Month: September 2024

Enlarge / The final Vega rocket on its launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana. (credit: European Space Agency)

The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket is scheduled for liftoff Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program.

The launch is set for 9:50 pm EDT Wednesday (01:50 UTC Thursday) from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket will head north from the launch pad on the coast of South America, aiming for a polar orbit about 480 miles (775 kilometers) above the Earth.

The sole payload is Sentinel-2C, a remote sensing platform set to join Europe's fleet of Copernicus environmental satellites. The multibillion-dollar Copernicus system is the world's most comprehensive space-based Earth observation network, with satellites fitted with different kinds of instruments monitoring land surfaces, oceans, and the atmosphere.

Enlarge / The Artemis II Orion spacecraft being prepared for tests at NASA’S Kennedy Space Center in Florida in June 2024. (credit: NASA / Rad Sinyak)

Now that NASA has resolved the question of the Starliner spacecraft and its two crew members on the International Space Station, the agency faces another high-stakes human spaceflight decision.

The choice concerns the Orion spacecraft's heat shield and whether NASA will make any changes before the Artemis II mission that will make a lunar flyby. Although Starliner has garnered a lot of media attention, this will be an even higher-profile decision for NASA, with higher consequences—four astronauts will be on board, and hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, will be watching humanity's first deep space mission in more than five decades.

The issue is the safety of the heat shield, located at the base of the capsule, which protects Orion's crew during its return to Earth. During the Artemis I mission that sent Orion beyond the Moon in late 2022, without astronauts on board, chunks of charred material cracked and chipped away from Orion's heat shield during reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Once the spacecraft landed, engineers found more than 100 locations where the stresses of reentry damaged the heat shield.

Enlarge (credit: Jorg Greuel via Getty Images)

Over the weekend, the nonprofit National Novel Writing Month organization (NaNoWriMo) published an FAQ outlining its position on AI, calling categorical rejection of AI writing technology "classist" and "ableist." The statement caused a backlash online, prompted four members of the organization's board to step down, and prompted a sponsor to withdraw its support.

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," wrote NaNoWriMo, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

NaNoWriMo, known for its annual challenge where participants write a 50,000-word manuscript in November, argued in its post that condemning AI would ignore issues of class and ability, suggesting the technology could benefit those who might otherwise need to hire human writing assistants or have differing cognitive abilities.

Enlarge (credit: tunart | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal after book publishers successfully sued to block the Open Libraries Project from lending digital scans of books for free online.

Judges for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected the Internet Archive (IA) argument that its controlled digital lending—which allows only one person to borrow each scanned e-book at a time—was a transformative fair use that worked like a traditional library and did not violate copyright law.

As Judge Beth Robinson wrote in the decision, because the IA's digital copies of books did not "provide criticism, commentary, or information about the originals" or alter the original books to add "something new," the court concluded that the IA's use of publishers' books was not transformative, hobbling the organization's fair use defense.

Minecraft is among the most successful and influential games of the early 21st century, winning many awards and selling over 300 million copies (so far) since its 2011 release. So it was only a matter of time before Hollywood gave us a feature film based on the 3D sandbox game, simply titled A Minecraft Movie. Sure, one might have reservations about yet another video game-based movie, but on the plus side, we've got Jason Momoa and Jack Black co-starring. And the first teaser is full of eye-popping candy-colored cubic visuals and sly references to the game that should please fans.

Within a year of Minecraft's initial release, Mojang Studios was fielding offers from Hollywood producers about making a TV series based on the game, but the company wanted to wait for "the right idea." There was a 2014 attempt to crowd-source a fan film, but game creator Markus "Notch" Persson didn't agree to license that effort, since he was already negotiating with Warner Bros. about developing a film based on the game. Thus began a long, convoluted process of directors and writers being hired and leaving the project for various reasons.

When the dust finally settled, Jared Hess (who worked with Black on Nacho Libre) ended up directing. The COVID pandemic and 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike delayed things further, but filming finally wrapped earlier this year in Auckland, New Zealand—just in time for a spring 2025 theatrical release. Per the official synopsis:

Enlarge / A US child infected with measles during a 2024 outbreak. The child’s cheek shows the characteristic rash associated with this viral infection. (credit: CDC)

With one of the highest vaccine-exemption rates in the country, Oregon is experiencing its largest measles outbreak in decades. This year's count is now higher than anything seen since 2000, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the highly contagious virus eliminated from the US.

Since the start of the year, Oregon has tallied 31 cases of measles, all in unvaccinated people. The cases have been accumulating in sustained waves of transmission since mid-June.

Last month, when the outbreak tally was still in the 20s, health officials noted that it was nearing a state record set in 2019. There were 28 cases that year, which were linked to a large outbreak across the border in Washington state. But, with that record now surpassed, the state is in pre-elimination territory.