Month: October 2020

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  This is what a Nest Secure looks like. That's a hub/keypad up top, with a key chain presence sensor and two pieces of a "Nest Detect" sensor.

The Nest Secure is dead. Google confirmed to Android Police that its home security product has been discontinued. Nest Secure has been listed as "no longer available" on the Google Store for about a week now.

The Nest Secure launched in 2017 after a reportedly troubled development period that ended up lasting four years. The product had been changed so many times in development that it earned the informal nickname "Tombstone," which now seems very appropriate. The main unit—called the "Nest Guard"—was a speaker and (an originally secret) microphone with a push-button keypad on top for arming and disarming the security system. It was also a hub for the "Nest Detect" sensors, which would measure motion at a door or window. The final piece of the Nest Secure puzzle was the "Nest Tag," which was a round NFC key fob that would let you arm and disarm the system by tapping it on the hub.

This was all pretty expensive, with the initial starter pack costing $500 for a Guard hub, two Detect sensors, and two Tags. The initial pack would only cover two doors or windows, and from there any other doors and windows you wanted to monitor would be another $60 each, which would quickly add up if you wanted comprehensive coverage. All three of the Nest Secure devices should be on the way out now, with the Google Store listing "no longer available" for the hub and " out of stock" for the sensors. The tags are still for sale, though.

After checking off a bucket list item by doing a video with LGR's Clint Basinger last month, there was only one place we could go next: to space. And no creator occupies the intersection of space science, gaming, and sheer lunacy quite like engineer and physics master Scott Manley.

Manley's videos are most often a mix of smarts and charm, delivered in a slow, calming Gaelic cadence. Manley's videos run the gamut from space tech explainers to game reviews to physics thought experiments, and all points in between. He's perhaps best known for doing ridiculous things in Kerbal Space Program (something I know a little bit about!). It's pretty good odds that if you're an Ars reader who already follows Scott, you were introduced to his channel by a KSP video.

As we've done now with a few different YouTubers, we booked some time on Scott's calendar and then took him on a trip down his own memory lane, pulling up notable and much-upvoted comments from some of his standout videos to see if Scott could tell us a bit about the videos each comment came from. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a student of engineering, Scott's recall remained excellent—and we learned quite a bit from him not just about physics but also about how sometimes the best-performing videos can be the ones you didn't even plan on shooting.

Enlarge / Will the sun ever set on the Google empire? (credit: 400tmax | Getty Images)

The Department of Justice today filed a landmark antitrust suit against Google, alleging that the company behaved anticompetitively and unfairly pushed out rivals in its search businesses.

A company does not have to be a literal monopoly, with no available competition of any kind, to be in violation of antitrust law. The law is instead primarily concerned with what a company does to attain dominance and what it does with that dominant position once it's at the top. And according to the DOJ's complaint (PDF), Google did indeed abuse its outsized market power to tilt the playing field in its favor and keep potential rivals out.

"Google is the gateway to the Internet," Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said in a call with reporters. "It has maintained its power through exclusionary practices that are harmful to competition."

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collecting a sample from the asteroid Bennu. (credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)

Hundreds of scientists and engineers have labored for the better part of two decades to reach this point. Now, their passenger-van-sized spacecraft is finally ready for its big moment, hovering near an asteroid about as long as the Empire State Building is tall.

Later today, this space drama will play out 333 million kilometers from Earth. NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will approach an asteroid named Bennu and extend its sampling arm. The circular head at the end of this arm will essentially bump into the asteroid for about five seconds.

During this critical juncture, the spacecraft will expel nitrogen gas onto the surface of Bennu, aiming to drive small particles on the asteroid's surface—with a width of 2cm or less—into a device akin to a catcher's mitt.

Enlarge / A person wears a protective face mask outside Trump International Hotel & Tower New York. (credit: Getty | Noam Galai)

The US is climbing toward a third peak in the coronavirus pandemic as the Trump Administration continues to belittle public health experts and their advice.

The country’s seven-day average of new daily cases has increased about 33 percent from just two weeks ago, according to tracking by the COVID Tracking Project. On Friday, there were 68,000 new cases recorded, a high not seen since July. The current seven-day average is around 57,000 new cases per day.

The surge is diffuse. Last week, 17 states set their own new records for cases in a single day. Those states include nine of 12 states in the Midwest and six of 11 in the west, according to the tracking project. Altogether, the US once again has the highest seven-day average of new cases of any country in the world, according to tracking by Johns Hopkins University researchers.