Month: September 2018

Video edited by Kevin Gallagher. Click here for transcript. (video link)

During the last decade or so, there has been an incredible amount of money, time, and energy put into revitalizing the launch industry, both in the United States and around the world.

Less than a decade ago, no company had ever developed an orbital rocket on its own and successfully launched a payload into orbit. SpaceX finally accomplished that feat in September 2008, opening the floodgates of private investment. The aerospace world today is radically different as a result, with more than 100 companies now seeking to build orbital rockets of varying size, scope, and capacity.

Doctor Who is coming back for its 11th season (since the modern reboot) next month, featuring the first-ever female Doctor (Jodie Whittaker). The BBC just released a new trailer, and it's clear from the footage that we've got a delightfully fresh take on the classic series ahead, while still keeping the most iconic elements that have made Doctor Who so enduring.

There were hints here and there over the last few seasons that, while the Doctor might have typically appeared in male form, a female incarnation was certainly possible. Count me among the longtime advocates for a female Doctor, particularly because it opens up an entirely new angle to the storytelling. It's one thing for a white male Time Lord to show up at various points in history. It's quite another for a strange woman to show up in, say, medieval England. So there's an opportunity for new kinds of conflicts and poignant shifts in relationships.

We got a taste of that during David Tennant's tenure as the 10th Doctor. In "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood," the Doctor takes the guise of a humble schoolteacher in 1913 London to escape detection by the so-called Family of Blood, who are pursuing him across time and space in hopes of draining his life force so they might survive. His companion, Martha, guards his Time Lord essence (in the form of a fob watch), since he will have no recollection of his no-human existence. But Martha is black (and female), which limits her own undercover identity options to that of a lowly maid in the school, scrubbing floors despite her medical degree. And, well, she's treated accordingly.

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Are the big ice sheets in Antarctica stable in the face of the warming we've already committed to? That's more serious question than it might sound. The continent is thought to hold enough ice to raise ocean levels by over 55 meters if it were to melt—enough to drown every single bit of coastal infrastructure we have and send people migrating far inland from the present-day shoreline.

But the melting of this ice is a complicated process, one that depends on things like the dynamics of glaciers as they push through coastal hills, the shape of the seafloor where the ice meets it, and the slope of the basins the ice sheets sit in. It's tough to reason out how much ice would be lost for a given bit of warming. As a result, we're left with historical comparisons: the last time it warmed by that amount, how much ice did we lose?

This week, we got some new information on this question courtesy of a detailed study of Antarctica's Wilkes Subglacial Basin. The work showed that it wasn't so much the amount of warming the ice experienced; it was how long it stayed warm.

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Amazon seems to have given us a glimpse into some of its new, unreleased products. Listings on Amazon UK show a new Echo Sub, a subwoofer designed to work with Echo speakers, and a new Amazon Smart Plug, a socket adapter with Alexa capabilities, both with an availability date of October 11. Amazon has since removed the listings, but reports from Pocket-lint show images and details of the two new devices.

The Echo Sub looks like a fatter version of Amazon's Echo speaker, almost like a clone of Apple's HomePod. The wireless subwoofer includes a 6-inch down-firing woofer and 100W of bass, tech that would certainly improve the quality of existing Echo speakers. Some complained after Amazon released the updated version of the original Echo last year, claiming its sound quality was subpar.

Listed within the device's description is stereo pairing, a feature that hasn't been available to Echo speakers yet. Currently, users can only group multiple speakers together to fill a room with sound, but they won't get that rich, complex left/right stereo sound. It appears that will be possible with the Echo Sub connected to two compatible Echo devices.