Month: May 2020

Enlarge / How to make a big hole fast. (credit: Collins et al./Nature Communications)

You know that scene in every forensic crime drama where someone works out the angle the bullet was fired from and points back to the source? In the case of the Chicxulub asteroid impact and the end-Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago, there’s no mystery about the shooter. (Space did it.) But the trajectory is interesting for other reasons, and researchers have long been trying to trace the path back out of the crater off the Yucatán coast.

Unsurprisingly, 66 million years have taken their toll on the crater, so researchers have offered several very different answers. Did the asteroid hit from the southeast at a very low angle? Did it come from the southwest at a moderate angle? Many studies that needed to model the impact have simply defaulted to a 90-degree strike and avoided the whole argument. The details actually matter, though, and precisely which rocks get vaporized—and which climate-changing gases they release—depends on that impact angle.

A lot of new research on the crater has been published recently thanks to a major expedition that included drilling a rock core down through the crater’s peak ring. (Impacts this violent leave a raised ring in the center rather than a single peak.) A new paper led by Imperial College London’s Gareth Collins makes the latest contribution using model simulations to see what impact angle best matches the observed characteristics of the crater.

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  The Samsung Money Card. Note the lack of numbers. You'll need to look them up in the app. [credit: Samsung ]

The Apple Card debuted 14 months ago, and right on cue, Samsung is today announcing "Samsung Money," a self-branded MasterCard debit card from SoFi. Unlike the Apple Card, which is a credit card, it sounds like Samsung Galaxy smartphone owners will be signing up for a money management account from SoFi, an online personal finance company The account is FDIC insured, has "no account fees," and even pays out interest for your savings.

Sign up for the account, and you'll get a physical "Samsung Money" card. It doesn't seem like Samsung tried to compete with Apple's fanciful titanium card design—the Samsung card looks like a regular plastic credit card with "dark mode" toggled on. Samsung did strip the card of numbers: it won't display the card number, expiration date, or CVV. Instead, you'll have to look those numbers up in the app, which is locked behind a pin or biometrics.

Users will be able to manage their new money management account from the Samsung Pay app. "With just a tap in the Samsung Pay app," Samsung's press release reads, "users can check their balance, review past statements, and search transactions. They can flag suspicious activity, pause or restart spending, freeze or unfreeze their card, change their pin, and assign their trusted contact—all without ever having to leave home or call a representative."

Enlarge (credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis)

Solar energy is currently dominated by photovoltaic devices, which have ridden massive economies of scale to price dominance. But these devices are not necessarily the best choice in all circumstances. Unless battery technology improves, it's quite expensive to add significant storage to solar production. And there are types of transportation—long-distance rail, air—where batteries aren't a great solution. These limitations have made researchers maintain interest in alternate ways of using solar energy.

One alternative option is to use the energy to produce a portable fuel, like a hydrocarbon or hydrogen itself. This is possible to do with the electrons produced by photovoltaic systems, but the added steps can reduce efficiency. However, systems that convert sunlight more directly to fuel have suffered from even worse efficiencies.

But a Japanese group has decided to tackle this efficiency problem. The team started with a material that's not great—it only absorbs in the UV—but is well understood. And the researchers figured out how to optimize it so that its efficiency at splitting water to release hydrogen runs right up against the theoretical maximum. While it's not going to be useful on its own, it may point the way toward how to develop better materials.

Enlarge / Skies at 2pm ET Wednesday over the launch site were rather stormy. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Now that humans are about to lift off from the United States into orbit again, the constraints surrounding launch weather are heightened. To that end, we're watching conditions closely today in advance of a historic launch of a Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft at 4:33pm ET (20:33 UTC).

This will be the first launch of humans into orbit from the United States since the space shuttle retired in 2011, and people who remember that program will recall plenty of scrubs. For today's mission, we need to track weather both at the launch site for liftoff, and down range in case of potential emergencies with the rocket during the countdown or after it launches.

Launch site weather

For Kennedy Space Center and SpaceX's Launch Complex 39A, there are 12 different criteria near the pad that must be met before a launch can proceed. These include sustained winds of 30mph or below, no anvil thunderstorm clouds within 10 nautical miles, and various rules about clouds.

Enlarge / A good old-fashioned General Electric lightbulb, which not only is no longer incandescent but also no longer made by GE. (credit: Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

General Electric has finally found a buyer for its lighting business and will be selling off its last consumer-facing business after more than 120 years of operation.

Boston-based GE said today it would divest the lighting business to Savant Systems, a smart home management company also based in Massachusetts. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but sources told The Wall Street Journal that the transaction was valued at about $250 million.

Savant specializes in full smart home systems for the luxury market. Acquiring a lighting business directly will allow it to take advantage of vertical integration and take more control over the physical equipment it installs in consumer' homes. Savant will keep the business's operations in Cleveland, where it is currently based, and will receive a long-term license to keep using the GE branding for its products.