Month: October 2018

Trevor Mahlmann/Special to Ars

In some respects, Sunday night's launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was nothing special. After all, SpaceX has launched 35 rockets in just the last 21 months. This rocket had already been launched once before as well, back in July, from this very launch pad. And sending a three-ton payload to Sun-synchronous orbit some 600km above the planet is hardly revolutionary.

But in some ways, the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket was pretty darn awesome. For one, skies at the notoriously fogged-in launch site along the central California coast are rarely crystal clear for a launch. (They were Sunday night). Moreover, SpaceX landed a rocket at its new Landing Zone 4 on the coast for the first time that night.

Enlarge / Google's event invite. (credit: Google)

Join us October 9, at 11am ET, when Google will take the wraps off its 2018 hardware lineup. We'll have boots on the ground in New York City to bring you the latest from Google's big event.

As usual, we are expecting around five or so Google products at this event. The headline item will be Google's Pixel 3 smartphone, and we're also expecting a new Chrome OS tablet—the Pixel Slate—and Google hardware to match its Google Assistant smart display software, the "Google Home Hub." We have a whole list of what we're expecting here.

There have been so many leaks of Google's hardware over the last month or so that we know most of what's coming. We're mainly on the lookout for pricing and availability information, but there's a chance we'll run into some unexpected surprise hardware. Keep in mind, this is a company that launched an AI-controlled camera at last year's event. Anything is possible from Google's wacky hardware labs.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Lost among the slew of Amazon's recent device announcements was an update to the Echo Show. While Amazon absolutely mentioned the second-generation smart display, you may have overlooked it completely amidst all the other devices that debuted: a new Echo Dot, the Chromecast-like Echo Input, that infamous smart microwave, etc. But while it  may not have grabbed as many headlines, Amazon gave the $229 Echo Show a fairly significant facelift with a bigger screen, more powerful speakers, and a redesigned outer shell.

The Echo Show remains the primary device that gives Alexa a "face" of sorts. But with that face comes the challenge of managing users' interactions with Alexa. Amazon's other Echo devices make Alexa interactions painfully simple—ask, and the virtual assistant answers. The Echo Show, and similar devices, both enrich and complicate interactions with virtual assistants with its touchscreen display.

Amazon admits it's still figuring out which interactions are best spoken versus seen or touched, but the new Echo Show demonstrates that the company is moving in the right direction.

Enlarge / High school student Michael Senatore started the water bottle flipping craze with his May 2016 performance in a talent show. (credit: YouTube)

The water bottle flipping craze, in which a partially filled bottle of water is flipped and magically lands upright, swept the globe a couple of years ago. Now a group of Dutch scientists has designed a classroom demo version of the feat, described in a recent paper in the American Journal of Physics. It's designed to illustrate the principle of conservation of angular momentum, and includes handy tips on how to optimize your chances of successfully performing the trick.

The whole craze started back in May 2016, when a high school senior named Michael Senatore swaggered onto a stage and successfully flipped and landed a water bottle on a table during his school's annual talent show. The crowd went wild and someone in the audience captured the feat with a smartphone camera. The resulting 30-second YouTube clip has garnered more than 8 million views, and sparked a wave of copycat attempts around the world. The Backyard Scientist performed a version using a mercury-filled cylindrical container.

Experimentally verifying the trajectory of a flipping water bottle. (credit: P.J. Dekker et al.)

Explanations for the underlying physics quickly made the rounds as well, based on slow-motion playbacks of the motion of both the bottle and the liquid inside. The consensus: the motion of the bottle though the air causes the liquid to climb up the sides, thereby redistributing the mass and increasing the bottle's moment of inertia. That has a damping effect on the rotation, slowing it down just enough in time to stick the landing.