Day: January 7, 2019

The Weather Channel app has been accused of tracking users and then selling their data

The private spaceflight company SpaceX has moved its first Dragon spaceship designed for astronauts to the launchpad ahead of an uncrewed test flight that’s just weeks away. 

SpaceX rolled the Crew Dragon and its Falcon 9 rocket out to the historic Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida Thursday (Jan. 3) for a test flight for NASA targeted for Jan. 17 . That schedule, however, may be delayed due to the ongoing partial government shutdown that has shuttered much of the U.S. space agency. 

Indeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk hinted that the Crew Dragon test flight, called Demo-1, could fly later than that Jan. 17 target. “About a month away from the first orbital test flight of crew Dragon,” Musk wrote on Twitter Saturday (Jan. 5). That timeline could potentially place the Crew Dragon demonstration flight in early February, though no official schedule change has been announced. [Take a Walk Through SpaceX’s Crew Dragon]

If all goes well with the uncrewed test, SpaceX will launch its first crewed flight with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. That flight was previously scheduled for June of this year.

New SpaceX photos show the first Crew Dragon attached to its rocket in their hangar at Launch Pad 39A, as well as rolling out to the pad, standing upright in launch position and sitting within reach of the company’s sleek white and black crew access arm.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship is a crewed version of the company’s robotic Dragon cargo ships that have been flying since 2010, with NASA resupply missions beginning in 2012. (There’s one at the space station right now.)

The Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX is one of two companies contracted by NASA to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station under the agency’s Commercial Crew program.  The other company is Boeing, which has its own crewed ship for NASA, called the CST-100 Starliner, that is scheduled to make an uncrewed test flight in March, with crewed flight later this year.

Like SpaceX’s uncrewed Dragon ships, the Crew Dragon will launch on the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft is designed to fly up to seven astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit. It will use parachutes to splash down in the ocean, also like the uncrewed Dragon.

SpaceX is also developing a larger crewed spacecraft, called Starship, as part of its effort to eventually fly people to Mars. That reusable spacecraft will be able to carry about 100 people on deep-space flights, and will launch on a massive rocket (called the Super Heavy) that is also designed to be reusable, Musk has said.

A “hopper” prototype for the Starship vehicle will undergo test flights at SpaceX’s newest launch site near Brownsville. Musk said those tests could begin in the next few months. SpaceX has already booked its first passenger for Starship, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who hopes to fly artists around the moon on the vehicle in the mid-2020s.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original story on Space.com.

Researchers who make the coldest plasmas in the universe just found a way to make them even colder — by blasting them with lasers.

The scientists cooled the plasma to around 50-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, about 50 times colder than in deep space.

This chilly plasma could reveal how similar plasmas behave at the centers of white dwarf stars and deep in the core of gas planets like our cosmic neighbor, Jupiter, researchers reported in a new study. [The Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

Plasma is a type of gas, but it’s different enough to be recognized as one of the four fundamental states of matter (alongside gas, liquid and solid). In plasma, a significant number of electrons have been separated from their atoms, creating a state where free electrons zip around ions, or atoms that have either a positive or negative charge.

Temperatures in naturally occurring plasma are typically very high; for example, plasma on the surface of the sun seethes at  3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius). By cooling plasma, scientists can make more detailed observations in order to better understand its behavior under extreme conditions, like those roiling our gas giant neighbors.

Be more chill

So why use lasers to help the plasma chill out?

“The laser cooling takes advantage of the fact that light has momentum,” lead study author Thomas Killian, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Texas, told Live Science. “If I have an ion in the plasma and I have a laser beam scattering light off that ion, every time that ion scatters a photon it gets a push in the direction of the laser beam,” Killian said.

This means that if a laser beam opposes the ion’s natural motion, every time the ion scatters light it loses some momentum, which slows it down.

“It’s like walking uphill or in molasses,” he said.

For their experiments, Killian and his colleagues produced small amounts of neutral plasma — plasma with a relatively equal number of positive and negative charges — vaporizing strontium metal and then ionizing the cloud. The plasma dissipated in less than 100 millionths of a second, which didn’t leave the scientists much time to cool it down before it disappeared. For the laser cooling to work, they needed to precool the plasma, slowing the ions down even more. In the end, the resulting plasma was about four times colder than any that had ever been created before, the study authors reported.

Assembling the pieces needed to generate highly cooled plasma took about 20 years, though the experiments themselves lasted less than a fraction of a second — and there were thousands upon thousands of experiments performed, Killian said.

“When we create a plasma it only lives for a couple hundred microseconds. Every ‘make a plasma, laser-cool it, look and see what happened’ is less than a millisecond,” he said. “It takes days and days to actually build up enough data to say, ‘Ah, this is how the plasma is behaving.'”

Going colder

The study’s findings invite plenty of questions about how ultracold plasma may interact with energy and matter; finding answers could help to create more accurate models of white dwarf stars and gas giant planets, which have plasma deep in their interiors that behaves similarly to the plasma cooled in the lab.

“We need better models of those systems so we can understand planet formation,” Killian said. “This is the first time that we’ve had a tabletop experiment in which we can actually measure things to feed into those models.”

Creating plasma that’s even colder may also be within reach, which could further transform scientists’ understanding of how this mysterious form of matter behaves, Killian told Live Science.

“If we can cool it another order of magnitude, we can can get close to predictions of where the plasma may actually become a solid — but a bizarre solid 10 times less dense than any solid that people have ever made,” Killian said.

“That would be very, very exciting,” he added.

The findings were published online Thursday (Jan. 3) in the journal Science.

Original article on Live Science.

NASA’s Glenn Research Center developed a novel means of articulating the outboard portion of an aircraft wing to create the optimal geometry for given flight conditions. The Spanwise Adaptive Wing (SAW) concept employs a high-force, solid-state Shape Memory Alloy (SMA)-based actuator to develop a structurally efficient and reliable method of deflecting a portion of the wing in flight. This ability enables significant increases in lateral-directional stability and control augmentation, thereby enhancing aircraft efficiency by reducing the rudder motion to control yaw.

Particularly in supersonic flight, the SAW’s benefits include increased compression lift and reduced wave drag. Compared to prior hydraulic-based actuators, the SMA-based actuator features significantly reduced size and weight, high specific work output, solid-state actuation, low maintenance, and high reliability.

Prior efforts to actuate wing articulation were unsuccessful, largely because the systems designed were too large, heavy, and complex to be practical for use. NASA’s comparatively simple SAW concept centers on a wing actuator fabricated from lightweight SMA material, which is trained to deform to a specific shape as it becomes heated. SMA actuators are composed of high-strength alloys, such as nickel-titanium-hafnium, and can feature elements such as trained tubes, wires, cables, or sheets. For example, a high-temperature, high-force SMA torque tube can be embedded in an outboard chordwise hinge line of a wing.

Every embodiment of the SMA actuator features integrated heaters and cooling devices that enable better control authority. A novel hinge line mechanism both provides a two-piece wing connection and houses the actuator assembly. When the actuator is heated, the SMA apparatus triggers the articulation of the wing to a predefined position. Once the desired position is reached, the heater maintains a constant temperature, causing the SMA to maintain its deformity.

As needed, the cooling system can be used to allow the wing to return to its original geometry. Multiple actuators can be employed on a single wing, allowing the various parts of the wing to articulate independently. By adapting the geometry of the wing during all phases of operation, from ground to subsonic and supersonic/hypersonic flight, NASA’s SAW offers the first practical method of using wing articulation to improve aircraft performance and fuel efficiency.

NASA is actively seeking licensees to commercialize this technology. Please contact the Technology Transfer Office at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 216-433-3484. Follow this link for more information.

If your TSA Precheck is set to expire soon, renewing it might be a bit easier than you think. The TSA is now allowing fliers to renew their enrollment in the program online and up to six months before their current enrollment is set to expire. If everything goes according to plan, the renewal process should only take around five minutes.

If you’re somehow not familiar, TSA Precheck is a program that allows low-risk travelers to go through an expedited security line at the airport.

When you fly you don’t have to remove your shoes, belt, or jacket and you’re able to leave your liquids and laptop in your bag. Most of the time you also only have to walk through a metal detector rather than that massive body scanner.

It’s nice. Really nice if you travel frequently.

The service is currently accepted at 200 U.S. airports nationwide and used by 56 airlines.

The program costs $85 for the five years, which boils down to roughly $17 a year. That $85 will be worth it the first time you arrive at the airport late and need to zoom through the line in order to catch your flight. I was personally thankful for mine on Dec 26th when I arrived at the airport in Raleigh, NC at 5am for my 6:30am flight to find the traditional security line wrapped around the airport lobby and running out into the street. The TSA Precheck line was maybe 30 people long.

If it’s something you have, it’s definitely something you want to keep.

If you travel out of the country, then Global Entry is an even better idea. Hands down the best $100 I’ve ever spent, Global Entry comes with TSA Precheck and allows you to re-enter the United States through the same line that the airplane’s crew does.

I travel out of the country frequently, and after traveling with pals who don’t have the service can confidently say that my Global Entry saves me literal hours of time standing in the customs line when I return home jetlagged and longing for bed.

And if you don’t have TSA Precheck but are looking to enroll for the first time, you’ve got options. You can enroll in the program for the first time at one of 400 IndentoGO enrollments centers, many of which are located in airports around the country. There will also be mobile enrollment centers at all New York Jets and San Francisco 49ers home games, and enrollment centers at a number of Staples stores around the country (those are rolling out now). The RVs will also make appearances at music festivals and concerts.

For months, players in HQ Trivia, a trivia app that offers cash prizes, say they have been having issues getting their money.

HQ Trivia is basically Bar Trivia: The App. Twice a day, every day, there’s a live trivia show, hosted on the app, that has a pool of cash that goes out to the winners. HQ Trivia players also have to deal with a rising epidemic of cheating, with users joining Discord servers to discuss answers with other players, or even writing bots that will pick the correct answers. The prevalence of cheating first became clear last March when one of the final players in a $25,000 “winner takes all” game was booted for cheating.

Cheating isn’t the only rampant problem in HQ, though. Since at least October of last year, players have been having problems cashing out their winnings. HQ allows you to cash out your winnings to PayPal. There used to be a $20 limit, but that was removed early last year, meaning theoretically players can cash out at any time. A lot of players have been saying that their cash out button is still grayed out, meaning they can’t tap it and receive their winnings.

Correction – 2:07pm: A previous version of this article said that the $20 limit was still in place.

Since August of last year, multiple players have reached out to Kotaku to inform us of this problem, after having tried and failed to get HQ Trivia’s attention. Some of these players say they were able to receive their winnings after a couple of days, but they still had to wait to cash out. Other players still haven’t been able to cash out at all. All of the players that told Kotaku they reached out to HQ about the problem said that they did not receive a response from the company.

One player who has won $150 from HQ and hasn’t been able to cash out since October told Kotaku that, since then, they’ve stopped playing HQ.

“I don’t care to play HQ anymore since the experience of being unable to cash out is so frustrating,” they wrote via Twitter DM. “It’s also frustrating that they decide someone is ineligible to win AFTER they have divided up the money, so a lot of the money from the prize pot does not end up going to anyone.”

Fans have speculated that this bug may be arising because of players getting falsely flagged as cheaters. HQ’s “Official Contest Rules” specify that “entrants may not communicate with, work with, or otherwise benefit from more than 25 other persons while entering a Contest if the communications between the entrant and those persons is facilitated by any technological means other than those explicitly provided by Sponsor.” Basically, if you’re in a Discord server during a game, you might be flagged as a cheater, and will be unable to cash out. A representative from HQ Trivia told Kotaku that “HQ reviews all cashout requests for eligibility. The average cashout time is less than one day.”

HQ appears steadfast in their rules, which probably do prevent cheaters from fraudulently winning money. Unfortunately, it also means that a lot of players are left out in the cold.