Nintendo has announced a new version of the Switch. The Nintendo Switch Lite is a leaner version of the existing Switch model that sacrifices some features for a cheaper $200 price tag. It will be available starting September 20.
The Switch Lite features a 5.5-inch screen that displays at a resolution of 720p. This shrinks the screen down slightly from the original Switch’s 6.2-inch size. Additionally, the Switch Lite will no longer be able to connect to TVs via USB-C and HDMI. This means that the Switch Lite is being positioned as a purely handheld platform, as opposed to a hybrid like the original.
Internally, the Switch Lite is largely the same as its older counterpart, with 32GB of storage space and a MicroSD card slot to add more capacity. However, it uses a more efficient processor, according to Nintendo. This, in turn, means its battery life is roughly 20%-30% better. The heat vents at the top of the hardware are also smaller, which enables the overall reduction in the hardware’s size.
The headphone port is still there (Bluetooth headset support has not been added, sadly), and the button layout is largely unchanged. However, the Switch Lite no longer has detachable Joy-Con controllers. Furthermore, the Switch Lite will not have rumble or the IR motion sensors. Joy-Con controllers can still be connected to the Switch Lite. Nintendo has swapped out the four small buttons that serve as the directional inputs on the Joy-Cons for a traditional D-pad, however.
One other thing to consider is that Nintendo Labo, which allows users to build peripherals using carboard, won’t work since the Switch Lite is smaller.
The Switch Lite is matte plastic and, according to CNET, which had a chance to go hands-on with it, has a "solid feel reminded me a lot of the recent Nintendo 2DS XL handheld. No detachable Joy-Cons means the sides of the Switch Lite don’t flex or creak as much, either."
When the Switch Lite launches on September 20, it will be available in grey, yellow, and turquoise. A limited edition Pokemon-themed design that has etchings and an off-white case will arrive alongside Pokemon Sword and Shield, though it will not include the game as part of a bundle.
Reports of new Switch models being in production surface in June. At the time, Nintendo said it would not announce the new systems during E3, and they stuck to their guns on that. Reports have indicated that two new Nintendo Switch models are in the works. The first, a less expensive iteration with pared-down features, we now know is the Switch Lite.
However, it has also been reported that an "enhanced" version of the Switch targeted at "avid" gamers is also in production. Nintendo has not indicated this is the case and there are far fewer rumors, reports, and early rumblings relating to this more powerful version that there was for the Switch Lite.
Space tourism company Virgin Galactic has announced that it will go public via a merger with an investment firm. Its new partner, Social Capital Hedosophia (SCH), will invest $800 million in exchange for a 49 percent stake and take Virgin Galactic public later in 2019 — a first for a spaceflight company.
The merger and investments will keep Virgin operating until it can start commercial operations and begin generating its own revenue. So far, around 600 people have put down $250,000 each to take the 90 minute flight, raising around $80 million. The company has already picked up around $1 billion worth of investments, mostly from Virgin’s owner Richard Branson.
The company had a significant setback when a tragic 2014 crash killed one of the test pilots. Late last year, however, Virgin Galactic ran its first successful suborbital tests to the edge of space with its vehicle, SpaceShip Two. A few months later, the company sent its first passenger to the edge of space, some 62 miles up. It recently established a new base in New Mexico, Spacesport America, and moved all of its operations there.
This downtime might be fairly long. [But] once we get out of that, we should be able to get through the remainder of the test program pretty quickly and get into commercial service. The next time it flies, we expect to have the full commercial cabin installed.
Branson’s firm has several rivals for space tourism, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and SpaceX. However, Elon Musk is focusing the latter company on commercial launches and, eventually, intergalactic travel. Blue Origin, meanwhile, plans to do suborbital flights with a conventional rocket. Unlike Virgin Galactic, however, it has yet to do any manned flights.
Virgin Galactic was courting a $1 billion investment from Saudi Arabia, but Branson reportedly backed off after Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi embassy. The $800 million investment from SCH reportedly includes $100 million from the creator of the fund, Chamath Palihapitiya.
The company has taken a break in order to retrofit SpaceShip Two, but testing is expected to resume later this year. "This downtime might be fairly long," said chief pilot Dave MacKay. "Once we get out of that, we should be able to get through the remainder of the test program pretty quickly and get into commercial service. The next time it flies, we expect to have the full commercial cabin installed."
A depiction of one of the trio of satellites that will form the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.
The first detection of gravitational waves came via LIGO, an instrument that has to strain to overcome the constant background noise of vibrations and jolts that occur on Earth. Its success has helped push for the pursuit of a project that would rise above all that noise. LISA—the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna—would detect gravitational waves using the same technique as LIGO but place its hardware in space, free of any ground-based vibrations. Preliminary tests of prototype hardware have found that the idea should work.
LISA isn’t expected to be put in place until the 2030s, but that hasn’t stopped astronomers and physicists from contemplating the things that it might possibly detect. Two of these astronomers, Nicola Tamanini and Camilla Danielski, are now suggesting that LISA could be used to identify a very strange class of planets: heavy planets orbiting binary pairs of white dwarf stars. But because of its exquisite sensitivity, LISA could potentially spot them orbiting outside our own galaxy.
How would this work?
Gravitational waves are produced when any two objects with mass interact but are too tiny to be detected unless the objects in question are both massive and near to each other. The LIGO detector is sensitive enough to pick up things like neutron stars and black holes, all of which are both incredibly dense and have masses on the order of the Sun’s and larger. But—due to its enhanced sensitivity and the frequencies of gravitational waves that it will be sensitive to—LISA will be able to pick up objects that are dense but not as massive.
A prime candidate here is a white dwarf star, which is the remains of a sun-like star after it has burned out most of its hydrogen and helium, producing a core that’s primarily carbon and oxygen. Without the energy provided by fusion, gravity will crush these objects down to a dense ball of atoms, but they lack sufficient mass to crush the atoms themselves. If there are no other sources of mass, they simply stay as they are and gradually glow as they lose the heat they started with.
On its own, a white dwarf will not produce gravitational waves. But many Sun-like stars exist in binary systems, and some of them are what are termed “close binaries.” These stars are close enough that, as they expand late in their lives, the two members of the binary will share a single envelope. The friction of orbiting through this can draw their cores even closer together. When this stage is over, the two resulting white dwarfs can be orbiting closely enough to produce gravitational waves.
LIGO is unable to detect these waves. LISA, on the other hand, would.
Stars
But detecting the binary system doesn’t mean detecting an orbiting planet. While a massive planet orbiting nearby wouldn’t be directly detectable via the gravitational waves it creates, it would alter the orbits of the two white dwarfs. And those changes would be detectable, as they would alter the frequency of the gravitational waves produced. The method is a bit like how we currently detect planets based on the Doppler shifts they create in a star’s light as they drag it back and forth during their orbit.
The authors themselves specifically make that comparison. But it’s not exact, as the technique will only work for planets far more massive than Earth and only if they’re orbiting relatively near the binary white dwarfs. But in exchange, there are quite a few benefits. Tamanini and Danielski write that LISA “has the advantages that it can observe everywhere in the galaxy, is not affected by the activity of the stars, and does not need any observational pointing.” In fact, they calculate that LISA may even be sensitive to binaries in the vicinity of the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, meaning it will certainly be able to pick up anything in the dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.
What can we learn?
Pairs of dead stars may sound extremely rare, and massive planets orbiting them is equally rare. But scientists estimate that 95 percent of the stars present in the Milky Way will end their lives as white dwarfs, which increases the odds of finding systems to observe considerably. Calculations indicate that LISA should be able to detect approximately 25,000 of these binary systems.
And finding anything would be informative. Right now, we are getting a clear picture of planet formation around lone stars, but binary stars are common. We have some indication that planets can form when the stars orbit at a distance, but we have a lot to learn about if or how they form around close binaries. It’s possible that a single planet-forming disk forms around both stars, but we have little evidence to judge that. In addition, as Sun-like stars expand late in their lives, they eject huge quantities of dust and gas, which may trigger a late round of planet formation.
In addition to telling us about planet formation near binary stars, LISA’s vast reach may make it possible to draw inferences about planet formation outside of the Milky Way. If we find similar frequencies of large planets orbiting white dwarfs in the Milky Way and the dwarf galaxies that orbit it, then that would support the idea that the mechanisms of planet formation are universal.
What LISA won’t be able to tell us is much about the planet itself. Because we don’t know what angle the planet orbits at relative to the line of sight with Earth, we can’t tell whether it’s a relatively light planet orbiting near the plane or if it’s a massive planet orbiting at a large angle. That’s because both should create similar alterations in the binary system. To really determine what’s going on, we’d need to combine the gravitational wave data with visual observations using traditional telescopes, which requires that the stars be relatively nearby.
It’s over a decade until LISA gets put into space, and Tamanini and Danielski note that the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, currently in operation, is expected to tell us about planets around close binary-star systems long before then. Still, the scientific case for LISA isn’t based on exoplanet detection. But when it gets to orbit, this sort of preliminary work can ensure that we have the software in place to get this information out of its data—along with all the data that originally justified pursuing the mission.
Almost half of American families don’t make enough money to regularly cover basic expenses like rent and food. A few years ago Leanne Brown made headlines with her book “Good & Cheap” which helps you plan recipes for the week working with a budget of $5 a day, the average food stamp allotment for someone in the United States.
Even if your food budget is a little higher, the book offers some great suggestions for how to prepare everything from breakfast to dessert economically.
Budget Meal Planner is a site that does something similar, offering meal plans that would allow you to eat for the entire day for a slightly higher budget: $5.
The site breaks down its meal plans into different themes and offers meal planning for an entire week’s worth of meals based around that theme. The idea here is you’ll buy one set of ingredients, but use them in a few different ways. Meals are also designed around pre-making those meals and having the same thing a few times.
For instance, under the “Thai” meal week you’ll have Thai Basil Chicken for dinner for three days, Thai Chicken Cabbage Wraps two days and Thai Yellow Chicken Curry.
At the end of the week of meal plans is a grocery list you can print off and take with you to the store to snag everything you need. Much like Good & Cheap, it appears as though some of that pricing is accounting for you using staples that you might already have in your kitchen. Thai week requires fish, soy, and oyster sauces, amongst other things. That said, if it’s a type of cuisine you enjoy, then you may have those things on hand already.
For people who need it, the site can be a great resource for coming up with ideas on things to cook. For those with a larger budget, it can also offer a little inspiration on how you can potentially save a few bucks on the meal front that can be used elsewhere in your life instead.
And if you’re looking for more inspiration, Good & Cheap’s author Leanne Brown also offers a few low-cost recipes on her site that are worth a look.
Many airliners can land automatically, but they don’t really land autonomously — the airport is guiding them in with a radio signal (the Instrument Landing System). And when many smaller airports don’t have this feature, it’s not even an option. Researchers at Technische Universität München might just make true autonomous landing a practical reality, though. They’ve successfully tested a system that uses a combination of computer vision and GPS to have the aircraft land itself.
The technology uses GPS to navigate, but allies that with both visible light and infrared cameras to spot the runway and obtain an accurate sense of its position even when fog or rain hurts visibility. From there, the aircraft can calculate a glide path and otherwise touch down all on its own.
The project is still young, but it’s promising. A test landing in late May went as well as you could hope. The aircraft recognized the runway from a long distance and landed on the centerline without the pilot once taking control. If it’s refined enough, the system could make hands-free landings feasible at virtually any airfield, not to mention give pilots a backup. This also lays some groundwork for end-to-end autonomous flight that might only require supervision for complete trips.
The first independent evaluation of the Metropolitan police’s use of face recognition systems warned it is “highly possible” it would be ruled unlawful if challenged in court.
The news: London’s police force has conducted 10 trials of face recognition technology since 2016, using Japanese company NEC’s Neoface system. It commissioned academics from the University of Essex to independently assess the scheme, and they concluded that the system is 81% inaccurate (in other words, the vast majority of people it flags up to the police are not on a wanted list.) They found that, of 42 matches, only eight were confirmed to be correct, Sky News reports.
Police pushback: The Met police insists its technology only makes an error in one in 1,000 instances, but it hasn’t shared its methodology for arriving at that statistic.
Rising fears: As face recognition technology becomes more ubiquitous, there’s growing concern about the gender and racial bias embedded into many systems. With that (and other concerns) in mind, San Francisco banned its use by public agencies last month. That doesn’t do anything to stop its use proliferating in the private sector, but at least it might mean it can’t be wielded by authorities with the power to arrest you.
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The way the world gets its electricity is undergoing a rapid transition, driven by both the increased urgency of decarbonizing energy systems and the plummeting costs of wind and solar technology. In the past decade electricity generated by renewables in the U.S. has doubled, primarily from wind and solar installations, according to the Energy Information Administration. In January 2019 the EIA forecast that wind, solar and other nonhydroelectric renewables would be the fastest-growing slice of the electricity portfolio for the next two years. But the intermittent nature of those sources means that electric utilities need a way to keep energy in their back pocket for when the sun is not shining and the winds are calm. That need is increasing interest in energy-storage technology—in particular, lithium-ion batteries, which are finally poised to be more than just a bit player in the grid.
For decades pumped-storage hydropower, a simple process that features reservoirs at different elevations, has been the dominant large-scale energy-storage method in the U.S. To store energy, water is pumped into the higher reservoir; when that energy is needed, the water is released into the lower reservoir, flowing through a turbine along the way. Pumped-storage hydropower currently accounts for 95 percent of U.S. utility-scale energy storage, according to the Department of Energy. But as efficiency and reliability have improved, and manufacturing costs have tumbled, lithium-ion batteries have surged. They account for more than 80 percent of the U.S.’s utility-scale battery-storage power capacity, which jumped from just a few megawatts a decade ago to 866 megawatts by February 2019, the EIA says. A March 2019 analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that the cost of electricity from such batteries has dropped by 76 percent since 2012, making them close to competitive with the plants, typically powered by natural gas, that are switched on during times of high electricity demand. To date, whereas batteries have largely been used to make brief, quick adjustments to maintain power levels, utilities in several states, including Florida and California, are adding lithium-ion batteries that will be able to last for two to four hours. Energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that the market for energy storage will double from 2018 to 2019 and triple from 2019 to 2020.
Lithium-ion batteries will likely be the dominant technology for the next five to 10 years, according to experts, and continuing improvements will result in batteries that can store four to eight hours of energy—long enough, for example, to shift solar-generated power to the evening peak in demand.
But getting to the point where renewables and energy storage can handle the baseline load of electricity generation will take energy storage at longer timescales, which will mean moving beyond lithium-ion batteries. Potential candidates range from other high-tech options, such as flow batteries, which pump liquid electrolytes, and hydrogen fuel cells to simpler concepts, such as pumped-storage hydropower and what is called gravity storage. Pumped-storage hydropower is cheap once it is installed, but it is expensive to build and can be used only in certain terrain. Similarly simple is the concept of gravity storage, which purports to use spare electricity to raise a heavy block that can later be lowered to drive a turbine to generate electricity. Although a few companies are working on demonstrations and have attracted investments, the idea has yet to take off. Other options are still under development to make them sufficiently reliable, efficient and cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries. There were only three large-scale flow-battery storage systems deployed in the U.S. by the end of 2017, according to the EIA, and utility-scale hydrogen systems remain in demonstration stages. The U.S. government is funding some work in this arena, particularly through the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), but much of the investment in those technologies—and in energy storage in general—is happening in China and South Korea, which have also ramped up storage research.
It is uncertain whether and how much the costs of energy storage will continue to decline. Yet the accumulating pledges by governments—including at the state and local level in the U.S.—to achieve carbon-free electricity production will provide a continued push to bring more and more storage online.
