Month: June 2019

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  Fabrice Coquio, Managing Director of Interxion, at the site of MRS3—a data center being built in a former Nazi sub bunker. [credit: Interxion ]

Marseille—France's largest city on the Mediterranean coast—is many things. It's the country's largest commercial port, the birthplace of French hip-hop, and the home of the French Foreign Legion. It's also a tech industry hotspot and the landing station for 13 major submarine cables. These cables connect Europe with North America, Africa, Cyprus, the Middle East, and Asia. Two more are scheduled to come online next year.

From a networking standpoint, the cables place Marseille very close to Cairo, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia. According to Fabrice Coquio (the managing director for France of data-center-operator Interxion), there are only five or six milliseconds of network latency to any of those locations—less than to Paris 800 kilometers (roughly 500 miles) away.

That has made Marseille a magnet for data-center operations—where data and application providers can "put platforms in a safe environment in terms of legal and financial environments like Europe and particularly the European Union and at the same time be connected to 46 countries directly with a very low latency," Coqiuo explained. "Basically, in the last 15 years, we have [cut] the cost of a submarine cable to a [10th of what it was] and multiplied the capacity by 50."

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  All sorts of stuff happened during Tuesday morning's launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

On Tuesday afternoon—a little more than 12 hours after the launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida—the US Air Force's Space & Missile Systems Center declared that all had gone well with the complicated mission. "All satellites are on orbit and have made contact," the Air Force unit tweeted.

SpaceX had a lot on its plate with Tuesday morning's launch, which occurred at 2:30am ET (06:30 UTC). Once again, the company recovered the two side-mounted Falcon 9 first stage boosters at a landing site along the Florida coast. But for the second time out of three Falcon Heavy launches, SpaceX was unable to land the center core on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. This is perhaps understandable because, due to mission requirements, the center core used in Tuesday's launch had to shed more energy than any previous launch—its attending drone ship was positioned more than 1,200km away from the launch site.

More favorably for SpaceX, the company succeeded in catching one half of a payload fairing for the first time. SpaceX did so with its rebranded Ms. Tree ship, which sports a large catcher's mitt-like netting. "Ms. Tree caught the Falcon fairing!!" company founder Elon Musk shared on Twitter. For a few years, the company has been experimenting with various approaches to capturing the payload fairing halves, which split apart after a rocket reaches orbit to allow the payload access to space.

Enlarge / Microsoft at a trade show. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

Microsoft is launching a new layer of security for users of its OneDrive cloud storage service. OneDrive Personal Vault is a new section of your storage that's accessed through two-step verification, or a "strong authentication method," although Microsoft didn't define the latter term.

Microsoft notes that fingerprinting, face scans, PINs, and one-time codes by email, SMS, or an authenticator app are among the acceptable two-step verification methods. And you’ll automatically get de-authenticated after a period of inactivity—that's the key to Microsoft's special security argument here. Two-factor authentication using text or email is less secure than other options. Using the more heavy-duty face or fingerprint verification will require the appropriate hardware, such as a device with Windows Hello.

It also has options for transferring physical documents to the OneDrive mobile app. You can scan documents or take photos directly into the Personal Vault section without needing to store the file in a less secure part of your device first.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Federal Express is suing the US Department of Commerce, arguing that US export control laws are so onerous that it's impossible for FedEx to comply with them. US laws "require considerably more screening than possible from common carriers like FedEx," the company argues in a legal complaint filed in a DC federal court on Monday.

The lawsuit doesn't mention Huawei, but it was filed after a string of disputes between FedEx and Huawei that may be connected to US export control laws.

FedEx is one of the many international companies feeling pressure from the escalating trade war between the United States and China. Last month, the Trump administration added Huawei and its affiliates to an "entity list" under export control law. That made it illegal to ship a range of US-made technology to Huawei.

Enlarge / Pages in macOS Mojave. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Apple released Pages 8.1, Numbers 6.1, and Keynote 9.1 for Mac, and the company also updated the accompanying apps on iOS. This is a small features update for the iWork suite, but some of the additions give functionality users have been requesting for a while.

For example, you can now create a link from text in one sheet to another sheet in your Numbers spreadsheet document, and the same goes for linking from one document to another in Pages. In Keynote, you can now place objects in-line so they move with text dynamically as expected, and you can edit master slides while collaborating with another user.

All three applications have new text styling options—notably, the ability to apply a gradient to text. It's easy enough to fill text with a two-color gradient, but more colors are supported from the "Advanced Gradient Fill" menu option. In Pages, you can apply new outline styles, and filling text with images is also possible across all three apps.

Enlarge (credit: Beth Waterbury)

Monarch butterflies engage in a spectacular migration that encompasses multiple generations. They surf the green wave of spring as it spreads north, producing new generations on the way. Then, as autumn sets in, that generation of butterflies shuts down reproduction and starts heading south, eventually reaching their wintering grounds in staggering numbers. But in recent years, those numbers have grown far less staggering. The loss of some of those wintering grounds, habitat destruction across North America, and other threats have steadily reduced the migrating population to the point where it's under consideration for endangered species designation.

The declining population has inspired people throughout North America to try to give the butterflies a hand. Their efforts include planting more of the insects' favorite food plants, protecting the butterflies in their pupal stage, and even ordering monarch pupae from commercial suppliers. Raising monarchs is also a common school project.

But a new study raises questions about whether buying pupae is really helping the butterflies. A group of researchers at the University of Chicago have found that the monarchs purchased from commercial suppliers may not be able to migrate effectively and so might only give the monarch population a transient boost.

Enlarge / This undated picture released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on October 18, 2016, shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (C) inspecting the newly built Ryugyong General Ophthalmic Hospital in Pyongyang. (credit: Getty | KCNA)

North Korea is experiencing an explosive outbreak of HIV amid limited access to diagnostic testing and treatments, according to an exclusive report by Science.

Independent researchers and government health officials tell the outlet that the isolated East Asian country confirmed its first HIV case in 1999 and has quietly watched infections balloon to over 8,300 cases in the last few years. The researchers and North Korean officials have submitted a report on the matter to the new medical preprint server medRxiv, which is scheduled to go live on Tuesday, June 25.

The case estimate stands in stark contrast to a celebration in Pyongyang last year on December 1—annual World AIDS Day—in which government officials declared that North Korea is an “AIDS-free zone” and that there is “not a single AIDS patient” in the country.