Month: March 2019

Enlarge / A single dose of MMR (for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) at Kaiser Permanente East Medical offices in Denver. (credit: Getty | Joe Amon)

Facing scrutiny for allowing anti-vaccine lies and conspiracy theories to fester and spread on its pages, Facebook announced Thursday a set of steps it will take to rid its platform of misinformation—which has seemingly become even weirder and more idiotic recently.

The move follows a letter sent to Facebook from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) last month, raising concerns that anti-vaccine information spread on the site could corrupt anxious parents’ views of safe, life-saving immunizations. Schiff also questioned the popular social media site about accepting payments from anti-vaccine advertisements.

Facebook wasn’t the only media giant questioned; Schiff sent a similar letter to Google, too, raising concerns about content on YouTube specifically. Still, Facebook has taken center stage on the issue.

Enlarge / All four parachutes opened as intended, bringing Dragon to a soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday. (credit: NASA TV)

After a six-day mission in orbit, SpaceX's Dragon capsule returned to Earth on Friday morning and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. The landing, at 8:45am ET, came right on schedule, as did pretty much every milestone during the Crew Dragon's first mission, a test before humans fly aboard the vehicle.

Shortly after the landing, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell could be seen on NASA's webcast, walking around her company's mission control at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Shotwell spent a few minutes shaking the hands of each controller and offering a few hugs. Certainly, this triumphant moment capped an emotional week for a company that has worked for the better part of a decade to develop a crewed spacecraft.

At first blush, the performance of Dragon appears to have met or exceeded NASA's hopes for this flight to the International Space Station, including during the critical descent back to Earth Friday morning. "The vehicle really did better than we expected," Steve Stich, deputy Commercial Crew program manager for NASA, said shortly after the landing.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Disney is rapidly preparing to launch its own streaming service, dubbed Disney+, later this year. While the debut date is still unknown, we now know that the service will include the entire Disney movie library shortly after the service launches. According to a report in Polygon, Disney CEO Bob Iger explained the strategy to investors at a meeting in St. Louis, Mo., pointing at the retirement of Disney's longstanding "vault."

"The service... is going to combine what we call library product, movies, and television, with a lot of original product as well, movies and television," Iger said. "And at some point fairly soon after launch it will house the entire Disney motion picture library, so the movies that you speak of that traditionally have been kept in a 'vault' and brought out basically every few years will be on the service. And then, of course, we’re producing a number of original movies and original television shows as well that will be Disney-branded."

The Disney Vault has been a marketing and sales strategy for years. After a film's initial release run, Disney would sequester the title in its vault for a long period of time. That meant that customers who didn't buy a physical copy of the movie immediately would be out of luck until Disney brought it out of the vault as a new edition or a special release run.

Enlarge / Captain Marvel is here, and thank goodness. (credit: Marvel Studios)

This review contains as few plot spoilers as the author could muster. (We even chose not to use certain film images that could be construed as spoilers, just in case.)

As much as we at Ars Technica like a given Marvel Studios film, even we can get burnt out by hero-movie fatigue. Quirky heroes face insurmountable odds. Then, wouldn'tcha know it, the heroes surmount them. We've seen it before—cheered at the action scenes, smiled at the jokes, forgiven the formula.

After so many entries, all burning a path toward mega-events like last year's boring Avengers: Infinity War, it's easy to lose sight of something unique to the superhero genre: protagonists who swear to protect the world at all costs. That's a big ask of any human, whether or not they've been granted insane powers.