Month: October 2018

Enlarge / A Britten Norman Islander plane, similar to the kind used in the Orkney Islands to shuttle people short distances. (credit: Britten Norman)

Up in the remote northeast of Scotland, residents of the Orkney Islands use small island-hopping aircraft to commute around the archipelago. The longest flight in the area is 15 minutes, traveling 33 miles from the city of Kirkwall to the island of North Ronaldsay. The shortest flight takes an average of 80 seconds to travel 1.7 miles between the islands of Westray and Papa Westray. That flight holds the Guinness World Record as the shortest commercial flight route in the world.

Now, Scottish airline Loganair and aircraft modifier Cranfield Aerospace Solutions are working together in the hopes of turning the Orkney Islands' 10 inter-island routes all-electric, perhaps even establishing the world's first all-electric commercial flight routes.

Electric planes are still something of a pipe-dream for environmentalists and technologists. Jet fuel is extremely energy-dense compared to batteries, and flight requires a lot of energy at little additional weight. Electric flight startups are either developing hybrid battery/jet-fuel planes or banking on the continuous improvement of batteries to make their visions viable years down the road. While the most optimistic see the advent of lithium-air batteries and engine efficiency improvement as a path to commercial electric flight, others have focused on decarbonizing jet-fuel synthesis.

Enlarge / The triangular shapes had been described as possible relics of 3.7 billion-year-old microbial life. The rock has been flipped upside down since then, but the red arrow highlights that one of these triangles is not like the others. (credit: Abigail Allwood)

Few things in science seem to be as controversial as claims to the oldest evidence of life on Earth. As researchers strive to push life's origins back further into the history of the early Earth, the evidence they have is never completely unambiguous. (If you were over three billion years old, you wouldn’t look so great, either.) Other scientists inevitably question any new evidence, and arguments ensue.

Microbes in Greenland?

Two years ago, a group working in the ancient rocks of Greenland stumbled on some tantalizing cone-shaped distortions of rock layers. Based on several lines of evidence, the researchers concluded that they had found stromatolites, which are layered mounds built by communities of microbes in shallow water. Modern stromatolites are mainly known from Australia's Shark Bay, but they were much more common when microbes ruled the Earth so are therefore one of the most obvious relics of life in the rock record. The Greenland find would push the age of the oldest-known stromatolite from about 3.45 billion years to 3.7 billion years.

But other researchers wanted to see these Greenland rocks for themselves. And in a newly published study led by Abigail Allwood, she and her team explain why they aren't buying it.

Enlarge

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, the dealmaster is back with a big bunch of deals for your consideration. The top featured item today is a ASUS ROG Strix gaming laptop. This 15.6-inch behemoth has an Intel Core i5-8300H, 8GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, and a 128GB SSD plus a 1TB hard drive. Normally this is $1,039.99, but today you can get it for $879.99. Did we mention it has a super cool RGB keyboard?

If you're more of a desktop gamer, we also have a deal on the new Intel Core i9 9900k CPU, which releases tomorrow.

You can find those and tons of other deals below. Happy bargain hunting!

Samsung

Samsung today announced the Galaxy Book2 (sic; the company has not put a space between the word and the number), a 2-in-1 tablet running Windows 10, powered by a Snapdragon 850 processor.

The first generation of Windows 10-on-ARM machines were roundly criticized for the performance of their Snapdragon 835 processors. The second generation of machines, however, uses the Snapdragon 850, a variant of the Snapdragon 845 that's designed for the bigger batteries and higher power dissipation of laptops and tablets. This is widely hoped and expected to bring performance up to respectable levels.

Apple

Apple will host another product announcement event on October 30 at 10am Eastern time, according to invitations that have gone out to members of the press and an update to Apple's live events page.

The invitation for the event carries the copy, "There's more in the making," and it's accompanied by artistic renditions of Apple's logo. This combo suggests the products discussed at this event might be targeted at creative professionals and hobbyists—a common theme for Apple's products of late. In fact, there appear to be several versions of the logo, and different members of the press received different ones. You can see many of them above or by refreshing the Apple live events page.

Brian Cleary/Getty Images

BRASELTON, Ga.—The Petit Le Mans is a 10-hour endurance race held each fall at Road Atlanta in Georgia. As the name suggests, it's run with similar rules as the French race that runs for 24 hours each June, which means a mix of prototype and production-based sports cars take to the track at the same time. And although Petit Le Mans was first held just 21 years ago, it quickly established itself alongside events with decades-more history. In fact, it helped revitalize endurance racing, particularly in the US where it gave rise to the series we now know as the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

This year's Petit Le Mans was possibly the best in a decade. In each of the three classes (Prototype, GTLM, and GTD), there were championships to decide. On top of that, the North American Endurance Cup was up for grabs (it's a separate trophy, again for all three classes, scored just at the longer races of the year). And those out of title contention were just going for the win.

It will soon be possible to discard more of the in-box apps that ship with Windows 10.

Currently, a handful of pre-installed apps can be removed, including OneNote, Skype, and Weather, but most of the other built-in apps are permanent fixtures. Windows 10 has also promoted a number of third-party applications such as Candy Crush Saga to the chagrin of many. These don't appear to be going away, but such apps have always been uninstallable if you don't want them. However, the latest preview build of Windows 10, build 18262, enables the removal of apps such as Mail, Calendar, Movies & TV, and the Groove Music app.

The ability to remove these apps doesn't really mean much in terms of disk space or convenience, as none of them are very big. The move may be of more interest to corporate deployments; an organization that has standardized on Outlook, for example, might want to remove the Mail and Calendar apps to reduce user confusion.