Month: November 2018

Enlarge / A launch-day photo of Starman leaving Earth orbit. (credit: SpaceX)

Since its launch on February 6 atop a Falcon Heavy rocket, Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its "passenger" Starman have been moving away from the Sun.

Today, according to the Where is Roadster? website, the vehicle has reached its first apogee from the Sun at a distance of 1.66 Astronomical Units. (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance, or 149.6 million km.)

According to Ben Pearson, who runs the site, the Tesla's position should be accurate to better than a day, but it is impossible to know for sure. The data on the Tesla's orbit comes from NASA and tracking by ground telescopes for the first six weeks after launch when the Falcon Heavy's upper stage, and the Tesla, were still relatively close to Earth.

Enlarge / Organizers lead a march through the Google campus. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Just a week after thousands of Google employees worldwide protested the company’s inadequate response to sexual harassment, CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company would agree to the first of the organizers’ demands: ending mandatory arbitration in sexual harassment cases.

Pichai released a public memo in which he said that arbitration, a quasi-legal private dispute resolution process that often favors corporations over individuals, would now be "optional for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims."

"Google has never required confidentiality in the arbitration process and arbitration still may be the best path for a number of reasons (e.g. personal privacy) but, we recognize that choice should be up to you," he wrote.

Enlarge / Historical family trees turn up useful new insights into the genetics of longevity, but represent a world of different health risks. (credit: flickr user: Jon. D. Anderson)

Romantic scenes that never happen: your eyes meet. Your heart flutters. This person is the one—you’re sure of it, because you're convinced they'll live to at least 95 years old. It’s what you’ve always dreamed of.

Lifespan doesn't usually make an appearance on people’s lists of what they’re looking for in a partner. But, according to a paper published this week in the journal Genetics, longevity correlates strongly through marriage relationships, meaning that people are pretty good at picking partners who live similar lifespans. Failing to account for that behavior has meant that estimates of the genetic contribution to longevity have been substantially overinflated.

I knew the second I saw your bloodwork

Nobody is choosing partners based on how long they’ll live. As the authors of the paper sagely note, lifespan “cannot be observed until death, at which point the opportunity to mate has ended.” But as anyone who’s ever dated can tell you, people are likely to marry their match (or close to it) in characteristics like wealth and education, which play an obvious role in longevity.

Enlarge / A mock-up of what the Water-Go-Round may look like. (credit: Golden Gate Zero Emissions Marine)

All aboard: construction of a hydrogen fuel cell boat, with aims to be the first of its kind to run commercially, was announced on Thursday in San Francisco.

A startup called Golden Gate Zero Emission Marine (GGZEM) held a keel-laying ceremony on Thursday for its new, 70-foot hydrogen fuel cell ferry. The keel-laying ceremony marks the beginning of the construction of a vessel, and GGZEM expects that it will be completed by September 2019.

The boat, which will be called the Water-Go-Round, will likely be the first hydrogen fuel cell boat to run commercially, ferrying people around the San Francisco Bay. Generally, ferries tend to be diesel-powered, creating significant noise underwater, as well as greenhouse gas emissions and potential marine pollution from spills. By contrast, a hydrogen fuel cell boat would be quieter, and its only emissions while operating in the water would be more water.