Month: April 2020

Earlier this month, TNT announced it would be moving up the release of its new science fiction series, Snowpiercer, by a couple of weeks in the wake of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. And now we have a new full trailer to give us a closer look at what we can expect: essentially a reboot of the critically acclaimed 2013 film by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), fleshed out into a full-length series.

Bong's film itself was an adaptation of a 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, about remnants of humanity trying to survive an ice age inside a 1,001-car train. The train is run by a reclusive transportation magnate named Mr. Wilford, who has separated the passengers according to class and has a nefarious plan to ensure life on the train remains sustainable.

The film starred Chris Evans as revolutionary leader Curtis, with Tilda Swinton as second-in-command Minister Mason. Bong shot much of it on a specially constructed set: a train mounted on a giant gyroscopic gimbal, the better to mimic the movements of an actual train. Snowpiercer earned critical raves and went on to gross $86 million worldwide against a roughly $40 million production budget.

Enlarge (credit: PASCAL POCHARD-CASABIANCA / Getty Images)

On March 1, New York City confirmed its first case of SARS-CoV-2 infection. By the end of the month, thousands were infected, and hospitals were struggling to manage the influx of patients. On Wednesday, JAMA published an analysis of the outcomes of thousands of patients who ended up at a large hospital system in the city and surrounding areas. While the data is annoyingly incomplete, it does provide a broad overview of how the pandemic is interacting with the health demographics in the United States.

Some of this is expected, as the sorts of pre-existing conditions that exacerbate COVID-19—obesity, hypertension, and diabetes—cause problems here. The study also suggests some dramatically bad outcomes for older patients who ended up on ventilators, with 97 percent mortality for those over 65. But the study period ended before the outcomes of most patients could be tracked, so this number has to be treated with significant caution.

At admission

The work is based on the electronic patient records from the Northwell Health hospital system, which has a dozen hospitals in New York City and the surrounding suburbs. The researchers (Safiya Richardson, Jamie S. Hirsch, and Mangala Narasimhan) pulled out the records of anyone with a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection from the period between March 1 and April 4 of this year. This produced a study population of 5,700 patients, which is quite large. However, the study cut off tracking the patients on April 4; if a case hadn't resulted in discharge or death by then, the outcomes couldn't be analyzed. Followups for those who were discharged was also limited, with the medium length being only four days.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 60 Starlink satellites launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on January 29, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

The Federal Communications Commission today unanimously approved new rules for preventing orbital debris and collisions in space but only after revising the plan to address criticism that the commission was moving too fast and imposing requirements that could conflict with NASA recommendations. The Department of Commerce had urged the FCC to delay action, but the commission went ahead with a stripped-down plan.

The new rules, the first update to the FCC's orbital-debris policies in 15 years, are being imposed as plans by SpaceX and other companies to launch thousands of broadband satellites raise concerns about collisions in space. While the FCC delayed action on several parts of the order, it still imposed these new requirements:

The new rules improve the specificity and clarity of rules that require disclosure of debris mitigation plans by satellite companies. The changes include requiring that satellite applicants assign numerical values to collision risk, probability of successful post-mission disposal, and casualty risk associated with those satellites that will re-enter earth's atmosphere. Satellite applicants will also have new disclosure requirements related to protecting inhabitable spacecraft, maneuverability, use of deployment devices, release of persistent liquids, proximity operations, trackability and identification, and information sharing for situational awareness. The new rules also update the process for geostationary orbit satellite license term extension requests.

The order approved today hasn't been released yet but is apparently substantially different from a draft version that was made public a few weeks ago. Originally, today's vote was going to impose "a requirement that all satellites must be equipped with maneuverability sufficient to perform collision avoidance maneuvers during any period when the satellite is in an orbit that is above the International Space Station (approximately 400 kilometers altitude)." But instead of adopting that requirement today, the FCC moved it into a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking so the commission can seek public comment on the change before finalizing it.

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  The design is very Volvo-like, which is unsurprising given that it's built on Volvo's Compact Modular Architecture. [credit: Polestar ]

The Polestar 2 is one of the cars I'm most looking forward to driving this year. It's an all-electric fastback sedan from the brand of the same name, Polestar having been spun off by Volvo and its Chinese parent company as a new brand for performance BEVs. Production of the brand-new BEV started last month in China, ahead of the start of US deliveries this summer. And now we finally know exactly how much a Polestar 2 will cost here: $59,900, before any federal or local incentives.

That's actually cheaper than we expected—last year, Polestar predicted the launch edition would start at $63,000. And the good news if you've already placed an online deposit is that the new, lower price is the one you'll be asked to pay. The online configurator is also live with US pricing, so we can report that the launch-edition Polestar 2 will come pretty heavily loaded—the only cost options are for colors other than black ($1,200), a fancy leather and wood interior ($4,000), and the performance pack ($5,000), which gives you some fancy Öhlins dampers, Brembo front brakes, a different alloy wheel design, gold-colored tire-valve caps, gold-colored seat belts, and a shiny black roof. (You can also buy the performance pack wheels separately, for $1,200.)

We also expect a cheaper version in the coming months—the launch edition comes with both the Pilot and Plus packages as standard, and when European pricing was revealed last year, it included a sub-€40,000 model.

Apple discusses the 2018 iPad Pro's A12X CPU and GPU on stage at its October 30, 2018 event. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

A new report from Bloomberg cites sources close to Apple who say that Apple is on track to introduce Macs running Apple-made CPUs and GPUs in 2021. The chips the company is developing are codenamed Kalamata.

While there have been previous reliable reports that Apple is doing this, today's article goes into much more detail than before on both Apple's strategy and the basic architecture of the chips. Its sources say that Apple is working on three different systems-on-a-chip for Macs, and all of them will be based on the A14 chip the company has developed for the next flagship iPhones.

The initial wave of Mac chips will have eight high-performance cores and four energy-efficient ones—codenamed Firestorm and Icestorm, respectively. Apple is looking into introducing chips with more cores in later products, it seems.