Bear Used As ‘Bait’ For Hunting Dogs Finally Sees Her First Flowers

July 9, 2018July 5, 2018 by Curt Long

The only times Kvitka was ever allowed out of her cage at the “hunting station” in Terebovlya, Ukraine, where she lived was when she was used for an illegal practice called “bear baiting.”

Four Paws International, which negotiated for months with the owner of Kvitka to free her, obtained some footage of what this cruel practice looks like: Bears, weak from malnourishment, are chained to a post while hunting dogs circle them and “practice” on them. The bears have often had their claws painfully removed so the dogs can attack them without risk.

Dog Left Tied Up In Woods With Only Empty Food Bowls For Comfort

July 9, 2018July 5, 2018 by Curt Long

Alone in the woods for days, a 3-year-old German shepherd barked and barked in hopes someone would hear her.

She had been tied up without any food or water, and she waited for her owner to return, but each day she was disappointed. Still, the dog wouldn’t give up hope that someone would find her.

Finally, a nearby resident decided to report the dog’s frantic cries for help.

“I got a call from one resident who said that there was a dog tied somewhere in the back of their building, and the dog was hollering and screaming all night long,” Alex Kelly, an animal control officer with New Jersey’s Irvington Township, told The Dodo. “So I asked her, ‘How long has the dog been hollering, and barking?’ And she said, ‘I’m going to be honest with you, the dog’s been back there at least three days.’”

Guy Comes Into Kitchen And Finds Someone Strange Eating His Pasta

July 9, 2018July 5, 2018 by Curt Long

Making fresh pasta from scratch isn’t an easy task, but a man in Brisbane, Australia, had already managed the culinary challenge — when he encountered another rather unexpected difficulty.

Jordan Cahill had wandered out of his kitchen for just a few moments, and when he returned he found an uninvited dinner guest who had seated himself at the counter.

The guest was a wild possum.

Tiny Dogs Abandoned On Roadside Were Living Together Inside Old Tire

July 9, 2018July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

On a hot Saturday afternoon, three tiny dogs huddled together inside an old tire, attempting to escape the bright sun.

The deflated tire sat on a shoulder of an empty dead-end road in Muscoy, California, just underneath a freeway overpass. In such a desolate location, chances that the abandoned dogs would survive the extreme heat were slim — but their luck was about to change.

A driver who took a wrong turn spotted a matted white terrier perched atop the pile of garbage. Sensing the animal needed help, the man called Faith Easdale, a local dog rescuer with Dream Fetchers: Project Rescue. Easdale receives this type of call far too frequently.

Guy Moves Into New House And Discovers It Apparently Comes With A Cat

July 9, 2018July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

When Crispy the cat’s family was in the process of moving from California to Texas, she was very overwhelmed by all the boxes and commotion — and while the door was open to move things out, Crispy ran outside and disappeared. Her family was devastated when they realized she was missing, and searched for her to no avail. They moved to Texas with heavy hearts, hoping that, eventually, someone would find their beloved cat.

As Jeff Saul, one of the house’s new tenants, was moving into the home, the previous family’s young daughter mentioned something about a missing calico cat to him. Saul didn’t think much of it — until he and his roommates heard meows coming from outside.

New California Bill Restores Strong Net Neutrality Protections

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

Last month, a California Assembly committee voted to remove key protections from a state-level net neutrality bill. Critics said the changes opened loopholes that would allow broadband providers to throttle some applications, or charge websites or services for “fast lane” access on their networks. Now those key protections are coming back.

At a press conference Thursday, California state Senator Scott Wiener, who introduced the original bill, and Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, who proposed the changes last month, said they had agreed on a new version of the bill that restores provisions that would make the California bill the most robust net neutrality protections in the nation.

The latest version of the bill restores provisions that prevent broadband providers from exempting some services from customers’ data caps, and ban providers from charging websites “access fees” to reach customers on a network or blocking or throttling content as it enters their networks from other networks, according to a fact sheet released by Wiener, Santiago, and state Senator Kevin de León.

During the press conference, Wiener explained that he and Santiago have been working on a new version of the bill since shortly after Santiago’s changes were approved last month.

Wiener’s original bill, which passed the California Senate in May, was in some ways more robust than the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality protections repealed last month; Wiener’s bill, for example, explicitly banned broadband providers from exempting services they own from customers’ data limits. So if the bill were to become law, AT&T would no longer be allowed to exempt its DirecTV Now video streaming service from its mobile users’ data allotments.

Last month, the Communications and Conveyance committee, which Santiago chairs, amended Wiener’s bill to remove the provisions that covered data caps, as well as other sections that explicitly banned broadband providers from charging websites “access fees” to reach customers on a network or blocking or throttling content as it entered their networks from other broadband networks.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Net Neutrality

Santiago originally framed his changes as bringing the bill in line with the Obama-era net neutrality protections. The FCC’s net neutrality order wasn’t as explicit as Wiener’s bill, but it did give the agency authority to regulate data caps and the interconnections between broadband networks; removing those provisions from the California bill made it weaker than the Obama-era protections.

Asked why he reversed course, Santiago says the changes he made in committee last month were part of an ongoing process to get the net neutrality protections right. “We ran out of time, we kept the issue moving, and we agreed to get it right,” he says.

But he also faced pushback from advocacy groups. One group, Fight for the Future, announced a crowdfunding campaign to pay for a billboard targeting the assemblymember in his Los Angeles district.

“We appreciate Assemblymember Miguel Santiago’s change of heart,” Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer said in a statement. “This should be a lesson to other lawmakers: don’t mess with net neutrality unless you’re prepared to feel your constituents’ wrath. Today’s news shows the power of the internet to overcome business as usual and win real victories for the public.”

The new version of the bill still needs to be approved by both houses of the California Legislature, and signed by Governor Jerry Brown. From there, it could face legal challenges from the FCC, which prohibited states from adopting their own net neutrality protections when it repealed the national net neutrality rules. During the press conference, Santiago said the California bill would stand up to legal scrutiny. Legal experts have told WIRED they are unsure whether the FCC has authority to preempt state law on the issue.

The telecommunications industry group USTelecom has promised to challenge state level net neutrality rules, arguing that they would lead to a fragmented legal environment.

“Ideally we would have one national standard, but that hasn’t happened,” Wiener said Thursday.

Bioproducts are seeing major tailwinds in renewable tech

August 7, 2018July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

Tom DicksonContributor

Tom Dickson is CEO of New Energy Risk.

Brentan AlexanderContributor

Brentan Alexander is chief science officer for New Energy Risk.

Although Silicon Valley seems to have largely forgotten about cleantech after failures in solar, wind and batteries, there are still major strides being made across new and exciting renewable technologies. However, because these companies can take a decade or more to come to market — a timeline that is anathema to Sand Hill venture capital — media coverage has died down significantly over the last few years. So what’s going on?

It turns out… a lot.

In particular, there are significant developments across the waste-to-fuel and waste-to-product industries, in the form of thermal (pyrolysis, hydrothermal, gasification) and non-thermal technologies.

The driver for this is somewhat simple: The human population is creating more waste every year and there are fewer options for disposal. Incentives around building a “circular economy,” where renewable products are created from that waste, are growing and making more financial sense.

Basically, companies are learning how to turn trash into cash.

Today, entrepreneurs are approaching the space head-on, and there are dozens of cutting-edge companies coming to market and breaking through with major projects and customers. Companies in the space can be divided between the developers like Fulcrum BioEnergy, Red Rock Biofuels, RES Polyflow and Envia, and the technology providers, such as TCG, TRI, Velocys and many others.

These companies are targeting a variety of waste types, including household garbage (plastics and organics), as well as agricultural waste (like wood) and livestock waste (like manure). Waste is then converted into various products, including synthetic crude oil, natural gas, electricity, refined products (from diesel to high-value waxes) and specialty chemicals.

In short, we’re seeing some major tailwinds for bioproduct companies as we near 2020. Here’s why.

The value of waste removal and disposal has increased

As population and urban density grow and environmental concerns mount, there are fewer places to store waste. Just recently, China — which recycles nearly half of the globe’s waste — banned the import of certain plastics, as well as 23 other waste products, leading to overflowing landfills in many countries, including Australia and Great Britain. Landfill permitting is becoming more stringent, while countries can no longer just ship their trash somewhere else to be dealt with. Gate or tipping fees (the cost of disposing waste at a landfill) are also increasing.

So, with more pressure on these systems around the world, waste disposal has increased in value, making waste-to-product facilities and technologies more economically attractive to developers.

The human population is creating more waste every year and there are fewer options for disposal.

These projects have become even more financially sound when paired with government incentives for cleaner fuels and lower emissions. These often come in the form of renewable credits and fuel standards, such as the EPA’s Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) and the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard Program (LCFS). In many cases, these credits are a significant portion of revenues, and similar government-market support can be seen in Europe and Asia.

RINs, in particular, were enacted about 10 years ago, initially for corn ethanol projects. In the last few years, however, the advanced biofuels RINs requirements have started to come in to force and generate a new market. For companies that can sell their product in California and take advantage of the LCFS, these policies, in tandem, can support more than 50 percent of the revenues of some plants, making them economically possible. The effects of these mechanisms are hard to overstate.

Old science, new goals

What’s most surprising, though, is that the science behind many of these companies and technologies is not actually new. In fact, some of the science was developed in the early 20th century in Germany, primarily used to convert coal into oil during World War II to overcome small domestic oil reserves. Later, in the 1970s, the idea of peak oil and price shocks around OPEC’s formation pushed major oil producers, like Exxon, to look for alternatives, refining and advancing these processes and creating fuels and products (once again primarily from coal).

However, oil producers focused on massive-scale projects because the goal was to supplant a portion of oil production. So they were looking at $5-10 billion facilities, which were not feasible for waste-to-fuel and waste-to-product processes. Trying to feed such huge facilities with sufficient waste day in, day out would be a logistical impossibility. Moreover, once cheap oil returned, there was no longer an economic rationale for alternative fuels, and much of the technology was shelved.

Today, rather than building $10 billion refineries, developers like Fulcrum BioEnergy or Red Rock Biofuels are looking at$100 million to $500 million in capital expenditure projects — still large sums for a startup. They are taking these systems initially developed for coal processing and using them for all kinds of waste, from household trash to wood to manure. These are smaller-scale systems that fit more specific needs for specific customers and geographies. However, this shift toward smaller scale has presented a new set of engineering challenges that many companies are just now beginning to overcome.

Luckily, developers today are using their experience building and financing similar facilities in the ethanol market and applying it to these new waste-to-fuel projects. High oil prices and ethanol subsidies in the late 2000s led to a resurgence of interest in renewable energies, and the last decade has seen engineering techniques applied to waste-to-fuel for the first time, such as small-scale, temperature-regulated Fischer-Tropsch, small-scale gasification and supercritical water pyrolysis. These big investments into engineering, as well as logistics, have been instrumental in bringing together technologists, developers and customers.

Corporate interest has improved both logistics and market opportunity

For these new projects and technologies to be successful, developers need to secure a reliable source of waste to feed the facility, as well as “offtake partners” — customers who commit to purchase the fuel or product before they can finance and build a large facility. Increasingly, companies are stepping up to the plate. The necessity and value of environmental and carbon credits, as well as growing concerns around sustainability, are pushing corporations to become more involved.

Partnerships have made securing sufficient feedstock possible. This includes waste disposal companies like Waste Management that want to preserve landfill space and reduce methane emissions, forestry companies looking for new forms of lumber byproducts and livestock companies looking to dispose of manure.

Companies are learning how to turn trash into cash.

In addition, some companies are becoming investors or buyers of the end product. For example, airlines (United, Cathay, JetBlue, Southwest, Qantas, British Airlines, Canada Air) are investing in and buying biofuels because of international policy requirements. Grocers (Whole Foods, Tyson) and food and beverage companies (Coca-Cola) are also looking for sustainable waste disposal, packaging and reduction of their environmental footprint.

These projects are highly susceptible to market changes, so company commitments to longer-term agreements for purchasing products like fuel — particularly ones that include price-floors in exchange for decreased upfront cost — can help bridge price gaps and mitigate project risk for lenders. Luckily, we’re seeing more of this happen.

Still, major challenges remain

It’s not all rosy, though. The most challenging aspect of scaling up these bioproduct operations are the significant capital requirements and funding. The process toward economic feasibility has not been an easy one, and unfortunately is littered with stories of failure — but these are high-risk ventures, and failures, are how the market navigates new technologies and learns from mistakes.

Indeed, we’ve seen a few green shoots over the last few years that have served as a boon for companies looking to hit scale.

Tax-exempt bonds and government funding have served as an alternative to traditional loans from risk-averse banks. Solid-waste processing facilities are allowed under the IRS rules for tax-exempt private activity bonds that can be issued by states. This financial mechanism isn’t new, but the use of it by renewable energy developers has helped project financials by lowering the interest rate on the debt that the project has to pay. However, the pot for tax-exempt bonds is also limited by state and federal governments, so developers have to fight to be given an allocation with other projects, which has limited availability of this kind of financing.

In addition, guaranteed performance of these facilities has been a significant weakness in the field. One response to this has been the creation of insurance and warranty products that guarantee reliability of new facilities, thereby reducing the risk for lenders, leading to better financing terms from banks and bond investors, and increasing customer adoption.

Lastly, nearly all of waste-to-product companies today rely on credits to make their projects financially sound. In many cases these are a significant portion of revenue. As mentioned above, RINs and LCFS have been key drivers for domestic projects.

However, not all sectors are treated the same way by these support systems. One of the major drivers in wind, solar and fuel cells has been investment tax credits, which do not apply to waste facilities. Moreover, oversupply of RINs is possible, which could lead to a market price collapse. Of course, the market is also susceptible to political squabbles. So far, the RINs market has survived the EPA transition under Scott Pruitt — they are prized by the farm lobby after all — and it seems increasingly likely the market will remain in place. In fact, the EPA just released its proposed 2019 biofuel requirements and continues to increase the number of available RINs beyond prior levels.

Support and demand for these technologies and processes are accelerating as stakeholders from across the marketplace align to bring these projects to life. Moreover, because of the local and regional nature of these projects, it is unlikely for global forces to derail progress, like China aggressively entering the market and undercutting prices as they did with solar a decade ago.

However, a number of factors still pose a threat, including volatility within the market for renewable credits, as well as government support structures, or risks around commercial and technological viability that scare financiers away from backing these new projects. Only the most robust projects that address a variety of risks and shore up their commercial and technological viability will succeed over the long-term.

Overall, though, given renewed corporate interest in biofuels, new sources of financing and new feedstock and regional focuses, we may soon see a quiet boom in renewable biofuels and products.

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The Boat Circling the Planet on Renewable Energy and Hydrogen

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

Victorien Erussard, an experienced ocean racer from the city of Saint-Malo in the north of France, was halfway through a dash across the Atlantic when he lost all power. Sails kept the boat moving, but Erussard relied on an engine and generator to keep the electronics running. He temporarily lost his autopilot and his navigation systems, jeopardizing his chances of winning the 2013 Transat Jaques Vabre race.

Never again, he thought. “I came up with the idea to create a ship that uses different sources of energy,” he says. The plan was bolstered by the pollution-happy cargo ships he saw while crossing the oceans. “These are a threat to humanity because they use heavy fuel oil.”

Five years on, that idea has taken physical form in the Energy Observer, a catamaran that runs on renewables. In a mission reminiscent of the Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane that Bertrand Picard and André Borschberg flew around the world a few years back, Erussard and teammate Jérôme Delafosse are planning to sail around the planet, without using any fossil fuel. Instead, they’ll make the fuel they need from sea water, the wind, and the sun.

The Energy Observer started life as a racing boat but now would make a decent space battle cruiser prop in a movie. Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels (1,400 square feet of them in all), which curve gently to fit the aerodynamic contours. Some, on a suspended deck that extends to the sides of the vessel, are bi-facial panels, generating power from direct sunlight as well as light reflected off the water below. The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production.

Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels—1,400 square feet of them in all.

Jean-Sébastien Evrard/AFP

Propulsion comes from two electric motors, driven by all that generated electrical energy, but it’s the way that’s stored that’s clever. The Energy Observer uses just 106-kWh (about equivalent to a top-end Tesla) of batteries, for immediate, buffer, storage and energy demands. It stores the bulk of the excess electricity generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing as hydrogen gas. An electrolyzer uses the current to spilt the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The latter is released into the atmosphere, and the H2 is stored in eight tanks, made from aluminum and carbon fiber, which can hold up to 137 pounds of compressed hydrogen. When that energy is needed, the H2 is run through a fuel cell and recombined with oxygen from the air to create electricity, with water as a byproduct. That’s the same way fuel cell cars, like the Honda Clarity and Toyota Mirai work.

By storing energy this way instead of with banks of batteries, Erussard made the Energy Observer three times lighter than the similarly sized MS Tûranor PlanetSolar, which became the first boat to circumnavigate the globe using only solar power in 2012.

The voyage, which started in June 2017, will last six years, reach 50 countries, and make 101 stops. The vessel has already travelled 7,000 nautical miles, to port cities around the French coast, and is now in the Mediterranean.

Jean-Sébastien Evrard/AFP

And the new vessel is kind to the ears as well as the planet. “There’s zero sound pollution, it’s a true pleasure to navigate on this vessel,” Erussard said on stage at the recent Movin’On future mobility conference in Montreal, Canada.

Inside there’s a gleaming white helm, with two captains chairs, and living quarters that wouldn’t look out of place in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with an almost harshly minimalist white design. The team designed the furnishings to be as light as possible too, because a lighter boat uses less energy, and so is more efficient.

The team isn’t rushing things. The mission started in June 2017, and will last six years, reach 50 countries, and make 101 stops. The vessel has already travelled 7,000 nautical miles, to port cities around the French coast, and is now in the Mediterranean. It’s due to arrive in Venice on July 6, and spend 10 days in port, where the crew will meet the public, and hold set up an interactive exhibit to showcase environmentally technologies.

“The idea with this ship is to prove a potential energy system of the future,” Erussard says. He’s determined that the same types of energy generation and storage that he’s using onboard could be used on land too, to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and maybe one day to clean up those container ships he’ll pass en route.

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Hungry for even more deep-dives on your next favorite topic? Sign up for the Backchannel newsletter

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Huawei MateBook X Pro Review: About That Webcam…

July 9, 2018July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

Chances are, you’ve never owned a Huawei laptop. You may not even know how to pronounce it (it’s ‘wah-way’ if you’re a stickler). Along with being a target of U.S. politicians and spy agencies, the Chinese tech giant is best known for its Android smartphones and tablets. That will change if it keeps making laptops like the MateBook X Pro.

It may have just made its big push into laptops last year, but Huawei’s new MateBook X Pro makes a strong statement, and it does it by making almost no statement at all: If you sat it down next to some of the fanciest notebook computers, it would fit right in.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think Huawei has made laptops for years. The MateBook X Pro looks and feels as luxurious as some of the most sought-after ultrabooks from established brands. It has everything you’d expect: a slim aluminum chassis, spacious touchpad, superb battery life, speedy boot times thanks to a solid-state drive, and souped-up processor. Its cool brushed exterior and island-style keyboard look right at home sitting next to a Surface Laptop, Dell XPS 13, HP Spectre 13, or any MacBook inspired machine.

Ports, Pixels, and Power

The MateBook X Pro gives you perks competing laptops don’t have, too. The high-end configuration I tried comes with a 2GB Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics card, a big step up from the usual integrated Intel graphics many similar machines rely on. It’s not powerful enough for hardcore, frame-rate intensive software, but it does open the door to some light gaming and will help in Adobe Photoshop or Premiere.

The extra oomph will help you get work done, too. I’ve used this laptop for almost all my needs in the past month. I regularly have dozens upon dozens of Chrome tabs open and an ultra-wide second monitor hooked up. Slowdowns have been rare thanks to the Nvidia chip, 512GB SSD drive, quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, and 16GB of RAM in my unit.

Though it charges with one of its two USB-C ports (your laptop and phone can now use the same charger!), Huawei was also kind enough to include a full-size USB-A on the opposite side. To my delight, I also found a multi-function USB-C dongle that let me connect the X Pro to my external monitor via HDMI, while also connecting a USB-A device and USB-C charger—it even has an old-school VGA monitor hookup.

Gazing upon the MateBook’s screen for the first time is astonishing. It stretches nearly 14 diagonal inches into a frame that would normally hold a 13-inch one. Huawei makes every dot on its 3,000 x 2,000 pixel touchscreen count, pushing the the screen right up to the edges with bezels that are less than a quarter inch (5mm) on the sides and top. It’s stunning to look at, and a greater joy when you realize it’s also gasp a touchscreen.

Typing on the MateBook X Pro comes very naturally if you’ve owned a thin laptop before. The backlit keys are spacious and have more travel than Apple’s flat, flawed butterfly keyboard, and adjusting the volume, brightness, and other settings with the top row of function keys is easier than many laptops.

Unworkable Webcam

The MateBook’s middle function key has a secret. Press down on it and up pops a 1-megapixel webcam. I couldn’t stop thinking of like the headlights on an old Corvette. It’s fun, makes a satisfying click when activated, and there is some comfort knowing that the camera physically cannot see you when it’s inside the keyboard.

Huawei hid the camera in the keyboard because, like Dell’s XPS 13, that beautifully thin 5mm bezel around the screen left no room up top. Sadly, it should have made space because the MateBook’s ‘nosecam’ is not practical.

Huawei

A webcam sitting underneath the screen—in this case angled up from the keyboard—is incredibly awkward to use no matter how you look at it. My video chats on Skype or Zoom felt so weird—my coworkers totally noticed something was off. The angle highlights my chin and nose in the most unflattering way, and I couldn’t type or take notes while on a call because my wiggling fingers block the camera.

Even though the webcam is this , I did miss Windows Hello facial recognition (which likely couldn’t fit because of the hidden webcam), though the MateBook’s power button does double as a speedy fingerprint sensor, which works almost as quickly. If you’ve used a fingerprint scanner to unlock a smartphone or tablet, you’ll feel right at home unlocking this laptop with a touch.

And then there are the quirks: the X Pro’s two processing chips can get a little hot and the fan is noticably audible if it’s running at full tilt. And even though the touchpad works well, it can be touchy at times. My left hand accidentally triggers Windows 10’s gestures accidentally while I’m using the computer. I’d like to blame my palm, but other laptops I use never seem to react while I’m happily typing away.

Outside of the X Pro’s webcam problems, there’s a lot to like. Assuming you won’t ever need a webcam, Huawei’s MateBook X Pro is a killer high-end laptop and a bargain next to some of its competitors. The high-end Core i7 model with Nvidia GPU costs $1,500 and its spec sheet looks incredibly good next to some $2,000+ competitors. If you have the cash, go for it, but the $1,200 model—which has an 8th-gen Core i5, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD for file storage—should do the trick. You’ll just have to wave goodbye to Nvidia and open your heart to Intel and its integrated graphics.

Huawei is onto something, and the MateBook X Pro is a fantastic laptop by most respects. Hopefully its next MateBook Pro won’t X-out the webcam.

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An Astronomer Explains Black Holes at 5 Levels of Difficulty

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

You probably know the basics when it comes to black holes: A lot of mass squished into not a lot of volume makes for an entity so prodigiously dense, not even light can escape its gravity. Perhaps you even know about things like event horizons, the boundary outside of which escape becomes possible, and gravitational waves, the ripples that black holes generate in the cosmic fabric when they collide. Conceivably you even know what a black hole would “look” like, if you were ever so fortunate (unfortunate?) as to observe one up close: a gyre of oddly lit matter that wraps around a spherical split in spacetime, thanks to the beam-bending effects of gravitational lensing (another essential black hole concept).

Maybe you already know all of these things. For all I know, you’re the champ of black hole trivia. But at some point, your knowledge probably peters out and collapses in on itself like a … like a … well, like a something. That simile got away from me. But! Fortunately! Wherever and whenever your command of the subject craps out, Varoujan Gorjian will be there to pick up where you left off.

A research astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Grojian specializes in—and I’d just like to pause here to emphasize that this is the official title of his research group at JPL—the structure of the universe. Which means the guy not only knows about event horizons and gravitational lensing but stuff like tidal forces (what!), x-ray binaries (hey now!), and active galactic nuclei (oh my god!). Seriously, the guy’s knowledge of black holes is encyclopedic.

And best of all, he’s good at explaining the stuff. Check out the video above to watch Gorjian discuss black holes at five scales of difficulty, from grade school to grad school right on up to fellow-black-hole-expert levels. Because who among us doesn’t want to hear two authorities on the subject nerd out about the extracoronal illumination of accretion disks? (There. Bet you didn’t know that term.)

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The Sooty Logistics of Fighting 2018’s First Major Wildfire

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

Just a few weeks into the 2018 fire season, any hopes that an ongoing drought and a winter of weak snowfall wouldn’t wreak havoc are already toast. Fires are already popping up across Colorado, New Mexico, and west into Oregon and California.

This year’s season got off to a roaring start more than a month ago in Durango, Colorado, where the 416 Fire has burned more than 50,000 acres in the San Juan National Forest. The burn started in a populated area and grew to cover huge swaths of ground in just a few days, but crews managed to contain the blaze and prevent the loss of any structures or life.

And as the fire season picks up momentum, it’s worth an examination of the techniques and tools firefighters use to fight back the flames.

The 416 Fire started on June 1, early in the Colorado fire season, which turned out to be somewhat helpful. There are only so many firefighters, engines, planes and helicopters to go around, and federal agencies must allocate them based on current and emerging threats to life and property. For a time, the Durango fire was the highest priority wildfire in the United States, and that means the crews fighting it got everything they needed. Including the VLAT.

When it comes to controlling a fire, aircraft are one of the most important tools in the arsenal. Whether it’s helicopters dropping a few hundred gallons of water on a single burning tree or enormous aircraft dropping tens of thousands of gallons of flame-suppressing chemicals at once, aircraft can change the tide of the fight. The rarest resource of all is the VLAT, or Very Large Air Tanker. Oftentimes these are repurposed DC-10’s with 11,600-gallon capacities, five times as much as a Large Air Tanker. And they put on quite a show, as this video shot by Durango Fire & Rescue (where I was a volunteer firefighter for five years) makes clear:

“They’ll use it to buy time strategically,” explains Deputy Chief Randy Black of Durango Fire & Rescue. “They don’t want to put crews in steep terrain at night. They’ll bring one in and paint the line, and that can take care of it for the evening. That was the last aircraft to come in, then sometime the next afternoon they started working that line.”

The red chemical mixture, or slurry, this aircraft dumps isn’t actually meant to extinguish the flames. “It’s to push the fire out of the trees and down to the ground,” says Black. “They’ll get it down to the ground, then do a burn off from the line up to the fire and control it. Create the line they want on their terms.”

The line is all important in battling wildfires, where the main tactic is cutting the flames off from the fuel they need to keep going. This part of the process looks like high-precision, high-speed landscaping. Twenty-man hand crews will use chainsaws, shovels, and a specialized tool called a Pulaski to remove leaves, pine needles, and other sorts of fuel from a stretch of ground to create a barrier around the fire. If the fire is creeping along the ground, an 18-inch wide stretch of line just might be enough to stop it.

Sometimes, the best way to fight fire is, yes, with fire. A controlled burn can eat up the fuel the main fire needs to advance. By creating an area of “black”, or burned out ground, firefighters can control where the fire goes.

“You have actual line, then the black, leading up to the fire that’s burning. Then you can mop up and make sure it’s cold in the black area. You’ll have a strong, reinforced line and you’re good,” says Chief Black. “Slurry bombers are working on slowing the fire and trying to control it to the point where it would be a line.”

Each unit relies on the other to work. A plane dropping slurry can’t do much without crews on the ground reinforcing the drop, and those crews can’t do anything if the fire is torching— jumping from tree to tree high above the ground. The logistics are daunting, especially when aircraft are involved: It can take hours for a DC-10 to return to base, refuel, refill with slurry, and then get back to the fire. In Durango, the plane needs to go back to Colorado Springs, which takes at least a two-and-a-half hour turnaround time. An aerial attack team must coordinate all of the assets at hand to best fight the fire. VLATs, helicopters, heavy tankers, single engine air tankers, ground crews—all to steer and manage the fire as best they can.

“That’s the science coming out of the command team, the fire behavior analysts, and meteorologists,” says Black. “Here’s what the weather is, tactically do this, then do this at this time. They have all this fuel modeling software and engineers—it’s not two 1970s Forest Service dudes sitting up in a tower there hoping this works. It’s a calculated scientific process.”

And when fire season roars in, you just hope it’s enough.

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Welcome To The Highly Probable World of Improbability

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the problem of intergalactic travel is ultimately solved by suspending an atomic vector plotter in a nice hot cup of tea. The tea, it turns out, is a strong producer of Brownian Motion: The molecules of water are moving pseudo-randomly, and any given specific configuration of those molecules is highly improbable. The vector plotter takes the improbability of that particular nice hot cup of tea, converts it into the identical improbability of intergalactic travel, and, presto, spaceships can travel, instantly, through every point of every conceivable universe.

To put it another way: Highly improbable events are all around us. Those events can make for extremely exciting sport competitions — after running 10,000 simulations, for instance, a team of 18 analysts from Swiss banking giant UBS determined that Germany, with a 91 percent chance of making it through to the round of 16, was by far the most likely country to win the World Cup. Instead, Germany crashed out at the bottom of its group, losing not only to Mexico but also to South Korea.

Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. He hosts the Slate Money podcast and the Cause & Effect blog. Previously he was a finance blogger at Reuters and at Condé Nast Portfolio.

At roughly the same time, in June’s midterm primaries, 28-year-old political neophyte Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spectacularly dethroned Joseph Crowley, the powerful congressman who chaired not only the Queens County Democratic Party but also the House Democratic Caucus. Her thumping victory was a direct consequence of another highly improbable result — the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president. Trump’s election came in the wake of an electoral upset across the pond — the Brexit referendum — which came as such a surprise that the most sophisticated prediction mechanism on the planet, the global foreign-exchange market, was blindsided in the middle of the British night. If you were one of the small group of hedge funds that bet in the right direction, you ended up making well over $100 million in the space of a few hours.

Humans love to read meaning into the unexpected and the improbable, even where there is none. As the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s best seller has it, we’re fooled by randomness. When Germany fails to make it out of the group stage of the World Cup, the pundits say it turned out to be a weaker team than anybody thought; when Ocasio-Cortez beats Crowley, we say that’s because she ran a powerful grassroots campaign that was largely invisible to the media elite; when Trump is elected president or when Britain votes to leave the EU, that’s because of … [insert any one of a thousand explanations here].

None of these narratives is wrong, exactly; they just tend to overlook the simple fact that improbable events happen on a regular basis, and that for every improbable event that happens, there are dozens which don’t. In certain artificial contexts, the frequency of improbable events can even be quantified: If you’re playing backgammon or craps, for instance, you know that you’ll get double ones one time in every 36 rolls, on average. If you roll a pair of dice a hundred times and never get double ones, you might not be surprised, but at the same time something fishy is going on.

These narratives tend to overlook the simple fact that improbableevents happen on a regular basis, and that for every improbable eventthat happens, there are dozens which don’t.

In the real world, probabilities tend to be Bayesian rather than frequentist — which is to say, their improbability is not something that can be measured empirically, but is rather a function of the available evidence and the direction that evidence points. You can’t measure the probability of outcomes in the World Cup or an election by re-running the same experiment thousands of times, since these are events that are played only once.

Still, there’s nothing inevitable about their outcome, and it remains important and true to be able to say that Germany was probably going to win their group, that Crowley had every reason to expect an easy victory, and that any presidential election where one candidate gets 4 million more votes than her opponent is overwhelmingly likely to result in that candidate’s victory. The recriminations that invariably follow an improbable event all too often ascribe an inevitability to a result which wasn’t inevitable at all and which in truth can most honestly be credited simply to bad luck.

In many ways, the really improbable event of recent decades was the manner in which so much of the world experienced stability and predictability. What was the probability that we could, collectively, have created such an unprecedented quantity of wealth, health, and prosperity? The late Hans Rosling astonished audiences worldwide by showing them the enormous gains that humanity has made; economists tend to work from the assumption that nearly every economy will grow in nearly every year, and that the rare periods of shrinkage, or recession, are anomalies which can generally be blamed on misguided government policy. The growth assumption is generally true today, but would have been hilariously false for most of human history. Steady, compounding economic growth is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is almost impossible to grasp instinctively.

Perhaps human intuition has something important to tell us here: That those audiences were right to be astonished by Rosling’s statistics, and that it’s perfectly normal for things to go down as often as they go up. Certainly the sweepingly new political enterprises being installed in countries from China to Hungary to Mexico — not to mention the US — are explicitly designed to upend the old system and replace it with something radically different. Disorder and unpredictability used to be the result of political mistakes and miscalculations; increasingly they’re a desired outcome of political leaders, with Donald Trump gleefully playing the role of chaos monkey in chief.

Disorder and unpredictability used to be the result of politicalmistakes and miscalculations; increasingly they’re a desired outcomeof political leaders.

The current world is one which has lost the probabilistic dampeners we all got used to growing up. We find ourselves immersed, much like Douglas Adams’s atomic vector plotter, in a soup of improbability—a place where we have to expect the unexpected. Such a world rewards resilience and improvisation; it naturally defeats well-laid plans.

The next time something improbable happens, then, don’t kick yourself for failing to see it coming, and don’t kid yourself that it was in any way inevitable. The best you can do is recalibrate and remain nimble. Because no matter what universe you find yourself in today, it’s very likely to be significantly different tomorrow.

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How to Take a Screenshot on a Mac

July 9, 2018July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

In the age of ephemeral communication, you need the receipts. Screenshots act as digital proof of what’s been said and done. They’re also a convenient way to capture, save, and send information to yourself and to your friends.

You probably already know how to take one. But do you know all the ways to do it? Here’s a primer on capturing screenshots on a Mac.

Entire Screen Shot

You’re watching West World on your laptop and Dolores is making a particularly fierce facial expression that you want to savor forever. This is a perfect time to take a screenshot of your whole computer screen. Press Command, then Shift, then 3. The image of your entire screen will be saved to your computer’s desktop. Use it to make the Dolores meme of your dreams.

Window Shot

Maybe you don’t want your whole screen, but a specific window open on your desktop. Hold down Command + Shift + 4, and then press space. Your cursor will turn into a little camera icon. With this activated, any window you hover over will turn gray; the entire window or application will appear in your screenshot. Click on the window you want to capture.

Selection Shot

You’re planning to see the Incredibles 2 at your local movie theater, but you and your date haven’t decided on a showtime. Instead of texting the movie times one by one, send your date a screenshot. You don’t need to send them the whole window, and you definitely don’t need to send them the whole screen. You want a cropped image that centers the Incredibles 2 showtimes. Press Command + Shift + 4, and a marquee selection tool will appear. Click and drag to highlight the selection you need. When you release, the selected area will be saved to your desktop.

Copy to Clipboard

If you just need a shot for immediate copy-and-paste purposes—not something you want to save to your desktop—add the Control button into the mix. For screenshot of the entire screen, you’ll press Command + Shift + Control and then 3. This will copy the screenshot to your clipboard instead of saving it to your desktop. When you’re ready to paste it, hit Command + V.

Use Preview

You can also take screenshots through the Preview Application. Open Preview, and from the File dropdown menu, hover over Take Screenshot. From there choose to capture a screenshot of a Selection, Window, or Entire Screen. Once it’s been taken, the image appears in preview. With Preview, you can change the automatic PNG format to JPEG, PDF and more.

Full Page Screen Capture

Sometimes you want to capture an entire webpage to save an article or story. This can be especially useful if you’re about to be without internet for a while. The Chrome extension, Full Page Screen Capture, lets you do just that. Download the extension for free from the Chrome web store. It’s icon will appear as a little camera in the top right corner of the page. Go to the page you’d like to save and simply click that icon when you’re ready to save it. From there, you’ll be given the option to save it in PNG format as an image, or PDF format as a file.

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Review: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ and the Importance of Small Stories in Big Universes

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

In Hollywood, it’s all about size. Big budgets, supersized casts, boffo box office openings. And in that world, there is perhaps nothing larger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If Avengers: Infinity War proved anything, it’s that the MCU had earned its scope. It would make sense, then, that the latest installment—Ant-Man and the Wasp—would look to hitch its wagon to its bonafide stars. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t need to. It has, to borrow the internet’s latest mini-meme, BDE.

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Before we get into that, or any more size jokes, a few points of clarity. Ant-Man and the Wasp takes place pretty much concurrently with Infinity War. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) briefly mentioned in that movie that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) would be sitting out the battle with Thanos, and in his standalone movie we find out why: His jaunt to Germany in Captain America: Civil War put him in violation of the Sokovia Accords, which forced him into house arrest in the Bay Area. So while the other Avengers were fighting Thanos out in the galaxy and in the fields of Wakanda, Ant-Man was stuck at home. How his story will tie in with the greater MCU isn’t even truly revealed until the (very good, but terrible to spoil) post-credits scene—a throwback to the time when all of the Marvel movies’ But wait, there’s more! moments teased the massive team-up to come.

And really, that’s exactly what an Ant-Man movie needs. Frankly, it’s what the MCU needs. After a few films where the fate of the entire universe hung in the balance—Infinity War, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok—Marvel needed a palate-cleanser, a movie that wasn’t all-or-nothing. And while director Peyton Reed’s movie trashes a few San Francisco tourist destinations, no country is decimated, and no planet gets pummeled. Hela, the Goddess of Death, is nowhere to be found. It’s just a little side-hustle about Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) trying to rescue Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer)—their wife and mother, respectively—from the quantum realm. It’s a Post-It Note reminder of an adventure.

And it’s a fantastic time. The setup: Scott is a just a few days away from completing his house arrest when he has a dream about Janet Van Dyne, a quantum entanglement that provides the key her family needs to get her out after being stuck there for 30 years. (An unanswered question: Where does one eat/sleep/poop in the quantum realm, which basically looks like a floor-less hot-box tent at Coachella?) But, as is always the case, getting Janet out isn’t that simple—especially since they’re trying to do it while a gangster, played by a wonderfully maniacal Walton Goggins, and a new mysterious villain called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) both vie for control of Pym’s lab and all the technology inside.

This kind of tightly-constructed story not only avoids the problems other recent Marvel movies have had with trying to do too much, it also gives the movie time to breathe, to develop characters and build worlds, without having to shift focus to a whole new location and collection of heroes every 10 minutes.

This kind of tightly-constructed story not only avoids the problems other recent Marvel movies have had with trying to do too much, it also gives the movie time to breathe, to develop characters and build worlds, without having to shift focus to a whole new location and collection of heroes every 10 minutes. All of which is to say, it lets Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp grow—and steal the show. Ant-Man may get top billing, but Hope is the one driving the action. (I mean that literally, she hits the streets of San Francisco like Steve McQueen in Bullitt.) Not only does she get the better fight scenes, she also delivers a fair share of one-liners, which isn’t an easy task in a movie that brought back Michael Peña’s Luis for some grand scene larceny. And when it comes to world-building, the Ant-Man sequel delves even further into the quantum realm, showing its many wrinkles and rainbows in a way reminiscent of how Doctor Strange built out its various mystical realms. It also, in a nod to super science nerds, features tardigrades, the microscopic “water bears” that look like pill bugs in khakis.

Then there’s the matter of Ant-Man and the Wasp‘s breadth, which, wisely, focuses simply on Scott Lang’s attempt to help Hank and Hope while not getting caught for violating his parole. It’s efficient, and feels like a turn of events that could take place in the time allotted. Marvel movies have always had strange scopes: They’re massive events of global (or galactic) significance that often begin and end in under a week. It’s hard to tell since the sun never sets in space, but I’d estimate the massive fights of Infinity War wrapped up in about 48 hours of real time. Ant-Man and the Wasp completes its full arc in a smooth 36, give or take, along with a comfortably digestible two-hour run time. And that’s all the time it needs—in both duration and story—to unspool its plot and catch Scott and Hope up with all of the Avengers, chronologically speaking. Everything you need in one tiny time capsule.

Truly, lean-and-meanness is Ant-Man and the Wasp’s greatest gift. After a few films full of all-you-can-eat chest-thumping, Reed’s movie is a necessary digestif, all the joys of a Marvel movie shrunk down into a quick caper that cuts through the post-Infinity War fog. Yes, this is all part of Marvel’s design. The studio knew it needed a breather between that film and next year’s Captain Marvel. But that doesn’t mean that Ant-Man and the Wasp, with all of their ease and banter, shouldn’t saunter in and have a little fun. The payoff is huge—even if the movie isn’t.

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How to Check App Permissions on iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

You probably spend a lot of your day inside apps: catching up on the news, playing music and movies, keeping in touch with friends, racing cartoon characters around a track, and so on. Every once in a while though, it’s worth running an audit on these apps to make sure they’re not overreaching and going beyond their remit—collecting more data about you and controlling more of your devices than you’d like.

Here’s how you can put controls on what your apps are allowed to do on Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS.

Choosing App Permissions

App permissions are the privileges an app has—like being able to access your phone’s camera or your laptop’s contact list—but deciding which ones to switch on or off isn’t an exact science.

Granting those permissions isn’t in and of itself a mistake; generally, trusted developers won’t request anything they don’t need for the app to function, even if that purpose isn’t immediately clear. Facebook Messenger asks for access to your microphone, for instance, not because it’s eavesdropping on you but because it has a voice-memo function.

That said, if you don’t plan on ever using that feature, you might as well disallow it. Similarly, an app might request access to your contacts so you can more easily share a link or split a bill with someone—it isn’t necessarily harvesting all your contact data and putting it in a database somewhere. But if blocking that contact access doesn’t break basic functionality? Go for it.

If you really want to dig deep into these permissions, check out the app’s data and privacy policy as well, which should explain what it does with the data that gets collected (like your location or contacts list). These policies are often couched in vague language, but they should help you decide what to disallow.

Even if you don’t make any changes though, it’s still a good idea to be aware of what privileges you’re giving to your apps. When in doubt, check the app listing or website for details. If you’re lucky (and the developers have done their job), you might find a list of requested permissions and what they’re used for.

Again, this can help in choosing which ones to switch off. If disabling a certain permission causes the app to misbehave or become less useful—you turn off phone-location access in your favorite mapping app, for example—then you can always turn it back on. Here’s how to do both on all the major platforms.

Android App Permissions

Android comes in a variety of flavors depending on which manufacturer makes the phone, but here we’ll list the required steps for the stock version of Android installed on the Google Pixel. Your version may not match exactly, but you should be able to find something similar on your handset.

Open up the Settings app and head to the Apps & notifications menu. Then, tap on the app you want to look at (if you can’t spot it, tap See all). Tap on Permissions to see everything the app has access to: A messaging app, for instance, might have access to SMS. To turn off a permission, tap on it. If the permission is particularly important to the app, you might have to tap a confirmation box.

A more comprehensive list of permissions can be found by tapping App permissions on the Apps & notifications screen. Here you can browse by permission—from microphone access to call logs—and switch off any you’re not comfortable with. As before, you’ll be warned if you’re disabling a permission that an app significantly relies on.

If you notice an app behaving strangely after you’ve removed a certain permission, or part of the app no longer works, you need to decide whether to allow the permission or live without that particular bit of functionality.

iOS App Permissions

As on Android, iOS apps request permissions as and when they need them, though you’ll usually see a flurry of requests—including one to show notifications—when you first install something new. You can revoke these permissions at any time.

From the Settings app, tap Privacy to see all the permissions available on your phone: access to photos, motion and fitness data, your phone’s location, and so on. Tap on any entry to see the apps granted those permissions and to disable those permissions, if necessary.

The exact choices vary depending on the permission. For location data, for example, you can grant access to an app all the time or only when the app is open. With Apple Health data, meanwhile, you can give an app access to certain bits of data, like the hours you’ve slept, but not others, like the steps you’ve walked.

Scroll down the Settings screen beyond the Privacy menu to find individual app entries. Tap on any app to access the same permissions as before, plus some extra ones—like access to notifications and permission to use cellular data as well as Wi-Fi. Again, a simple tap on an option or toggle switch is enough to grant or refuse a permission.

Windows App Permissions

As Windows 10 has evolved over time, it’s become more smartphone-like in the way it handles apps, and that includes the way it handles app permissions. Click the cog on the Start menu to open Settings, then pick Privacy to see what your installed apps are allowed to do on the OS.

The options are sorted by permission rather than by app, so click any of the entries on the left side to see apps with access: Location, Camera, Pictures, and so on. Each screen looks slightly different, but if you scroll down you’ll see a list of apps associated with that permission. You can grant or revoke them with a click on the relevant toggle switch.

With all of these permissions, you can turn off app access completely: For example, you might decide you don’t want any of your applications using your webcam. Note though that these screens cover apps installed only from the Windows Store and some apps bundled with Windows, like Mail and Cortana.

For full desktop apps with access to all your system resources, like Photoshop, there’s no easy way of controlling permissions; these apps may have some options available in their respective preferences boxes, but otherwise you’ll have to completely uninstall any that you aren’t happy with.

MacOS App Permissions

Finally to macOS, which has a simple and straightforward permissions management screen that closely resembles the one in iOS. To find it, open up the Apple menu, then choose System Preferences. From there, click Security & Privacy, then open the Privacy tab.

Here you can see all the permission categories, from location to app analytics. Click on any of the entries on the left side to see which apps have requested and been given permission. The screens look slightly different depending on which permission you’re dealing with, but they’re all straightforward.

To make changes to permissions, click the lock icon on the lower left, then enter your macOS username and password to confirm you have the authority to modify these settings. You can then untick the box next to any permission you’re not happy with. Note that the changes won’t be applied to open apps until they’re restarted.

As on Windows, desktop applications are of course more complex than their mobile counterparts, so you might find more permission and privacy options by delving into the programs themselves—most will have a preferences pane available.

And there you have it! Just remember that even when you set your app permissions the way you like them, the wording can still be vague about what they’ll do with the info they collect. The safest way to keep an app you don’t trust from accessing things it shouldn’t will always be to not download it in the first place.

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The Air Force Is Already Betting on SpaceX’s Brand-New Falcon Heavy

July 4, 2018 by Curt Long

Falcon Heavy is about to take off in a big way. Just a few months after its thrilling debut, SpaceX’s heavy-lift rocket is back in the headlines. Not for sending another cherry-red Tesla into space, but for gaining some major accolades from the Air Force.

In a surprising move, and after just one flight, the Air Force announced it has certified Falcon Heavy for military launches and awarded the vehicle its first highly coveted launch contract: the AFSPC-52 mission. The contract is valued at $130 million—that’s the price of ferrying the Air Force Space Command-52 satellite to its intended orbit sometime in 2020.

SpaceX wasn’t the only launch provider hoping to snag this sought-after contract. The Air Force said in a press release that more than one launch provider put in a bid. Although United Launch Alliance was not named in the announcement, it is implied that SpaceX’s newly-debuted Falcon Heavy beat out the competition’s tried-and-true Delta IV Heavy—the only other heavy-lift vehicle certified by the Air Force.

“SpaceX is honored by the Air Force’s selection of Falcon Heavy to launch the competitively-awarded AFSPC-52 mission,” SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement released to the media last week. “On behalf of all of our employees, I want to thank the Air Force for certifying Falcon Heavy, awarding us this critically important mission, and for their trust and confidence in our company.”

But SpaceX hasn’t always had the Air Force’s full confidence. In 2015, the aerospace company petitioned the military branch to allow multiple launch providers the chance to compete for lucrative military contracts—contracts that, up until that point, ULA had a monopoly on.

Eventually the Air Force opened the bidding process to any provider that has met its certifications—which now includes just SpaceX and ULA. That process normally requires at least three successful flights for any given vehicle; Falcon 9 was approved in 2015. But the Falcon Heavy is a different matter.

After only one flight, the Air Force decided the heavy lifter had earned its seal of approval. It will still need to fly at least three times before AFSPC-52’s scheduled 2020 launch date to maintain the contract.

This makes the Falcon Heavy—essentially three strapped-together Falcon 9 rockets—a powerful new weapon in SpaceX’s arsenal. According to SpaceX’s stats, the Falcon Heavy can deliver 140,660 pounds of mass to low earth orbit and 58,860 pounds to geostationary transfer orbit. For comparison, United Launch Alliance says its Delta IV Heavy can haul 62,540 pounds to LEO and 30,440 pounds to geostationary transfer orbit.

The increased capacity comes with another perk: a lower price. The $130 million associated with this mission is approximately one-third to one-half that of the Delta IV Heavy, which ULA CEO Tory Bruno says costs around $350 million.

SpaceX is also scooping up big bucks from the state of Florida—$14.5 million from Space Florida, the agency that manages the state’s aerospace economic development. The funds will help cover the aerospace company’s planned expansions, including a new rocket hangar, a launch-and-landing control center, and a rocket garden that could be used to display retired boosters.

The creation of a new 480,000-square-foot campus would enable SpaceX to store and refurbish large numbers of Falcon rocket boosters and nose cones near the launch pad—supporting its goal of rapid reusability. The company’s current digs include two launch pads, a launch control center nestled inside a small office complex right outside the Air Force station, and facilities at the port where drone ships return with recovered boosters. A hangar adjacent to launchpad 39A is capable of holding only three boosters.

But SpaceX expects that in the future it might have as many as 50 first-stage boosters. If that happens, it will need significantly larger facilities to process the boosters and any other part of the rocket SpaceX is able to reuse.

SpaceX will also need facilities to handle its planned Starlink satellite constellation. To date, the aerospace company has launched only two satellites of potentially thousands. The two experimental broadband satellites—dubbed TinTin A and B—launched in February, and SpaceX aims to start with 800 satellites as early as 2020 or 2021.

Don’t go dreaming of frolicking through SpaceX’s new rocket garden just yet. The proposed expansion still needs to pass Kennedy’s environmental review. But with SpaceX snagging new military contracts, it could take shape soon.

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July 3, 2018 by Curt Long

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HTC U12 Plus Review: No Buttons, Mo Problems

July 9, 2018July 3, 2018 by Curt Long

One day, smartphones will be reduced to their simplest, most elemental form: a single slab of glass. That’s what shows like Black Mirror, The Expanse, and even (yes) Parks & Recreation like to tell us. I’ve always thought that future was a ways off, but HTC is apparently ready to get the ball rolling.

HTC’s new U12 Plus (styled U12+ by HTC themselves) has completely eliminated physical buttons. It has spots on its sides that resemble volume and power buttons, but they’re really just pressure-sensitive bumps that make a clicky vibration when you push ‘em. If the lack of buttons sounds strange, you should know that HTC made the sides of its phone pressure sensitive, too. You can squeeze it to open apps or perform actions like zooming on a map.

It’s fun to see a phone maker experiment with new concepts, and it’s hard not to root for HTC, one of the smartphone pioneers. But, sometimes change for the sake of change turns ugly—this time, the price of said change was my sanity.

Under Pressure

The U12 Plus never behaves. It’s tricksy like those hobbitses—always up to something. Sometimes the screen shuts off when I pick it up, or the camera app springs to life on its own. Other times I’ll successfully unlock it and accidentally shut the screen off again.

It gets up to the most mischief when it’s in my pocket. Without fail, if I’m walking around it will somehow unlock itself and start doing something nefarious. I’ve gotten used to feeling that annoying vibration, telling me that I need to turn my phone’s screen off again. For a while I had convinced myself that it has changed its ways. What I didn’t realize was that the phone had yet again gone rogue, slipping into its silent mode.

After a week, I shut off the touch-able edges (called Edge Sense) altogether, which hasn’t alleviated the problem. It’s just not particularly fun to use fake buttons—in use they’re overly sensitive when you don’t want them to be, and infuriatingly difficult to press when they shouldn’t be. Ratcheting up the volume is also slower, and more of a chore. Sometimes it takes more pressure than it should, but mostly it’s just so silly to have to have to think about how I’m pressing the volume buttons on my phone.

The Show Must Go On

I’ve grown to accept (but dislike) those touchy buttons, and if you pretend they aren’t there, the U12 Plus is a good Android phone.

My U12 Plus had a black metal frame and translucent blue finish on the back, which lets you peek through parts of the glass. It’s gorgeous, but not particularly durable. Since it’s covered in Gorilla Glass 3 (not 5), it’s a little less tough than some newer phones—not that any of them are particularly crack resistant under the right conditions. To its credit, HTC included a cheap, but usable plastic case in the box. The case wasn’t my favorite, but I do recommend keeping it on.

The one time I took the case off, it slipped off a counter within minutes. It survived, but picked up a noticeable nick on its edge, which hurts my gadget-caring soul just a little every time it catches my eye.

HTC’s 6-inch 2,880 x 1,440 pixel Super LCD screen is notchless and beautiful, like always, though it does run a little dim by default. What you see on the screen is mostly Google’s new Android 8 Oreo operating system, though HTC still included some of its customary visual touches and apps. It’s mostly harmless stuff, but HTC’s apps aren’t particularly pretty to look at, and some are overly aggressive about demanding privileges. It’s also odd that I can’t make the grid of homescreen icons more dense on such a big screen, and the interface seems to hiccup whenever I open the app drawer, which hasn’t regularly happened on an expensive phone for a few years now.

The hiccup is especially worrying because this is a very powerful phone—about as fast as any Android phone out there in our benchmark tests, including the Samsung Galaxy S9. It runs on the prized new Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and packs 6 GB of RAM and 64GB of file storage (with a MicroSD slot if you need more).

Battery life is only so-so. It always lasted until midnight at least, but many days, my battery meter dropped below 20 percent by the evening. One late night it did die on me. Some phones can regularly stretch their juice to a full day and a half. The HTC U12 isn’t one of them, and that’s disappointing.

Crazy Little Thing Called Bokeh

All four of the cameras work well. Unlike a lot of competitors, HTC decided to put two 8-megapixel selfie cams on the U12 Plus, along with dueling 12-megapixel and 16-megapixel rear cameras. The rear camera has optical image stabilization and uses its extra cam to perform a 2x optical zooming and nice portrait shots with an artificially blurred background.

The phone can take some beautiful shots. Photos snap incredibly quickly thanks to its fast f/1.75 aperture and responsive camera software. It had a little trouble with some macro shots of flowers, but even on a cloudy day, many of my outdoor shots looked lovely. Some low light selfies also turned out better than I expected.

Jeffrey Van Camp

Jeffrey Van Camp

The Auto HDR contrast enhancement was a little more hit or miss. I ended up turning it off because it added too much contrast, darkening areas of a photo more than needed. But while shooting the setting sun over a pond, HDR effectively blacked out the grass. It may have looked stylish, but it wasn’t accurate. HTC’s camera does enhance color and will add funny effects, smooth your wrinkles, or help your face lose a few pounds if you’re having that kind of day. I prefer reality. Luckily, HTC lets you choose.

The fake bokeh portrait effect isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough you might use it in real life. On the other hand, the selfie portrait mode felt a little less refined and seemed to kind of blur the edges of my head more than, well it just shouldn’t blur my head at all. But it’s still works better than many other high-end phones.

Another One Bites the Dust

You can buy the HTC U12 Plus unlocked for $800 ($850 for 128GB), and it will work on every major wireless network except Sprint. It’s as powerful as any 2018 phone, and comes with a great camera, case, waterproof build, and some solid earbuds.

But for every positive, there’s a negative. It has no audio jack, HTC’s included software is either ‘meh’ or outright annoying, and the battery life is behind the pack, not nearly as long as the OnePlus 6 or Galaxy S9.

And then there are the touch buttons. You can get used to having no volume or power buttons, but if you’re like me, it’s a sacrifice that will routinely annoy you. The lack of actual buttons made it difficult (sometimes impossible) to even take a screenshot, something you usually do by holding Volume Down + Power.

As much as I like aspects of the U12, I just can’t recommend a modern phone that falls flat on its face when you’re trying to crank up the volume on a podcast. Minimalism for the sake of it, no matter if it’s in the pursuit of futuristic design, has badly harmed the poor HTC U12 Plus.

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A Fourth of July Drone Show Helps Military Families With Special Needs

July 9, 2018July 3, 2018 by Curt Long

Last year, Brianna Santos and her family didn’t leave home for the Fourth of July. Stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, Santos and her husband, a senior airman with the 60th Civil Engineer Squadron, have seven children, five of whom have specialized medical needs. Her youngest daughter has a tracheostomy tube. Getting into a nearby town for a fireworks show was logistically overwhelming; even if they’d made it, the sounds and lights were overwhelming to some of her older kids.

The Santoses are just one of 1,000 families stationed at Travis who participate the Exceptional Family Member Program, which offers additional support for active personnel who have dependents who require ongoing medical care, be it physical or psychological. This year, they’ll celebrate Independence Day on base, thanks in part to a drone-powered light show that promises all the spectacle of a traditional fireworks display but far fewer complications.

Video by Intel

“Having it here on base, it really reduces that stress,” Santos says. “Just being somewhere familiar.”

You might remember the Intel Shooting Star drones from the Pyeongchang Olympics Opening Ceremony in February and Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show in 2017. On Wednesday night, 500 of the foot-long, 8-ounce quadcopters will ascend over an open field near the edge of Travis Air Force Base (weather permitting—winds have been picking up this week), dodging and zipping though a preprogrammed show that includes simulated fireworks, sure, but also custom-crafted imagery, like a pixelated homage to the KC-10 and C-17 aircraft that call Travis home. [Update: The July 4 drone show was canceled due to 30 mph winds, and rescheduled for July 5.]

Putting It Together

A number of factors make traditional fireworks impractical for the base, home to 10,000 active duty personnel and their family members, who bring the total population to 26,000. There’s the climate, first of all; fires start too easily in Northern California to send sparks flying with confidence. And then there’s the high concentration of EFMP members, for many of whom a fireworks show is untenable. Last year, rather than host a Fourth of July event, the base directed people to celebrations in nearby towns.

In early May this year, though, leaders at Travis had a thought that quickly turned into a revelation. The base has an existing relationship with Intel through its “grassroots innovation” program called Phoenix Spark. Having seen Intel’s glossy drone productions in the past, they wondered if there might be an opportunity to do the same for Travis. The timing felt right: This year also marks the base’s 75th anniversary.

That may seem like a short timeline in which to organize an original drone display, but the Shooting Star system allows for quick work. An animator choreographs a routine using 3-D design software, and each drone gets mapped onto an individual pixel. That also allows for a lot more flexibility than a traditional fireworks display might; imagination becomes the main limiting factor.

“A light show is a lot more than digitized fireworks. Fireworks have certain shapes and categorizations that come with what you can visualize with fireworks,” says Anil Nanduri, general manager of Intel’s drone group. “You can do all that visualization with drones, as well, but a lot more. You can put letters, you can put logos and animations. You can put stories in the sky.”

Intel

That flexibility means that while Wednesday’s show will be the first Intel drone light show to sub in for traditional Fourth of July fireworks, it won’t be a one-to-one replacement. It adds those planes, as well as an American flag, a hashtag with special significance to the base, and a few other custom touches, all by special request.

“We gave them a series of images that we were hoping to incorporate into the show,” says Captain Lyndsey Horn, chief of public affairs for the 60th Air Mobility Wing. “We basically provided those images, and they created the show around that.”

The most important difference from traditional fireworks, though, will be its inclusiveness. Drones may not pack quite the same visceral wallop as literal explosions in the sky, but they’ll help the Santos family and many others at Travis celebrate the Fourth in a way they haven’t been able to for years.

Lights, Action

Travis provides a compelling backdrop for a drone light show, but quadcopters aren’t likely to displace traditional fireworks displays anytime soon. While Nanduri notes that a Shooting Star show has more customization options and less of an environmental impact than pointing colorful boom-rockets toward the heavens, the drones come with some caveats.

There’s the wind, first of all; anything greater than 18 miles per hour or so will scuttle the flight. Current battery technology also allows for maximum duration of only about 20 minutes. Most shows come in well under that, between four and seven minutes a pop. That may feel slight next to the sustained quake of a fireworks display. And then there’s the cost: Nanduri says an individual Shooting Star drone show can run up a six-figure tab. (Intel will provide the Travis display free of charge.)

That said, Intel’s swarm has started making appearances apart from the globally significant sporting events where they first gained notice. They showed up at Pride Week in San Francisco in June and at Coachella before that. And like any new technology, each iteration helps expand capabilities and drive down cost.

“With drones, they’re reusable. You have to look at the economics of it as value creation. They’re not just about doing a one-off fireworks display; you can do a lot more with it,” Nanduri says. “The economics work based on reuse of the platform.”

Long-term prospects aside, though, Wednesday’s drone light show at Travis Air Force Base highlights a benefit that has no dollar sign attached.

“There’s lots of families with kids on base, mine included, where you can’t take them to your typical fireworks show, because the sounds and the lights of the show can be very overwhelming,” Santos says. “We really appreciate that they have this.”

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Wild Elephant Mom Delivers Once-In-A-Lifetime Surprise

July 9, 2018July 3, 2018 by Curt Long

At Amboseli National Park in Kenya, nearly 1,600 elephants roam free with their families and friends.

But recently, one family welcomed some new babies who were extra special. They’re so rare, in fact, that the park hasn’t seen this since 1980.

Elephant twins.

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