Month: July 2019

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  At 7am ET on Tuesday morning, a Peacekeeper missile launched a boilerplate Orion spacecraft.

It went fast. Early on Tuesday morning, a former Peacekeeper missile lofted a boilerplate Orion spacecraft to an altitude just shy of 10km before a powerful escape motor fired. Amid the smoke, the escape system pulled the NASA spacecraft rapidly away from the Peacekeeper booster. The entire test lasted 3 minutes and 13 seconds.

"Everything we’ve seen so far looks great," said Orion program manager Mark Kirasich, about two hours after the test following a very preliminary review of data.

In many ways, this was an odd-looking test. The stubby Peacekeeper missile looked nothing like a tall, brawny rocket—such as the Space Launch System or the Delta IV Heavy—capable of launching Orion into space. After the escape system fired and Orion was released, the vehicle tumbled and plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean in what was less than a heartwarming scene.

Enlarge / Neanderthals lived in Grotta di Sant'Agostino between 55,000 and 40,000 years ago. (credit: Degano et al. 2019)

Neanderthals glued their stone tools into place on wooden handles, a new study suggests. Archaeologists found chemical traces of pine resin on 10 stone tools from Grotta del Fossellone and Grotta di Sant’Agostino, on the western coast of central Italy. That’s pretty solid evidence that Neanderthals living in Italy were hafting their stone tools and securing them in place with resin between 55,000 and 40,000 years ago—long before Homo sapiens set foot in Europe.

Getting a grip on stone tools

For around three million years, hominins had been shaping various cutting, pounding, and scraping tools out of stone, but something was still missing. Imagine trying to skin and butcher a deer using a knife with no handle, and you’ve got life for most of hominin history. Hafting tools was a major improvement.

Typically, hafting a stone tool involves fitting it into a notch or slot in a wooden handle; the tool-maker might then lash it into place with tightly wrapped sinews or plant fibers. But people also use tree resin or pitch as a glue to help hold the tool in place.

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  The Nvidia RTX 2070 Super. Coming July 9 for $499.

The rumors are true: nine months after the launch of the RTX 2070 and six months after the RTX 2060 arrived, both of these Nvidia graphics cards are getting retail upgrades. Behold: the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super, coming to stores on July 9 for the same price as their previous numbered versions ($399 and $499 MSRP, respectively).

These will be followed on July 23 by the $699 RTX 2080 Super. Nvidia will continue selling the RTX 2080 Ti ($999) and RTX 2060 (marked down to $349), while the standard 2070 and 2080 graphics cards are already being phased out by Nvidia. (If you're wondering, AMD has a big launch during this calendar period, as well: the Radeon RX 5700 series, coming July 7.)

We'll have to wait to see what to expect from the 2080 Super, whose review hardware hasn't yet landed in outlets' hands. In the meantime, a last-minute shipment gave us a chance to put the RTX 2070 Super through a few tests ahead of today's announcement. That helped us confirm some good news: Nvidia finally got an RTX card to the performance point worthy of a $500 investment (and, honestly, the card now runs neck and neck with the original RTX 2080).