Month: November 2023

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  SpaceX fans turned out at Starbase, the company's sprawling test facility in South Texas, on the eve of the second full-scale test flight of the Starship rocket. [credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica ]

Early Saturday morning, SpaceX will load more than 10 million pounds of super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the propellant tanks inside the company's second flight-ready Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket.

Then, if all goes according to plan, 33 Raptor engines will light at 7 am CST (13:00 UTC) to propel this gigantic rocket into the sky over Boca Chica Beach, a remote stretch of South Texas shoreline a couple of miles north of the US-Mexico border. SpaceX will live stream the event on X.

Space fans got what they hope will be their last look at this particular rocket Friday night, hours before law enforcement closed off public access to the launch site. One of the neat things about SpaceX's privately-owned South Texas launch site, named Starbase, is the public can approach white a few hundred feet of the rocket. The surrounding mud flats, dunes, and beach are all public land.

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Ars Technica)

On Friday afternoon, not long after news of CEO Sam Altman's abrupt and surprising departure from OpenAI began spreading online, the company held an all-hands meeting at its headquarters in San Francisco, reports The Information. During the meeting, interim CEO Mira Murati attempted to reassure the shocked employees that the search for a new CEO is underway.

Hours later, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman posted a statement on X, saying that after he learned today's news he sent a message to the OpenAI team: "based on todays news, i quit." Brockman, a key technical figure involved in many of the company's successes, was relieved of his OpenAI board membership on Friday, but the company initially announced he would be staying on.

Earlier on Friday, OpenAI released a blog post titled "OpenAI announces leadership transition" where it announced that Atlman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." In a response post on X, Altman wrote, "I loved my time at openai," and hinted at future plans without revealing any details.

Enlarge / It's been a while since I've seen some of those once-ubiquitous logos... (credit: Valve)

This Sunday, November 19, makes a full 25 years since the original Half-Life first hit (pre-Steam) store shelves. To celebrate the anniversary, Valve has uploaded a feature-packed "25th anniversary update" to the game on Steam, and made the title free to keep if you pick it up this weekend.

Valve's 25th Anniversary Update page details a bevy of new and modernized features added to the classic first-person shooter, including:

• Four new multiplayer maps that "push the limits of what's possible in the Half-Life engine"
• New graphics settings, including support for a widescreen field-of-view on modern monitors and OpenGL Overbright lighting (still no official ray-tracing support, though—leave that to the modders)
• "Proper gamepad config out of the box" (so dust off that Gravis Gamepad Pro)
• Steam networking support for easier multiplayer setup
• "Verified" support for Steam Deck play ("We failed super hard" on the first verification attempt, Valve writes)
• Proper UI scaling for resolutions up to 3840x1600
• Multiplayer balancing updates (because 25 years hasn't been enough to perfect the meta)
• New entity limits that allow mod makers to build more complex mods
• A full software renderer for the Linux version of the game
• Various bug fixes
• "Removed the now very unnecessary 'Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards' setting"

One of four new multiplayer maps added to Half-Life's 25th anniversary update. (credit: Valve)

In addition, the new update includes a host of restored and rarely seen content, including:

Enlarge / Eye drop over woman's eye. (credit: Getty | AGF)

The Indian manufacturing facility that made generic eye drops sold under CVS, Target, Rite Aid, and Walmart brands had a slew of manufacturing violations, including allowing workers to regularly perform their roles barefoot and failing to document bacterial contamination, according to an inspection report released by the Food and Drug Administration.

Last month, the regulator warned consumers to immediately stop using over two dozen kinds of big-brand eye drops due to a risk of infection. The list has since been updated to include a few more products. In addition to the big store brands, the eye drops were also sold as Leader (Cardinal Health), Rugby (Cardinal Health), and Velocity Pharma branded products.

All of the products are made by Kilitch Healthcare India Limited in Mumbai. At the time of the FDA's initial warning, the agency said it had found bacterial contamination in critical production areas of the Mumbai facility. As such, the agency warned of a possibility that the products, which are intended to be sterile, may not be and could pose a risk of infection.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship rocket on a launch pad in Texas awaiting liftoff on a test flight. (credit: SpaceX)

NASA managers are in South Texas this weekend as SpaceX prepares to launch its second full-sized Starship rocket. If the rocket flies perfectly, it will unlock additional tests beginning as soon as next year to prove that SpaceX can transfer hundreds of tons of super-chilled methane and liquid oxygen between two spaceships in orbit.

This is a fundamental part of the architecture SpaceX has designed to fly Starship missions beyond low-Earth orbit. With two NASA fixed-price contracts valued at more than $4 billion, SpaceX is on the hook to develop and fly two human-rated lunar landers based on the Starship design (and likely many more missions, assuming these first two work as advertised).

Depending on who you ask, SpaceX may need to launch a dozen or more refueling tankers to fill up the methane and liquid oxygen tanks on the Starship lunar lander, which will have emptied its tanks just to get into low-Earth orbit following launch on top of a Super Heavy booster. The Starship lander will use this fuel to boost itself out of low-Earth orbit toward the Moon, descend to the lunar surface with astronauts, and climb back into space to deliver the crew to their Earth return vehicle—an Orion spacecraft.

Enlarge / OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies about AI rules before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law on May 16, 2023, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, announced Friday that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman will be departing the company and vacating his seat on the board. CTO Mira Murati has been appointed interim CEO effective immediately, according to a blog post from the board of directors.

"Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," the blog reads, in part. "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

"We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," the board writes in a prepared statement. "At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward."

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a gamma-ray burst. (credit: NASA)

An astounding gamma-ray burst, dubbed GRB 221009A, continues to amaze even though it has been more than a year since it was detected. Scientists from Italy have recently published a study that shows how our planet’s ionosphere was impacted as a result of its high intensity and long duration.

The ionosphere is one of the Earth’s atmospheric layers, stretching from 60 km to more than 950 km in altitude. Containing electrically charged plasma, its lower half, called the bottom-side, extends until 350 km. Beyond 350 km lies the upper half, called the top-side.

Charging the top-side

According to Mirko Piersanti, who is a professor at the University of L’Aquila, gamma-ray burst effects have often been observed in the bottom-side but rarely in the top-side of the ionosphere. “That’s because the plasma density and conductivity in the top-side is much lower than the bottom-side. Also, to observe this effect, you need a satellite that can make observations, orbiting in this layer,” Piersanti said.