Tech

(Updated: You can watch the launch live below; it’s set for Tuesday 3:45pm EST.) SpaceX is working toward a much-anticipated launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, and it’s confirming an impressive twist to the event. A SpaceX spokesperson says the company will attempt the of its Falcon 9 booster engines. That, of course, assumes the rocket does not explode on lift-off, which CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly reminded us is a possibility. In fact, he’s saying that an awful lot. SpaceX is targeting the launch for Tuesday, February 6, but there’s a backup window the following day if the weather conspires to spoil the first one.

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The has been building for years, reaching all the way back to CEO Elon Musk’s announcement of the rocket in 2011. After years of development and a few last minute delays, the Falcon Heavy is operational. SpaceX successfully launched the rocket from Cape Canaveral today, Feb. 6, 2018. On board the rocket is Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster, which makes it the first car in space. SpaceX completed a last month, which ensured that all 27 Merlin rocket engines on the vehicle could ignite simultaneously. That cleared the way for today’s test, but Musk has been carefully controlling expectations.

LG has been fighting a losing battle with Samsung in the mobile space over the last few years, and part of LG’s problem might be the long-term reliability of its phones. Owners of the LG G4, V10, V20, Nexus 5X, and G5 filed a class-action lawsuit against the company last year, and the parties have apparently . LG will offer up to $425 in cash or $700 toward the purchase of a new LG phone. LG’s reliability issues became apparent back in 2015 with the release of the G4. This phone started strong, but owners reported a startlingly high incident of failure after using it for several months.

The use of hydrogen as a fuel and energy storage medium as interested scientists for decades, but physics isn’t on our side. Generating from water requires a lot of power and expensive materials, but researchers from Washington State University may have developed a method that could make it a viable way to store energy . Many of the technologies we look toward as part of a renewable energy economy are less consistent than traditional means. For example, solar power produces a lot of energy during the day and none at night. It’s the same story with wind power — it might provide more power than needed when it’s gusty out, but none on a calm day.

Samsung is currently the top chipmaker in the world, and it’s quietly expanding into a new market: mining. Samsung isn’t mining coins itself, but it is using its massive manufacturing capacity to produce so-called “,” or ASIC chips, for use in mining rigs. These chips are designed just to mine coins, making them vastly more efficient than a stack of GPUs. Cryptocurrencies have different features, values, and management features, but almost all of them can be mined. To mine coins, your machine has to complete complex mathematical calculations as “proof of work.” This computing power goes toward processing transactions on the crypto’s network, and in return you are rewarded with a small amount of the currency.

Most devices can make do with a solid brick-like , but what about wearables and the supposed flexible phones we’ve been promised? A new kind of battery could improve the design and reliability of such devices, but making a flexible design that doesn’t degrade or fail catastrophically is a challenge. Researchers from Columbia University have developed a prototype for a flexible battery , and it has properties similar to non-flexible batteries. The internal structure of a battery is vital not only to its capacity, but also to its reliability and safety. As we learned from Samsung’s battery issues, even small defects in the insulation between layers can cause a battery to fail catastrophically.

Vision Research isn’t in the business of making boring old “regular” cameras. It’s the leading maker of high-speed digital cameras, and is really something else. This camera records at greater-than-HD resolution, but that’s not the impressive part. No, the impressive part is that it records at greater than HD resolution at a mind-boggling 6,600 frames per second. You can push it even higher at lower resolutions. The Phantom v2640 has a 4MP CMOS image sensor, which might not sound like a lot. However, it’s capable of capturing at the full resolution of that sensor at the aforementioned 6,600fps. That’s a resolution of 2048 x 1952.

IRVINE, Calif. – A small fleet of well-worn, matte-black Mazda3’s here carry an amazing new technology under the hood, called SkyActiv-X: They use gasoline, but compress the fuel so much it spontaneously combusts like a diesel engine. The efficiency gains could amount to 20 percent, possibly 30 percent more than the same engine burning gasoline in the traditional fashion, Mazda believes. A test drive shows Mazda’s SkyActiv-X technology indeed works and should be available in 2019. The compact sport hatchback prototypes showed solid power under acceleration. Noise levels were acceptable thanks to lots of sound-damping material, including around the engine.