Month: August 2021

Enlarge / Image of the hole in Soyuz MS-09 vehicle docked to the International Space Station in 2018. (credit: NASA TV)

Russia's state-owned news service, TASS, has published an extraordinarily defamatory article about NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor. The publication claims that Auñón-Chancellor had an emotional breakdown in space, then damaged a Russian spacecraft in order to return early. This, of course, is a complete fabrication.

The context for the article is the recent, near-disastrous docking of the Russian Nauka science module with the International Space Station. The TASS article attempts to rebut criticism in US publications (including Ars Technica) that covered the incident and raised questions about the future of the Roscosmos-NASA partnership in space.

One of a dozen rebuttals in the TASS article concerns a 2018 incident—a 2 mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle docked with the International Space Station. Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, and NASA's Auñón-Chancellor had flown to the station inside this Soyuz in June. The leak was discovered in late August.

Enlarge / Second-grade teacher Wendy Verrall takes students temperatures during the first day of class at Tustin Ranch Elementary School in Tustin, California, on Wednesday, August 11, 2021. (credit: Getty | Orange County Register)

While battles over mask mandates in schools rage on in several states, the delta-fueled COVID-19 surge continues to sicken more and more children, sending some to the hospital.

"There's no doubt that there are more children getting infected," top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said in a White House COVID-19 press briefing Thursday. "The delta variant is much more highly transmissible than was [the] alpha [variant]," he said, noting that delta is more than twice as contagious and those infected can carry viral loads up to 1,000 times greater.

"So, given that, you'll see more children likely get infected and since you have a certain percentage of children—even though the percentage is small—a certain percentage of children will require hospitalization, so quantitatively, you will see more children in the hospital."

Enlarge / Get excited! The new Calculator app is here!! (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft is giving the Windows 11 treatment to a handful of core apps in the next Insider Preview build of the upcoming operating system. Mail, Calendar, the Calculator, and the Snipping Tool are all being revamped, and if you're running the latest Insider Preview, you should be able to grab these updates from within the Windows Store app starting today.

The changes in Mail, Calendar, and Calculator appear to be largely cosmetic, ejecting the squared-off corners of Windows 8 and 10 for a softer, more rounded look that fits in with the rest of the operating system. The one "new" app is a revamp of the Snipping Tool that unifies the features of the old Snipping Tool and the Windows 10 Snip & Sketch app (this update brings the useful side effect of finally getting rid of the annoying message telling you that the Snipping Tool is going away every time you open it up).

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  The new Snipping Tool updates its predecessor's Windows 7-era UI while integrating the features of Windows 10's duplicative Snip & Sketch tool. [credit: Microsoft ]

The new Snipping Tool still gives you buttons for changing what kind of screenshot you're trying to take and whether you want it to happen on a delay. Its annotating tools for screenshots have been given a more modern facelift, too (the old ones were stuck in the Windows 7 era). Snip & Sketch users can continue to access that handy UI by using the Windows + Shift + S keyboard shortcut.

Enlarge / Astronomers continue to ponder the strange, dramatic dimming in the light from Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the Orion constellation, first observed in December 2019. (credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al.)

Back in June, we reported on a likely explanation for the strange, dramatic dimming of Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the Orion constellation: The star burped out a massive gas bubble, resulting in lower temperatures that condensed heavier elements into dust that temporarily obscured the starlight. Now, a team of Chinese scientists has found evidence of a large, dark, cooler spot on the star—consistent with those earlier findings—based on spectral analysis, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

As Ars' John Timmer reported last year, Betelgeuse is one of the closest massive stars to Earth, about 700 light-years away. It's an old star that has reached the stage where it glows a dull red and expands, with the hot core only having a tenuous gravitational grip on its outer layers. The star has something akin to a heartbeat, albeit an extremely slow and irregular one. Over time, the star cycles through periods when its surface expands and then contracts.

Astronomers noticed the pronounced dimming of the light from Betelgeuse in December 2019; the difference was even visible to the naked eye. And the dimming persisted, decreasing in brightness by 35 percent in mid-February before brightening again in April 2020. Astronomers puzzled over the phenomenon and wondered whether it was a sign that the star was about to go supernova.