Month: August 2019

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  The SpaceX Starhopper vehicle is seen venting on Monday. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars Technica ]

A day after SpaceX's first attempt to launch the Starhopper test vehicle to an altitude of 150 meters, the company plans to try again as early at 5pm ET Tuesday (21:00 UTC).

The company went all the way through the countdown on Monday before the test vehicle's single methane-burning Raptor rocket engine failed to ignite. The fault lay with a wiring or other connector issue within the engine's igniter, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter.

The Raptor engine uses a new kind of igniter to start the combustion process between oxidizer and methane propellants, which Musk characterized as "dual redundant torch igniters." This ignition process will be more reliable in the future, he said, but it has proven "finicky" during development.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Koehler | Getty Images)

When it comes to gender, science suffers from what has been called a "leaky pipeline." In some fields, like biology, women make up the majority of the individuals entering graduate school in the field. But at each successive career stage—post-doctoral fellowships, junior faculty, tenured faculty—the percentage of women drops. The situation is even worse in fields where women are in the minority at the graduate level.

It's difficult to figure out why so many women drop out of the career pipeline. Progressing through a research career is a struggle for everyone, and it can be tough to suss out subtle sources of bias that can make it harder for women to push through. It's possible to do statistical analyses of outcomes—say, how many women received a particular type of grant—but then it becomes hard to determine whether they were all equally qualified. It's possible to set up artificial test situations that are better controlled, but people's behavior changes when they know they're being tested.

That is precisely the message that's driven home by a new paper that looks at gender bias in the awarding of research positions in France. While the study has some significant limitations, it examined the outcomes in two situations: the year the test was announced and all the people on the award committees were aware of it, and the year after, when the same people returned but had probably not realized the test was being repeated.

Enlarge / IRVINE, CALIFORNIA - AUGUST 26: A sign is posted at the Johnson & Johnson campus on August 26, 2019 in Irvine, California. A judge has ordered the company to pay $572 million in connection with the opioid crisis in Oklahoma. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Mario Tama)

A state judge in Oklahoma ruled for the first time Monday that an opioid maker was partly responsible for sparking the devastating opioid crisis that has engulfed Oklahoma and the US overall, killing an estimated 130 people nationwide every day.

Johnson & Johnson—maker of the opioid painkillers Duragesic and Nucynta—must pay $572 million in damages to the state of Oklahoma, which has reportedly lost more than 6,000 people to the opioid crisis since 2000.

“Defendants caused an opioid crisis that is evidenced by increased rates of addiction, overdose deaths and neonatal abstinence syndrome in Oklahoma,” Judge Thad Balkman stated in his ruling, handed down in a courtroom in Norma, Oklahoma.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another roundup of the day's best tech deals. Today we've got a nice discount on the 1TB variant of Crucial's MX500 solid state drive—it's not the absolute fastest SSD on the market, but at $97 it's a great value for the performance provided, so it's a good way to speed up any PCs you have saddled with a sluggish HDD. It has normally sold for $108 in recent months.

We also have a number of video game deals, highlighted by a $10 discount on Control, the just-released game from Alan Wake developer Remedy that recently earned our Ars approved badge. For Switch owners, both Super Mario Party and Mario Tennis Aces are down to $40, while the Fighters Pass DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate—which bundles all of that game's DLC characters—is at an all-time low of $20. If you can't wait for the PlayStation 5, the 4K-ready PS4 Pro is available at $85 off its list price as well.

There's plenty more to peruse beyond that, including nice discounts on the Apple Watch Series 4, Roku Streaming Stick+, and Marvel's Spider-Man, among others. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

When the Department of Justice approved T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint, the DOJ's antitrust officials insisted that an unusual remedy could replace the competition lost in the merger.

Sprint will no longer exist as a separate entity if the DOJ's plan is finalized, reducing the number of major nationwide mobile carriers from four to three. But the government agency is simultaneously requiring T-Mobile and Sprint to sell some of their assets to Dish Network in what amounts to a government attempt to micromanage the mobile industry.

Dish, the government-selected replacement for Sprint, will create its own mobile service from its existing assets and spare parts the DOJ is requiring T-Mobile and Sprint to sell off. The DOJ acknowledged that T-Mobile buying Sprint "would eliminate head-to-head competition" and threaten the "lower prices and better service" created by that competition. But the department also claimed that the required divestitures will let Dish replace Sprint as a viable fourth carrier.