Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Bake off that new car smell. (credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In the US, "new car smell" is a beloved scent. People even try to make their cars smell new with after-market cleaning products. But in China, customers find the same odor repulsive. As the Chinese auto market grows, car makers are looking for a way to make the aroma of their new vehicles more amenable to Chinese tastes.

Early this month, Ford filed a patent to reduce the odor of some of the adhesive, leather, and other materials that produce Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) that contribute to new car smell. The patent appears to include software that senses the car's location and the weather it's experiencing, then it possibly detects whether the owner has "requested volatile organic compound removal from the vehicle." Next, on a sunny day, the car will roll down a window and turn on the engine, the heater, and a fan in order to bake off the VOCs and their accompanying smell.

The Ford patent explains: "new vehicles typically have an odor often referred to as a 'new car smell'... This odor typically persists for several months after the manufacture of a new vehicle. Some customers do not like this smell, and even become irritated or sick from the VOCs in the interior of a new vehicle" [emphasis Ford's].

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

We've known since May that serious flaws in Uber's self-driving software contributed to the fatal crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, back in March. For example, Uber had disabled emergency braking on its vehicles to make its cars' driving behavior less erratic. A new report from Business Insider's Julie Bort sheds light on why Uber's software may have been so flawed at the time of the March crash.

In early 2018, Uber's Advanced Technology Group—the team developing self-driving cars—was focused on getting ready for a forthcoming demo ride with Uber's recently hired CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. Business Insider reports that in November 2017, Uber circulated a document asking engineers on the self-driving car team to think about "rider experience metrics." Engineers were encouraged to try to limit the number of "bad experiences" to one per ride.

Two days later, another email went out announcing that Uber was "turning off the car's ability to make emergency decisions on its own like slamming on the brakes or swerving hard."

Enlarge / An image of Apep taken in the infrared. (credit: University of Sydney/European Southern Observatory)

Figuring out what powers the Universe's largest explosions can be a real challenge, as the explosion wipes out evidence of what caused it. Archival data can sometimes provide hints of what was in the area where things went boom, but a lot of the progress we've made comes down to physicists modeling some of the more extreme objects out there and seeing if they can recapitulate the details of the explosion.

That's where we're at with long gamma ray bursts (where "long" in this case means a couple of seconds). We've seen them happen, and astrophysicists have calculated that they could be emitted from a rapidly rotating, massive star. But we don't have a lot of examples of this sort of star to study in order to see if the physics of their explosions match up with our models. Now, a team of researchers thinks it has spotted one that, in combination with a second massive star, created the fantastic-looking pinwheel shown above. But detailed observations of the system suggest that the pinwheel is formed by materials that originated on a single star yet are moving at two different speeds—something we can't explain.

The serpent god

Technically, the new object goes by the absurdly memorable name 2XMM J160050.7–514245. Surveys spotted it because it was an oddity: unusually bright at certain infrared wavelengths. Follow-up observations revealed its sinuous form, which led the researchers to rename it from the "cumbersome" 2XMM J160050.7–514245 to Apep, which is the name of a serpent deity in Egyptian mythology.

Enlarge (credit: Benjamin)

After endless difficulties with the Windows 10 October 2018 update—finally re-released this month with the data-loss bug fixed—it seems that now it's the Office team's turn to release some updates that need to be un-released.

On November's Patch Tuesday two weeks ago, Microsoft released a bunch of updates for Office to update its Japanese calendars. In December 2017, Emperor Akihito announced that he would abdicate and that his son Naruhito would take his role as emperor. Each emperor has a corresponding era name, and calendars must be updated to reflect that new name. The Office patches offer updates to handle this event.

Two of these updates, KB2863821 and KB4461522, both for Office 2010, are apparently very broken, causing application crashes. The company has suspended delivery of the patches, but the problem is so severe that Microsoft is recommending that anyone who has installed the updates already should uninstall them pronto (see instructions for KB2863821 here and for KB4461522 here).

Enlarge / A YES logo banner. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Heiman)

Amazon is trying to buy 22 regional sports TV networks (RSNs) from the Walt Disney Company, according to a CNBC report today.

In June, Disney received Department of Justice approval to buy 21st Century Fox properties on the condition that it divest Fox-owned regional sports networks (RSNs). Together, these networks have programming rights for 44 Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, and National Hockey League teams.

"In addition to Amazon, Apollo Global Management, KKR & Co, The Blackstone Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group and TEGNA also made first round bids for the full slate of networks," CNBC wrote, citing anonymous sources.

Samsung

We're rapidly approaching 2019, and that means it will soon be time for Samsung's yearly Galaxy S flagship launch. The company has been facing declining smartphone sales for some time now, and if the latest Wall Street Journal report is to be believed, it seems Samsung's 2019 strategy will be to launch a whole bunch of high-end smartphone models and let the market decide.

The Journal's report claims the Galaxy S10 launch should happen sometime in February, and instead of the usual two smartphone models (one big, one small), Samsung will launch three variants of the Galaxy S10 at once. The report says the three models will have "displays that range in size from 5.8 inches to 6.4 inches"—so instead of "big" and "small," it sounds like we're getting "small," "medium," and "large." After similar designs for the S8 and S9, the S10 is expected to be all new.