Month: April 2019

Enlarge / The Pyrenees mountains, now with microplastics. (credit: flickr user: Paula Funnell)

Microplastics may be having a moment in the spotlight, as the public is increasingly aware of their presence in the environment around us. But as more evidence of their presence comes to light, it’s becoming clearer that we don’t yet have a handle on how big or bad the problem is. A huge amount of small plastic particles end up in the sea, but recent research has also found them in in lakes and mountain river floodplains, and even as airborne pollution in megacities.

A new paper in Nature Geoscience reports finding microplastics in a region that should be pristine: the French Pyrenees mountains. The researchers estimated that the particles could have traveled from as far as 95 km away, but they suggest that it could be possible for microplastics to travel even further on the wind—meaning that even places relatively untouched by humans are now being polluted by our plastics.

The mystery of the disappearing plastic

Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic are produced. In 2016, this figure was estimated to be around 335 million tonnes. We have no idea where most of this ends up. The amounts that are recovered in recycling plants and landfill don't match the amount being produced. Some of it stays in use, sometimes for decades, which explains part of the discrepancy. An estimated 10 percent ends up in the oceans. Although these numbers could change with further research, there's still a gap.

Enlarge (credit: Peloton)

Hype necessarily recedes as the blunt realities of actually developing autonomous vehicles sets in. For the companies developing robotaxis, that means a scaling back of ambition (like Waymo) or the pushing back of timelines (just about every major OEM). In the trucking sector, we've seen this as a splash of cold water poured over the idea of driverless road trains speeding along highways. But a company called Peloton thinks that running two big rigs close together can still work—and still boost fuel efficiency and safety—as long as you keep humans drivers in the cab and in the loop.

Although Peloton's PlatoonPro tech involves some clever vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-cloud (V2C) technology, it only counts as level 1 automation on the SAE scale. That's because the system only links together the accelerating and braking functions in the platoon; the human driver in each cab is still responsible for steering and remains in charge.

Conceptually, the idea is an evolution of the adaptive cruise control system already fitted to many cars—and even some class 8 trucks—already on the road. These systems use information from a forward-looking radar to match the speed to a vehicle ahead, maintaining a constant gap between the two as the one in front speeds up or slows down. Peloton's approach leverages this idea, but it adds the V2C element (using 4G).

SpaceX's Crew Dragon Spacecraft completed a pad abort test in May, 2015. This image shows the vehicle's eight SuperDraco thrusters firing as intended. (credit: SpaceX)

During a series of engine tests of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft this past Saturday, the vehicle experienced what the company has characterized as an "anomaly." Based upon an unauthorized leaked video of the accident, the company was counting down toward a firing of the Dragon's SuperDraco thrusters when the vehicle exploded. SpaceX has not validated the video, but it is consistent with verbal accounts of the failure that have been shared with Ars.

After the accident, large dramatic clouds of orange smoke billowed above "Landing Zone 1," where SpaceX conducted Saturday's engine tests. According to one source, the orange plumes were the result of between one and two tons of nitrogen tetroxide—the oxidizer used by Dragon's SuperDraco engines—burning at the location. After a dramatic weekend, what follows is a summary of what we know, what we don't know, and where SpaceX goes from here.

What was destroyed?

The Crew Dragon capsule in question is the same one that successfully flew a demonstration mission to the International Space Station in March. The spacecraft was being prepared for a launch abort test this summer. During this test, the Dragon would have launched from Florida on a Falcon 9 booster and then fired its powerful SuperDraco engines to show that the Dragon could pull itself safely away from the rocket in case of a problem with the booster before or during flight.

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  The Samsung Galaxy S10. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Samsung's flagship Galaxy S smartphone line is back with the Galaxy S10 and S10+. Since the launch of the Galaxy S8 in 2017, Samsung has stuck with the same basic design for two years across four major devices: the S8, Note8, S9, and Note9. The Galaxy S10 firmly fits into the Galaxy S8 family tree, but with new display and fingerprint technology, the S10 represents the biggest design upgrade since that release in 2017.

As usual, Samsung is gunning for the title of "spec-sheet champion" with the Galaxy S10, and the company is turning in devices with bigger displays, bigger batteries, faster SoCs, more RAM, and more storage. This is one of the first devices that gives us a look at the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC, and it's also one of the first devices with "Wi-Fi 6," aka 802.11ax support. The S10 is also the first device with a Qualcomm-made ultrasonic fingerprint reader, and it features Samsung's new "hole-punch" display tech for the camera cutout. If all that's not enough for you, the Galaxy S10+ can hit even more stratospherically high configurations—and prices—that would rival some laptops, topping out at 12GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for a whopping $1,600.

We reviewed the bigger Galaxy S10+, where even the base configuration results in a $1,000 smartphone. And if spending that much cash, we're not really in the mood for the kinds of excuses and compromises that would be acceptable at a lower price point. When a device manufacturer turns up with sky-high prices like this, it's only fair to go in with sky-high expectations.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of some fancy tech that you probably can't have because the company that makes it isn't on your company's list of approved vendors. (credit: Caiaimage / Robert Daly / Getty)

One of the things I enjoy most about writing for Ars is the opportunity to interact with such an enormous pool of brilliant IT folks. The Ars readership is overflowing with that most valuable of demographics: the proverbial "IT decision maker," or just "ITDM." From the sysadmin trenches to the C-suite, you guys do it all—not just turning the wrenches that keep business operational, but deciding which wrenches to buy, too.

But even while so many of us work at businesses whose products shape the future, as ITDMs we also often find ourselves faced with a tremendous number of obstacles when it comes to modernizing our own business tech and processes. You all know the drill, because you've all been through it—a new vendor shows up with a product that seems like it would solve so many of your problems, and you're interested in evaluating it, but the solution they're pitching gets shot down by a steering committee or design review board because it might require some unforecasted expense to conduct a mandatory IT security audit of the thing. Or because the head of the steering committee once had a bad experience with that vendor three jobs ago. Or simply because it's different, and here at $COMPANY, we do things a certain way.

Or perhaps you work in a large company with a tremendous amount of "IT inertia," and change happens as slowly as steering the Titanic. Maybe your company sees current and future IT trends like "edge computing" or the "hybrid cloud" not as desirable directions but as enormous security and regulatory nightmares waiting to be unleashed. Maybe you work in an industry with iron-clad change control requirements; maybe you're at a Fortune 100 company that is just now starting to consider alternatives to the traditional "datacenter full of servers and SANs" architecture.

Enlarge / Still photograph of supercooled water turning into snow, shot on an iPhone camera at 120 FPS slow-motion. (credit: Matthew M. Szydagis)

Like many people, physicist Matthew Szydagis has been amused by all those YouTube videos showing people banging on a bottle filled with water, causing it to quickly freeze in response to the blow. The trick is to supercool the water beforehand—that is, cool it below the freezing point without the water actually freezing. (Yes, it's possible.) But when he saw the same phenomenon depicted in Disney's 2013 animated film Frozen, he realized he might be able to exploit the effect to hunt for dark matter, that most elusive of substances.

The result is his so-called "snowball chamber," which relies on a newly discovered property of supercooled water. A professor at SUNY's University of Albany, Szydagis gave an overview of this research at the American Physical Society's annual April meeting, held earlier this month in Washington, DC. A draft paper can be found on arXiv, and a final version is being prepared for journal submission.

“All of my work is motivated by the search for dark matter, a form of matter we’re sure is out there because we can observe its indirect gravitational effects,” Szydagis said. “It makes up a significant fraction of the universe, but we have yet to uncover direct, conclusive and unambiguous evidence of it within the lab.” The detector could also be useful for detecting nuclear weapons in cargo, for understanding cloud formation, and for studying how certain mammals supercool their blood when they hibernate.