Month: May 2019

Maxar has been selected to build and fly the first element of NASA’s lunar Gateway. (credit: Maxar Technologies)

NASA has chosen its first commercial partner for a proposed space station to be built near the Moon, known as the Lunar Gateway. On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Maxar Technologies would build the first component of the Gateway—the power and propulsion element. Like the name suggests, it will provide electricity to the Gateway and help move it around.

"This time when we go to the Moon, we're actually going to stay," Bridenstine said in making the announcement. He has characterized the Gateway, which will be positioned in a high, elliptical orbit balanced between the Earth and Moon's gravity, as a reusable "Command Module." Under NASA's current plans to land humans on the Moon by 2024, this is where astronauts will launch to from Earth before climbing aboard pre-positioned landers to take them down to the lunar surface.

Despite the fanfare Thursday—Bridenstine provided an hour-long overview of NASA's ambitious Moon plans at the Florida Institute of Technology for a relatively simple contract award—the announcement represents a continuation of a Lunar Gateway plan that was initiated under the Obama administration. The Obama space plan involved using the Gateway as a stepping stone toward Mars, but now the Trump administration is pivoting toward the lunar surface.

Unlike this ceramic replica, video game loot boxes are not filled with real candy. (credit: ThinkGeek)

Weeks ago, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) released an outline for the The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act, aimed at stopping randomized loot boxes and pay-to-win mechanics in the game industry. Today, Hawley was joined by Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in formally introducing that bill in the Senate, complete with an 18-page draft of its legislative text.

Perhaps the most interesting portion of the bill attempts to define so-called "pay-to-win" mechanics in games. Those are defined broadly here as purchasable content that "assists a user in accomplishing an achievement within the game that can otherwise be accomplished without the purchase of such transaction" or which "permits a user to continue to access content of the game that had previously been accessible to the user but has been made inaccessible after the expiration of a timer or a number of gameplay attempts."

For multiplayer games, this would also include any purchasable in-game content that "from the perspective of a reasonable user, provides a competitive advantage."

Enlarge / Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, and its owners, the Sackler family, are facing hundreds of lawsuits across the country for the company's alleged role in the opioid epidemic. (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer)

Infamous OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma used front organizations and sponsored research to deceive the World Health Organization and corrupt global public health policies with the goal of boosting international opioid sales and profits, according to a Congressional report(PDF) released Thursday, May 22.

The investigation identified two WHO guidance documents that appear to parrot some of Purdue's misleading and outright false marketing claims about the safety and efficacy of their highly addictive opioids.

The findings, released by Reps. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), land as the country is still grappling with an epidemic of opioid abuse and overdoses. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid overdoses kill an average of 130 Americans every day.

Enlarge / A Comcast sign at the Comcast offices in Philadelphia, Penn. (credit: Getty Images | Cindy Ord )

Comcast may be harming its reputation by failing to reveal all of its lobbying activities, including its involvement in trade associations and lobbying at the state level, a group of shareholders says in a proposal that asks for more lobbying disclosures.

Comcast's disclosures for its lobbying of state governments "are often cursory or non-existent," and Comcast's failure to disclose its involvement in trade associations means that "investors have neither an accurate picture of the company's total lobbying expenditures nor an understanding of its priorities, interests, or potential risks from memberships," the proposal said. "Comcast's lack of transparency around its lobbying poses risks to its already troubled reputation, which is concerning in a highly regulated industry, especially given the rise of public Internet alternatives."

The proposal is on the ballot for Comcast's June 5 annual shareholder meeting and was filed by Friends Fiduciary, which "invest[s] based on Quaker values" and says it "actively screen[s] companies for social responsibility." Friends Fiduciary and other investors who joined the proposal collectively hold "over 1 million shares of Comcast stock," they said.

Enlarge / Does he look happy or sad to you? (credit: US Fish and Wildlife)

As social creatures, we subconsciously match moods with those around us—and not just when a cranky supervisor darkens your day (Editor's Note: Is it something I said?). The scientific term for the spread of feelings is “emotional contagion,” a term that may feel particularly appropriate when it comes to grumpiness. But as is so often the case with human psychology, this very human behavior does not appear to be unique to our species.

Studying emotions and their contagious nature in other animals can be tricky. Relying on outward displays runs the risk of conflating a simple emotion with some overt rowdiness that makes it visible. Getting at that underlying emotion requires understanding how critters act in varying moods. A team led by the University of Vienna’s Jessie Adriaense tried to do that with ravens by designing a test to reveal whether they were feeling optimistic.

Emotional control

The first goal of the experiment was to induce a positive or negative emotional state in a raven. To do so, the raven was shown a pair of food items: dog kibbles (a highly rated treat) and some raw carrot (a hard pass). One of the food items would then be taken away. When the tasty treat remained in view, the raven should be enthused; it responded by walking up to that side of the cage and focusing its attention on the snack. When the carrot was left, the bird gave it a dominantly left-side side-eye (the left eye and right brain hemisphere are linked to negative stimuli) and scratched at the ground in frustration.

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  That's a good-looking vine, alright

Star Trek fans briefly turned into Internet archaeologists today after CBS posted, then quickly took down, the first trailer for Star Trek: Picard. Earlier this morning, Entertainment Weekly appeared to have taken down a story about the reveal, but luckily for everyone else the trailer still showed up in Google results as "Star Trek: Picard first trailer released." (And this being the Internet, of course, mirrored versions of the trailer soon existed everywhere, showing us the first public glimpse of a show that was last teased at CBS' Upfront presentation in March.)

With rampant unofficial footage of the captain officially out of retirement, however, CBS soon righted the ship and debuted the teaser via the @StarTrek Twitter feed, noting it comes on the anniversary of The Next Generation's series finale.

25 years ago today, ‘All Good Things’ brought us to an end. The end is only the beginning. #StarTrekPicard to stream exclusively on @CBSAllAccess in the United States, Amazon #PrimeVideo in more than 200 countries, in Canada on @SpaceChannel & @CraveCanada https://t.co/MQp0eP0ovM pic.twitter.com/m9sDqvS8Mo

— Star Trek (@StarTrek) May 23, 2019

"Fifteen years ago today you led us out of the darkness," a voiceover intones elliptically over a vineyard that evokes images of the potential future in Next Generation finale All Good Things.... "You commanded the greatest rescue armada in history. Then, the unimaginable. What did that cost you? Your faith? Your faith in us? Your faith in yourself?"

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Memorial Day hasn't arrived yet, but the holiday deals are already in full swing. Before you get out of town for the long weekend, you can snag big sales on some of our favorite Windows laptops from the likes of Dell, HP, and Lenovo. You can get the newest Dell XPS 13 laptop, featuring a Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD for just $979.

The XPS 13 has always been a stellar laptop, but Dell made a few updates this year that pushed it up to the top spot in our Windows ultrabook guide. It's constructed beautifully and sturdily with a mixture of aluminum and woven fiberglass (depending on the model), and now it's not blemished by an unflattering up-nose cam. Dell's new, 2.25mm FHD webcam sits atop the FHD display so you can video chat without worrying about your on-camera appearance.

On top of that, the XPS 13 laptop has a comfortable keyboard and trackpad area, a fingerprint sensor embedded into its power button, and superb performance with an average battery life of about 13 hours base on our testing. The biggest things you can complain about are its display's 16:9 aspect ratio, which admittedly isn't ideal, and its scant port selection that includes just two Thunderbolt 3 ports, one USB-C 3.1 port, one microSD card slot, a headphone jack, and a lock slot. The base laptop still costs $899, but you'll save $230 if you opt for this more powerful model.