Month: March 2019

Enlarge (credit: Marian Lockhart / Boeing)

The crashed Lion Air 737 MAX and the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX aircraft had more in common than aircraft design and the apparently malfunctioning flight system that led to their demises. Both of the planes lacked optional safety features that would have alerted the pilots to problems with their angle of attack (AOA) sensors—the input suspected of causing the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software to put both aircraft into a fatal dive.

The New York Times reports that both vehicles lacked an "AOA disagree" light—a warning light that indicates when the aircraft's two AOA sensors provide different readings—and an angle of attack indicator. Since the MCAS system relied only on one of the aircraft's AOA sensors, the disagree light and AOA indicator would have given the flight crew visible evidence of a sensor failure and prompted them to disable the MCAS. But both of these features were sold by Boeing as expensive add-ons. And many discount and smaller airlines declined to purchase them, as they were not required by regulators.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is highlighted by a deal on the 256GB variant of Samsung's EVO Select microSD card. It's down to $40 on Amazon, which is a new low and about $10-15 off its usual price.

We've highlighted this card a few times in the past, so we won't dwell on the specifics here. In short, while it's not the absolute fastest of its kind and it's not as good for security cams as a dedicated high-endurance card, it should still be plenty powerful enough to boost the storage space of a Nintendo Switch, smartphone, or GoPro. It also comes with a 10-year warranty. More importantly, it's good value for a reliable card with this much storage at this price.

If you don't need more storage, though, we also have deals on HDMI cables, Kingdom Hearts III, PlayStation Plus subscriptions, and much more. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge / Two indie devs explain how they used automation, a single Google Play account, and a single slot-machine template to create and distribute over 1,000 slot machine apps. (credit: Alex Schwarz)

SAN FRANCISCO—This year's Game Developers Conference saw two game makers emerge with a possible chapter in a future dystopian sci-fi novel: the story of making money by letting robots do the work. In their case, that work was the procedural generation of smartphone games.

A single "game jam" event led to a data machine that ultimately pumped out a decent amount of cash: $50,000 over a couple of years. Years later, with that data (and money) in hand, the makers of this game-making machine, which focused entirely on "garbage" free-to-play slot machines, used GDC as a wake-up call to an industry where the "right" messages often revolve around listening to players, sidling up to publishers, and racking up critical acclaim. In their case, eschewing all of that worked a little too well for their comfort level.

Winning the “race to the bottom”

In 2013, two video game makers had been trying for years to make it in the burgeoning mobile games space. One of them, Alex Schwarz, had helped get the solid mobile swiping-action game Jack Lumber off the ground. (In a past life, I gave that game a good review at the now defunct tablet-only magazine The Daily.) The other, Ziba Scott, had put together a fine mobile-friendly puzzle game, Girls Like Robots.

Fresh on the heels of the announcement that Bill and Ted 3: Face the Music will start shooting this summer, we get a new trailer for another Keanu Reeves-starring vehicle: John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum.

(Spoilers for first two films below.)

For those who missed the first two movies, John Wick (Reeves) is a legendary hitman (known as "Baba Yaga") who tried to retire when he fell in love and got married. Unfortunately, he's drawn back into the dark underground world by an act of senseless violence after his wife's death. Nothing will stop John Wick from seeking retribution. The first John Wick grossed more than $88 million worldwide for a film that cost around $30 million to make, and it was praised for its brisk pace, heart-stopping action sequences, and stylish noir feel.

Enlarge / The level of detail in some of the fossils is astonishing. (credit: Dongjing Fu et. al.)

The first signs of complex animal life begin in the Ediacaran Period, which started more than 600 million years ago. But it's difficult to understand how those organisms relate to the life we see around us today. Part of this issue is that those fossils are rare, as many rocks of that period appear to have been wiped off the Earth by a globe-spanning glaciation. But another problem is that the organisms we do see from this period aren't clearly related to anything that came after them.

With the arrival of the Cambrian Period about 550 million years ago, all of that changed. In fossil beds like the famed Burgess Shale, we can see organisms that clearly have features of the major groups of life that have persisted to this day. As more collections of fossils become available, we can even watch groups diversify as the Cambrian progressed. But there's still considerable debate over whether these changes represent a true, multi-million-year "explosion" and what environmental changes might have driven this diversification.

We may be on the verge of some big help in answering these questions, as scientists are announcing the discovery of a spectacular deposit of Cambrian fossils from South China. The fossils include dozens of species, half of which we've never seen before, and appear to represent a previously upsampled ecological zone. The preservation is such that soft-bodied creatures like jellyfish, and the softer body parts of creatures with shells, can easily be made out in the rocks. Best yet, the researchers who uncovered the samples suggest that rocks from the same formation are widespread in China.

(credit: Photograph by tva.com)

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the US nuclear fleet produced more electrical energy than ever before in 2018. Last year, it produced 807.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, barely beating its 2010 peak of 807TWh. But the US nuclear industry has been in a well-documented decline. So what gives?

(credit: Energy Information Administration)

The EIA says the explanation comes from a combination of scheduling serendipity and what's called "uprating," where older nuclear plants are permitted to output more power. In a post this morning, the administration wrote that we shouldn't expect this much nuclear power output from the industry again—at least not in the near future.

Since the last peak in 2010, more than 5 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity has been retired. Some of that was offset by a new reactor addition: another 1.2GW of capacity came online in 2016 at TVA's Watts-Barr nuclear plant when reactor 2 was completed.