Companies are pulling their advertising campaigns from YouTube amid reports that a network of pedophiles is openly operating in the comments sections of videos of young children, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Disney and Nestlé are among those who have reportedly yanked spending after a YouTube video surfaced the…
SpaceX is set to launch a Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday night, and while it may not be the primary payload, a small Israeli lunar lander is by far the mission’s most intriguing payload.
The 180kg Beresheet spacecraft, privately developed by SpaceIL in Israel and funded largely through philanthropy, will spend more than six weeks raising its orbit, and becoming captured into lunar orbit, before finally making the first private attempt to land on the Moon. Until now, only the U.S, Russian, and Chinese space agencies have ever successfully landed on the Moon.
This means there is a lot of pressure on the small Israeli team leading the mission, both in their native country and among the commercial lunar community, which wants to prove that private ventures can do what only nations have done before. “What it means to me is that the responsibility is very high,” said Yoav Landsman, a senior systems engineer for the project, in an interview.
The first step into space may come Thursday night, with the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The primary launch window for the mission opens at 8:45pm ET (01:45am UTC Friday) for a flight from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The main payload is a geostationary communications satellite, PSN-VI. The weather forecast is optimistic.
A long road
An Israeli corporation, SpaceIL was formed a day before the deadline in 2011 to enter Google’s Lunar XPrize competition to land a rover on the Moon. At first, the project was led mostly by volunteers, but by 2013 the team realized that if they were going to make a serious run at actually reaching the Moon, they needed professional help.
So SpaceIL began raising tens of millions of dollars from philanthropists such as Morris Kahn, and it staffed up. Landsman was among the hires who joined—he couldn’t resist the opportunity to be part of a small team to land on the Moon.
The challenges were immense. They could not afford to buy their own rocket launch, so SpaceIL had to tag along as a ride-share on a mission (they settled on SpaceX in 2016). Because of this, and funding limitations, their spacecraft had to be small, with a limited amount of fuel. The Falcon 9 rocket would drop the Beresheet spacecraft into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of about 60,000km. From there, they would have to get to the Moon on their own.
SpaceIL has released a video, screen-capped above with notes from Landsman, that explains their journey to the lunar surface from launch on Feb. 22 through a projected landing on April 11 in the Sea of Serenity.
On the Moon
Engineers designed the spacecraft to satisfy the demands of the Lunar XPrize, which ended last March without a winner. That competition required a privately funded robot to land on the Moon, travel more than 500 meters, and return high-definition images and video to Earth.
The Beresheet vehicle will attempt this feat, within a limited lifespan on the Moon. After about three days, Landsman said the vehicle’s solar panel are expected to reach a temperature of 200°C and overheat. This was one of the compromises of developing a smaller lander on a tight budget.
So Beresheet will land with urgency, take images and video, transmit them back, and then attempt to hop 500 meters to another site. When Beresheet is not taking video or moving, it will be attempting to transmit data back to Earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network. “We have to hurry, and start to download data immediately after landing, to get everything back to Earth,” Landsman said. If the solar panels last longer, the team will be able to return higher-definition images.
This landing attempt comes as NASA has asked several US companies—some of which also were competing in the Lunar XPrize—to develop the capacity for small landers to deliver science experiments to the Moon. Earlier this month, NASA’s science chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, said he would like at least one of those missions to fly by the end of the year, but it is not yet clear whether any of the American companies can deliver.
Certainly, they’ll all be watching SpaceIL’s attempt to make the first private landing. “The people that were competing with us until not long ago have come to me and told me they are rooting for us,” Landsman said. “If we succeed in our mission, and show the world we can soft land on the Moon with a privately funded spacecraft, it means the technology is already here.”
I like free games. And I’m not just talking about freeware or open-source titles that are either maddeningly complex or of occasionally suspicious quality. Triple-A titles, when discounted to the low price of zero, are great.
There’s an extremely common design trend that may have slipped by right under your nose, slowly taking over seemingly ever new car on the road, one by one. It’s only maybe a couple inches wide at most, and at all four corners of the car. It’s purpose a mystery, until now.
After years of teasing, Samsung on Wednesday took the wraps off its first foldable smartphone: the Galaxy Fold.
The device will
start
at a whopping $1,980 and arrive on April 26. Samsung says both LTE and 5G-capable variants will be available. The electronics giant detailed the Android phone-tablet hybrid at an event in San Francisco, where it is also expected to unveil its new flagship Galaxy S10 phones.
As the company hinted at its developers conference last year, the Galaxy Fold consists of two displays: a 4.58-inch, 1960×840 resolution panel that serves as a more traditional smartphone display, and a foldable 7.3-inch, 2152×1536 resolution panel that behaves more like a tablet.
OLED panels are known in part for their flexibility, which in this case allows users to close the Galaxy Fold like a book. Samsung says it uses a hinge system with “multiple interlocking gears” to create the fold, which the company claims is—and indeed appears to be, at first blush—hidden from view. The smaller display sits on the outside of the device for one-handed use. When the phone is fully unfurled, the larger, foldable display can be used like one of Samsung’s Android tablets. This setup differs from other early foldable phone designs like that of the Royole FlexPai, which uses one big bendable outer display.
The Galaxy Fold doesn’t fold completely in half, however, so there is a small gap in the center of the device when it is closed. When it is folded, the smaller screen is surrounded by enormous bezels. The larger display, meanwhile, looks more like a modern tablet, with a noticeably elongated notch in its top right corner. The outer display looks to use a plastic cover—not the traditional, inflexible Gorilla Glass—which should make it relatively prone to scratches, though the design should give the inner display at least some protection from scuffing. Effectively having two devices in one also makes the phone relatively thick, though Samsung has not provided specific dimensions as of this writing.
Samsung is pitching the Galaxy Fold as a “luxury device,” and the details it shared on stage sound appropriately high-end. The company says the Galaxy Fold runs on a “state of the art 7nm processor”—i.e., Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 855 SoC—and 12GB of RAM. It has a whopping 512GB of UFS 3.0 storage, which should allow it to read data quicker than most other handsets. Powering the multiple displays are a pair of batteries which combine for a 4,300 mAh capacity. Samsung says there are six cameras in the device in total, including three on the back of the device.
Apart from potential durability concerns with a device that’s constantly being opened and closed, one of the big questions here is how well Samsung and Google have optimized Android for the foldable form factor. Google has already said it’s working on this, and on stage Samsung showed off a few software features unique to the Galaxy Fold. The company gave the example of using Google Maps on the smaller display, unfolding the device, and having that map open up in the same spot on the larger display. It also says that the larger display is capable of running three apps simultaneously.
This is a developing story. Samsung’s event is still underway and we will update this post as more information becomes available. For now, you can follow along in real-time with the Ars liveblog.
Over a hundred museums and libraries around the world make coloring books based on their collections for the Color Our Collections program, led by the New York Academy of Medicine. Along with three previous annual collections, there are now 396 PDF coloring books you can print out. Here are some of our favorites.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new system that will either improve the quality and accuracy of robotics or lead to humanity’s inevitable demise at the hands of mechanical overlords. Using RFID tags, the researchers were able to make robots more efficient and accurate when tracking moving objects. The development carries major implications for the future of drones, manufacturing robots and many other applications.
The system, which will be presented in a paper at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, is surprisingly simple and novel. RFID tags are applied to an object and provides a signal that gives a robot a more precise idea of where its target is. The system could potentially replace computer vision, which is often limited by what is within its range of sight and can lose track of objects in cluttered and fast-moving situations. Radio frequencies, on the other hand, can be identified through walls and other obstacles. According to researchers, robots using the system can locate objects within 7.5 milliseconds with an error range of less than one centimeter.
The system, which researchers call TurboTrack, boasts a lot of potential for use cases in manufacturing. A robotic arm used on an assembly line would benefit greatly from increased accuracy. It could help avoid accidents like the one that occurred in an Amazon warehouse where a robot punctured a can of bear mace and sent dozens of people to the hospital. It could also be used to help dictate the flight patterns of drones, including providing accurate deliveries. And because RFID tags are inexpensive, the system would be cheap to deploy in any number of scenarios.