Month: November 2023

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos walks near Blue Origin’s New Shepard after flying into space on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Virgin Galactic smoothly completed its sixth human spaceflight in six months on Thursday, continuing an impressive cadence of missions with its VSS Unity spacecraft. This performance has made the company the clear leader in suborbital space tourism.

A key question is where this leaves the other company with a launch system capable of carrying private astronauts above the atmosphere: Blue Origin. That company's New Shepard rocket and spacecraft have been grounded since an engine failure nearly 14 months ago. During that uncrewed flight, the rocket broke apart, but the capsule safely parachuted to the West Texas desert.

Blue Origin finished its accident analysis this spring and implemented a fix to the issue, including design changes to the BE-3 engine combustion chamber. In May, the company said it planned to return to flight "soon." Then, in September, the Federal Aviation Administration closed its mishap investigation. So where is New Shepard?

For decades now, PC players who wanted to check out Rare's seminal 2000 shooter masterpiece Perfect Dark were stuck with the compromises inherent in emulating an aging title designed for very different hardware. Now, over 23 years after its release, Perfect Dark has gotten the full PC port it so richly deserves, complete with graphics and control updates that make the experience much more enjoyable for a modern audience.

The "work-in-progress" port from GitHub user fgsfdsfgs is described as "mostly functional," with "minor graphics- and gameplay-related issues, and possibly occasional crashes." But those are a small price to pay for a version of the game that comes complete with full mouse-and-keyboard controls for the first time, alongside a 60 fps frame rate, support for modern widescreen monitor resolutions, and even the ability to load custom levels.

After some quick testing, we can say this is easily the best way to play Perfect Dark today. The mouse-and-keyboard controls in particular make this version of the game stand out from the quality 2010 Xbox 360 port. And while the character models and level designs can feel a bit repetitive and blocky from a modern viewpoint, the added resolution and upscaling represent a big improvement over the muddiness of the N64 original (despite the improvements enabled by the then-massive 4MB RAM expansion pack).

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Officially, Intel's Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture died back in 2021, when the company shipped its last processors. But failed technology often dies a million little deaths. To name just a few: Itanium also died in 2013, when Intel effectively decided to stop improving it; in 2017, when the last new Itanium CPUs shipped; in 2020, when the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped getting updates; and in 2003, when AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn't break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications.

Itanium is dying another death in the next version of the Linux kernel. According to Phoronix, all code related to Itanium support is being removed from the kernel in the upcoming 6.7 release after several months of deliberation. Linus Torvalds removed some 65,219 lines of Itanium-supporting code in a commit earlier this week, giving the architecture a "well-earned retirement as planned."

The first Itanium processors were released in mid-2001, the result of years of collaboration between Intel and HP. The initial designs were made for servers, where their parallelized design would (theoretically) be able to speed things up by executing multiple instructions simultaneously. From there, the instruction set would eventually migrate into lower-end servers and then to consumer PCs.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Six weeks of targeted strikes by the United Auto Workers has proved to be an effective approach. Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors have all reached tentative agreements with the UAW over the past 10 days. Now, the union wants to focus its attention on automakers like Toyota and Tesla, who have resisted unionization or opened plants in right-to-work states that are hostile to collective bargaining.

The UAW began strike action at three car factories in mid-September, the first time in the union's history that it initiated industrial action against all three of the big US automakers simultaneously.

After watching years of executive pay raise largesse, the union asked for a 36 percent pay increase spread over four years, the return of cost-of-living adjustments, and the return of defined-benefit pensions. Among other demands were an end to the two-tiered system of hiring some employees as temporary workers, which meant that people hired after 2007 could be paid half as much as someone doing the same job hired before that practice was instituted.

Enlarge / Jackson Pollock working in his Long Island studio adjacent to his home in 1949. (credit: Martha Holmes/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Image)

If you've ever drizzled honey on a piece of toast, you've noticed how the amber liquid folds and coils in on itself as it hits the toast. The same thing can happen with 3D and 4D printing if the print nozzle is too far from the printing substrate. Harvard scientists have taken a page from the innovative methods of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock—aka the "splatter master"—to exploit the underlying physics rather than try to control it to significantly speed up the process, according to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter. With the help of machine learning, the authors were able to decorate a cookie with chocolate syrup to demonstrate the viability of their new approach.

As reported previously, Pollock early on employed a "flying filament" or "flying catenary" technique before he perfected his dripping methods. The paint forms various viscous filaments that are thrown against a vertical canvas. The dripping technique involved laying a canvas flat on the floor and then pouring paint on top of it. Sometimes, he poured it directly from a can; sometimes he used a stick, knife, or brush; and sometimes he used a syringe. The artist usually "rhythmically" moved around the canvas as he worked. His style has long fascinated physicists, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the question of whether or not Pollock's paintings show evidence of fractal patterns.

Back in 2011, Harvard mathematician Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan collaborated with art historian Claude Cernuschi on an article for Physics Today examining Pollock's use of a "coiling instability" in his paintings. The study mathematically describes how a viscous fluid folds onto itself like a coiling rope—just like pouring cold maple syrup on pancakes.

Enlarge (credit: Alexandros Maragos / Getty Images)

During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods, and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off any time soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published Thursday in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.

But the research was controversial even before it was published, and it may widen the rifts in the climate science community and in the broader public conversation about the severity and imminence of climate impacts, with Hansen criticizing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for underestimating future warming, while other researchers, including IPCC authors, lambasted the new study.

The research suggests that an ongoing reduction of sulfuric air pollution particles called aerosols could send the global average annual temperature soaring beyond the targets of the Paris climate agreement much sooner than expected, which would sharply increase the challenges faced by countries working to limit harmful climate change under international agreements on an already treacherous geopolitical stage.