Month: December 2018

Samsung's Galaxy S phones are usually announced in the first quarter of the year, so we're still a few months out from the unveiling. We already have an idea of what the device will look like, though, thanks to renders from OnLeaks at 91mobiles.

91mobiles identifies this devices as the "Galaxy S10 Plus," and it lines up well with previous rumors about the S10. There are a whopping four cameras on the back (rumored to be a wide-angle lens, a telephoto lens, a main camera, and a depth camera for bokeh effects) and two cameras on the front. The front design gets dramatically slimmer bezels compared to the Galaxy S9, and for the front camera Samsung is going with a new "hole punch" design. A camera hole shouldn't have much functional difference compared to a camera notch. It will be a dead area of the screen, and while you could just have the area above the camera be dead space, Samsung is flexing its display technology and surrounding the camera with pixels. Again there's a lot of corroboration here: Samsung previously announced this "Infinity-O" display technology.

The Earth's oceans are rising. It's an inevitable outcome when ice sitting on land melts and when oceans warm, which causes their volume to expand. But if you live at the coast, it may not be rising near you. Places like Miami and Newport News are experiencing floods at many high tides. Some places in Alaska, in contrast, are seeing the oceans edging away, as land seems to lift out of the sea (albeit incredibly gradually).

How can that happen?

It happens because the Earth's not a bathtub—adding more water doesn't increase ocean levels evenly. As this video details, there are lots of factors that add a local twist to the overall rise of the oceans. These factors range from the strength of ocean currents to the gravitational pull of large ice fields. The net result is that the US has some areas where ocean levels are actually falling a bit and many others where they're rising even faster than the global average.

Enlarge / Boeing 787 Dreamliner. (credit: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Each day this week from Wednesday through Friday, we're bringing you a pair of stories about facing the future. Today's focus is on AI in transportation—buckle up!

Ask anyone what they think of when the words "artificial intelligence" and aviation are combined, and it's likely the first things they'll mention are drones. But autonomous aircraft are only a fraction of the impact that advances in machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will have in aviation—the technologies' reach could encompass nearly every aspect of the industry. Aircraft manufacturers and airlines are investing significant resources in AI technologies in applications that span from the flightdeck to the customer's experience.

Automated systems have been part of commercial aviation for years. Thanks to the adoption of "fly-by-wire" controls and automated flight systems, machine learning and AI technology are moving into a crew-member role in the cockpit. Rather than simply reducing the workload on pilots, these systems are on the verge of becoming what amounts to another co-pilot. For example, systems originally developed for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) safety—such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) for traffic situational awareness—have migrated into manned aircraft cockpits. And emerging systems like the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) are being developed to increase safety when there's a need to compensate for aircraft handling characteristics. They use sensor data to adjust the control surfaces of an aircraft automatically, based on flight conditions.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket goes vertical on Wednesday morning in Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

This is an extraordinary week for orbital launches. On Monday, alone, a Soyuz rocket carried three humans into space, en route to the International Space Station. Then, a Falcon 9 rocket launched 64 smallsats into orbit about 500km above the planet.

On Tuesday, the flurry of activity continued when an Ariane 5 rocket lofted two large satellites to geostationary transfer orbit. This capped Arianespace's launch program for the year.

The action continues on Wednesday, with the launch of another Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft into orbit, scheduled for 1:16pm ET (18:16pm UTC). This is an instantaneous launch window, and the mission will ferry 2.5 tons of supplies to the International Space Station, including materials to support 250 experiments on the orbiting laboratory.