Month: February 2022

We're unabashed fans of The Orville here at Ars Technica, and like everyone else, we've keenly felt the absence of the series following its explosive S2 finale way back in April 2019. We thought we were getting a third season on Hulu in March, but it looks like we'll have to wait a few months longer. The streaming platform announced that it is pushing the release of The Orville: New Horizons until June 2. To soften the blow, Hulu released nearly four full minutes of teaser footage, including the new main title.

Series creator Seth McFarlane addressed the long, frustrating delay when he announced the sneak peek on Twitter:

To all the Orville fans: Thanks for being so patient with us as we’ve navigated the production challenges resulting from the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. As occasionally happens, our show has been repositioned amidst the ever-changing television schedule landscape, which means that the wait will be just a bit longer, and we’re now preparing for a June 2nd launch on Hulu. We’ve always promised you a television experience that will make it worth the wait, and we’re not wavering on that. We understand the frustration you’re feeling over more delays, so we want to give you a little taste of what’s to come. Here’s a sneak peek at the first few minutes of our season opener, and our new main title!

(Spoilers for prior seasons of The Orville below.)

Enlarge / Aeration System, Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant, Camarillo, Ventura County, California. (credit: Getty | Universal Images Group)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday announced it is now publicly logging levels of SARS-CoV-2 found in sewage from around the country. The announcement elevates a growing system for wastewater surveillance that the CDC says will eventually be aimed at other infectious diseases.

The system began as a grassroots research effort in 2020 but has grown to a network of more than 400 wastewater sampling sites nationwide, representing the feces of approximately 53 million Americans. The CDC is now working with 37 states, four cities, and two territories to add more wastewater sampling sites. The health agency expects to have an additional 250 sites online in the coming weeks and more after that in the coming months.

In a press briefing Friday, Dr. Amy Kirby, the CDC's program lead for the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), called the sampling a critical early warning system for COVID-19 surges and variants, as well as "a new frontier of infectious disease surveillance in the US."

Enlarge / How much longer can Stadia stay aloft? (credit: Google / Aurich Lawson)

As Stadia continues to desperately cling to life inside Google, a new report from Business Insider's Hugh Langley sheds light on what the cloud gaming division has been up to for the past few months. As usual, it's not promising.

According to the report, the "Stadia consumer platform" has been "deprioritized" inside Google and now only takes up an estimated 20 percent of the Stadia division's time. After Google closed its only first-party studio last year (before it had ever produced a game!), a blog post hinted that a white-label service would be Stadia's future. We saw a bit of what that would look like in October when AT&T released a cloud version of Batman: Arkham Knight that was secretly powered by Google Stadia. BI reports that service will be called "Google Stream" and that "the focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream."

The white-label Stadia service would work a lot like the way Google Cloud Platform works—companies that don't want to run their own cloud gaming service could just use Google's back end and distribute the game however they want. Like with Batman, presumably there are no branding requirements necessary and no need to plug into the Stadia store or the rest of the Stadia ecosystem.

Enlarge (credit: Mozilla)

If you didn't know that Mozilla made a VR-specific version of Firefox called Firefox Reality, then it's OK for you to continue not knowing, because Mozilla announced today that it would be discontinuing support for the browser a little over three years after introducing it.

The Spanish co-op Igalia will pick up the pieces next week with a "somewhat beta" browser called Wolvic, which will be based on Firefox Reality's source code. Firefox Reality will be removed from all the app stores in which it is available "in the coming weeks." Like Firefox Reality, Wolvic will use the WebXR standard to enable VR and AR experiences on websites, rather than requiring a download of a standalone app from a curated app store.

This may simply be a case of a company discontinuing a niche project intended for a niche market that wasn't generating sufficient user interest—it's rare for companies not just to cancel but to willingly hand off overwhelmingly successful products. But Mozilla has been open about its need to carefully manage its resources as it has downsized over the years—The company endured multiple rounds of layoffs in 2020, both pre- and mid-pandemic, citing a need to "refocus."

Enlarge / NASA Television of the Crew-2 landing shows three main parachutes deployed, with a fourth one lagging behind. (credit: NASA TV)

Officials from NASA and SpaceX say that they are paying attention to a parachute issue with the Dragon spacecraft, but they do not believe significant actions will be needed to address it.

Upon returning to Earth from orbit, both the Crew and the latest Cargo versions of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft use four main parachutes to slow the capsule before it impacts the water. If one parachute fails, the spacecraft can still land safely.

During the first two crewed flights of the Dragon spacecraft in 2020 and 2021, all four parachutes inflated nominally. However, when the Crew-2 mission carrying four astronauts returned to Earth in November 2021, one of the four parachutes was delayed by 75 seconds before it fully inflated. This had no effect on the spacecraft's planned descent rate because the extended parachute still offered some drag.