Month: March 2019

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  The first Boeing 737 makes its maiden flight in 1967. [credit: Boeing ]

[Update, March 12, 9:00am] The civil aviation authorities of the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia have now also grounded 737 MAX aircraft flown by their airlines. The additional groundings account for about 40 percent of all 737 MAX aircraft in service. The United States' Federal Aviation Administration has not yet taken any action, citing the absence of conclusive data on the crash's cause. An investigation is still underway.

Boeing announced late yesterday that a software update would be issued for the 737 MAX's flight controls:

For the past several months and in the aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610, Boeing has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX, designed to make an already safe aircraft even safer. This includes updates to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training. The enhanced flight control law incorporates angle of attack (AOA) inputs, limits stabilizer trim commands in response to an erroneous angle of attack reading, and provides a limit to the stabilizer command in order to retain elevator authority.

A Boeing spokesperson said that the FAA was expected to approve and mandate the updates no later than April.

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  The poster for Breakthrough, a 2019 SXSW documentary about scientific hero/occasional Willie Nelson harmonica player, Dr. Jim Allison. [credit: Nathan Mattise ]

AUSTIN, Texas—"It's astonishing how few documentaries there are about gifted scientists," filmmaker Bill Haney tells Ars about Breakthrough, his new documentary premiering over the weekend at South by Southwest. "Part of it is most filmmakers don’t know much about science, they’re thinking about film. But science can be complex, and audiences can be overwhelmed by scientific subjects. If you’re not careful, you can make NOVA, which hits your head not your heart."

Luckily for audiences, Breakthrough has both. And that's because (luckily for Haney) recent Nobel-winning scientist Dr. James Allison agreed to be the film's focal point. For those familiar with Allison's groundbreaking work centered on empowering the immune system to battle cancer, the documentary spends ample amounts of time in the lab detailing everything from how the scientist first became fascinated by T cells to his years of work leading up to the potentially game-changing cancer drug, Ipi. (No less than Woody Harrelson narrates each of Allison's scientific steps along the way.)

And while it may not pack in the same amount of information as reading an Allison paper directly, Breakthrough remains loyal to its academic source material in a way that's clear enough for any viewer to follow. The film quite frankly feels a little bit like a science communications miracle in this regard.

Enlarge (credit: Robyn Beck/Pool via Bloomberg|Getty Images)

In the early hours of Monday morning, Tesla employees got a surprising email from CEO Elon Musk. Less than two weeks after announcing that he was closing the company's retail stores and letting go the sales staff, it was time for an about-turn. According to CNBC, which received a copy of the email, Musk wrote that the company would now be keeping many of its unclosed stores open and would even reopen some of the now-shuttered locations. Additionally, a week from now, there will be price increases on all of its vehicles with the exception of the standard range Model 3. The email to employees was also followed by a public-facing blog post.

Musk referred to some of the closed stores as being "in such difficult or obscure locations, only Sherlock Holmes could find them." Such a criticism could not be leveled at Tesla's now-closed store in Washington, DC, located in the city's newest and poshest downtown retail location; perhaps this store was one that suffered from "low apparent demand generation."

Despite this possible reprieve for the thousands of retail workers at Tesla, Musk's email and the blog post state that sales will remain online only and that the stores will exist just to show people how to order a car "on their phone in a few minutes."