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Last Updated: 2022-04-29 12:00:01 PM
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 13:57:34 +0000
Enlarge / US Senator Joe Manchin likes the coal industry, doesn't like electric vehicles. (credit: J. Scott Applewhite-Pool/Getty Images)
Senator Joe Manchin called federal tax credits for electric vehicles "ludicrous" in a Senate hearing on Thursday. The West Virginia politician, who continues to make millions from the coal industry, has been a regular critic of subsidies for EVs, which have played a key role in the Democratic Party's plan to decarbonize the transport sector.
Since 2009, the US has used federal tax credits as a way to offset the higher price of EVs thanks to their battery packs.
Currently, the credit is for any plug-in vehicle (both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs) with at least 5 kWh of battery capacity and ranges from $2,917 to $7,500, depending on the exact kWh total. But it's a credit, not a rebate, so to receive the full $7,500, an EV buyer has to have at least $7,500 in tax liability that year. The tax credit also sunsets once a car manufacturer has sold 200,000 plug-in vehicles, although, so far, only Tesla and General Motors have crossed that threshold.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 13:28:33 +0000
Enlarge / The number of days between the first 50 Falcon 9 launches, the second 50, and the last 50. (credit: Eric Berger)
SpaceX launched its first Falcon 9 rocket on June 4, 2010, nearly a dozen years ago. During those first years, the company grappled with a whole host of challenges, from things as seemingly simple as trying to transport the rocket over land instead of by sea or air to more demanding tasks such as producing enough Merlin engines.
The company's first 50 flights took nearly eight years to complete, and in that time SpaceX engineers and technicians learned much about building large rockets, testing and transporting them, and then flying them. From 2010 to early 2018 SpaceX would make three major "block" upgrades to the rocket, as well as debuting the Falcon Heavy variant of the booster.
During this learning period of activity, SpaceX managed to launch a Falcon 9 rocket only every 56.6 days. As it started to experiment with reusing the first stage, of its first 50 launches, seven of those were on reused rockets. Also during this learning period, SpaceX had one launch failure, CRS-7 in 2015, and one failure during pre-launch activities, the Amos-6 accident in 2016.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:00:02 +0000
Enlarge / The Space Launch System rocket rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building this week. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)
Welcome to Edition 4.41 of the Rocket Report! For your situational awareness, Rocket Lab's "There and Back Again" mission is now scheduled for 22:35 UTC on Friday from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. The company is seeking optimal weather for the launch and subsequent recovery of the first stage by helicopter. Can't wait to see it.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Angara 1.2 rocket finally ready for flight. Russian space journalist Anatoly Zak reports that the Angara 1.2 vehicle—a single-core version of the Angara booster—is finally ready for its debut flight. It may launch as early as Friday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia, carrying the small MKA-R spacecraft. The vehicle, Zak notes, has been under development for 25 years in various guises.
Publish Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:00:01 +0000
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This year's PAX East was a bit of a strange experience. The last time we attended the show was just weeks before the entire country began shutting down due to the pandemic. After a canceled show in 2021, the Boston Convention Center was once again filled with gaming fans this year, though now all of them were wearing masks (with strict enforcement).
Many of the big-name publishers that were at previous PAX shows were missing this year, whether because of pandemic risks or shrinking promotional travel budgets. That left the usual mix of indie developers and publishers hanging on to their floor space—though not really expanding to fill in the gaps.
Even though the total selection of games on offer seemed smaller, there were plenty of standout titles. Here are the nine games we've been thinking about ever since we left Boston.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 21:57:27 +0000
Enlarge / Adding the M1 chip to the iPad Air didn't move the needle much for the iPad lineup's revenue this quarter. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Apple reported its earnings for Q2 2022 to investors on Thursday. Once again, the company beat analyst expectations and posted massive revenues and profits across most of its product lines. The only category that saw a drop in year-over-year revenue was the iPad.
Q2 2022 largely included the months of January, February, and March 2022. For that period, Apple reported $97.3 billion in revenue, up 9 percent year over year, with a profit of $25 billion.
Apple rolls up each product into one of five categories to report revenue to investors. The services category includes iCloud, the App Store, Apple Card, and Apple Music. The Other Products category includes both the Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as a smorgasbord of others that don't neatly fit with the other devices. The iPhone, Mac, and iPad categories are self-explanatory.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 21:28:22 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Barcroft)
Health officials in Wisconsin are investigating what could be the first child death in the US—and the second worldwide—linked to a growing international outbreak of unexplained liver inflammation, aka hepatitis, in children.
In a health alert Wednesday, Wisconsin health officials said they are investigating four cases of unexplained hepatitis in children that match the profile of the outbreak cases. Two of the cases were severe, with one leading to a liver transplant and the other being fatal.
Wisconsin is at least the fifth US state to report cases of mysterious and severe hepatitis in children. Earlier this month, Alabama health officials initially reported nine cases, which occurred between October 2021 and February 2022. Five of the cases occurred last November in the same large children's hospital in the state, and three of those cases involved acute liver failure.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 20:51:59 +0000
Enlarge / In the case of the samoyed, selection for physical characteristics produced a dog that sure looks happy. (credit: Zhao Hui)
Many dog breeds are purely about appearance—think poodles and the Pekingese. But plenty of other breeds, like racing greyhounds, are devoted to specific tasks. For many of these tasks, physical appearance isn't enough; behavior also matters, like herding by sheepdog breeds or fetching by various retrievers.
It's not surprising that many people ascribe these behaviors—and a wide variety of other, less useful ones—to their dog's breed and its underlying genetics. Now, a large team of US-based researchers has looked into whether this belief is accurate. And, with a few exceptions, they find that it's not. With a huge panel of volunteer dog owners, they show that the genetics of dog behavior is built from lots of small, weak influences, and every breed seems to have some members that just don't behave as we expect.
Dogs, meet Darwin
The work is based on a citizen science project called Darwin's Ark. Participants were asked to give details about their dog, including whether it belonged to an established breed (either certified or inferred). They were also asked to fill out short surveys that collectively asked about 117 different behaviors. Overall, they obtained data on some 18,000 dogs, about half of them purebreds.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 20:08:54 +0000
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A cryptocurrency platform was recently on the receiving end of one of the biggest distributed denial-of-service attacks ever after threat actors bombarded it with 15.3 million requests, content delivery network Cloudflare said.
DDoS attacks can be measured in several ways, including by the volume of data, the number of packets, or the number of requests sent each second. The current records are 3.4 terabits per second for volumetric DDoSes—which attempt to consume all bandwidth available to the target—809 million packets per second, and 17.2 million requests per second. The latter two records measure the power of application-layer attacks, which attempt to exhaust the computing resources of a target’s infrastructure.
Cloudflare's recent DDoS mitigation peaked at 15.3 million requests per second. While still smaller than the record, its power was more considerable because the attack was delivered through HTTPS requests rather than HTTP requests used in the record. Because HTTPS requests are much more compute-intensive than HTTP requests, the latest attack had the potential to put much more strain on the target.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 19:39:48 +0000
Enlarge / Belkin's SoundForm Elite Hi-Fi smart speaker and wireless charger. (credit: Belkin)
The timeline for over-the-air charging in the home just got murkier. On Wednesday, a press release from Israel-based wireless charging company Wi-Charge detailed plans for a partnership with Belkin to launch a consumer product with Wi-Charge's technology this year. Belkin is now tempering those expectations.
On Wednesday, TechCrunch interviewed Wi-Charge co-founder and Chief Business Officer Ori Mor. The TechCrunch reporter wrote that Wi-Charge "told me it has just inked a mysterious deal with Belkin, and we can expect the first wireless power device to show up from the accessories manufacturer later this year." Mor told the publication that Belkin is being "super aggressive on the timeline."
Mor stoked hopes of domestic cable- and pad-free wireless charging by saying that the Belkin product in the works is "a center-stage consumer product" and that Belkin had chosen "a perfect application." Neither Mor nor Wi-Charge's announcement specified the Belkin product, but the Wi-Charge executive highlighted Belkin's businesses in aftermarket charging accessories, smart home products, and powerline offerings.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 19:05:05 +0000
Enlarge / Just a few of the Activision franchises that will become Microsoft properties if and when the acquisition is finalized. (credit: Microsoft / Activision)
On Thursday, Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard cleared the second-biggest hurdle remaining in their plan to complete a $68.7 billion acquisition deal: existing shareholder buy-in.
ATVI shareholders have voted overwhelmingly in favor of approving Microsoft's bid to acquire Activision-Blizzard, and a company announcement counted over 98 percent of shareholder votes in the "yes" column.
On a dollars-and-cents level, anyone currently holding on to Activision stock is likely interested in the potential cash windfall coming their way should the deal be completed. Ahead of the shareholder vote on Thursday morning, Activision stock prices were trading around $76 per share, while Microsoft's acquisition terms include a buyout amount of $95 per share.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 18:51:45 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Earth Day is April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.
The best gadgets are the ones that find a way to enhance your world of work, play, or even just the daily grind. But there's also another feature that can make a nice piece of tech even better: sustainability.
Continually buying the latest and greatest tech or gadget obviously creates a lot of waste. But thinking critically about the gadgets you buy can play a small part in reversing this trend.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 18:33:57 +0000
Enlarge / This is our first look at Formula E's Gen3 race car, which debuts next season. (credit: Formula E)
On Thursday, ahead of this weekend's Monaco E-Prix, Formula E finally unveiled its next electric race car. It's called the Gen3 car because it's the third generation to be used by the series and will be introduced at the start of next season.
Much of the reaction online has been about the car's unconventional looks, at least in terms of what people expect race cars to look like. But then people reacted that way about the Gen2 vehicle as well. The new bodywork is more sustainable than before, with linen and some recycled carbon fiber (from retired Gen2 cars), which Formula E says will reduce the carbon footprint of the Gen3 car by 10 percent.
The new Formula E car is smaller than the previous version, with a narrower track and shorter wheelbase. It has also gone on a diet, with the car's mass decreasing from Gen2's 903 kg to 760 kg, which is just lighter than a current F1 car, for context. Gen3's weight reduction is coupled with a significant power increase: from 250 kW (335 hp) to 350 kW (469 hp) deployed to the rear wheels. With a top speed of 200 mph (320 km/h), we expect lap times to be significantly faster than before.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 18:12:35 +0000
Enlarge / A splash image for Nuvia from the company's blog. (credit: Nuvia)
Qualcomm bought a chipmaking startup called Nuvia in March 2021, and later that year, the company said it would be using Nuvia's talent and technology to create high-performance custom-designed ARM chips to compete with Apple's processor designs. But if you're waiting for a truly high-performance Windows PC with anything other than an Intel or AMD chip in it, you'll still be waiting for a bit. Qualcomm CEO Christian Amon mentioned during the company's most recent earnings call that its high-performance chips were on track to land in consumer devices "in late 2023."
Qualcomm still plans to sample chips to its partners later in 2022, a time frame it has mentioned previously and has managed to stick to. A gap between sampling and mass production is typical, giving Qualcomm time to work out bugs and improve chip yields and PC manufacturers more time to design and build finished products that incorporate the chips.
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia based in part on its personnel—the company was founded by former members of Apple's chip design team—and in part on its work designing ARM-based server chips. Chip designs take years to bring to market, so even if Nuvia had already been working on chips destined for consumer laptops when it was acquired, it was always going to be at least a couple of years before we could actually buy them in anything.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 17:54:20 +0000
Enlarge / The Unihertz Titan Slim. It has big bezels and a weird keyboard layout. (credit: Unihertz)
Unihertz's latest boutique smartphone is the Unihertz Titan Slim. In contrast to the all-screen phones that dominate the market, this phone marks another attempt to bring Blackberry-style QWERTY bar phones into the smartphone era.
For whatever reason, Unihertz never officially unveiled the phone on its website (there is only this "coming soon" teaser image), but enough phone reviews have been published by now that the product is pretty much public. Be warned that almost every reviewer who tested the Titan Slim came away with negative impressions, but at least it's a unique device.
This PCMag report details most of the specs. The front of the phone sports a 4.2-inch LCD that is "roughly" 1280×768—and then all those QWERTY buttons start. With so much space needed for the hardware keyboard, shrinking the bezels should be a priority. Even $150 smartphones have teardrop front cameras and minimal bezels these days. Wasting so much space means the display comes with a weird 5:3 aspect ratio, which several reports say causes problems with Android app layouts.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 17:24:53 +0000
Enlarge / Elon Musk talks to members of the media while leaving federal court in New York on Thursday, April 4, 2019.
A federal judge has rejected Tesla CEO Elon Musk's attempt to get out of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that requires Tesla to impose limits on Musk's social media statements.
The judge also rejected Musk's request to quash portions of an SEC subpoena that seeks documents related to whether he got pre-approval before posting a recent tweet about Tesla stock sales. The ruling against Musk was issued Wednesday by Judge Lewis Liman in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
"Musk was not forced to enter into the consent decree" with the SEC, and he "cannot now seek to retract the agreement he knowingly and willingly entered by simply bemoaning that he felt like he had to agree to it at the time but now—once the specter of the litigation is a distant memory and his company has become, in his estimation, all but invincible—wishes that he had not," Liman wrote. The judge also called Musk's claim that the SEC is harassing him "meritless."
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 17:05:56 +0000
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are joined by Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill in Jurassic World Dominion.
Universal Pictures has released a second trailer for Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth installment in the hugely successful franchise, featuring cloned dinosaurs roaming freely on the mainland as human beings face possible extinction.
As we've reported previously, the Jurassic World trilogy was always intended to be a complete story told across three films, as opposed to the standalone nature of the original trilogy. Director Colin Trevorrow, who co-wrote Dominion's script, knew that he wanted the third film to center on dinosaurs going "open source," so to speak—portraying a world in which Wu is not the only scientist capable of cloning the beasts. But rather than scene after scene of dinosaurs terrorizing people and destroying cities, he wanted "a world where dinosaur interaction is unlikely but possible—the same way we watch out for bears or sharks."
Per the official premise:
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:26:34 +0000
Enlarge / Subscription cards like this seemingly won't work until PlayStation Plus transitions to its new tiered structure in June.
Sony has temporarily cut off users' ability to renew their PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscriptions, an apparent effort to prevent users from converting those cheaper subscriptions into more expensive PlayStation Plus Premium subscriptions when the services transition to a new unified, tiered structure in June.
Current PlayStation Plus subscribers who try to renew their subscription through the online PlayStation Store are greeted with a cryptic message reading, "Can't Purchase; Can't Add to Cart; You've already purchased this item." Users across the Internet are reporting similar issues using physical prepaid PlayStation Plus cards to renew their subscriptions. Accounts that aren't currently subscribed to PlayStation Plus can still sign up for up to a year, though.
Subscriptions to Sony's streaming-focused PlayStation Now subscription, meanwhile, are no longer available for purchase on the PlayStation Store at all. The area of the store's Subscriptions page where that subscription was previously listed now shows a message telling users that "PlayStation Now is changing soon and merging with PlayStation Plus." The message points players to an FAQ page.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:01:43 +0000
Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link)
Our previous episode of Edge of Knowledge peeped back in time a few billion years to explore the origins of life on Earth, but now we aim our lens in a different direction. Rather than looking at the distant past to see how life began, this episode looks to the near future—specifically, at the ways in which Earth's climate might change over the next few decades.
Dealing with it
First, let's get this bit of inconvenient truth out of the way: anthropogenic climate change—that is, climate change caused by humans—is well-established science. The evidence is overwhelming, and attempted rebuttals are incomplete, flawed, or fabricated. The questions we need to be answering, as Paul points out in the video, aren't "Is this even happening?" or "Should we do something?" The questions we're now faced with are "How bad is it going to get?" and "What, exactly, do we need to be doing?"
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:01:56 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Elon Musk has claimed he is buying Twitter in order to protect free speech. But what does Musk mean by "free speech"? Musk provided a somewhat vague answer in a tweet on Tuesday, one day after striking a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. (The sale to Musk is pending and needs shareholder approval to be completed.)
Musk's statement, which he made the pinned tweet on his Twitter profile, said the following:
By "free speech," I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
Twitter has First Amendment right to moderate tweets
There are multiple ways to interpret Musk's statement as it relates to United States law, particularly the First Amendment. One interpretation is that Musk doesn't need to change Twitter at all to prevent "censorship that goes far beyond the law."
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:00:05 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Earth Day was April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.
For many people, buying an electric vehicle puts a stake in the ground—if I'm going to drive around town, I'm going to do it while reducing my carbon footprint.
“Gone are the days of burning toxic gasoline. A new age of electrons and instant torque is upon us,” you might say, standing next to your new vehicle and blue recycling bin.