Month: February 2021

Enlarge / This image consists of six photographs taken from the Apollo 14 Lunar Module, enhanced and stitched into a single panorama to show the landing scene, along with the location from where Alan Shepard hit two golf balls. Both astronaut's PLSS' (life-support backpacks) can also be seen at left. (credit: NASA / JSC / ASU / Andy Saunders)

Fifty years ago this week, NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. made space history when he took a few golf swings on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission, successfully hitting two golf balls across the lunar surface. Space enthusiasts have debated for decades just how far that second ball traveled. It seems we now have an answer, thanks to the efforts of imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who digitally enhanced archival images from that mission and used them to estimate the final resting spots of the golf balls.

Saunders, who has been working with the United States Golf Association (USGA) to commemorate Shepard's historical feat, announced his findings in a Twitter thread. Saunders concluded that the first golf ball Shepard hit traveled roughly 24 yards, while the second golf ball traveled 40 yards.

Shepard's fondness for cheeky irreverence had popped up occasionally during his successful pre-NASA naval career, most notably when he was a test pilot at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. He was nearly court-martialed for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge during a test flight, but fortunately, his superiors intervened. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1959, Shepard was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts. (The others were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools, colleges, and businesses to limit in-person meetings, the world quickly adopted video conferencing from services such as Zoom and Google Meet. That, in turn, gave way to "zoombombing," the term for when Internet trolls join online meetings with the goal of disrupting them and harassing their participants. Meeting services have adopted a variety of countermeasures, but a new research paper finds that most of them are ineffective.

The most commonly used countermeasures include password-protecting meetings, using waiting rooms so that conference organizers can vet people before allowing them to participate, and counseling participants not to post meeting links in public forums.

The problem with these approaches is that they assume the wrong threat model. One common assumption, for instance, is that the harassment is organized by outsiders who weren’t privy to meeting details. Researchers at Boston University and the State University of New York at Binghamton studied zoombombing calls posted on social media for the first seven months of last year and found that wasn’t the case in most instances.

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  Google Fit for Pixel phones will have this new card in the middle for vitals tracking. [credit: Google ]

Google's latest Pixel-exclusive feature is the ability to track your heart rate and respiratory rate without any extra hardware. The company says that starting next month, Google Fit on Pixel phones will track these health stats using only the devices' existing cameras.

We've seen heart-rate tracking on smartphones before thanks to Samsung's Galaxy line. From the Galaxy S5 through the Galaxy S10, Samsung tracked heart rate through a physical photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor on the back of the phone. Users could just press a finger against the sensor and get a heart reading in seconds.

The Pixel phones don't have a PPG, but Google's solution is not all that different. A PPG shines a light (usually a green LED) into your skin, which is reflected by your bloodstream back to a nearby photoreception. It's basically a specialized camera. Google's Pixel solution just uses the actual camera. Google says, "To measure your heart rate, simply place your finger on the rear-facing camera lens."

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

Lobby groups for small ISPs are urging the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether SpaceX can deliver on its broadband promises and to consider blocking the satellite provider's rural-broadband funding. Meanwhile, SpaceX says the Starlink beta is now serving high-speed broadband to 10,000 users.

SpaceX was one of the biggest winners in the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), winning $885.51 million over 10 years to bring Starlink broadband to 642,925 homes and businesses in 35 states. Overall, the reverse auction awarded $9.2 billion ($920 million per year) in funding for 180 entities nationwide to expand networks to 5.2 million homes and businesses that currently don't have access to modern broadband speeds.

But funding winners still had to submit "long-form applications" by January 29 to provide "additional information about qualifications, funding, and the network that they intend to use to meet their obligations." The FCC will review those applications to determine whether any funding should be revoked.

Enlarge / The "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display, the original augmented reality headset, circa 1968. Augmented reality has gotten a lot more mobile in the past decade. (credit: Ivan Sutherland)

A new report in The Information corroborates and expands upon an earlier Bloomberg report claiming that Apple is preparing to launch a high-end VR headset as early as next year, citing unnamed people with knowledge of the product.

Among the new revelations is that the new headset will feature two 8K screens (one for each eye) and that Apple has considered a steep $3,000 price point.

The headset (which the report says is codenamed N301) will be able to display rich 3D graphics at that resolution, thanks both to an ultrafast M1 chip successor and because Apple will liberally use an already-known VR technique that involves using eye-tracking to render objects in the user's periphery at a lower fidelity than what the user is focusing on.