Month: October 2020

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  The OnePlus 8 Pro. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

OnePlus is staying true to its reputation of "best Android OEM" and is the first third-party manufacturer to ship a final Android 11 build to its phones. The big update started rolling out to the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro over the weekend, just 32 days after the OS hit Pixel phones. Some companies, OnePlus included, have been involved in the Android 11 beta program, but this is the first stable release outside of Pixel phones.

For OnePlus, Android 11 also brings a rev of its Android skin, and the headline inclusion is that after years of complaints, the company is finally adding an always-on display mode to its smartphones. An always-on display pretty much never turns off and always shows time and any notifications on your phone. The trick to doing this without killing the battery is that OLED displays have per-pixel lighting control (as opposed to the screen-wide backlight on an LCD), so black pixels can be turned off. With a minimal white-on-black interface, you can display important information all the time while only minimally impacting the battery.

We check our phones nearly a hundred times a day to see things like the time or notifications, and if you're sitting at a desk, an always-on display lets you do that all the time without even touching the phone. Having the most important information always available, hands-free, is something that's hard to give up once you've lived with it, and here OnePlus has finally caught up to the competition. Google, Samsung, Motorola, and LG have been shipping the feature for years, even on budget phones.

Enlarge / Melvinjohn Ashue, vice chairman of the Hoh Tribe, discusses the tribe's use of Starlink broadband. (credit: Washington State Department of Commerce)

A remote tribe in Washington state is one of the first users of SpaceX's Starlink broadband, having been connected recently after years of struggling to get modern Internet service. "We're very remote," said Melvinjohn Ashue, vice chairman of the Hoh Tribe's governing committee. "The last eight years I felt like we have been paddling upriver with a spoon and almost getting nowhere with getting Internet to the reservation."

The Hoh Tribe's reservation is in western Washington and had a population of 28 households with 116 people in the 2010 US Census. Ashue described the tribe's Internet problems and use of Starlink in a video produced by the Washington State Department of Commerce.

The video serves partly to advertise the state agency's efforts to get everyone connected to modern broadband by 2024, a goal that has been helped along by SpaceX's decision to start its limited Starlink beta in Washington. Previously, we wrote about how Washington state emergency responders are using Starlink in areas ravaged by wildfires. Residents of the wildfire-stricken town of Malden have also used Starlink.

It's a popular misconception that black holes behave like like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon—including light—is swallowed up and can't escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object's matter is actually ejected out in a powerful jet.

If that object is a star, the process of being shredded (or "spaghettified") by the powerful gravitational forces of a black hole occurs outside the event horizon, and part of the star's original mass is ejected violently outward. This in turn can form a rotating ring of matter (aka an accretion disk) around the black hole that emits powerful x-rays and visible light. Those jets are one way astronomers can indirectly infer the presence a black hole. Now astronomers have recorded the final death throes of a star being shredded by a supermassive black hole in just such a "tidal disruption event" (TDE), described in a new paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"The idea of a black hole 'sucking in' a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But this is exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event," said co-author Matt Nicholl of the University of Birmingham. "We were able to investigate in detail what happens when a star is eaten by such a monster."

Enlarge / Roscosmos Head Dmitry Rogozin before Russia-China talks at the Moscow Kremlin in June. (credit: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images)

There's a nasty, increasingly public battle that has engulfed a handful of former cosmonauts, a robot, and the current leader of Russia's space program, Dmitry Rogozin, in controversy.

The genesis of the dispute seems to be that some former cosmonauts have begun to speak out against Rogozin's leadership of Russia's space efforts—which has at times seemed self-serving—amid the rise of competitors like SpaceX and the decline of the country's aging infrastructure.

The most outspoken critic of Rogozin and Russia's space program has been Maxim Suraev, a Russian fighter pilot who served six-month stints on the International Space Station in 2010 and 2014. After retiring from the cosmonaut corps, Suraev was elected to the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian assembly.