Month: September 2019

Enlarge / NASA's chief of science has made asteroid detection a priority at the space agency. (credit: NASA)

On Monday, NASA's science chief committed to funding a space-based telescope to find the vast majority of near-Earth asteroids that may one-day threaten Earth.

During an advisory committee meeting at NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC, the agency's associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said the agency was moving forward with the NEO Surveillance Mission, which would be ready to launch no earlier than 2025, at cost of less than $600 million.

"This is a priority for us," Zurbuchen said. He has been negotiating with the White House and Congress to obtain funding for the mission, which will be paid for out of the agency's planetary defense budget. NASA currently spends about $150 million a year to track and characterize hazardous objects, but that amount will need to increase in future years. The new surveillance mission's launch date will depend on funding allocated for the project.

Enlarge / Staff from South Sudan's Health Ministry pose with protective suits during a drill for Ebola preparedness conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO). (credit: Getty | Patrick Meinhardt)

The United Republic of Tanzania has been unforthcoming about several reports of suspected Ebola cases in the country, and the reports have been trickling in since September 10, the World Health Organization said in an unusual statement Saturday.

To date, the WHO said its disease surveillance programs have picked up unofficial reports of at least four cases of suspected Ebola virus disease in Tanzania, including one death, as well as an unidentified number of contacts being quarantined in “various sites in the country.”

The official word from Tanzanian authorities is that there have been no cases of Ebola in the country and that it does not “have any suspected case admitted anywhere.” However, the WHO says Tanzanian officials have been cagey about sharing information about the cases and have not said what the people involved were sickened with if it was not Ebola.

Although he comes from that wild time in gaming that gave us Trip Hawkins and the concept of "rock star developers," Sid Meier is not loud and brash. Nor is he looking to make anyone his bitch. These days he's more like your friendly gaming grandpa—as we spoke, he placed his words carefully and deliberately, as if he were positioning game pieces on a hex grid. He became animated as we discussed game mechanics but otherwise answered questions almost laconically, with a slight smile—after all, he's been dealing with the press for decades.

Meier spent a few hours walking us through the birth of Civilization, one of the most famous and lauded franchises in the history of gaming. It's among those rarest of titles that effectively mainstreamed an entire genre—in this case, the "4X game" (which stands for "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate"). Although Civilization wasn't the first strategy game on the market, it was the proverbial 800-pound gorilla—and it did for turn-based strategy games what Doom would do for the FPS genre a few years later.

But as so often happens with genre-defining games, Civilization started out as a very different experience.

It's a common stereotype that dogs bond strongly with their owners and are highly dependent on them, while cats are aloof and independent—and therefore exhibit weaker attachment to their humans. Cat lovers would beg to differ, and now there's some science to bolster our case. According to a new study by scientists at Oregon State University, most kittens and cats show a marked attachment to their owners or caregivers, especially when stressed, on par with prior studies involving dogs and human infants. And that bonding ability is likely one reason cats have flourished in human homes.

"Like dogs, cats display social flexibility in regard to their attachments with humans. I think a lot of people don't think about the fact that the majority of cats use their owners as a source of security when they're stressed," said co-author Kristyn Vitale. "We have this stereotype that cats don't depend on their owners. But it makes sense [that they would], because they are still living in a state of dependency in human homes."

There have been a number of attachment studies on human infants, primates, and dogs, usually involving tracking how the subjects respond after being left alone in an unfamiliar room for several minutes, followed by a reunion with their caregivers. Vitale designed her feline study along similar lines. She recruited local cat and kitten owners to bring their pets to OSU's Human-Animal Interaction Lab. They used both kittens (between 3 and 8 months old) and cats in the study, because they wanted to verify that attachment behavior persisted into adulthood.

Enlarge / Chuck Yeager in 2015. (credit: Rick Diamond/Getty Images for CMHOF)

In 2017, Airbus published a promotional article promoting an Airbus helicopter.

"Seventy years ago, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier,” said Guillaume Faury, CEO of Airbus Helicopters. "We’re trying to break the cost barrier. It cannot be 'speed at any cost.'"

The 96-year-old Yeager wasn't happy. Last week, he filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that Airbus had infringed his rights by using his name without permission.

Enlarge / The photo posted in an DVIDS tweet joking about what would happen to anyone storming Area 51 this past weekend. (credit: US Air Force)

The Defense Department's Defense Video and Image Distribution Service (DVIDS) issued an apology on September 21 after deleting a Twitter post that suggested individuals who participated in the "Storm Area 51" event and entered Air Force property would be blown up by bombs.

The post, tweeted on September 20, displayed a B-2 Spirit bomber on a runway at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, behind a formation of airmen from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri deployed during a Bomber Task Force mission in January. The tweet's text read, "The last thing #Millenials will see if they attempt the #area51raid today…."

A tweet, since deleted, by an employee of DOD's Defense Video and Image Distribution Service. (credit: DVIDS)

DVIDS, a service of the Defense Media Activity, is responsible for providing media organizations access to Defense Department imagery, video, and other content, including real-time broadcast-quality video links for interviews with service members (as well as the video content frequently used by Ars' Sitrep video series). On September 21, a spokesperson for DVIDS issued the following statement via Twitter: