Month: April 2020

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  The Galaxy Tab S6 Lite. It comes with a pen. [credit: Samsung ]

Samsung is still making Android tablets, and today it quietly pushed a site live for the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite, a cheaper companion to the Snapdragon 855-packing Galaxy Tab S6 it launched in 2019.

We don't actually have official confirmation of the SoC. Samsung only calls it an "Octa-Core" SoC with frequencies of 2.3GHz and 1.7GHz. A good bet is that this is the Exynos 9611, which not only matches Samsung's limited description—it was recently listed in a Geekbench test for the tablet. This is a 10nm chip with four 2.3Ghz Cortex A73 cores, four 1.7GHz A53 cores, and a Mali G72 MP3 GPU.

The display is a 10.4-inch, 2000×1200 LCD, a big step down from the 2560×1600 OLED panel on the Tab S6. There's 4GB of RAM, 64GB or 128GB of storage, a 7040mAh battery, an 8MP rear camera and a 5MP front camera. There's a MicroSD slot, and unlike the Tab S6, the Lite has a headphone jack. It also comes with a S-Pen stylus.

Enlarge / An Electron rocket lifts off in 2019. (credit: Sam Toms/Rocket Lab)

Rocket Lab announced late Tuesday that it had signed another customer to its launch manifest for 2020, a Japanese company named Synspective. Rocket Lab will launch the company's synthetic-aperture-radar satellite (named StriX-α) late this year from its facility in New Zealand.

"We are very pleased to work with Rocket Lab, a pioneer in rocket ventures," the founder and chief executive of Synspective, Motoyuki Arai, said in a news release. "We are also grateful for their flexibility in accepting our requests on the satellite's orbit and launch period."

This was all standard enough. The 150kg StriX-α satellite is near the top end of Electron’s capability, but the booster can loft that much mass to Sun-synchronous orbit. To date, the heaviest payload launched by Electron is a 185kg satellite for the Air Force, into a 500km orbit last year.

Enlarge / An aerial view of the Pentagon, the Potomac river, and parts of Washington, DC, taken back before a pandemic started keeping most of those cars in the commuter lot at home. (credit: Matthew Borkoski Photograpy | Getty Images )

The Department of Defense's internal probe into a controversial $10 billion cloud-computing contract concluded that the process by which the contract was awarded was proper and not influenced by President Donald Trump or members of his administration—despite the fact that the White House declined to cooperate with the investigation.

The DoD Office of Inspector General circulated the report (a 317-page PDF) on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract (JEDI) award internally on Monday and made it public today. In the end, the inspectors determined the evidence showed DoD personnel who made the decision were neither pressured by the White House directly nor by senior DoD officials who may have been in communication with the White House, even though "media swirl" made it seem otherwise.

Many enterprise computing vendors threw their hats in the ring for the JEDI contract. By April 2019, the shortlist was down to two finalists: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Industry experts and observers largely expected Amazon to win the contract and were generally surprised when the Pentagon sealed the deal with Microsoft in October.

Enlarge (credit: d3sign / Getty)

A New York federal judge has ruled that the tech news site Mashable did not violate copyright law when it embedded an Instagram photo from photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair in an article.

James Grimmelmann, a copyright law expert at Cornell University, said that the ruling will provide a firmer legal footing for sites that embed third-party content. "It gives you a very clear basis for throwing out most of these cases quickly," he told Ars in a phone interview.

The dispute began in 2016, when Mashable published an article highlighting the work of 10 female photojournalists whose work focuses on social justice. Mashable included Sinclair among the 10 featured photographers and initially offered her $50 for the rights to one of her photos. When Sinclair declined to license the photo, Mashable embedded the photo from Sinclair's official Instagram account instead. Sinclair sued, arguing that Mashable had infringed her copyright.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 27: EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler testifies before the US House Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change. (credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) periodically reviews certain pollution standards, considering new science and analysis to see if the previously chosen limit should be updated. The latest of these reviews looked at the standards for particulate-matter pollution—dust and soot categorized by size as PM_2.5 (2.5 micrometers across or less) and PM₁₀ (up to 10 micrometers).

On Tuesday, the EPA released its decision to not tighten the standards set in 2012. That’s not really a surprise given current leadership under the Trump administration, but the argument employed to defend the decision is remarkable. At a time when a pandemic has shut down most of the United States, the EPA is essentially arguing that epidemiology isn’t up to the task of guiding policy.

A change in process

EPA’s process for these multi-year reviews, like the process for setting new standards, is ostensibly designed to minimize the influence of politics. EPA analysts do the work of combing through and synthesizing existing scientific research, quantifying best estimates of the health impacts of pollutants at various levels, as well as the economic costs of restricting pollutants to those levels. Those estimates then go through advisory panels of outside scientists and are subject to public comment before the agency decides which standard fulfills its obligations under the law.

Enlarge / The Super Kamiokonde neutrino detector as it was being filled with water. (credit: Super Kamiokande)

Everything we can see in the Universe is made of matter, and we wouldn't exist without it. For physicists, this is actually a problem. From the perspective of the physics that describes the behavior of particles, matter and antimatter are equivalent. As far as the Standard Model of particles is concerned, there's no reason we shouldn't see equal amounts of matter and antimatter—or, more correctly, just the photons left behind after they meet and annihilate each other.

For there to be the sort of difference between the two that makes our Universe possible, something has to break the apparent symmetry between them (technically termed charge-conjugation and parity-reversal symmetry, or simply CP symmetry). And we have identified some cases of CP symmetry violations; they're just too small to account for all the matter in the Universe.

Now, nearly a decade of data from the world's leading neutrino observatory has found an indication that these particles display hints of a CP symmetry violation that's potentially much larger. While the data doesn't reach the level where physicists are willing to call it a discovery, it definitely warrants follow-ups as additional detectors come online.

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  The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. [credit: Apple ]

Apple has started taking orders for its trackpad-equipped Magic Keyboard peripheral for the iPad Pro, and it plans to put units in buyers’ hands as early as next week. The company previously announced that the peripheral was coming in May, so this is a little ahead of the previously described schedule.

This peripheral works with the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro models (both the 11- and 12.9-inch sizes).

The focus might seem to be on the trackpad because that’s such a departure for this platform, but the keyboard is modeled after the Magic Keyboard, which has been sold as a standalone peripheral and which replaced the butterfly keyboards in the 16-inch MacBook Pro and 2020 MacBook Air.