Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Apollo 11's Eagle moves slowly away from Columbia and prepares for landing. (credit: NASA / Apollo Lunar Surface Journal)

Update: It's Fourth of July weekend in the US, and Ars staff is off presumably safely operating fireworks and catching some R&R. With the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing rapidly approaching, this felt like the perfect time to resurface a few favorite NASA stories from the archives. If our recent six-part documentary or report from a restored Mission Control haven't quite satiated your moon landing needs, this piece on the infamous Apollo 11 landing alarms might do the trick. It originally ran on July 28, 2015 and appears unchanged below.

Last week was the forty-sixth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing—the first of the six crewed landings on our nearest celestial neighbor. In the years between 1969 and 1972, 12 human beings walked on the surface of the moon: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Al Bean, Alan Shepard, Ed Mitchell, Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, John Young, Charlie Duke, Jack Schmitt, and Gene Cernan. Each Apollo landing by necessity leapfrogged the previous by some notable amount, because even as Apollo 11 was preparing to lift off it was obvious that the money wasn’t coming and Project Apollo might be the only chance to visit the moon—perhaps for a long, long time.

Even though Apollo 10’s "dress rehearsal" had taken NASA through all but the final phase of the lunar landing two months before, there were still a large number of unknowns in play when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin separated Eagle from Columbia, leaving Michael Collins to watch his crewmates descend to the lunar surface—perhaps to stay there forever.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Dogukan Keskinkilic)

Adding to the steaming pile of unsubstantiated hype over probiotics, the New York Times ran an uncritical article this week suggesting that a probiotic of heat-killed bacteria can treat obesity.

Of course, the data behind the story does not suggest that. In fact, the study is so small and the data so noisy and indirect, it’s impossible to come to any conclusions about efficacy. There’s also the nit-picky complaint that the study deals with dead bacteria, while probiotics are generally defined as being live bacteria. More importantly, the study was authored by researchers with a clear financial stake in the treatment succeeding. They hold a patent on the treatment and have started a company based on it—two details the New York Times seems to have forgotten to mention.

Microbiome madness

In many ways, the study is pretty typical of those on probiotics. The field is riddled with underpowered and/or poor-quality studies that use a wide mix of methods, metrics, and surrogate endpoints—that is, stand-ins for actual clinical outcomes, like measuring tumor shrinkage rather than actual cancer survival to assess a new therapy. According to a recent review of probiotics, the field’s hard-to-compare studies form a mucky mess, "collectively leading to conflicting, ambiguous, and debatable overall conclusions."

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  Sony's latest attempt at making good noise-cancelling true wireless headphones: the WF-1000XM3. [credit: Sony ]

Since launching last year, Sony’s WH-1000XM3 headphones have been near-universally praised as one of the most effective pairs of noise-cancelling headphones on the market. Now, the Japanese giant hopes to translate that success to a true wireless design with the launch of the WF-1000XM3.

The new totally wireless earphones are up for pre-order at various retailers beginning on Friday and will become available to purchase sometime in August. They’re priced at $230.

Trying to make true wireless ANC work

Sony’s elevator pitch with the WF-1000XM3 is to mix the active noise cancellation (ANC) technology of the over-ear WH-1000XM3 headphones—which, in our previous testing, has come out slightly ahead of long-time market leader Bose in terms of pure noise cancelling strength—with the cord-free design of Apple’s AirPods, which have seemingly skyrocketed in popularity in recent years and helped increase the demand for the true wireless form factor as a whole.

Enlarge / The Facebook login screen. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

On television and radio, the ads are fairly innocuous: “Hey guy,” a female narrator says playfully in one TV spot for Hims, a men’s wellness brand that sells prescription drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, oral herpes, social anxiety, hair loss, and other conditions. “Hi there. Welcome to Hims.”

The ad invites viewers to “get ED treatment started for only $5,” next to a close-up of a young man pressing a white pill seductively to his lips. What appear to be customer reviews are superimposed over the image: “Should have done it years ago and I feel like the young stud that I always imagined I was," says one. "Outstanding product, works above and beyond our expectations," reads another.

Much like other ads for Hims—and its sister brand, Hers, which sells prescription drugs and wellness products for women—that are broadcast on television, radio, podcasts, or appear in print or on billboards, this ad is rather generic. It describes a medical problem, alludes to the company’s business model—which skips a trip to the doctor in favor of an “online visit” with a physician—and invites the viewer to check out its website for more details.