Cosmic Log
Team Roadrunner, a Nevada-based drone consortium, says it set a record for long-distance drone delivery last week in Texas. The team’s fixed-wing drone flew more than 97 miles on May 5, during a circuitous trip that headed southward from Austin and then returned. Visual observers and a mobile command-and-control center guided the drone through the flight corridor using cellular communication links.
The kids who play with internet-connected toys such as Hello Barbie and CogniToys Dino may not fully realize their voices are being recorded – but when they find out, University of Washington researchers say even the little ones understand the privacy concerns.
“That’s pretty scary,” one child was quoted as saying.
The researchers explored the attitudes of kids and parents toward Wi-Fi-enabled toys in a study presented today at the CHI 2017 computer conference in Denver.
The study found strong support for parental controls, leading the researchers to recommend taking such controls to the next level. They suggested that toys should be designed to delete their recordings after a week, or that parents should be given the ability to delete conversations permanently.
Tesla has started taking orders for traditional-looking glass roof tiles that soak up solar power to generate electricity.
Installations are to start next month, beginning with California and gradually rolling out to other U.S. markets, Tesla said. Overseas markets will be added to the mix next year, said Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire CEO.
“I think it will be great,” Musk tweeted.
In a blog posting, Tesla said “the typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot” for the product it calls Solar Roof. That’s significantly more than the cost of a traditional asphalt roof, based on Consumer Reports’ estimates, but closer to competitive in price when the anticipated electric-bill savings are factored in.
First static fire test of a Falcon Heavy center core completed at our McGregor, TX rocket development facility last week. pic.twitter.com/tHUHc1QiKG
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 9, 2017
SpaceX showed off the first static-fire engine test for the center core of its three-core Falcon Heavy rocket – a yet-to-be-flown launch vehicle that could someday send robotic probes to Mars.
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation says a 20-foot section of a tunnel system where it stores contaminated material and equipment collapsed today, sparking an emergency alert and restrictions on workers’ movements. No injuries were reported.
A remotely operated TALON robot surveyed the scene and detected no release of contamination, Hanford said in its online update on the emergency.
Hanford said workers conducting routine surveillance this morning discovered the 20-by-20-foot hole in the roof of one of the two storage tunnels at the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant, or PUREX Plant, in the site’s central 200 East Area.
The tunnels were constructed of wood and concrete during the Cold War, and covered with about 8 feet of soil. They’ve been used for decades to store contaminated equipment from plutonium production operations at the site in southeastern Washington state.
The cave-in occurred in the 200 East Area, around a spot where the two tunnels join together, Hanford said.
The workers on the surveillance team were evacuated, and thousands of employees sheltered in place for hours. As of this afternoon, all non-essential employees at the Hanford site have been released, officials said in a tweet.
The paleontologists who discovered a previously unknown line of human ancestors in South Africa say that they’ve found more fossils — and that the species, known as Homo naledi, could have lived alongside our own species 250,000 years ago.
The newly disclosed finds from the Rising Star Cave system could reignite the debate over the tangled roots of humanity’s family tree.
Fifty-two scientists from 35 organizations around the world, including University of Washington anthropologist Elen Feuerriegel, were part of the team behind the Rising Star research
In one of the papers published today by the journal eLife, the scientists set the age of the first Homo nadeli fossils they found at between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, based on radioisotope dating, electron spin resonance dating and an analysis of the flowstone overlying the fossils.
I’m the last person in the world to set up my own space startup, but I have a better idea of what might be involved after a week’s worth of whirlwind playwriting for Infinity Box Theatre’s “Centrifuge 2” theater festival.
“Centrifuge 2” was the second running of an exercise adapted from the 14/48 Projects, in which playwrights, directors, actors and other theater people create batches of 14 plays in the course of 48 hours.
My fellow Centrifugers and I had twice that long to come up with 10-minute science-themed plays, plus five-minute introductions by science writers such as myself. But there was no time to waste: The scramble continued all the way up to the first technical run-through on Friday afternoon, followed just a couple of hours later by the premiere.
It all started last Monday night, when I was matched up with playwright Marcy Rodenborn, based on a slip of paper drawn from a jar. I had been kicking around a few ideas, and we quickly settled on a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin filling in for the warring families.
The Boeing Co. and the U.S. Air Force say they’ve shown that a new type of communication pod for F-15 fighter jets, known as Talon HATE, can link together different types of aircraft and ground stations for secure communications.
The Boeing-developed system is designed to knit together the communication systems aboard F-15 jets and other traditional weapons systems, plus the F-22 stealth fighters built for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin. The F-22 uses a special type of networking system that’s optimized for stealthiness but poses a challenge for communication with non-stealth airplanes, as explained in this report from Foxtrot Alpha.
During a flight demonstration conducted out of Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, Talon HATE pods on two F-15C aircraft enabled test pilots to share information through a variety of channels, including the Wideband Global Satcom system, Boeing said in today’s news release.
A county-by-county survey of U.S. life expectancy reports a 20-year gap between the lows and the highs – a gap that correlates with socioeconomic factors, race and ethnicity, and the availability of health care as well as preventable risk factors such as obesity and smoking.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and published in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggests that the gap is widening.
“This is way worse than any of us had assumed,” UW professor Ali Mokdad, who leads U.S. county health research at the institute, told The Guardian.
After nearly two years in orbit, the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B robotic space plane landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today with a loud sonic boom, but nary a word about what exactly it was doing up there all this time.
This was the fourth and longest classified mission for the Boeing-built craft, which was launched from Florida 718 days earlier in 2015 atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The three earlier missions were flown in 2010, 2011-2012 and 2012-2014, with landings at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The Air Force’s fleet of X-37B Orbital Test Vehicles has now spent a total of 2,085 days to gauge the reusable winged plane’s ability to conduct on-orbit operations and return for airplane-style horizontal landings.