Month: February 2019

Enlarge / On Nov. 15, NASA conducted a full-power, full-duration 650-second RS-25 engine test on the A-1 Test Stand at Stennis Space Center. (credit: NASA)

NASA has continued to make progress with the development of its large Space Launch System (SLS) rocket as work continued on its critical core stage throughout the partial government shutdown, and the agency is nearing critical hardware tests. However, it now seems all but certain that NASA will miss its latest launch date for the first flight of the rocket, June 2020.

Multiple sources have told Ars that while NASA is still targeting sometime later in 2020 for a test launch of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, known as Exploration Mission-1, this flight is likely to slip into 2021.

This week, in response to a query about potential delays, a spokeswoman for the agency's exploration program, Kathryn Hambleton, said the agency is not ready to discuss a new schedule yet. "NASA is still assessing impacts as a result of the shutdown, but we are still working toward a launch in 2020," she told Ars.

• 

  Say hello to the "finger pinch" emoji. Please use this responsibly. [credit: Emojipedia ]

Emoji version 12.0 has been finalized by the Unicode Consortium, and for 2019 we're getting 230 new emoji. Although the standard is finalized, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other platform vendors still need to create artwork and integrate these new glyphs into their respective platforms. Today we have a preview of what to expect thanks to Emojipedia, which put together a list of the new glyphs with example artwork.

There's a push for more diversity with this new emoji release. We have emojis for deaf people in three genders (male, female, and genderless) and five skin tones, an ear with a hearing aid, people in motorized and unmotorized wheelchairs, prosthetic arms and legs, a guide dog and a service dog, and people with a probing cane. There are actually only 59 distinct new emoji types in this release, but everything that depicts a human comes in five skin tones and three genders, which pumps up the numbers. You can really see this with the "People holding hands" emoji, which is completely configurable for a total of 70 possible combinations.

The emoji that's causing the most buzz is "pinching hand." Emojipedia's example shows a thumb and pointer finger with a small distance between them, which could also be interpreted as a hand signal for "small." People are already coming up with uh, "suggestive" uses for such a glyph, and if the actual implementations follow Emojipedia's design, the glyph could end up on the naughty list next to peach and eggplant.

Enlarge / A fizzling Hurricane Sandy churns over the Northeastern US at night after making landfall in 2012. (credit: NASA/Earth Observatory)

Every once in a while, a day comes along to remind you that weather is more than a trusty source of social lubrication for awkward elevator encounters. Severe weather can threaten property, homes, and even lives. If a statistically rare weather event happens to you rather than someone else, abstract ideas about low probabilities can become concrete, like the way the phrase "broken bone" means so much more when you're wearing a cast.

Climate is really just the probabilities of weather, so extreme weather is also the most attention-grabbing aspect of a region's climate. Thus, climate change includes a change in the probabilities of many weather extremes. As a result, each individual disaster now triggers a natural question: did humanity's history of greenhouse gas emissions make that disaster more likely or worse?

It's an inherently complex question for scientists to answer and gives people who reject climate science rhetorical room to loudly argue that you can't prove climate change was solely responsible for a storm.