Month: October 2020

Enlarge / A SpaceX Starlink user terminal/satellite dish. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is one of the 386 entities that have qualified to bid in a federal auction for rural-broadband funding.

SpaceX has so far overcome the Federal Communications Commission's doubts about whether Starlink, its low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service, can provide latency of less than 100ms and thus qualify for the auction's low-latency tier. With the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) set to distribute up to $16 billion to ISPs, the FCC initially placed SpaceX on the "incomplete application" list, which includes ISPs that had not shown they were qualified to bid in their desired performance and latency tiers. The FCC also said that LEO providers "will face a substantial challenge" obtaining approval to bid in the low-latency tier because they must "demonstrat[e] to Commission staff that their networks can deliver real-world performance to consumers below the Commission's 100ms low-latency threshold."

That changed yesterday when the FCC announced the list of bidders that qualified for the auction that is scheduled to begin on October 29. Besides SpaceX, qualified bidders include Altice USA, CenturyLink, Charter, Cincinnati Bell, Cox, Frontier, Hughes, US Cellular, Verizon, Viasat, Windstream, and many smaller companies. There were 119 applicants that did not make the final list.

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  Besides being an actual working RC car, the Mario Kart Live kart makes for a nice conversation piece on its own.

When we were first introduced to the concept of Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit just last month, it seemed like one of the most clever implementations of "augmented reality" we'd ever heard of. A remote-controlled Mario Kart with a camera that lets you view your house as a virtual race course on your Switch? What could go wrong?

After spending about a week with Mario Kart Live in my house (complete with an eager six-year-old co-tester), I found a lot of imaginative fun in the novelty of this "real world" Mario Kart. Once the novelty wore off, though, the realities and annoyances of this particular "real-world" implementation left me wondering how much long-term appeal there is to the idea.

Smile, you’re on candid camera

Setting up Mario Kart Live is a relatively simple process. After downloading the free Switch app from the eShop, you simply point the kart's camera at an on-screen QR code to pair it with the system over Wi-Fi (no external router or Internet connection needed). From that point on, you see an over-the-shoulder view from the kart's camera on the Switch screen, though the kart itself is replaced on-screen with an animated version.

Enlarge / The Lucid Air is a stylish and aerodynamic sedan. (credit: Lucid Motors)

When Lucid Motors revealed the final production version of its new electric vehicle in September, the only thing not to like was the price. The specs for the Air Dream Edition were eye-opening: 1,080hp (805kW), zero to 60mph in 2.5 seconds, and a range of 503 miles (810km). But they were matched by the MSRP—$169,000 for this fully loaded hypersedan.

Cheaper versions costing $139,000 (the Air Grand Touring) and $95,000 (the Air Touring) were also announced, and it told us that an entry level Air would also arrive in due time, at "under $80,000." (All these prices are before taking into account the $7,500 IRS tax credit or any state incentives.) On Wednesday, it filled in that final blank.

It's not quite the $60,000 model that was originally on the cards a few years ago, but a regular Lucid Air will be available for $77,400, or $69,900 after the IRS tax credit. For your money, you get a single-motor variant that packs 480hp (359kW) with an estimated EPA range of 406 miles (653km) on a single charge. The biggest catch: you'll have to wait until 2022 before taking delivery.

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  Yes, you can pet the dog... in your village. You can kill the dogs in other people's villages. (All images in this article were captured from real-time preview gameplay.) [credit: Ubisoft ]

Last week, Ubisoft offered me an opportunity to play its upcoming open-world quest game Assassin's Creed Valhalla in an almost-retail state. This follows my 3.5 hours of preview gameplay in July, and honestly, the long and short of my combined tests is pretty simple: I like this game just fine. Ubisoft may very well have struck the right balance between new and familiar content in this follow-up to Assassin's Creed Odyssey, a game we very much liked. As a result, I'm optimistic.

However, I've yet to see exactly how the good bits fit together in the final retail experience or whether the solid momentum and pacing I've seen thus far falls apart under launch-version scrutiny. (Or, obviously, whether the game will buckle or crash under the load of a massive open-world engine, all while launching on a zillion old and new platforms on November 10.)

In the meantime, I'll take this moment to talk about some of the stuff I've noticed thus far while playing the PC version (as streamed to my home via Ubisoft's private cloud services), then open the floor up to questions in our comments section in case I missed anything (which I probably did).

Enlarge / Equipment including a diamond anvil cell (blue box) and laser arrays in the lab of Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester. Undoubtedly, they cleaned up the typical mess of cables and optical hardware before taking the photo.

In the period after the discovery of high-temperature superconductors, there wasn't a good conceptual understanding of why those compounds worked. While there was a burst of progress towards higher temperatures, it quickly ground to a halt, largely because it was fueled by trial and error. Recent years brought a better understanding of the mechanisms that enable superconductivity, and we're seeing a second burst of rapidly rising temperatures.

The key to the progress has been a new focus on hydrogen-rich compounds, built on the knowledge that hydrogen's vibrations within a solid help encourage the formation of superconducting electron pairs. By using ultra-high pressures, researchers have been able to force hydrogen into solids that turned out to superconduct at temperatures that could be reached without resorting to liquid nitrogen.

Now, researchers have cleared a major psychological barrier by demonstrating the first chemical that superconducts at room temperature. There are just two catches: we're not entirely sure what the chemical is, and it only works at 2.5 million atmospheres of pressure.