Month: April 2021

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  Lego's latest official NASA set is this massive model of space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-31. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

The ongoing collaboration between Lego and NASA continues to delight. Back in 2017, the Danish toymaker brought out a highly detailed Saturn V—a model ably assembled in time lapse by Ars' Eric Berger before its release. Two years later, Lego followed up with the Apollo 11 lunar lander, and in 2020 it was the turn of the International Space Station. And earlier this April, Lego released the latest set to bear NASA's famous worm logo: space shuttle Discovery, as it was for 1990's STS-31 mission. This was an important mission, reaching the highest orbit for a space shuttle to date. Discovery put the Hubble space telescope into orbit, and its crew even captured the event on IMAX cameras brought along for the ride.

Lego has made a number of space shuttle sets over the years, but none has been as detailed as this 2,354-piece set. The finished orbiter is a substantial 21.8 inches (55.46 cm) long with a 13.6-inch (34.6 cm) wingspan, and it lends itself well to reproduction in Lego bricks at this scale; the space shuttle was covered in blocky tiles, after all.

Enlarge / A Winn-Dixie supermarket in Florida. (credit: Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

A federal appeals court struck a significant blow against disability rights this week when it ruled that a Florida grocery store's inaccessible website did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ruling contradicts a 2019 decision by a different appeals court holding that Domino's did violate the ADA when it failed to make its app accessible to blind people. The disagreement between courts creates uncertainty about the rules that will govern online accessibility in the future.

Winn-Dixie is a grocery store chain with locations across the American South. Juan Carlos Gil is a blind Florida man who patronized Winn-Dixie stores in the Miami area for about 15 years.

A few years ago, Gil learned that the store offered customers the ability to fill prescriptions online. Ordering online saves customers time because prescriptions are ready when the customer arrives. Gill also preferred to order prescriptions online because it offered greater privacy. In court, he testified that ordering in person as a blind man made him "uncomfortable because he did not know who else was nearby listening" as he told the pharmacist his order.