Month: October 2018

Enlarge / The crew aboard the International Space Station took this photo of Thursday's failed Soyuz launch. (credit: NASA)

On Thursday, a Soyuz rocket suffered a catastrophic failure at around the time the second stage began to separate from the first stage. At that moment, the spacecraft's escape system automatically fired, carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin into a ballistic return to Earth. They later landed safely in Kazakhstan.

The incident has raised a number of questions about what actually happened, what this means for the International Space Station going forward, and what this means for the commercial crew program. With this post, we're going to try and answer some of those questions based upon a NASA briefing that Ars attended in Houston as well as discussions with several officials including former astronauts and aerospace engineers.

What happened to the rocket?

Razer

Razer has announced the second iteration of its gaming-focused Razer Phone. Called the Razer Phone 2, the device improves the camera, adds wireless charging, and bumps up the specs across the board compared to its predecessor.

The main draw is still its screen. The 5.7-inch LCD display has a 2560x1440-pixel resolution, HDR support (HDR-10), 645 nits of maximum brightness, and Wide Color Gamut with 98.4% of DCI-P3. But the big claim to fame is a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz with Ultramotion technology; the refresh rate is variable, going as low as 40Hz. The audio setup is also notable; this phone has stereo speakers that are Dolby Atmos certified.

Enlarge / Solar panels sit on the roof of Google headquarters in Mountain View. (credit: Kimberly White/Corbis via Getty Images)

Google has long been a carbon-neutral company in a theoretical sense. That is, even when it's physically impossible for Google's data centers and offices to consume renewable energy, the company offsets that "dirty" energy with "clean" energy purchases at other times and locations.

The problem is, this does not make Google carbon-neutral in a practical sense, because the company still needs polluting energy sources to keep functioning. In a new report (PDF), Google has acknowledged this limitation and offered a few interesting graphics showing how much carbon-free energy its data centers actually consume.

The report is interesting not just because Google is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world but also because it shows Google is heading off criticism that has been lobbed at all kinds of corporate buyers of renewable energy, including major players like Facebook and Apple. That is, if you're "offsetting" your carbon emissions by paying a wind farm owner for energy that's created at 2am on land that's 3,000 miles from your data center or factory, how much good have you really done?

Enlarge / Clockwise, from the top left: Surface Laptop 2, Surface Studio 2, Surface Headphones, Surface Pro 6. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft was the fifth-biggest PC maker in the US in the third quarter of this year, according to industry advisory firm Gartner.

The top spot in the US belongs to HP, with about 4.5 million machines sold, ahead of Dell at 3.8 million, Lenovo at 2.3 million, and Apple at 2 million. The gap between fourth and fifth is pretty big—Microsoft sold only 0.6 million Surface devices last quarter—but it suggests that Microsoft's PC division is heading in the right direction, with sales 1.9 percent higher than the same quarter last year. The company pushed down to sixth place was Acer.

The current quarter should be better still; the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Studio have all been given hardware refreshes which, when combined with the always-busy holiday season, should stimulate higher sales.

Enlarge / Artist's depiction of a black hole. These strange objects could hold the key to a theory of quantum gravity. (credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab)

When famed physicist Stephen Hawking passed away earlier this year, he left a scientific legacy that included one of the knottiest paradoxes in modern theoretical physics. Now his final paper has just been published, revisiting the question of whether information can be retrieved from a black hole or whether it is lost forever. The paper posits that information can be stored in a halo of "soft hair" surrounding a black hole.

Once upon a time, physicists believed that black holes had no hair. "We can often tell people apart by looking at their hair, but black holes seemed to be completely bald," co-author Malcolm Perry of the University of Cambridge writes in The Guardian. That is, all you needed to describe black holes mathematically was their mass and their spin. So there would be no noticeable change if you threw something into a black hole—nothing that would provide a clue as to what that object might have been. That information is lost.

But in 1974, Hawking realized that black holes also have a temperature, and if so, they had to produce some kind of thermal radiation. So black holes must also have entropy—technically, a means of determining how many different ways you can rearrange the atoms of an object and still have it look pretty much the same. Hawking was the first to calculate that entropy. He also introduced the notion of "Hawking radiation."

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by the handful of pre-order deals that are out there for Google's Pixel 3 phones, which the tech giant launched earlier this week.

Now, our first impressions of the new hardware aren't incredibly positive, and we'd recommend waiting for our review to drop before making any judgments if you're on the fence. If you're dead set on only buying from Google, though, there are a handful of special offers available. Verizon has a BOGO deal that ultimately takes $800 off a second Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL phone, while Best Buy is offering a $100 store gift card with a purchase. Google's Project Fi is offering a $799 credit deal for new users as well.

Per usual, these offers come with heavy caveats. Best Buy's offer is for new Verizon activations only—not those who just buy the phone unlocked—and requires a monthly installment plan. The "$800 off" deal at Verizon and Best Buy, meanwhile, comes in the form of 24 monthly bill credits, each worth $33.33 a month. That means you'll still be paying for two phones upfront and you'll have to stick with Verizon and the Pixel 3 phone for two years to get all money back. Project Fi's deal requires that you have an existing member on a group plan and buy two Pixel 3 devices, at which point the $799 credit will be put toward a new user added to that same plan.

Enlarge / CVS, now an even more towering figure in the healthcare world. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The Department of Justice on Wednesday approved a $69 billion merger between prescription-drug behemoth CVS and insurance giant Aetna, with some strings attached.

The massive merger is just the latest grand-scale restructuring of the health care industry, which is under pressure to rein in unwieldy costs while facing competitive threats from tech giants, such as Amazon, joining the fray.

CVS, which racked up about $185 billion in revenue last year, runs the country’s largest retail-pharmacy chain and provides prescription plans to more than 94 million customers. By joining forces with Aetna—the nation’s third-largest health-insurance provider with over 22 million medical members, earning $60 billion in revenue in 2017—CVS will have a tight grasp on the market. The combined enterprise aims to be a first-line health care hub with clinics in its ubiquitous brick-and-mortar stores.

Enlarge / Your family tree could be leaking personal information. (credit: Harvard University)

Earlier this year, news broke that police had devised an unexpected new method to crack cold cases. Rather than use a suspect's DNA to identify them, data from the DNA was used to search public repositories and identify an alleged killer's family members. From there, a bit of family tree building led to a limited number of suspects and the eventual identification of the person who was charged with the Golden State killings. In the months that followed, more than a dozen other cases were reported to have been solved in the same manner.

The potential for this sort of analysis had been identified by biologists as early as 2014, but they viewed it as a privacy risk—there was potential for personal information from research subjects to leak out to the public via their DNA sequences. Now, a US-Israeli team of researchers has gone through and quantified the chances of someone being identified through public genealogy data. If you live in the US and are of European descent, odds are 60 percent that you can be identified via information that your relatives have made public.

ID, the family plan

Any two humans share identical versions of the vast majority of their DNA. But there are enough differences commonly scattered across the three billion or so bases of our genomes that it's now cheap and easy to determine which version of up to 700,000 differences people have. This screen forms the basis of personal DNA testing and genealogy services.