Month: October 2018

Enlarge (credit: Ford)

On Thursday, Ford announced a recall affecting almost 1.3 million cars in the US. It covers the 2012-2018 model year Ford Focus, specifically those with either a 2.0L GDI engine built before April 13, 2017, or those with a 2.0L GTDI engine built before February 2, 2018. A further 136,272 vehicles are affected in Canada, with 44,521 more in Mexico.

The problem is with the evaporation system fitted to the cars' fuel tanks. The affected cars have canister purge valves that can refuse to close, which in turn could cause enough vacuum within the tank to deform it. Ford says that the concern is that cars could refuse to start or stall while driving, and then refuse to restart. Affected vehicles may display a malfunction indicator light or maybe just a fluctuating fuel gauge.

The fix sounds relatively simple: a reprogrammed control module that detects if the purge valve is malfunctioning and prevents the above from happening. Ford dealers will also inspect and replace affected fuel systems if necessary.

Enlarge / This maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy was a success. (credit: SpaceX)

When the Falcon Heavy rocket launched for the first time in February, some critics of the company wondered what exactly the rocket's purpose was. After all, the company's Falcon 9 rocket had become powerful enough that it could satisfy the needs of most commercial customers. One such critic even told me, "The Falcon Heavy is just a vanity project for Elon Musk."

At the time, the rocket only had a couple of launches on its manifest, including the 6-ton Arabsat 6A satellite for Arabsat of Saudi Arabia, and the Space Test Program-2 mission for the US Air Force. However, since that time SpaceX has seen the rocket certified for national security missions by the US military and has signed several additional launch contracts.

Last week, the Swedish satellite company Ovzon signed a deal for a Falcon Heavy launch as early as late 2020 for a geostationary satellite mission. And just on Friday, ViaSat announced that it, too, had chosen the Falcon Heavy to launch one of its future ViaSat-3 satellite missions in the 2020 to 2022 time frame.

Enlarge / The breathing of the crowd: The 2015 found-footage horror film Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension was one of the movies screened during the study. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

Parents of young children often struggle to assess how upsetting a particular film will be for their offspring. Ratings systems can help, but tend to be subjective assessments. It might soon be possible to objectively evaluate how intense films might be for younger viewers just by analyzing the chemicals that audiences emit when they breathe, according to a new study by researchers from the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. They described their findings in a new paper in PLoS ONE.

Sure, it seems bit far-fetched, but tracking the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is an active and entirely legitimate area of research. Plastics, for instance, emit VOCs as they degrade over time, thanks to exposure to light, heat, moisture, and pollutants. This so-called "off-gassing" results in a serious issue for museum conservationists and libraries, among others.

Every country has its own rating system for films, designed to guide consumers as to what kinds of content they might encounter while watching a given film. While such systems are supposedly based on objective criteria—how much violence, sexual content, and bad language is included—there is actually quite a bit of subjective variability involved in making these determinations. And the public's sensibilities can shift over time: films that were deemed shocking in the 1930s strike today's audiences as remarkably tame. It matters because a film's rating has a direct impact on how broad an audience it can reach.

Enlarge / Photo by Gary Gardiner/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

The New York State Attorney General hit oil giant Exxon Mobil with a lawsuit on Wednesday, claiming that the company misled its investors about climate change and the risks that it would cause for their investment.

The lawsuit has been in the works for years. New York started investigating Exxon Mobil in November 2015, when it subpoenaed the company for financial records as well as internal documents and communications.

Wednesday's lawsuit (PDF) claims that the company told investors it was managing risks from existing and potential climate change regulations, while it allegedly wasn't. Failing to build political risk into its financial models would have made Exxon Mobil look more profitable, and consequently investing in the company might have seemed like a better bet to investors.