A new space station experiment is testing whether would-be space miners can enlist some very small potential accomplices to do their grunt work.
The experiment, called BioRock, hitched a ride to the International Space Station on board the SpaceX Dragon capsule that arrived on July 27. It’s designed to measure a common characteristic of microbes here on Earth — they can leech minerals out of rocks. With BioRock, scientists are measuring how well the bacteria can perform that feat without gravity. The project includes 18 different miniature reactors, each containing a sample of a type of rock called basalt and a strain of bacteria.
“We hope to gain insights into how microbes grow in space and how we might use them in human exploration and settlement of space, from mining to turning rocks into soils on the moon and Mars,” principal investigator Charles Cockell, professor at the UK Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, said in a NASA statement.
For this initial experiment, the team is testing three different types of bacteria, including one that was found in the arid crust of the Colorado Plateau and one that can tolerate exposure to heavy metals. Each microbe can set to work attaching to the rock sample and trying to draw minerals out of it so that scientists can understand how effective these bacteria can be without gravity.
“The BioRock experiment starts putting the pieces of the puzzle together,” Cockell added. “Understanding how microbes interact, grow and extract elements from a rock surface in microgravity and simulated Mars gravity will tell us, for the first time, if low gravity affects the ability of microorganisms to attach to rock surfaces and perform biomining. In other words, whether extraterrestrial mining is possible.”
BioRock reactors sent to the International Space Station.
(Image credit: Rosa Santomartino, UK Centre for Astrobiology/University of Edinburgh)
The scientists behind the experiment will measure how much iron, calcium, magnesium, and more than a dozen other elements the bacteria can pull out of the rock samples during their time in space. Later experiments could test other microbes and other materials to better understand the potential opportunities.
“Microbes are everywhere — in our food, our homes, and our industrial processes — and they do hugely important things in our everyday life,” Cockell said. “As we move into space, we can harness microbes to make our lives easier and improve the success of space settlements. BioRock is about forming a new space-faring alliance with the microbial world — using microbes to advance a permanent human presence in space.”
It might not look like much, but this wobbly self-driving bicycle is a symbol of Chinese growing expertise in advanced chip design.
Look, no hands: The bike not only balances itself, it steers itself around obstacles, and even responds to simple voice commands. But it’s the brains behind the bike that matter. It uses a new kind of computer chip, called Tianjic, that was developed by Luping Shi and colleagues at Tsinghua University, a top academic institution in Beijing.
Two in one: The Tianjic chip comprises of a hybrid design that seeks to bring together two different architectural approaches to computing: a conventional, von-Neuman design and a neurologically-inspired one. The two architectures are used in cooperation to run artificial neural networks for obstacle detection, motor and balance control, and voice recognition, as well as conventional software.
AI’s future? In a paper outlining the chip and the bicycle, published in the journal Nature today, the researchers suggest that such a hybrid architecture could be crucial for the future of artificial intelligence, perhaps even providing a route towards more general forms of AI. That’s a bit bold, given how far we are from AGI but Tianjic does show the growing value of new chip designs optimized for running AI algorithms.
Made in China: The chip also hints at the progress China is making in developing its own chip design capabilities. As outlined in this feature article, China has long struggled to build its own chip industry, a major weakness in its technological capabilities that have been exploited in the ongoing trade war. But while manufacturing the most advanced computer chips remains out of reach, Chinese researchers are showing they can make specialized AI chips as well as anyone.
via Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories https://ift.tt/1XdUwhl
If you’re a Capital One customer, odds are good that you’re probably wrapped up in the company’s recent data breach—one that affected 106 million people (100 million in the U.S. and six million in Canada.) Here’s our question: Has Capital One actually told you if you’re affected?
That might sound like a silly request, but we want to know if you’ve actually heard anything from Capital One or not. Odds are good you learned about the breach via the news, not Capital One itself. And while the company promised in the fine print of its press release that it would start reaching out to affected customers, it doesn’t appear to have actually started doing that:
To Capital One’s (small) credit, the company now has a splash-page announcement when you log into its banking service, alerting you that you might want to read up on the latest Capital One news.
That link takes you to a prettier version of Capital One’s terrible press release, which itself links to a somewhat-useful FAQ about the incident. Neither page tells you if you’re specifically affected, nor does it give you a way to look up whether you were or not.
Capital One also posted a tweet about the breach, as you saw earlier. However, that’s a far cry from actually notifying individuals about whether they should be slightly concerned or very concerned about their leaked data. That includes:
The approximately 140,000 credit card customers whose social security numbers were leaked
The approximately 80,000 credit card customers whose banking account numbers were leaked
The who-knows-how-many customers facing less-severe, but still problematic data leaks, including “names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.”
We’re still curious. Has Capital One reached out to you at all? Let us know in the comments.
Late last week, president Joko Widodo of Indonesia told the AP that he’s fast-tracking a decade-in-the-making plan for a giant sea wall around Jakarta, a city that’s sinking as much as 8 inches a year in places—and as seas rise, no less. Models predict that by 2050, a third of the city could be submerged. It’s an urban existential crisis the likes of which the modern world has never seen.
But deploying a sea wall is a massive political and engineering problem in any country, to say nothing of Indonesia’s struggles with a literal underlying crisis: Jakarta’s people are pumping too much groundwater, and consequently the land is collapsing underneath them. If Jakarta can’t find a way to hydrate its people some other way, it’ll keep sinking, pulling that new sea wall down with it. It’s a glimpse of a dark future for much of human civilization, which stubbornly clings to coasts around the world.
Think of Jakarta as sitting on top of giant water bottles, aka aquifers. Forty percent of its 10 million residents get their water from pumping, so they’ve been draining those bottles, which consequently collapse, leading to land subsidence. This, by the way, is not unique to Jakarta: California’s Central Valley has sunk by as much as 30 feet for the same reason. But because other nations have dealt with the problem, Jakarta knows how to fix it.
Matt Simon covers cannabis, robots, and climate science for WIRED.
“The big solution is water management, to stop groundwater pumping,” says Heri Andreas, who studies subsidence at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia. “But the problem in Jakarta is we’re still struggling to find a replacement. And we’re a developing country, so it makes it more complicated.”
The city has 13 rivers, for instance, but they’re all polluted. Desalination might help provide the city with fresh water, but it’s enormously expensive to run such plants. And Jakarta doesn’t do water recycling, so it could actually learn a thing or two from Singapore or even Los Angeles, of all places. “Of course if we don’t stop the subsidence, the sea wall will go down too,” says Andreas.
Complicating matters further, Jakarta is wrestling with serious inequality, with the least fortunate being shoved off to the most dangerous areas along the coast. Even worse, almost no one in Indonesia has insurance, a factor of both economics and cultural considerations.
So does the Indonesian government eventually have to force those people to leave if the wall doesn’t work? And what’s worse, the inequality that keeps them in danger, or the devastation of uprooting them? “The equity impacts can cut both ways, in terms of not being able to move and also being told to move,” says Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara.
This idea of retreat is not a popular one. We’re humans, after all, masters of the built environment. We must be able to engineer ourselves out of this pickle, and to say otherwise diminishes our dominance. But “managed retreat”—an engineered withdrawal from coastal areas, as San Francisco is doing to save very expensive wastewater infrastructure—might be a tough sell. “I feel like even in my own work, it’s sort of a dirty word,” says Carter Smith, who studies coastal adaptations at Duke. “I would say on a global scale, we’re certainly not talking about it enough, even in the scientific community.”
But let’s say you build your sea wall. If the rate of sea level rise accelerates because of runaway glacial melting, which may well happen, your new wall may not be tall enough. Climate change is a flurry of terrifying feedback loops, after all. In fact, one feedback loop is burning this very moment: an increasingly dry arctic means an unprecedented number of fires are blazing there, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere, which further heats the planet and melts more ice.
The future is looking very expensive indeed for Jakarta. To save itself, the city will first and foremost have to figure out how to find more sources of water to stop subsidence. But it will also have to spend a massive amount of money on the giant sea wall—around $42 billion, it reckons. That’s the choice coastal cities are increasingly facing, to spend money to adapt now or suffer worse down the road. It’ll almost certainly be worth it in the long run: for every dollar spent on adaptation, you save between $4 and $10 in disaster recovery efforts.
“This is an expensive undertaking, but in some ways it’s not any different from something like a high-speed rail discussion,” says Lester. “We need to make some changes in our built environment that are hugely expensive.”
No two places on Earth will adapt the same way—there are all kinds of economic and political and social considerations that make each coastal crisis unique. But what our entire civilization shares is an increasingly dire threat that no amount of engineering alone can fix.
With four settlement agreements, the state of California will get nearly $70 million from pharmaceutical companies that allegedly cut illegal deals to keep affordable generic drugs off the market, shielding pricey brand-name products from competition.
The settlements also include injunctions that temporarily prevent the drug makers from entering into such “pay-for-delay.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra argued that the deals violate antitrust laws and can lead consumers to pay as much as 90% more for prescription drugs.
“These dark, illegal, collusive agreements that drug companies devise not only choke off price competition but burden our families and patients—they force every Californian to shoulder higher prices for lifesaving medication. It’s nothing less than playing with people’s lives,” Becerra said in a statement.
The three companies involved—Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Endo Pharmaceuticals, and Teikoku Pharma—deny that the deals are illegal and that they harmed consumers.
The four settlements involve two drugs: Provigil (a treatment for narcolepsy and other sleep disorders) and Lidoderm (a prescription patch for shingles).
In the case of Provigil, Becerra alleged that Teva set up four pay-for-delay deals with competitors to keep a monopoly on the sale of the drug from 2006 to 2012. Teva settled, agreeing to a 10-year injunction and a $69 million pay-out. From that payment, $25,250,000 will be put into a fund to reimburse California residents who bought the drug in that time frame.
As for Lidoderm, Becerra argued that all three companies (Teva, Endo, and Teikoku) worked together to delay the release of a generic from the market. Endo and Teikoku, partners in production of Lidoderm, allegedly cut a multimillion-dollar deal with a company acquired by Teva to delay the release of a generic. Endo settled with California for $760,000 and agreed to an eight-year injunction. Teikoku agreed to a 20-year injunction.
Becerra’s office noted that the settlements include the largest payout to a state regarding a “pay-for-delay” deals. They also mark the first time a state has secured an injunction on the deals. The companies had already settled with the FTC over similar allegations related to both drugs.
On Tuesday afternoon, NASA announced 19 new partnerships with 10 U.S. companies to help bring more cutting edge technologies closer to production use in spaceflight. There were a lot of useful engineering ideas here, such as precision landing systems and robotic plant farms, but perhaps the most intriguing one involved the rocket company SpaceX and two of NASA’s field centers—the Glenn Research Center in Ohio and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
“SpaceX will work with Glenn and Marshall to advance technology needed to transfer propellant in orbit, an important step in the development of the company’s Starship space vehicle,” the NASA news release states. This is a significant announcement for reasons both technical and political.
For its part, SpaceX welcomed the opportunity to help advance NASA’s Artemis Program, which NASA hopes will send humans to the Moon by 2024 (and, later on, to Mars). “We believe SpaceX’s fleet of advanced rockets and spacecraft, including Falcon Heavy and Starship, are integral to accelerating NASA’s lunar and Mars plans,” a company spokesperson told Ars.
Technical
One of SpaceX’s principal engineers behind the Starship project, Paul Wooster, has identified orbital refueling as one most difficult technology challenges the company will have to overcome in order to realize its Mars ambitions.
Under some scenarios by which the company aims to send humans to Mars, a Super Heavy rocket would launch a Mars-bound Starship to low-Earth orbit. At that point, the spacecraft would need to top its fuel tanks back up in order to get its payload all the way to the red planet. It’s estimated that five Starship launches’ worth of fuel (as payload) would be required to refuel a single Mars-bound Starship in low-Earth orbit, and this would involve the transfer of hundreds of tons of methane and liquid oxygen.
Such refueling technology would also be useful for others besides NASA. “I’ve got a stack of studies that go from the floor to the ceiling that list the critical technologies needed for humans to become long-term explorers in deep space, and in-space refueling is always on the list,” said Bobby Braun, a former chief technologist at NASA who is now Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It’s the key for sustainability.”
The new partnership recognizes SpaceX’s maturity as a leading space transportation company, Braun said. And Glenn and Marshall are the right centers for SpaceX to partner with, even if there simultaneously exists a strong rivalry between SpaceX’s low-cost rockets and Marshall’s lead development of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket.
In-space refueling of Starship is a significant challenge for SpaceX.
SpaceX
How does one safely transfer cryo-propellants in space?
SpaceX
SpaceX has to develop the technology to produce propellant on the surface of Mars, and refuel rockets there.
SpaceX
And then launch them back to Earth, of course.
SpaceX
NASA has previously done considerable work studying the handling, transfer of, and storage of rocket fuels such as liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and methane in space—they are difficult to work with, and susceptible to boil off in the space environment (hydrogen atoms can even migrate directly through metal fuel tanks). Under the new Space Act Agreement, NASA’s Space Technology program will fund the time the agency’s people spend working on these problems, and any agency test facilities used. In effect, teams from the company and agency will work together to solve the problem, each paying for its own part of the effort.
“The civil servants at Marshall and at Glenn are very talented in this area,” Braun said. “The people at SpaceX clearly know their system, both the capabilities and the needs of the Starship architecture. The fact that they’re all going to get together in the same room, and work on the same problem, that’s tremendous.”
Political
Braun served as chief technologist in 2010, back when the Obama administration created NASA’s Space Technology program to foster just this kind of innovation in America’s private space industry. It was a contentious time in space policy, as the White House was pushing for more funding for new space companies—and new space ideas such as fuel-storage depots—while Congress wanted to keep NASA in the rocket-building business.
Eventually, Congress got the upper hand, putting NASA on track to build the large SLS rocket at a development cost of more than $2 billion a year. The rocket program mostly benefited the Alabama space center, and was championed by Alabama state senator Richard Shelby. The potential of in-space fuel storage and transfer threatened the SLS rocket because it would allow NASA to do some exploration missions with smaller and cheaper rockets. As one source explained at the time, “Senator Shelby called NASA and said if he hears one more word about propellant depots he’s going to cancel the Space Technology program.”
The line from other NASA officials was that as a technology, propellant depots were not ready for prime time. In 2011, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin and the current executive secretary of the National Space Council Scott Pace—both SLS advocates—wrote a withering criticism of the technology for Space News.
“Fuel depots as an element of a near-term space architecture are an example of magical thinking at its best, a wasteful distraction supported by the kinds of poorly vetted assumptions that can cause a concept to appear deceptively attractive,” Griffin and Pace wrote. Ironically, their chosen heavy lift rocket for use in NASA’s “near-term” architecture, the SLS rocket, remains badly behind schedule and over budget. It is unlikely to fly meaningful exploration missions for at least three or four more years and is holding up the Trump administration’s Artemis plan.
Some engineers at NASA still wanted to solve the fuel storage and transfer issue in 2011, and put together a $400 million depot development plan. This would have included an in-space demonstration of the technology. They argued that both orbital refueling and large rockets were vital for a sustainable exploration plan. However, Congress never adequately funded the effort, and it fizzled into a series of lesser ground tests.
A consultant to NASA at the time, Charles Miller, was among those performing studies to show that the use of propellant depots could significantly lower exploration costs for NASA. On Tuesday, he praised the Trump administration and NASA chief Jim Bridenstine for putting the Space Technology program to good use.
“Administrator Bridenstine is clearly executing on President’s Trump’s guidance to increase commercial public-private-partnerships at NASA,” Miller, now chief executive of UbiquitiLink, told Ars. “The game-changing technology that NASA has discovered is capitalism. This program proves NASA leadership has figured out the future is reusability mixed with commercial public-private-partnerships.”
AT&T is eliminating the DirecTV Now brand name it uses for its struggling Internet-based TV service. DirecTV Now will become “AT&T TV Now” later this summer, AT&T announced today. DirecTV Now (the future “AT&T TV Now”) offers a bundle of linear TV channels, similar to traditional cable or satellite services, and AT&T said its core offering won’t be changed.
AT&T’s 2015 purchase of DirecTV, the nation’s largest satellite TV network, doesn’t seem to be paying off as AT&T hoped. AT&T launched DirecTV Now—a stripped-down, online-only version of DirecTV—in 2016, and it was immediately plagued by multiple outages, unexpected blackouts of live local sports games, and missing channels.
While the technical problems got sorted out, AT&T’s subscriber gains were short-lived. As we wrote last week, AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019 after announcing a series of price increases.
The 946,000-subscriber loss consisted of a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in AT&T’s DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services, as well as 168,000 lost subscribers to DirecTV Now. The losses are much bigger when you look at the past year instead of just the past three months. Including all three services, AT&T’s total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2018 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019. DirecTV Now subscribers dropped from 1.8 million to 1.3 million in the past year.
DirecTV satellite is still called DirecTV
While the streaming service is dropping the DirecTV brand, the satellite TV service will keep the DirecTV name, at least for the time being.
“We continue investing to enhance our satellite experience, and that brand remains unchanged today,” AT&T said in a statement to Ars.
AT&T said the actual DirecTV Now service will remain the same despite the name change. “Our DirecTV Now subscribers will simply need to re-accept the terms of service and their streaming will continue as usual without interruption,” AT&T said.
The name change comes as AT&T plans multiple new services to prop up its TV business, and it could get confusing for customers. The company will offer AT&T TV Now and AT&T TV—two separate services with near-identical names—from a single app called AT&T TV.
“In select markets this summer, we will pilot an all-new connected TV experience with no satellite needed—AT&T TV,” today’s announcement said. AT&T continued:
Both the AT&T TV and AT&T TV Now experiences will be accessed through the same AT&T TV app either on mobile or the big screen. Customer login credentials will determine what content appears. In the coming weeks, the AT&T TV app will be available for download across various app stores, and current DirecTV Now customers will see this update automatically on their devices. We’ll share more details on this rollout when it begins.
How AT&T TV will be different from AT&T TV Now isn’t totally clear. AT&T TV’s webpage says it will include “access to live TV, thousands of titles on demand, 500 hours of Cloud DVR, and access to other apps like Netflix and Pandora.” But the page doesn’t say how much it will cost.
Services like Netflix and Pandora would still require separate subscriptions, but AT&T will provide a set-top box that can access the apps. “AT&T TV comes with our 4K-enabled next-gen device and voice remote with the Google Assistant built-in,” the webpage also says.
AT&T TV sounds awfully similar to DirecTV Now (the future “AT&T TV Now”), even though they’re going to be separate services. Like the future AT&T TV, the current DirecTV Now has live TV, on-demand programming, and a cloud-based DVR. But DirecTV Now allows just 20 hours of cloud DVR recordings, compared to the 500 hours planned for AT&T TV. We assume there will be other differences in channel offerings and prices, but AT&T hasn’t revealed specifics yet.
In March of this year, AT&T raised the price of DirecTV Now for existing subscribers and reduced the number of channels new customers receive. The current version of DirecTV Now offers two plans that cost $50 or $70 a month, with extra charges for premium networks.
AT&T is facing a class-action complaint accusing it of lying to investors in order to hide DirecTV Now’s failure. AT&T told investors that DirecTV Now was succeeding even as its subscriber base fell due to price increases and the discontinuance of promotional discounts, the lawsuit alleges.
AT&T TV, HBO Go, HBO Max, U-verse, DirecTV etc.
AT&T also offers WatchTV, a $15 streaming plan with 35 channels, and multiple HBO-branded services thanks to AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner Inc. The other big release planned by AT&T is HBO Max, which is coming in spring 2020 and will combine the HBO library with other Time Warner content.
Including today’s services and future launches, Wall Street Journal reporter Drew FitzGerald pointed out on Twitter that AT&T will be offering TV shows through HBO Go, HBO Max, HBO Now, AT&T TV Now, AT&T TV, AT&T WatchTV, AT&T U-verse, and DirecTV. We already mentioned most of these services in this article. The others are HBO Go, an online service for people who buy HBO through their cable or satellite TV provider, and HBO Now, which is similar but purchased directly from HBO for $15 a month.
