Month: February 2021

Enlarge / NASA originally studied nuclear thermal propulsion in the 1960s. Here is concept art for the Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program. (credit: NASA)

Getting humans to Mars and back is rather hard. Insanely difficult, in fact. Many challenges confront NASA and other would-be Mars pioneers when planning missions to the red planet, but chief among them is the amount of propellant needed.

During the Apollo program 50 years ago, humans went to the Moon using chemical propulsion, which is to say rocket engines that burned liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a combustion chamber. This has its advantages, such as giving NASA the ability to start and stop an engine quickly, and the technology was then the most mature one for space travel. Since then, a few new in-space propulsion techniques have been devised. But none are better or faster for humans than chemical propulsion.

That's a problem. NASA has a couple of baseline missions for sending four or more astronauts to Mars, but relying on chemical propulsion to venture beyond the Moon probably won't cut it. The main reason is that it takes a whole lot of rocket fuel to send supplies and astronauts to Mars. Even in favorable scenarios where Earth and Mars line up every 26 months, a humans-to-Mars mission still requires 1,000 to 4,000 metric tons of propellant.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter Dazeley)

Frontier Communications is raising its sneaky "Internet Infrastructure Surcharge" from $4 to $7 later this month, widening the gap between its advertised broadband prices and the actual prices customers pay.

Telecom providers love to advertise low rates and then sock customers with bigger bills by charging separate fees for things that are part of the core service. In cable TV, that means customers see one advertised rate for a bundle of channels and then pay way more after the addition of "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees that supposedly cover the costs of certain channels that are part of the bundle. With Frontier Internet service, customers pay the advertised rate for Internet service and then get hit with fees including the Internet Infrastructure Surcharge.

While some fees cover costs that providers must pay to the government, the Internet Infrastructure Surcharge is decidedly not one of them. In its list of fees, Frontier describes the surcharge as follows:

Enlarge / Brewing kombucha tea. Note the trademark gel-like layer of SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). (credit: Olga Pankova/Getty Images)

Kombucha tea is all the rage these days as a handy substitute for alcoholic beverages and for its supposed health benefits. The chemistry behind this popular fermented beverage is also inspiring scientists at MIT and Imperial College London to create new kinds of tough "living materials" that could one day be used as biosensors, helping purify water or detect damage to "smart" packing materials, according to a recent paper published in Nature Materials.

You only need three basic ingredients to make kombucha. Just combine tea and sugar with a kombucha culture known as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), aka the "mother," also known as a tea mushroom, tea fungus, or a Manchurian mushroom. (It's believed that kombucha tea originated in Manchuria, China, or possibly Russia.) It's basically akin to a sourdough starter. A SCOBY is a firm, gel-like collection of cellulose fiber (biofilm), courtesy of the active bacteria in the culture creating the perfect breeding ground for the yeast and bacteria to flourish. Dissolve the sugar in non-chlorinated boiling water, then steep some tea leaves of your choice in the hot sugar water before discarding them.

Once the tea cools, add the SCOBY and pour the whole thing into a sterilized beaker or jar. Then cover the beaker or jar with a paper towel or cheesecloth to keep out insects, let it sit for two to three weeks, and voila! You've got your own home-brewed kombucha. A new "daughter" SCOBY will be floating right at the top of the liquid (technically known in this form as a pellicle). But be forewarned: it's important to avoid contamination during preparation because drinking tainted kombucha can have serious, even fatal, adverse effects. And despite claims that drinking kombucha tea can treat aging, arthritis, cancer, constipation, diabetes, or even AIDS, to date there is no solid scientific evidence to back those claims.

Enlarge / An orange traffic cone has long been the logo and symbol for VLC media player.

News website Protocol ran an extensive piece on the history and status of the popular open source video player VLC, and the story includes new details about the next major version of the software. Among other things, VLC 4.0 will bring a complete user interface overhaul.

"We modified the interface to be a bit more modern," VideoLAN foundation President Jean-Baptiste Kempf told the publication. Kempf had previously shown some version of a new interface about two years ago, but it's unclear at this point how much that one resembles the one the team plans to introduce with VLC 4.0.

While the article doesn't list every change coming, it does outline a couple other possible directions and priorities for VLC.

Enlarge / Supporters of former President Donald Trump, including Jake Angeli, a QAnon supporter known for his painted face and horned hat, enter the US Capitol on January 6. (credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Facebook has gone out of its way to help law enforcement officials identify those who participated in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, the company said in a Thursday conference call with reporters.

"We were appalled by the violence," said Monika Bickert, Facebook's vice president of content policy. "We were monitoring the assault in real time and made appropriate referrals to law enforcement to assist their efforts to bring those responsible to account."

She added that this "includes helping them identify people who posted photos of themselves from the scene, even after the attack was over" and that Facebook is "continuing to share more information with law enforcement in response to valid legal requests."

Enlarge / A medical staff member adjusts a ventilator on a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at the United Memorial Medical Center on December 2, 2020 in Houston, Texas. (credit: Getty | Go Nakamura)

An anti-inflammatory arthritis drug called tocilizumab modestly reduces deaths and hospital stays in patients with severe COVID-19, according to preliminary data from a randomized trial of over 4,000 patients.

Among hospitalized patients requiring oxygen in the trial, there were 596 deaths in the group of 2,022 patients randomly assigned to take tocilizumab—29 percent died—and 694 deaths in the group of 2,094 patients randomly assigned to standard care—33 percent died. That’s an absolute difference of 4 percent in deaths and a 14 percent drop in the relative rate of death.

Tocilizumab also appeared to shorten hospital stays, boosting the chances that surviving patients could leave the hospital within 28 days after randomization from 47 percent to 54 percent.

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  The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra. Uh, it's got a screen in the camera bump? [credit: Tech Buff ]

Xiaomi is gearing up to launch the Mi 11 Ultra as its next flagship smartphone, and one of the more interesting design touches is a tiny, postage-stamp-sized display in... uh, the camera bump? Filipino YouTuber Tech Buff brings us an exclusive leak of the device, which has some pixels where there are not normally pixels. If you're sitting there asking "why?" the answer is "attention." The answer is always "attention." We're writing about it right now, so it's totally working!

Tech Buff ended up taking the video down, but a mirror of the video is up on YouTube.

We don't have official specs, a launch date, or marketing info yet, but the phone seems to be a pretty standard 2021 flagship with a Snapdragon 888 SoC. The back features what has to be the world's biggest camera bump, with two big lenses, a "120x" periscope camera (that's not the actual optical zoom rating), and an LED flash. Next to all that normal camera stuff is a tiny little display, which seems to be the same aspect ratio as the front display and appears to simply mirror the front display at all times. The video shows the back screen keeping up with the front screen as the user navigates around in a few apps. Hopefully, you can turn it off, too, for privacy's sake.