Month: March 2024

Enlarge / A Long March 8 rocket, standing 165 feet (50 meters) tall, rolled out of its assembly building to its launch pad Sunday at the Wenchang Space Launch Site. (credit: Luo Yunfei/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)

The next phase of China's Moon program began with the launch of a new data relay satellite Monday to link lunar landers and rovers on the far side of the Moon with ground controllers back on Earth.

This launch sent China's Queqiao-2 relay spacecraft toward the Moon, where it will enter an elliptical orbit and position itself for the arrival of China's next robotic lunar lander, Chang'e 6, later this year.

A medium-lift Long March 8 rocket carried the Queqiao-2 spacecraft aloft from the Wenchang launch base, located on Hainan Island in southern China. This was the third flight of the kerosene-fueled Long March 8, one of a new generation of Chinese rockets designed to replace older Long March launcher designs burning toxic propellant.

Enlarge (credit: Kevin Noki)

Have you ever worked on a hobby project where modifying and compiling the source code for a Linux-based emulator was possibly the easiest and most straightforward part of the whole thing?

Kevin Noki really, really wanted a functioning Macintosh Plus, complete with a functioning, auto-ejecting disk drive that it could boot from. The German maker already had a Mac Plus (1Mb) from eBay, but it had both a busted power supply and floppy drive. Rather than carve out the busted Plus' one-of-a-kind internals and slap a Raspberry Pi in there like some DIY slacker, Noki went … a different path.

Noki 3D-printed his own Macintosh, the "Brewintosh." I would like you to consider what you think that last sentence means and then wipe your expectations clean. I have watched the entire 48-minute journey of Noki's Brewintosh, which is both very soothing on some ASMR-adjacent gut level and also low-key maddening for the way it plays down all the individual accomplishments along the way. Any one of the Brewintosh's pieces would be my entire weekend, and my spouse would not enjoy my mood while I was sunk into it.

Enlarge (credit: DigiPub | Moment)

Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.

"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)

Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 60 Starlink satellites launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on January 29, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

The European Union has reached an agreement with the United States that will allow for the launch of four Galileo navigation satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

According to Politico, the security agreement permits staff working for the EU and European Space Agency to have access to the launch pad at all times and, should there be a mishap with the mission, the first opportunity to retrieve debris.

With the agreement, final preparations can begin for two launches of two satellites each, on the Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. These Galileo missions will occur later this year. The satellites, which each weigh about 700 kg, will be launched into an orbit about 22,000 km above the planet.

We got the first trailer for the spinoff prequel film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga in December, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the younger incarnation of the character immortalized by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. We're now just a couple months away from the film's much-anticipated release—i.e., the perfect time to drop a second trailer to keep that anticipation high.

(Spoilers for Fury Road below.)

As previously reported, we met Furiosa early on in Fury Road, working logistics for Immortan Joe (the late Hugh Keays-Byrne), who charged her with ferrying oil from Gas Town to his Citadel with the help of a small crew of War Boys and one of the war rigs—basically tractor trailer trucks souped up with armor and novel weaponry. Furiosa stole the war rig instead, taking Joe's five wives with her.