Month: January 2020

Enlarge / A close-up view of the Starliner capsule with its service module immediately beneath it. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann )

Nearly one month ago, Boeing completed the first orbital test flight of its Starliner spacecraft with a near-perfect landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

The mission had to be cut short due to a well-publicized timing error that delayed the spacecraft's service module from performing an orbital insertion burn. This caused the thrusters on board the service module, which provides power to Starliner during most of its mission, to fire longer than expected. As a result, the spacecraft did not have enough fuel to complete a rendezvous with the International Space Station, a key component of the test flight in advance of crewed missions.

Since providing some initial information during a post-flight news conference, NASA and Boeing have gone mostly quiet about the investigation into the timing error. Two weeks ago, the space agency said it had initiated two investigations. One would find the root cause of the "mission elapsed timer anomaly" over the course of about two months, and the second will determine whether another uncrewed test flight of Starliner is required before astronauts fly on the vehicle.

Enlarge / Could you resist these Oreos? Maybe if you depended on a friend to help you delay gratification. (credit: Pranee Tiangkate/iStock/Getty Images)

In the 1970s, the late psychologist Walter Mischel explored the importance of the ability to delay gratification as a child to one's future success in life, via the famous Stanford "marshmallow experiment." Now a team of German researchers has adapted the classic experimental setup with German and Kenyan schoolchildren and found that kids are more likely to delay gratification when they depend on each other. They described their findings in a recent paper in Psychological Science.

As we previously reported, Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and give them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next.

Some kids just ate the marshmallow right away. Others found a handy distraction: covering their eyes, kicking the desk, or poking at the marshmallow with their fingers. Some smelled it, licked it, or took tiny nibbles around the edges. Roughly one-third of the kids held out long enough to earn a second marshmallow. Several years later, Mischel noticed a strong correlation between the success of some of those kids later in life (better grades, higher self-confidence) and their ability to delay gratification in nursery school. Mischel's follow-up study confirmed the correlation.

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  Arcimoto's FUV is small, light, and nimble, but even with such a small vehicle there's still the opportunity to save weight. [credit: XponentialWorks ]

Arcimoto accurately calls its electric three-wheeler a Fun Utility Vehicle—we first tested one at CES four years ago, and it remains one of the more entertaining vehicles I've driven for Ars. The company started delivering the first FUVs to customers last September, but it's not quite done with the design for this engaging little machine. As you probably know, weight is the enemy of efficiency, and even little EVs like this one have to carry around a hefty battery pack, in this case a 12kWh unit with 102.5 miles (165km) of city range. On Tuesday, Arcimoto and XponentialWorks announced they've been working together on a project that should make future FUVs even more efficient, thanks to lightweight suspension parts created using AI generative design and 3D printing.

"Our mission to rightsize the footprint of daily mobility means a continued commitment to optimizing not just the vehicle platform architecture, but all of its constituent parts as well. The speed at which the XponentialWorks team has made meaningful weight improvements to core components of the Fun Utility Vehicle is truly impressive," said Arcimoto CEO Mark Frohnmayer in a statement.

XponentialWorks used ParaMatters' AI software to iterate new designs for components like the FUV's brake pedal, upper control arm, rear swing arm, and knuckle. As with other AI-generated auto parts, the results look far more organic than anything you'd expect to find on a road vehicle, and the weight savings is real–between 34 and 52 percent compared to the conventionally designed and constructed bits fitted to the versions we've tested in the past. It all happened pretty rapidly, according to XponentialWorks founder Avi Reichental.