Month: October 2018

Enlarge / CSIRO's ASKAP antennas at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, 2010. (credit: Ant Schinckel, CSIRO)

Some of science's biggest mysteries are in outer space. The identity of dark matter and dark energy involve fundamental questions about how the Universe is constructed. If you instead are interested in mysteries about what the Universe is doing, then fast radio bursts may be at the top of the enigma list.

They are, as their name suggests, fast, lasting for only a handful of milliseconds. And they also involve huge quantities of energy at radio wavelengths, just as promised. But beyond that, we know almost nothing about them, and we have only observed about 35 of them as of last count. Their rarity and transient nature have helped keep them from being better understood.

But this week's edition of Nature includes a collection of 20 new observations, all occurring since the start of 2017. Unfortunately, the new bursts don't tell us much about how they're generated. And, to make matters worse, they suggest that our best bet for figuring it out—the only repeating burst source we know about—is probably unlike all the other sources we're seeing.

John Campanella does all kinds of custom paint jobs in his spare time, airbrushing designs on cars, semis, motorcycles, and guitars. But by day, he works in the paint shop of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, applying paint to components for Pathfinder, Juno, Cassini, and Deep Impact, among other NASA missions.

"I think my paint is just about everywhere in the solar system," Campanella says. His team just finished painting the chassis for the Mars 2020 rover, which will be a nuclear-powered six-wheel drive machine about the size of an SUV. JPL features this under-appreciated process in a new video.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Enlarge / Alongside the PlayStation VR headset, which will work on both units. (credit: Kyle Orland)

There's only so much breathing room between the season's biggest video game releases, and that has meant an incredibly brief respite at Ars HQ. What do we gnaw on between massive games like Spider-Man, Forza Horizon 4, and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey? (Let alone Red Dead Redemption 2 around the corner.)

In my case, it's been PlayStation VR—a stint that I admittedly kicked off after testing the Oculus Quest. PSVR currently sits in a cushy point between PC's awesome-but-expensive systems and ho-hum phone-VR solutions. Sony's set thus feels to me like the closest Quest corollary (which relies on a mobile Snapdragon 835 SoC) ahead of that wireless headset's "Spring 2019" launch.

This season's biggest PSVR games, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and Firewall: Zero Hour, are both good and bad news for anybody getting excited about the Quest's possibilities. The good news is that these games deliver great gameplay while leaning on simple, lower-powered graphics (and in Astro Bot's case, still looking gorgeous). But Oculus fans will probably never see these first-party Sony games on next year's wireless kit, and it's a reminder that sometimes, smart development (and triple-A money to fund it) can beat any futuristic tech possibility.