Month: March 2019

Enlarge (credit: Andrew / Flickr)

Apple is abusing its control over the iOS App Store to give its own music streaming service an unfair advantage over competitors, Spotify argued in a Wednesday filing with the European Commission.

"Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience," writes Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek. "After trying unsuccessfully to resolve the issues directly with Apple, we’re now requesting that the EC take action to ensure fair competition."

For years, Apple has pressured Spotify to use Apple's In-App Purchase service to collect subscription fees. Spotify has resisted, largely because Apple takes a whopping 30-percent commission. Over time, Spotify says, Apple has tightened up its app store rules to make it more and more difficult for app makers to direct users to payment methods outside the Apple ecosystem.

Enlarge / Relatives of the victims of the Sunday plane crash take a picture next to a pile of airplane fuselage at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, at Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region, on March 13, 2019. - A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including tourists, business travelers, and "at least a dozen" UN staff. Families of the victims were taken to the remote site on March 13, 2019, where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. (credit: TONY KARUMBA / AFP / Getty Images)

The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft on March 13, citing new data that showed a possible link between the March 10 crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight and the crash of a Lion Air flight off the coast of Indonesia last October. In an interview with NPR's David Greene this morning, acting FAA Director Dan Ewell said that "newly refined satellite data" from a flight telemetry system had led the agency to make the move.

Both Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (ET302) and Lion Air Flight 610 (JT610) were recently acquired 737 MAX 8 aircraft, and both were lost with all aboard just minutes after take-off. According to the emergency order issued by the FAA, "new information from the wreckage concerning the aircraft's configuration just after takeoff that, taken together with newly refined data from satellite-based tracking of the aircraft's flight path, indicates some similarities between the ET302 JT610 accidents that warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed."

The source of the data in question is a combination of telemetry feeds from the flights' Automatic Dependent Surveillance(ADS) system. Introduced in the US in 2001 and more widely worldwide in the wake of the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 in 2014, Europe has required most aircraft to carry the UHF-band ADS-Broadcast (ADS-B) system since 2017, and the FAA has mandated ADS-B for most aircraft by 2020.

Enlarge / Close-up of a hydrogen fuel cell. (credit: Wladimir Bulgar | Science Photo Library)

Lithium batteries can readily smooth out short-term hiccups in the supply of intermittent renewable energy. But they're not ideal for long-term storage, since they'll slowly discharge. They also aren't great for large quantities of energy—to store more, you keep having to buy more battery. Because of these issues, there has been research into a number of technologies that scale better, like flow batteries and renewable fuel production. But these pose their own challenges, both chemical and economic.

But researchers are now reporting a possible solution to some of these problems: a fuel cell that can be run efficiently in both directions, either using hydrogen or methane to produce electricity or using electricity to produce these fuels. Their measurements suggest that, after doing a complete cycle, they get out 75 percent of the electricity they put in to start with.

Limitations abound

Batteries, as we mentioned above, don't work for longer-term storage, as they will typically lose charge slowly. They're also expensive, as adding capacity means adding more batteries. Flow batteries solve some of these problems by storing the charged and discharged forms of a chemical in different tanks; larger or additional tanks are cheap, making expanded capacity relatively simple and inexpensive. But flow batteries aren't as efficient as traditional batteries, and the chemicals they use can be toxic or corrosive.

Enlarge / The dog is thought to have caught the plague from a dead prairie dog. (credit: Getty | Craig F. Walker)

At least 116 people and 46 animals in Colorado were potentially exposed to the black plague after veterinarians struggled to diagnose a critically ill dog back in 2017.

The unusual case prompted health experts to issue an equally unusual—and perhaps startling—warning. That is, that dogs in the US may contract the deadly bacterial infection at any time of the year, and the signs may be hard to spot.

“[P]neumonic plague, although rare, should be considered in dogs that have fever and respiratory signs with potential exposure in disease-endemic areas, regardless of season and lobar [lung] distribution,” the Colorado health experts concluded. They published details of the case and their warning this week in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Captain Marvel is still burning up the box office, saving Hollywood from a lackluster first quarter of 2019. Might she do the same for the embattled Avengers, reeling from their staggering loss? It sure looks that way, based on the latest trailer for Marvel's Avengers: End Game. And since it would take several days at this point to re-watch all the earlier films in the franchise, we also get to revisit the origins of our surviving Avengers in black-and-white footage from those movies.

(Some spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War and prior MCU films in this series below.)

For the two people on the planet who don't know this yet, in Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos (an intergalactic supervillain from Titan) successfully collected all six Infinity Stones: the Power Stone, the Space Stone, the Time Stone, the Reality Stone, the Soul Stone, and the Mind Stone. Once collected and placed in the Infinity Gauntlet, they gave Thanos the power to wipe out half of all living beings in the universe. And despite the valiant collective efforts of pretty much every superhero in the Marvel cinematic universe, Thanos succeeds. With a single snap of his fingers, half of the universe dissolves into dust, including many of our beloved superheroes.