Month: June 2019

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  I don't know where the pedals are, and I can't see a way of changing gear. My hands don't even reach the wheel. And yet this Ferrari F40 Competitzione is fast. [credit: Microsoft ]

It's not a secret that I like cars. I left a career in science policy to come to Ars to write about them, after all. But long before I fell in love with the automobile, there was Lego. I got sucked back into the world of the plastic brick on the eve of the millennium thanks to the first Lego Star Wars sets, but these days I've mostly been building little minifig-scale sports cars, particularly when writer's block strikes. So imagine how excited I was to find out that those Lego Speed Champions cars were coming to the rather excellent Forza Horizon 4.

Expansion packs are no new thing to the Horizon series. Nor are cameos or guest appearances from other franchises—The Fast and the Furious has shown up previously, and the most recent game includes a brief Halo crossover. But this is certainly the most left-field of them, transporting you from Britain to the Lego Valley, a magical place where most everything is built from bricks, and the humans are all now minifigs.

There are some Lego-specific tweaks—as well as in-game currency and reputation points you also need to earn bricks to build yourself a Lego house. But by and large the gameplay remains identical: drive around wherever you want, entering races and challenges as you go, listening to the radio while you do it. (Sadly, or perhaps happily, that catchy number so beloved by Emmett in The Lego Movie is absent from the soundtrack.) There's still dynamic weather, day turns into night, and each week the in-game season changes.

Enlarge / When will NASA's Space Launch System rocket take flight? (credit: NASA)

As NASA talks up its Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon by the year 2024, a new report from the US Government Accountability Office raises questions about the space agency's ability to build the spacecraft and rockets intended to carry out that mission.

Instead of launching in 2020, the Artemis-1 mission that will see a Space Launch System rocket boost an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon will instead launch as late as June 2021, the GAO report finds. NASA also appears to have been obscuring the true cost of its development programs, particularly with the large SLS rocket, which has Boeing as its prime contractor.

"While NASA acknowledges about $1 billion in cost growth for the SLS program, it is understated," the report found. "This is because NASA shifted some planned SLS scope to future missions but did not reduce the program’s cost baseline accordingly. When GAO reduced the baseline to account for the reduced scope, the cost growth is about $1.8 billion."

Enlarge / Sensors, sensors everywhere! (credit: Getty / 7postman)

Ars yesterday wrote a big feature on the concept of "Industry 4.0," the fancy-sounding name that describes the ongoing shift in how products are created from raw materials and distributed along the supply chain to customers.

What the "4.0" revision adds compared to Industries 1.0 through 3.0 is a complex set of linkages between information and operational technologies. (IT stores, transmits, and manipulates data, while "OT" detects and causes changes in physical processes, such as devices for manufacturing or climate control.)

It's a modular and flexible approach to manufacturing that creates digital links among "smart factories" that are powered by the industrial Internet of Things, big data, and machine learning. And that's almost enough fancy CEO words to make bingo. At least in this case, the buzzwords aren't just important-sounding but ultimately meaningless concepts. Similar to how the rise of devops welded programming with operations, making the manufacturing process smarter by stuffing in all those buzzwords really is causing fundamental changes in how things are made.