Month: April 2020

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  The TCL 10 Pro, TCL flagship smartphone for $449. [credit: TCL ]

TCL is primarily known as a company that builds cheap TVs, but it has also been building smartphones for awhile now. After Blackberry quit the smartphone market in 2016, TCL licensed the brand and started pumping out QWERTY-equipped Android phones. It licenses the Alcatel brand from Nokia and builds cheaper slab phones. It bought the Palm trademark from HP and produced the microscopic "Palm Palm" smartphone. Starting now, though, TCL is actually going to put its own name on the smartphones it makes, and the first is this set of three devices that all cost under $500.

The lineup here is kind of strange since the most expensive phone is not the fastest phone of the bunch. The most expensive is the $449 TCL 10 Pro, which has a Snapdragon 675 SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 4500mAh battery, and a 6.47-inch, 2340×1080 OLED display. The design is pretty flagship-y, with an in-screen fingerprint reader, a front camera notch, a display that curves along the sides, and an always-on display mode. There are four rear cameras, a 64MP main, a wide-angle lens, a macro camera, and a "low light video cam." TCL says this phone is coming out in "Europe, North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom starting in Q2 2020 for €449/$449/£399."

The Snapdragon 675 is the one oddball listing in that spec sheet. This is an 11nm, eight-core SoC with two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores. This SoC was first introduced in 2018, which makes it pretty old. Now let's get weird and compare this $449, 4G, Snapdragon 675 phone to the next phone in TCL's lineup, a Snapdragon 765G, 5G phone for... $430?

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

By now, it's hard to escape the severity of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. As more and more local and state authorities tell everyone to stay at home, traffic has declined to the point where there has been a meaningful (albeit temporary) fall in air pollution over major American cities as people give up the daily commute or school run. With commutes off the calendar for the time being, it's easy to forget about your car. If that sounds like a description of your new reality, don't just park up and put away the keys. Being completely sedentary is bad for a car, just like it's bad for humans. The following tips might come in handy, and don't worry—they're not as complicated as trying to refuel a nuclear reactor.

Try to drive your car(s) for at least 20 minutes once a week

The most immediate problem is keeping your car's 12V battery from dying, and running the engine—and therefore the alternator—for at least this long, about once every week, should prevent that from happening. But getting your car moving will help more than just the battery. Oils and fluids and lubricants will circulate around the bits that need them. Brakes will shed their surface rust. And in the long term, you'll avoid problems like tire flat spots and dried-out belts.

For people with only one car in the household, it's probably advice that's unnecessary, because everyone needs to pop out for groceries at some point. But America is the land of two (or more) cars per family, and both need the occasional bit of attention. Even if you have a battery electric vehicle that gets plugged into a nice, dry garage every night, it should get turned on weekly—even some BEVs will discharge their 12V batteries if left idle for too long.

Enlarge (credit: J G Lee)

Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, but it's the only force that operates over very long distances. Hence, planets orbit stars, stars form galaxies, and galaxies cluster. Gravity also operates at the tiniest of scales, too, but its weakness makes it very hard to detect its influence. It's worth trying, though, as violations of the laws of gravity at very small scales would be good evidence for New Physics. So physicists have been looking, though without much luck so far.

Searching for flaws in gravity

The force due to gravity reduces with the square of the distance. If you double the distance, the force is not halved but reduced to a quarter of its original value. This law, called an inverse square law, is based purely on geometry: we live in three spatial dimensions, and therefore the inverse square law holds. However, if the universe has more than three spatial dimensions, the inverse square law would break.

We know that over long distances—the Earth to the Moon, and the distances between stars—the inverse square law appears to be correct. At galactic and cosmological scales, the inverse square law also holds, with the caveat that dark matter and dark energy are required. You might think that what we call dark matter or dark energy would be potential evidence of extra dimensions, but it isn’t quite that simple. At these scales, the hidden dimension would have to be both large and unable to influence anything else, like photons. Since we also require consistency, and large hidden dimensions don’t appear to offer it at the moment, we are restricted to tiny hidden dimensions and changes to gravity at very small scales.

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  Apple CEO Tim Cook demonstrates the company's face shields in a Twitter video. [credit: Tim Cook ]

Apple CEO Tim Cook took to a Twitter video to announce that the company will design and make face shields for medical workers battling the COVID-19 crisis, to the tune of one million shields per week. This announcement follows already publicized efforts to source face masks from the company's supply chains; Cook said that effort has produced 20 million face masks to date.

"We've launched a company-wide effort bringing together product designers, engineering, operations, and packing teams and our suppliers, to design, produce, and ship face shields for health workers," Cook explained in the two-minute video. He added that one shipment has been delivered to Kaiser hospital facilities in the Santa Clara valley and that the company expects to make one million face masks by the end of the week and just as many each following week.

Apple is dedicated to supporting the worldwide response to COVID-19. We’ve now sourced over 20M masks through our supply chain. Our design, engineering, operations and packaging teams are also working with suppliers to design, produce and ship face shields for medical workers. pic.twitter.com/3xRqNgMThX

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) April 5, 2020

Cook went on to explain that the shields "pack flat, one hundred to a box" and that each shield can be assembled in under two minutes. Both materials and manufacturing will be sourced from the United States and China, Apple's two primary countries of operation. For now, Apple is distributing the masks within the United States, but Cook said the company hopes to expand to other countries and regions in the future.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

A career of 22 years in the same gig is uncommon these days. And for that 22 years to be at the same place, online, doing what I do with the awesome people I get to work with, is ludicrous. But I’m no fool: I have had this honor because of the strength, love, and respect of our readership and our community.

That’s why, when we started to see Bad Things in our industry a couple of weeks ago, we knew that we needed to turn to our most important lifeline—you. We picked a big goal: something that would not only impress Condé Nast leadership but would be a meaningful bridge to better times.

I speak for everyone at Ars when I say we are truly humbled, thrilled, amazed, a little “I’m not crying you’re crying,” and extremely grateful. As I write this, we are at 187% of our goal. One hundred and eighty-seven percent! My left brain is soaking in happiness while my right brain is saying, “Dude, you should’ve known this was gonna happen.”

Enlarge / Soyuz ascends from the Spaceport in French Guiana in February, 2019, carrying the first six satellites for OneWeb. (credit: Arianespace)

Last week, one of the leading companies attempting to build a satellite mega-constellation, OneWeb, filed for bankruptcy and laid off all of its employees. This was the largest failure in the aerospace industry of late, but it's hardly the only one, as other prominent companies such as LeoSat and Bigelow Aerospace lay off staff and potentially shutter operations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated financial pressures on the space industry, where many small and medium-sized businesses already live on the edge, needing regular infusions of private capital or government contracts to remain afloat. To get a sense of what OneWeb's failure means for this industry, Ars spoke with Chuck Beames, executive chairman of York Space Systems and chairman of the SmallSat Alliance (of which OneWeb was a member).

Beames also previously managed more than $1 billion in assets during his time at Vulcan Aerospace, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's fund to support space ventures. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.