Month: March 2021

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  This gallery of SN10 images shows the vehicle's flight on Wednesday. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

So what, exactly, are we to make of the third flight of a full-scale Starship prototype?

If nothing else, Wednesday afternoon's flight provided several minutes of first-rate entertainment: Rocketship goes up. Rocketship comes down. Rocketship lands. And then, with an incredible plot twist 10 minutes later, rocketship briefly ascends again and then blows up.

It all looked remarkable. Like many of the most inspiring things SpaceX has accomplished over the last decade, this launch, landing, and subsequent explosion looked almost otherworldly. It felt like a peak into the future, a glimpse of something yet unseen, that might yet be.

Enlarge / Ars' Kyle Orland tries out the Nintendo Switch in its portable mode. (credit: Jennifer Hahn / Ars Technica)

Nintendo's next Switch hardware revision has long been rumored, but details on what to expect from a possible "Switch Pro" finally began firming up on Wednesday, thanks to an apparent leak from its screen supplier.

Bloomberg Japan has the scoop, and it points to Samsung as the source of Switch's next panel type: a 7" OLED panel, currently estimated at 720p resolution. That Samsung OLED production line will begin cranking in June, according to Bloomberg's unnamed sources familiar with "internal matters." Meanwhile, other Nintendo hardware assemblers will begin receiving the panels "around July."

For sizing comparisons, the current standard Nintendo Switch uses a 6.2" 720p LED panel, while 2019's Nintendo Switch Lite shrunk its LED panel to 5.5" (but is also 720p in resolution).

Enlarge (credit: NPG Press)

Remotely operated vehicles have changed how we explore and exploit the ocean. They can operate for far longer than human-occupied vehicles, go into areas where risk would dictate people avoid, and reach depths where very few craft can take a human. But even so, a lot of the hardware gets taken up by an enclosure that's capable of protecting things like batteries and electronics from the pressures of the deep.

But that may not be entirely necessary, based on a report in today's Nature. In it, a team of Chinese researchers describe adapting hardware so that it could operate a soft-bodied robot in the deep ocean. The researchers then gave the robot a ride 10 kilometers down in the Mariana Trench and showed that it worked.

Going soft

Mention robots, and for many people, the first thing that comes to mind are the collections of metal and cabling that make up things like the dancing Atlases from Boston Robotics. But over the last decade, plenty of researchers have demonstrated that all that rigid hardware isn't strictly necessary. Soft-bodied robots work, too, and can do interesting things like squeeze through tight spaces or incorporate living cells into their structure.

Enlarge (credit: KJ Parish)

Facebook will lift a ban on political advertising imposed after the US election to curb the spread of misinformation, and it has pledged to investigate whether its political ads systems need a further overhaul.

Advertisers would be able to resume running political ads on March 4, Facebook said in a blog post on Wednesday. It said it had introduced the temporary moratorium “to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day.”

The social media company said it had received “feedback” about its ads system during the latest election cycle, including its inability to distinguish between ads from politicians and political groups and social issue ads from advocacy groups, for example.