Month: January 2021

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket stands ready to launch the Turksat 5A mission. (credit: SpaceX)

9:30pm ET Thursday: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched on Thursday evening from Florida, sending a communications satellite toward geostationary transfer orbit. The rocket's first stage then returned to Earth and made a safe landing on the Just Read the Instructions droneship.

Notably, this was the 50th launch of previously flown Falcon 9 first stage. It has only been five years and a few days since they landed their first one, and less than four years since the company re-flew one. The company's next Falcon 9 launch attempt may come as soon as January 14, with the Transporter-1 smallsat rideshare mission.

Original post: SpaceX will seek to kick off what promises to be a busy year of launches on Thursday evening, when a Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the Turksat 5A communications satellite. The 3.4-ton satellite will be deployed into a geostationary transfer orbit.

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  The Galaxy Chromebook 2. It's still extremely red. [credit: Samsung ]

CES 2021 is next week, and announcements are starting to hit the wire. Last year, Samsung launched the Galaxy Chromebook, a premium $1,000 Chrome OS laptop that felt like a successor to the Google Pixelbook. Just like Google, after experiencing the sales of a premium $1,000 Chromebook, Samsung has decided to tone down the premium-ness in subsequent versions, and today's "Galaxy Chromebook 2," is a cheaper follow-up.

Last year's Galaxy Chromebook featured a headline-grabbing 13.3-inch 4K OLED display, but this year, Samsung has hacked and slashed at the spec sheet to get down to a lower price. Instead of a 4K OLED, we've got a 1080p LCD. The laptop is slower, thicker, and heavier than last year's, with less storage, fewer cameras, and less RAM. All this cost-cutting has nearly cut the price in half, though: it now starts at $549.

For the starting $549, you get a 13.3-inch 1920×1080 (16:9) LCD touchscreen; a 1.9GHz, 14nm, dual-core Intel Celeron 5205U; 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM; 64GB of eMMC storage; and a 45.5Wh battery. For $699, there is an upgraded model with an Intel Core i3-10110U, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage.

Enlarge / The seditionists who broke into the US Capitol on Wednesday were not particularly subtle and did not put any particular effort into avoiding being identified. (credit: Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images)

Law enforcement agencies trying to track down insurrectionists who participated in yesterday's events at the US Capitol have a wide array of tools at their disposal thanks to the ubiquity of cameras and social media.

Both local police and the FBI are seeking information about individuals who were "actively instigating violence" in Washington, DC, on January 6. While media organizations took thousands of photos police can use, they also have more advanced technologies at their disposal to identify participants, following what several other agencies have done in recent months.

Several police departments, such as Miami, Philadelphia, and New York City, turned to facial recognition platforms—including the highly controversial Clearview AI—during the widespread summer 2020 demonstrations against police brutality and in support of Black communities. In Philadelphia, for example, police used software to compare protest footage against Instagram photos to identify and arrest a protestor. In November, The Washington Post reported that investigators from 14 local and federal agencies in the DC area have used a powerful facial recognition system more than 12,000 times since 2019.

Enlarge / The output of two optical frequency combs, showing the light appearing at evenly spaced wavelengths. (credit: ESO)

AI and machine-learning techniques have become a major focus of everything from cloud computing services to cell phone manufacturers. Unfortunately, our existing processors are a bad match for the sort of algorithms that many of these techniques are based on, in part because they require frequent round trips between the processor and memory. To deal with this bottleneck, researchers have figured out how to perform calculations in memory and designed chips where each processing unit has a bit of memory attached.

Now, two different teams of researchers have figured out ways of performing calculations with light in a way that both merges memory and calculations and allows for massive parallelism. Despite the differences in implementation, the hardware designed by these teams has a common feature: it allows the same piece of hardware to simultaneously perform different calculations using different frequencies of light. While they're not yet at the level of performance of some dedicated processors, the approach can scale easily and can be implemented using on-chip hardware, raising the process of using it as a dedicated co-processor.

A fine-toothed comb

The new work relies on hardware called a frequency comb, a technology that won some of its creators the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. While a lot of interesting physics is behind how the combs work (which you can read more about here), what we care about is the outcome of that physics. While there are several ways to produce a frequency comb, they all produce the same thing: a beam of light that is composed of evenly spaced frequencies. So a frequency comb in visible wavelengths might be composed of light with a wavelength of 500 nanometers, 510nm, 520nm, and so on.

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  "NERTS!" has been shouted, ending a round of the new, free Zachtronics game Nerts!. But how did we get here?

We're no strangers to video games as escapism during the pandemic, especially the games that bring friends together online with simple-yet-deep gameplay. That very premise catapulted Among Us, a quietly launched indie game from 2018, to the top of 2020's charts and headlines.

After only one week, 2021 has already started as a... rollicking year, which has led me to the unusual step of highlighting a new, free multiplayer card game on Windows, Mac, and Linux that we might not otherwise cover at Ars Technica: Nerts! One reason is that it's currently the "best new game" of 2021—admittedly a silly designation only seven days into the year, but I'm counting it.

You may have already stumbled upon Nerts! as a child, perhaps calling it Pounce or Racing Demon, as it's a modified version of solitaire for larger groups of players—a fact that the game's developers at Zachtronics freely admit (and perhaps plays into the game's free-as-in-beer price). The below video tells the story, though you'll want to read my context to better parse it.

Enlarge / A mask is left behind in a hallway at the US Capitol January 7, 2021, in Washington, DC. The US Congress has finished the certification for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' Electoral College win after pro-Trump mobs stormed the Capitol and temporarily stopped the process. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)

Yesterday's disgraceful and violent insurrection will stand as one of the darkest moments in American history. But it could also be yet another dark point in the ongoing pandemic, which—in case you got distracted—is still spreading out of control and devastating much of the country.

As seditionists entered the United States Capitol building Wednesday, health officials around the country logged more than 243,000 new cases of COVID-19. Hospitals tallied nearly 132,500 COVID-19 patients in their beds. And at least 3,793 American lost their lives to the pandemic virus. With surge upon surge of disease, over 21 million people in the US have been infected, and over 352,000 loved ones are dead.

Fuel on the inferno

The pandemic did not pause for those in the District of Columbia on Wednesday. Like many places, Washington has seen an increase in cases and deaths amid winter holidays. During the president's insurrection, the capital reported 316 new cases—a sharp rise from the seven-day rolling average of 86 new cases per day logged on November 1. There were also five new deaths Wednesday, up from an average of one November 1. Overall, the city of more than 700,000 residents has reported a total of nearly 30,500 cases and over 800 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.