Everyone who works at Boeing or takes an interest in the company’s long-term performance had best keep their seat belts fastened and their tray tables locked and in the upright position. The black box data from Ethiopian Airlines reportedly shows ‘similarities’ with the Lion Air crash. This has been rumored before, but we didn’t have the black box data on both aircraft to prove it. The Boeing 373 Max 8’s stall-preventing MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) has been under scrutiny since Lion Air 610 crashed last year. We still advise against a rush to judgment. Even if the MCAS system is implicated in both crashes, it’s possible that other systems also failed, or that the MCAS failed for different reasons in this case.
It might seem like we’ve been talking about the Space Launch System () for years, and that’s because we have been. NASA began this ambitious project in 2011, eventually settling on Boeing as the primary contractor for what will be the most powerful rocket in the world. It’s not ready to fly yet, and NASA is getting impatient. According to administrator Jim Bridenstine, NASA is considering launching its Orion crew capsule on a different rocket to speed things along. The SLS is a super-heavy lift rocket based loosely on the Space Shuttle and capable of sending payloads anyplace in the solar system.
The Tesla Model Y introduced late Thursday is everything Tesla has promised, and less. This is the smaller SUV in the Tesla fleet, a sibling to the Model 3 sedan. But: The cheapest Model Y will cost $40,200 with zero options, and it won’t be available for two more years. It’s so far off, you can’t even put down a $2,500 deposit today, let alone configure it. The Model Ys you can order today will be delivered fall 2020, a year and a half away, and will cost $48,200 to $75,700. They also look like hatchbacks even if Tesla calls them SUVs.
You can’t spend long on the internet without hearing about some piece of malware that’s going to take over every Android phone in the world. The hysteria over malware is a bit overblown, but it’s led to the proliferation of anti-malware apps that promise to keep your phone squeaky clean. A from Austrian antivirus testers AV-Comparatives claims that most AV apps on Android are ineffective, and some are downright frauds. AV-Comparatives tested 250 of the top Android antivirus apps and services by installing them on a Samsung phone. They automated the device, directing it to download and install known malware apps from the browser.
Stars are heavy. Heavy things require more energy to move. Therefore, accelerating solar masses to roughly 568km/s (or 353 miles/s) requires a staggering amount of it. Scientists have typically believed that the handful of hypervelocity stars we’ve found — the term refers to stars moving significantly faster than the typical ‘background’ rate for stars in the Milky Way galaxy — were flung out towards the void between the galaxies by Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. With a diameter of an estimated 60 million kilometers across, Sagittarius A* is really good at throwing things (gravitationally speaking).
Robots are surpassing people in numerous areas, but the human hand is still superior. have trouble picking up irregular objects. Now, a new grasper designed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) could give robots an edge. The origami “magic ball” gripper doesn’t try to imitate our hands, but it can still hold . The origami gripper is an application of what’s commonly called “soft robotics.” As the name implies, these machines use flexible materials like rubber instead of cold, unyielding metal. The new CSAIL contraption looks like a floppy paper flower, but it contracts to grab objects with incredible strength.
Self-driving cars are coming, and they’re going to be more connected than anything on the road today. There may come a day when most or all vehicles in a city are , and they’ll most likely communicate with each other to make traffic move more efficiently. What happens if you hack a few of those cars, though? Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology to predict what would happen as self-driving cars were attacked. They found you’d only have to take out a fraction of vehicles in a city to bring traffic to a complete halt. The study used Manhattan as the basis of the model, a city that has notoriously snarled traffic without self-driving vehicles.
Microsoft’s Xbox One unveil and initial positioning were, to put it simply, a disaster. The company’s vision of an all-in-one media center box that served as a sort of hub for home entertainment, streaming services, and gaming at a higher price point ultimately didn’t survive contact with Sony’s simpler, more focused, and less expensive approach. But one aspect of the original Xbox One’s unveil that has survived — and slowly grown — was the idea that Microsoft could levy its expertise in the PC world to draw the Xbox closer to its native ecosystem. For years, Microsoft has allowed gamers to stream Xbox titles to a PC.
There has been more pre-release buzz about the upcoming Android release than usual this year thanks to a leaked build of Android Q several weeks back. It’s no longer so exclusive — the Android Q public beta is , and you can install it on any of Google’s Pixel phones. This release will inevitably include ample bugs and half-finished features, but it’s the first glimpse of Google’s vision for the future of Android. Android Q, which won’t have a name or version number until closer to release, doesn’t have any significant visual changes as we saw in Android Pie.
