Month: April 2019

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  Last Thursday Firefly Aerospace tested the second stage of its Alpha rocket. [credit: Edwards Media ]

Last Thursday, on a green expanse at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, Firefly Aerospace prepared to test the second stage of its Alpha rocket. After years of development, engineers bolted the rocket stage to a vertical test stand and began to feed kerosene and liquid oxygen into the engine.

Then, for 300 seconds, the rocket's Lightning-1 engine fired, blowing white and yellow flame out of its exhaust nozzle. The five-minute test demonstrated the performance of the engine and upper stage over an entire cycle of flight in space, during which the upper stage would boost a satellite and insert into orbit.

During the test, all of the second stage's flight avionics, structures, and propulsion systems were subjected to a sustained firing consistent with a normal flight mission. According to Firefly, preliminary analysis of data from the test show that all of the rocket's systems performed nominally, and a post-test inspection revealed no observable degradation of the stage systems.

Enlarge (credit: Tire Rack)

Of all the areas of automotive technology that have improved over the years, perhaps none is as significant—and as little understood by the public—as the advances in tire technology. After all, a vehicle's tires are its sole points of contact with the road; if they lose grip, the car loses control. But to many drivers, tires are a dark art, round and black and mysterious. The cause is not helped by the tire companies themselves—few are prepared to sit down with journalists and explain in any real detail how and why their particular offerings are better than they used to be. But there is one good resource for doing some tire shopping, and it's one you as a denizen of the Internet may already be familiar with.

It's Tire Rack, a massive (now) online retailer of the round black things, and since 1995, the company has been doing independent tire testing as a way to give consumers the ability to cross-shop their new rubber. You don't even need to be a Tire Rack customer to benefit. The company probably won't like to hear it, but I'm sure I'm not alone in having done hours of research on the site trying to decide on new shoes for my old MX-5 and Saab 9-2x before going to Costco.

Actually, it's something Tire Rack already knows. "There have always been people that want to educate themselves, particularly with a connection to safety. The Internet makes it very easy for people to find us who aren’t able to make that time investment in the process" says Woody Rogers, Tire Rack's product information specialist. "We build out tools on the website to help people do that."

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  A few wild new Samsung TV designs. We're interested in the "The Sero," the two TVs in the bottom right. [credit: Samsung ]

It's tough to stand out in the TV market, where everyone is shipping beautiful 4K panels in pretty much whatever size you want. Samsung is hoping to turn heads with a few wild "concept lifestyle TV" designs, which it rounded up in a Korean-language press release today. There's the previously announced "The Frame," which looks like a framed picture and displays artwork when not in use. There's "The Serif," which is mounted on four legs, looking kind of like a canvas easel. And then there's the real head-turner, "The Sero," which is a vertical TV.

The Sero isn't vertical all the time. The 43-inch panel is mounted on a rotating stand, allowing you to get up, walk over to the TV, and swing it from landscape to portrait—kind of like working the world's biggest smartphone. Through Google Translate, Samsung's press release tells us it "analyzed the characteristics of the Millennial generation" to come up with the TV design, which is purpose-built for watching the vertical videos you find on services like Instagram. Of course, the scourge of vertical videos was created because people couldn't be bothered to rotate their 5-inch smartphones, so I'm unsure about the idea that people will get off the couch to rotate their 43-inch TV.

Samsung says the TV comes with NFC pairing and a "simple mirroring function" to get your smartphone videos on the TV. Like Samsung's other TVs, this has an ambient mode that can display images, photos, clocks, and more when not in use. There's a microphone with Samsung's Bixby assistant built in.