Month: June 2023

Enlarge / The Centaur V upper stage for the first Vulcan test flight was originally lifted atop its booster at Cape Canaveral in February. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance technicians at Cape Canaveral, Florida, have partially disassembled the first Vulcan rocket to send the launch vehicle’s upper stage back to its factory for reinforcements to its paper-thin steel fuel tank.

A test article for the Vulcan rocket’s Centaur V upper stage exploded on March 29 during a structural test at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. After a nearly three-month investigation, ULA engineers determined the upper stage already mounted to the first flight-rated Vulcan rocket inside a hangar in Florida needs more work.

ULA hasn’t ruled out launching the company’s first new Vulcan rocket by the end of the year, but the recovery from the test stand explosion in March eliminated any chance of getting Vulcan off the ground this summer. This also means the Vulcan rocket won’t become operational for the US military until some time next year, following two “certification” flights to demonstrate the vehicle’s performance and reliability.

Enlarge / The Keck telescopes, where some of the key observations were done. (credit: NASA)

The exoplanet 8 Ursae Minoris b should not exist. It orbits its host star at just half the Earth-Sun distance, and by all indications, the star should have gone through a phase in which it bloated up enough to engulf that entire orbit and then some. Yet 8 Ursae Minoris b definitely appears to exist.

There is a handful of potential explanations, none of them especially likely. The people who discovered the planet are suggesting that it survived because its host star got distracted by swallowing a white dwarf instead.

Big and hot

8 Ursae Minoris b was discovered using the radial velocity method, which watches for changes in a star's light that occur as planets tug the star back and forth as they orbit. This tugging creates a blue shift in the light when the planet is pulling the star in the direction of Earth and a red shift when the star is pulled away from Earth.

Enlarge / From left to right: Apple Watch Ultra, Shinola Bronze Monster, Oura Ring, Withings Scanwatch Horizon, a traditional ring, and Garmin Epix Gen 2. (credit: Chuong Nguyen)

Everyday carry enthusiasts typically face a conundrum when it comes to choosing between a smartwatch with all the benefits of modern wrist-worn tech or giving up tracking their health metrics in exchange for classic, mechanical watches. There are a few people who wear a regular timepiece on one wrist and a smartwatch on the other, but those drawbacks are obvious.

Fortunately, there's a growing selection of wearables that offer the tracking power of an Apple watch without taking up space on your wrist. These allow you to wear a mechanical watch for timekeeping while a health-tracking device feeds data to your phone. If you care about sleep metrics, step counts, heart and respiration rates, blood oxygen levels and still want to wear your mechanical watch, we’ve found three great wearable solutions for you.

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Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg Creative | Bloomberg Creative Photos)

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court decided that a lower court's logic was flawed when it convicted a Colorado man, Billy Raymond Counterman, for stalking. Counterman had sent hundreds of online messages—some of which the lower court ruled that a reasonable person would consider threatening—to a local musician, Coles Whalen, whom he'd never met.

The Supreme Court ruled that the objective standard that the Colorado lower court used to convict Counterman violated his First Amendment rights and, if upheld, could have a chilling effect on online speech.

"The State prosecuted Counterman in accordance with an objective standard and did not have to show any awareness on Counterman’s part of his statements’ threatening character," the SCOTUS opinion said. "That is a violation of the First Amendment."

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  This is Apple’s Vision Pro headset. It looks a bit like a particularly bulky pair of ski goggles, with the materials and design language of Apple’s AirPods Max headphones. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Recent discoveries by developers working with Apple's visionOS software development kit have revealed that Apple isn't going for room-scale VR with Vision Pro—something that will potentially frustrate users hoping for a high-end VR headset to compete with offerings from Meta and others.

As reported by 9to5Mac, Hans Karlsson of creative marketing agency Mimir lamented last week on Twitter that visionOS pulls users out of immersive VR when they move more than 1.5 meters away from the virtual environment's origin point, saying that Apple has thus "crippled VR" and made it so the platform is only for "couch potatoes." This wasn't new information, though; Apple's documentation for visionOS developers revealed this was the case during WWDC. The documentation reads:

When you start a fully immersive experience, visionOS defines a system boundary that extends 1.5 meters from the initial position of the person’s head. If their head moves outside of that zone, the system automatically stops the immersive experience and turns on the external video again. This feature is an assistant to help prevent someone from colliding with objects.

Around the same time, people discovered that Apple also yanks you out of any immersive environment if you start moving too quickly in any direction. visionOS will show users a message stating that they are "moving at an unsafe speed" and that "virtual content has been temporarily hidden until you return to a safe speed."

Enlarge / This cuttlefish can change its skin pattern to blend in with different background environments. (credit: Stephan Junek, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research)

It's well known that cuttlefish and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin, thanks to that skin's unique structure. But according to a new paper published in the journal Nature, the process by which cuttlefish generate those camouflage patterns is significantly more complex than scientists previously thought.

“Prior research suggested that cuttlefish only had a limited selection of pattern components that they would use to achieve the best match against the environment," said co-author Sam Reiter of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). "But our latest research has shown that their camouflaging response is much more complicated and flexible—we just hadn’t been able to detect it, as previous approaches were not as detailed or quantitative.” Their quantitative approach combined high-resolution video with machine learning to investigate not just camouflage patterns but the related process of "blanching" in response to threats.

Cuttlefish and their fellow cephalopods are fascinating creatures. For instance, a 2021 study showed that cuttlefish can delay gratification. Specifically, they could pass a cephalopod version of the famous Stanford marshmallow test: waiting a bit for their preferred prey rather than settling right away for a less desirable prey. Cuttlefish also performed better in a subsequent learning test—the first time such a link between self-control and intelligence has been found in a non-mammalian species. Cuttlefish also seem to exhibit a form of episodic memory, but unlike with humans, their capability doesn't decrease as they get older.