Month: March 2021

Enlarge / Cars could eventually get satellite Internet from SpaceX Starlink. (credit: Getty Images | Ozgur Donmaz)

SpaceX on Friday asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to deploy Starlink satellite broadband to passenger cars and other moving vehicles.

The application describes SpaceX's plans for Earth Stations in Motion (ESIMs) for automobiles, ships, and aircraft. SpaceX said it is "seek[ing] authority to deploy and operate these earth stations... throughout the United States and its territories... in the territorial waters of the United States and throughout international waters worldwide, and... on US-registered aircraft operating worldwide and non-US-registered aircraft operating in US airspace."

"Granting this application would serve the public interest by authorizing a new class of ground-based components for SpaceX's satellite system that will expand the range of broadband capabilities available to moving vehicles throughout the United States and to moving vessels and aircraft worldwide," SpaceX told the FCC. Internet users are no longer "willing to forego connectivity while on the move, whether driving a truck across the country, moving a freighter from Europe to a US port, or while on a domestic or international flight," SpaceX said.

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  Acura just redesigned its bestseller, the MDX SUV. [credit: Acura ]

Now must be an interesting time—in the Pratchettian sense—to be a car maker. All you want to do is sell vehicles, but there are economic downturns and the occasional pandemic to factor in. Around the world, climate change policies are heavily favoring electric-powered machines, at least in Europe and China, and a Californian upstart has embarrassed all the usual players in the process. And on top of that, all your customers are bored with the cars they used to buy—everything has to be a crossover or SUV, preferably with Wi-Fi.

In Acura's case, the company has had to deal with all of the above while going through something like a midlife crisis. After decades competing for sales with Lexus and Infiniti, Honda's North American spinoff decided to engage in some soul-searching to see whether that's really where its effort should be spent. And Acura decided that instead of focusing on luxury, it needed to return to its roots as a performance brand.

In the past, the Japanese luxury brands were seen as a rung below their German competitors, particularly in terms of driving dynamics, mostly due to the preponderance of front-wheel-drive platforms. But if Acura's plan was to dislodge BMW as the driver's choice, the MDX is the SUV to do it. Particularly the version it sent us for 48 hours—a $57,100 2022 MDX A-Spec. A-Spec, in addition to being something to do with Gran Turismo, is also Acura-code for "this is the one that handles really well," a bit like those BMWs you see with M Sport badges.

Enlarge (credit: Xanadu)

Excuse me a moment—I am going to be bombastic, overexcited, and possibly annoying. The race is run, and we have a winner in the future of quantum computing. IBM, Google, and everyone else can turn in their quantum computing cards and take up knitting.

OK, the situation isn’t that cut and dried yet, but a recent paper has described a fully programmable chip-based optical quantum computer. That idea presses all my buttons, and until someone restarts me, I will talk of nothing else.

Love the light

There is no question that quantum computing has come a long way in 20 years. Two decades ago, optical quantum technology looked to be the way forward. Storing information in a photon's quantum states (as an optical qubit) was easy. Manipulating those states with standard optical elements was also easy, and measuring the outcome was relatively trivial. Quantum computing was just a new application of existing quantum experiments, and those experiments had shown the ease of use of the systems and gave optical technologies the early advantage.

Enlarge (credit: University of Copenhagen)

Egyptologists have recently translated the oldest-known mummification manual. Translating it required solving a literal puzzle; the medical text that includes the manual is currently in pieces, with half of what remains in the Louvre Museum in France and half at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. A few sections are completely missing, but what’s left is a treatise on medicinal herbs and skin diseases, especially the ones that cause swelling. Surprisingly, one section of that text includes a short manual on embalming.

For the text’s ancient audience, that combination might have made sense. The manual includes recipes for resins and unguents used to dry and preserve the body after death, along with explanations for how and when to use bandages of different shapes and materials. Those recipes probably used some of the same ingredients as ointments for living skin, because plants with antimicrobial compounds would have been useful for preventing both infection and decay.

New Kingdom embalming: More complicated than it used to be

The Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg, as the ancient medical text is now called, is the oldest mummification manual known so far, and it’s one of just three that Egyptologists have ever found. Based on the style of the characters used to write the text, it probably dates to about 1450 BCE, which makes it more than 1,000 years older than the other two known mummification texts. But the embalming compounds it describes are remarkably similar to the ones embalmers used 2,000 years earlier in pre-Dynastic Egypt: a mixture of plant oil, an aromatic plant extract, a gum or sugar, and heated conifer resin.

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  A sign reads "Gambit Construction Entrance" at a construction site outside Angleton, Texas, on March 4, 2021. [credit: Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images ]

Tesla is best known as an electric car company, but the firm also has a thriving business in battery storage—including utility-scale battery installations to support the electric grid. Bloomberg reports that Tesla is currently building a battery installation in Tesla CEO Elon Musk's new home state of Texas. The project is in Angleton, about an hour south of Houston.

Tesla hasn't publicized the project, which is operating under the name of an obscure Tesla subsidiary called Gambit Energy Storage LLC. When a Bloomberg photographer visited, a worker discouraged picture-taking and said the project was "secretive." The project appears to consist of 20 large banks of batteries that have been covered by white sheets.

A document on the city of Angleton's website provides some details about the project. It's listed as being a project of Plus Power but includes a photo of a Tesla battery cabinet. Plus Power counts two former Tesla employees among its executives. Plus confirmed to Bloomberg that it had started the project, then sold it to an undisclosed party.

Enlarge / AT&T's logo and share price displayed on a monitor at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sued AT&T and three AT&T executives, saying the wireless carrier leaked nonpublic data about falling phone sales to analysts in order to convince the analysts to change their revenue forecasts. This scheme helped AT&T "beat" analysts' revenue forecasts in the first quarter of 2016, the SEC said.

The complaint, filed Friday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that AT&T repeatedly violated the Securities Exchange Act and the SEC's Regulation FD (for "fair disclosure") in March and April of 2016. The regulation "prohibit[s] selective disclosures by issuers of material nonpublic information to securities analysts," the SEC lawsuit said. AT&T executives "disclosed AT&T's internal smartphone sales data and the impact of that data on internal revenue metrics, despite the fact that internal documents specifically informed Investor Relations personnel that AT&T's revenue and sales of smartphones were types of information generally considered 'material' to AT&T investors, and therefore prohibited from selective disclosure under Regulation FD," the SEC said in a press release about its complaint.

AT&T claimed in a response Friday that "there was no disclosure of material nonpublic information and no violation" and said it will fight the lawsuit. AT&T also said that the SEC "spen[t] four years investigating this matter," but no charges were brought during the Trump administration. The lawsuit was filed about six weeks after President Biden appointed Democrat Allison Lee as acting chair for the SEC; although the SEC is an independent agency, its commissioners and chair are appointed by the president.