, and now slipped to 2018 and 2019—NASA hasn't publicly tipped its hand on which company is actually ahead in the race. Now, however, a new report from the US Government Accountability Office has provided a window into NASA's internal thinking on commercial crew launch dates.

Enlarge / The Mackenzie River empties into the Beaufort Sea along Canada's northwest coast. (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

Sometimes the plucky investigator in a mystery story isn’t baffled by a “whodunnit.” Sometimes they are pretty sure about the who, but the evidence ain’t where it ought to be. Studying past climate events can be like that, with likely explanations waiting in limbo for years until good evidence turns up—or points to another explanation.

About 13,000 years ago, the warming out of the last ice age temporarily reversed course around the North Atlantic. This cold “Younger Dryas” period lasted almost 2,000 years. Like most climate events that primarily affect the North Atlantic region, ocean circulation is the prime suspect.

Jamming the conveyor

Global ocean circulation is a bit like a branching conveyor belt, with currents pushing water one way at the surface and allowing it to return along the bottom. In the Atlantic, surface currents move north until they grow salty and cold, at which point they stop being less dense than the underlying deep water. In several areas around Greenland, surface and deep waters can mix while a deepwater current heads off to the south.

Enlarge / FORT WORTH, Texas: The Barnett Shale Gas field at dusk, February 27, 2006. XTO Energy Inc. is extracting natural gas at this facility. (credit: J.G. Domke/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Between 2018 and 2020, natural gas is expected to continue to eat away steadily at coal's share of the US energy mix, barring any regulatory intervention from the federal government.

The competition between natural gas and coal is especially fierce this summer: the former could set a record in terms of its contribution to overall US energy generation.

Another interesting prediction about fossil fuels: in 2018, the average price of a gallon of gasoline has been significantly higher than the year before, but that may not be great news for the oil industry, because drivers are already responding to higher prices. The amount of gas drivers will purchase in 2018 is expected to fall year over year for the first time since 2012. The contraction amounts to 10,000 barrels of oil per day not sold—a small change for the US economy but potentially a harbinger of things to come.

Enlarge / Was Monet on a hot streak when he painted this? (credit: G. Starke)

Poker players are familiar with hot streaks—times where it just seems the cards consistently fall their way. But we also talk about hot streaks when it comes to athletic skill, for things like hitting in baseball and shooting in basketball. Now, a group of researchers would like to add a few more activities where hot streaks take place: science, art, and movie making.

The researchers analyzed the production of high-impact work in those fields, and they find that it tends to cluster in a single time period. And, for most people, getting hot once is all they can hope for—getting hot twice is not common, and multiple hot streaks are extremely rare.

Random or streaky?

The work was an attempt to make sense of two seemingly contradictory results from past studies. Some had suggested peak productivity in creative fields tended to occur in a cluster around the middle of people's careers. Other studies had indicated that people's best work seemed to occur randomly throughout their careers.

Enlarge / At $200, the Sonos One is now the cheapest way to get AirPlay 2 onto a Sonos setup. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Sonos on Wednesday announced that it has started to roll out support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 protocol on its wireless speakers.

As previously noted, AirPlay 2 is only fully supported on the company’s Sonos One and Play:5 speakers and its Beam and Playbase soundbars. Sonos users will need one of those speakers to directly activate AirPlay 2 control, but if they have one of those devices within a larger whole-home speaker setup, they’ll be able to control any other Sonos device they might have.

Apple rolled out AirPlay 2 as part of its iOS 11.4 update in late May, enabling its HomePod speaker to play the same audio across speakers in separate rooms, as well as the ability to play a pair of HomePods in stereo. (Sonos speakers already had the latter functionality.) Several third-party audio manufacturers have promised to include AirPlay 2 functionality in their speakers, including Bose, Bang & Olufsen, Marshall, Pioneer, and Bowers & Wilkins. With the update on Wednesday, Sonos is the first non-Apple speaker maker to support the protocol.

Enlarge / Ajit Pai does the Harlem Shake in order to prove that the FCC should repeal net neutrality. (credit: Daily Caller)

Ajit Pai's Federal Communications Commission is proposing that it stop reviewing the vast majority of consumer complaints about telecom companies. Going forward, consumers harmed by broadband, TV, and phone companies would have to pay $225 in order to get an FCC review of their complaints.

The FCC accepts two types of complaints: informal ones and formal ones. It costs nothing to file an informal complaint and $225 to file a formal one; given that, consumers almost always file informal complaints. Besides the filing fee, formal complaints kick off a court-like proceeding in which the parties appear before the FCC and file numerous documents to address legal issues. It isn't an easy process for consumers to go through.

The FCC is scheduled to vote Thursday this week on a proposal that would change the FCC's complaint rules by deleting two references to the commission's "disposition" of informal complaints.

Enlarge / A shot of some of the hardware used to discover the Fusée Gelée exploit, which is reportedly now fixed on newly sold Switch units. (credit: Kate Temkin)

Months ago, word leaked out to the public of an "unpatchable" exploit method that allowed Switch users to run custom firmware, homebrew code, and even pirated software on all existing hardware. Now, Nintendo is reportedly selling Switch systems that have been fixed at the factory to protect against this exploit.

The report comes from prolific Switch hardware hacker SciresM, who writes that at least some Switches currently on retail shelves are not vulnerable to the coldboot exploit known in hacking circles as "Fusée Gelée." SciresM suspects that Nintendo has used the iPatch system on the system's Nvidia Tegra chip to burn new protective code into the boot ROM, cutting off the USB recovery mode overflow error that previously let hackers in.

These boot-ROM iPatches are relatively simple for Nintendo to implement in the factory when the system is manufactured, but they are impossible to load onto the tens of millions of Switch units that had already been sold before the exploit was made public.

Enlarge / Prescription Drugs behind the counter at Boots the chemist in London, England, United Kingdom. (photo by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Mike Kemp)

Pfizer has agreed to roll back a round of price increases from July 1 that affected more than 100 medicines after President Donald Trump called the company’s CEO and had an “extensive discussion,” the company announced Tuesday.

Now, Pfizer says it will return the drugs to their pre-July 1 list prices “as soon as technically possible,” and it will leave them there until either the President puts in place new healthcare policy or until the end of the year—whichever comes first.

The idea is to “give the president an opportunity to work on his blueprint to strengthen the healthcare system and provide more access for patients,” Pfizer said in its announcement.