Month: October 2018

Enlarge / In dry hopping, hops are added during or after the fermentation stage of the brewing process. (credit: Natasha Breen/Getty Images)

Last month, the Quebec-based Le Castor brewing company recalled three different brands of its beer after numerous incidents of exploding bottles. The beer was re-fermenting in the bottle, and the resulting high pressures proved too much for the bottles to withstand.

This is hardly an isolated case. In 2014, a sour fruit beer called Swill was pulled from North American shelves after several bottles exploded. And a Manhattan barback is suing his former employer after a bottle of Corona exploded while he was placing it in an ice bucket (the incident left him permanently blinded in one eye). That wasn't even the first time a Corona bottle had exploded at the bar. Google "exploding beer bottles" and you'll get hundreds of results.

The culprit is probably the hops, according to Thomas Shellhammer, a food scientist at Oregon State University and co-author of a recent paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry—specifically, Shellhammer points to the growing popularity of a brewing process known as "dry hopping." Far from being the chemically inert ingredient brewers have long assumed, hops contain starch enzymes that, under certain conditions, can boost their activity to such a great extent that excessive re-fermentation occurs ("hop-creep").

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks about the new Apple headquarters during a media event in Cupertino, California, on September 12, 2017. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images)

On Thursday morning, Bloomberg published a bombshell story claiming that the Chinese government had used tiny microchips to infiltrate the data centers of Apple and Amazon. Apple and Amazon, for their part, responded with unusually specific and categorical denials. It's clear that someone is making a big mistake, but 24 hours later, it's still not clear whether it's Bloomberg or the technology companies.

On Thursday afternoon, Apple laid out its case against the story in a lengthy post on its website. The post specifically disputed a number of Bloomberg's claims. For example, Bloomberg says that after discovering a mysterious chip in one of its servers, Apple "reported the incident to the FBI," leading to an investigation. Apple flatly denies that this occurred.

"No one from Apple ever reached out to the FBI about anything like this," Apple writes. "We have never heard from the FBI about an investigation of this kind."

Samsung

$15,000. That's what it will cost you to buy Samsung's first 8K TV in the US later this month. If only there were something in 8K you could watch on it.

The Samsung Q900R 8K TV will arrive the week of October 28, according to a recent announcement from Samsung. It measures 85 inches, though smaller versions (65 and 75 inches, at least) are expected as well. In some respects, the QLED set resembles the company's current 4K flagship, the positively reviewed Q9F. It has the big-ticket Samsung bells and whistles, like "Ambient Mode," which lets you input a photo to make your TV show an image that makes it blend into the wall behind it.

Enlarge / That's no moon—it's an artist's conception of ICESat-2 in orbit. (credit: NASA)

On September 15, NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite left Earth on the last Delta II rocket. Happily, the satellite is providing a successful send-off to the Delta II as it has started its important mission without incident. On Wednesday, NASA showed off the first data beamed down: measurements of Antarctica’s glacial ice.

Like its predecessor, ICESat-2 is a laser altimeter that can very precisely map surface elevations. These satellites were designed with changing surface elevations in mind—chiefly the declining sea ice and ice sheets of the polar regions. The original ICESat had a seven-year run that ended in 2010. Without ICESat-2 ready to go, NASA turned to similar instruments onboard planes to collect what data they could in the meantime—an intensive project titled Operation IceBridge.

Compared to some other Earth-observing satellites, the principle at work here is pretty simple—though the engineering that makes it work is approximately miraculous. The satellite shines a laser pulse at the Earth and measures how long it takes to reflect back. Do the math (speed of light and all that) and you have the distance between the satellite and the ground. With precise knowledge of the satellite’s position, you can map surface elevation around the globe in great detail.