Month: November 2019

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  A view of Starliner and its Service Module mounted for the test. [credit: NASA TV ]

On a cold Monday morning in New Mexico, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft took flight for the first time. Under the power of its main launch abort engines, the capsule accelerated to 650mph in just 5 seconds during a demonstration of its escape system.

The pad abort test marked a critical milestone as Boeing seeks to fly humans to the International Space Station sometime in 2020. During Monday's 75-second test, Starliner appeared to successfully demonstrate its ability to rapidly escape from a problem with its Atlas V rocket during launch.

The test evidently proceeded nominally until the main parachutes deployed—only two rather than three emerged from the capsule as it descended to the desert floor. During the webcast, both Boeing's Jessica Landa and NASA's Dan Huot said the deployment of two parachutes fell within the safety requirements of the system, and that this result was "within the bounds" of this test.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia)

There are no walruses in Iceland, but, at one time, there were hundreds. The timing of the walruses' disappearance suggests that the population's loss may be one of the earliest known examples of humans driving a marine species to local extinction.

The ghost of walruses past

Walruses used to be a major feature of life in Iceland. Several settlements and landmarks along Iceland’s coast still bear names that refer to walruses, and a few of the medieval Sagas (the stories of the island’s early settler families) even mention them. The Saga of Hrafin Sveinbjarnarson, written down sometime in the late 1100s, tells the story of a chieftain who killed a walrus and brought its tusks and skull to Canterbury Cathedral in England. But the walruses themselves have been reduced to only a few ancient bones and tusks.

Did the walruses disappear before or after the Norse arrived? In other words, did the Norse kill off Iceland’s walruses, or did the population die of natural causes? Because Iceland has no living walruses today, historians have debated whether the place names referred to places where walruses were living when people arrived or just places where settlers found the skulls and tusks of long-dead animals. The walrus tusks that Hrafin Sveinbjarnarson delivered to England could have been part of a thriving Icelandic walrus population, but it could also have been only a lost wanderer from more distant shores.

Enlarge (credit: Jim Salter)

Google says its new Nest Wi-Fi isn't just Google Wi-Fi plus a smart speaker—it's new, improved, and with better coverage. This is good news—despite the impressive sales numbers Google says it has for the original Google Wi-Fi, the product never ranked very well in performance tests at Wirecutter, Smallnetbuilder, or here at Ars.

In fact, Google claimed that the new Nest Wi-Fi would cover "up to 3,800 square feet." This raised our eyebrows immediately, since one square foot is very much not like another—my own 3,500 square foot house is a particular bear to cover due to the downstairs floor having plenty of packed earth occluding the line-of-sight between that entire floor and the router, for example.

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  The top floor of our test house is relatively straightforward—although like many houses, it suffers from terrible router placement nowhere near its center. [credit: Jim Salter ]

If you set up Wi-Fi systems in many houses, you'll also soon discover that even without an occluded sub-basement floor, a house shaped like one long Viking hall is very different from a house with similar volume but arranged in a mostly rectangular or L-shape. And heaven help you once you get into turn-of-the-century chicken-wire-and-daub walls, or apartments with central elevator shafts, and so forth.