SpaceX aims for a Wednesday rocket launch after second abort in two days

Why it matters to you

No one ever said that creating a reusable rocket system was going to be easy, but despite the current difficulties SpaceX is continuing to make huge strides in its endeavors.

SpaceX had been enjoying a decent run of successful launches since resuming its operations in January after a four-month lay-off caused by September’s rocket explosion.

But it came to an end on Sunday night when Elon Musk’s private space company had to abort a mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida just seconds from lift-off. It happened again on Monday, and now the team is hoping for a case of “third time lucky,” possibly on Wednesday evening.

Sunday’s night’s aborted mission was put down to a computer guidance issue, while the cause of July 4’s abandonment, which like Sunday’s effort occurred within 10 seconds of lift-off, is yet to be fully determined.

Desperate to avoid any major mishap along the lines of last year’s launchpad calamity, SpaceX said it would be performing thorough checks before its third launch attempt, which, when it eventually takes place, will put  the Intelsat 35e communications satellite into geostationary orbit.

“Out of an abundance of caution, SpaceX will be spending the Fourth of July doing a full review of the rocket and launch pad systems,” the company said on its website. “The next launch opportunity for Intelsat 35e … is now no earlier than Wednesday.”

When the mission does eventually takes place, the large amount of energy needed to deliver the satellite into geostationary orbit (much higher higher than the Falcon 9’s usual low-Earth orbit missions) means the rocket won’t have enough fuel to bring it back to terra firma for one of those awesome landings SpaceX fans have come to know and love. The company has so far achieved 13 launch-and-land combos.

Better news

There was better news for the SpaceX earlier in the week when it successfully welcomed back its Dragon capsule, the first to make more than one mission. The capsule delivered supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) in early June and stayed docked till its return voyage, splashing into the Pacific Ocean south-west of Los Angeles on Monday.

“Dragon’s been an incredible spacecraft,” current ISS astronaut Jack Fischer told mission control shortly after the the capsule left its outpost, adding, “I could even say it was slathered in awesome sauce. This baby had almost no problems, which is an incredible feat considering it’s the first reuse of a Dragon vehicle.”

This particular Dragon capsule made its first mission to the ISS in 2014 and forms part of the reusable space transportation system being developed by SpaceX in a bid to significantly reduce the cost of space travel.

Actors on streaming shows reach a deal for better pay

It’s not just writers who are getting a better deal from streaming video providers. SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have reached a “tentative” 3-year deal that includes better pay for actors on Amazon, Hulu, Netflix and other subscription-based on-demand services. They’ll now get their first residual payments (compensation for subsequent showings) within 90 days, rather than a year. They’ll also get a higher residual rate, and will receive their first residuals for “foreign use.” A streaming show available worldwide will be about 300 percent more lucrative over the first 2 years.

It’s safe to say that this will raise production costs in the streaming world, although it’s going to be a while before we know the practical impact. There’s no guarantee that it’ll lead to subscription fee hikes. However, the agreement could ultimately help internet video by luring actors toward internet-oriented shows they wouldn’t consider otherwise. It’s easy for a company like Netflix to throw money at major stars — it’s harder to attract mid-tier actors bound to standard contracts. This won’t necessarily lead to better shows, but it could give streaming media more credibility in an industry that still revolves around TV and film.

Source: SAG-AFTRA

The future of tickets might be ultrasonic audio from your phone

Dealing with paper tickets may become a thing of the past if Ticketmaster’s new “Presence” digital system takes off. The ticket agency worked with data-via-audio company Lisnr to implement a new ticketing technology that uses a ultrasonic audio broadcast to transfer data from your smartphone to a venue. The benefit to consumers is a faster entry to their favorite music or sporting event, while Ticketmaster then gets to know who is at an event, reducing fraud. It also helps the company control scalping of unused tickets.

Lisnr’s audio technology uses what it calls “Smart Tones” in the hard-to-hear 18.7 – 19.5 kHZ range to transmit data between compatible devices. Venues can also place receivers all around a concert arena, which can track exactly where people are in order to send customized messages. Maybe ones like, “get back to your assigned seats.” VentureBeat reports that the technology will be used to authenticate event attendees for “hundreds of millions of tickets,” and will roll out globally over the next four years. According to VentureBeat, Ticketmaster’s future plans include using the technology for attendee purchases instead of credit cards or NFC as well as empowering artists to engage with fans.

It’s not just ticket sellers that can use audio technology like this, of course. Jaguar Land Rover is using Lisnr tech to identify specific drivers and then personalize the interior of a car for them with seat and climate control preferences. Chirp has been sending data between iPhones using sound for years now, and Google uses ultrasonic audio as part of its Nearby Messages API. The new partnership with Ticketmaster may take this nascent technology into the mainstream, however. It’s not hard to imagine the tech powering shopping malls, advertising systems or even helping people find the tissues in a big-box store like Costco. For now, though, getting into a concert faster seems like a solid application of the tech.

Source: VentureBeat

Traveling to India? These are the apps you need to install

India has a thriving local app ecosystem, and you should take advantage of that.

India is now the second-largest smartphone market, only behind China. Mainstream availability of 4G and an influx of affordable handsets has led to a meteoric rise in smartphone adoption in the country, and for millions of users, their phone is the only gateway to the internet. As a result, there’s a thriving app ecosystem in the country.

If you’re traveling to India for the first time or are returning to the country, these are the apps you need to install on your phone.

Google Maps

Google Maps comes bundled with every Android phone, which is a good thing as the service is invaluable in India. Most cities in the country aren’t well-planned, and a distinct lack of road signs makes getting to your destination harder than it should be. While you can ask around for directions — most of the country is English literate — a better option is to just use Google Maps.

Google has invested significant resources into its Maps program in India, and the service is as reliable as it is in Western markets. You get easy access to live traffic information, along with schedules for public transit, the ability to download areas offline, and turn-by-turn directions. If you’re heading to a city like Bangalore, where the traffic situation is unpredictable at best and downright horrendous most days, you’re going to need Maps.

Everything you need to know about Google Maps

Uber/Ola

Public transportation isn’t the best way of getting around in India, but there’s no dearth of ride-hailing services in the country. India is one of Uber’s largest markets, and you’re likely to find a cab at any hours of the day in most cities. In the odd instance that you cannot get a cab on Uber, you can rely on Ola, India’s local ride-hailing service.

Both Uber and Ola let you book a ride in advance. With Uber, you can use the number and credit card account that’s already associated with your account, but with Ola you’ll have to use a local number. If you don’t already have a local number, you can easily get your hands on one. When it comes to payment, you can add your credit card, or use cash.

• Download Uber from the Play Store
• Download Ola from the Play Store

Google Translate

English literacy is great in most sections of India, but there will be times when you’ll run into locales where there’s only Hindi or other regional languages. India has over 23 official languages, so a good bet is to have Translate installed. Because India is a major market for Google, the search giant has done a lot of the legwork in translating some of the more commonly used languages in the country. As such, you’ll be able to get on-the-fly translation even if you’re in remote sections of India.

Download Google Translate from the Play Store

Paytm

Paytm is one of the most useful services in India. The app lets you book local flights, trains, and buses, and offers the easiest way to pay for purchases at most local stores. The service started out as a digital wallet, and most merchants — including restaurants, retail stores, and street vendors — now accept Paytm as a valid form of payment.

To get started, you’ll need to have a local SIM card as Paytm relies on a mobile number for sending a OTP (one-time password) during account creation. Once you set up, you can send money by scanning a QR code at an establishment, or via entering the recipient’s mobile number.

• Download Paytm from the Play Store
• How to pick up a local SIM in India

Zomato

Zomato is India’s version of Yelp. You can easily find a restaurant of your liking based on your cuisine or budget preferences, and it has a curated list that highlights prominent eateries in a particular city. Like Yelp, Zomato has an active community of users that rate restaurants.

Download Zomato from the Play Store

BookMyShow/Insider

If you’re going to be in India for a while or are looking to explore local events — there are plenty of gigs every weekend in major cities — you should take a look at BookMyShow. The service is present in most major cities, and gives you a detailed selection of all the events in town.

BookMyShow’s user experience has deteriorated over the course of the last year — you’ll see ads everywhere — but the service is still great at highlighting events in your city. An alternative to BookMyShow is Insider, which is slowly gaining ground.

• Download BookMyShow from the Play Store
• Download Insider from the Play Store

Hyperlocal delivery

If you’re not looking to go out, there are several apps that you can use to get food delivered to your location. Swiggy and Zomato Order are two of the leading hyperlocal delivery services, with both apps serving up options around a five-kilometer radius from your location.

Need to get groceries delivered? No problem. BigBasket is the FreshDirect of India, and you’ll be able to buy everything from fruits and vegetables to packaged goods and household essentials. The best part is that delivery only costs ₹20 (30 cents), and the service also offers a 90-minute delivery option if you’re in a hurry that will set you back just ₹30 ($45 cents).

If you’re traveling to Bangalore, you should try out Google’s own solution, Aero. The app collates information from several hyperlocal services, giving you a variety of options from a single interface.

• Download Swiggy from the Play Store
• Download Zomato Order from the Play Store
• Download BigBasket from the Play Store

Find My Device

Finally, before you head off on your travels, make sure you have Find My Device installed and set up. Google recently overhauled the user interface, but the core functionality is still intact. Find My Device lets you remotely track, lock, and erase the data on a lost or stolen phone.

• Download Find My Device from the Play Store
• Find My Device: The ultimate guide to finding your lost phone

Got any questions? Let us know in the comments below.

A bus powered by formic acid could hit the road this year

Creating sustainable vehicle fuel is rife with challenges, not least in finding the balance between developing a viable solution and putting forward ideas that have mainstream appeal: poo-powered cars sound great in theory, but, y’know…

However, students from the Eindhoven University of Technology, Team FAST, are now throwing their hats into the ring with a design for the first ever system that allows a bus to drive on formic acid. Their system, officially unveiled on 6 July, comprises an electric bus hooked up to a small trailer (nicknamed ‘REX’, for ‘range-extender’), where formic acid is converted into electricity.

Formic acid naturally occurs in stinging nettles and certain species of ants, but it’s also manufactured cheaply and safely on an industrial level, and is typically used for preserving livestock feed. Team FAST uses a blend of 99% formic acid with a performance enhancing agent to create Hydrozine — which has four times as much energy density as a battery — to power the bus. The CO2 produced in splitting the hydrozine is used during the electricity-making process, so it’s completely carbon neutral.

The system is 42,000 times stronger than the scale model the team originally presented in 2016 and is capable of producing 25kW of power. While Team FAST is still running final tests, it’s hoped the bus will be fully operational by the end of the year.

Source: Eindhoven University of Technology

GTA modding tool quietly reappears after legal threats

The popular Grand Theft Auto V modding tool OpenIV now looks to be back in action, just weeks after its creators found themselves in a whole heap of legal trouble. Last month GTA publisher Take Two Interactive sent the creators of the modding software a cease and desist letter, claiming that the tool allowed users to bypass the game’s security features and violated the publisher’s rights. Unsurprisingly, this forced OpenIV to remove the mod’s download link from its site on June 14th, resulting in a huge community backlash. Now, that link is back up and fans can once again download the modding tool directly from OpenIV’s website.

While this obviously bodes well for the modding community, this isn’t a completely unexpected turn of events. On June 23rd, fans were given a glimmer of hope that suggested the situation had begun to resolve itself with OpenIV quietly releasing an update that contained a few bug fixes. Alongside the surprise patch, GTA developers Rockstar released a statement claiming that they’d no longer seek legal action against modders creating single player content, implying that online mods will continue to be targeted.

Following the download link going back up, the mod creators confirmed in a statement to Kotaku that “The development of OpenIV will be continued soon.” This means that while fans can continue to download the software, surroundings legal issues may shape how the project continues in the future. With Take Two’s last statement merely saying that they won’t “generally” take legal action against third party projects, for many weary modders, the lack of clarity means that this dispute is still far from resolved.

Source: Kotaku

Extremely detailed images of living cells can now be taken over time

Advanced microscope technology now lets us view objects at the nanoscale, meaning, when it comes to biology, we can see details of living cells that were never possible before. But doing that comes with a few requirements that have been fairly limiting. For instance, you have to be able to pack a lot of fluorescent dye into the object you want to see and you need that dye to be really stable. Typically, those sorts of dyes grab onto proteins in the object, but proteins are often not distributed densely enough, limiting how much dye can be introduced. Also, these fluorescent dyes tend to bleach out really quickly, only giving researchers a few seconds of imaging time.

But scientists at Yale University have developed a new method that gets around both of those problems. Instead of linking their dye to a protein, they had it attach to a lipid – the fatty material surrounding most cellular organelles. Targeting lipids over proteins allows researchers to get far more dye into the object and protects that dye from photo-bleaching, meaning it sticks around much longer. With this technique, detailed views of cellular organelles like the endoplasmic reticulum can be sustained for tens of minutes rather than just seconds. The developers of this technique were even able to create 3D images of cellular organelles.

They used these high-density environment-sensitive, or HIDE, probes in the endoplasmic reticulum but they say that the same technique can be used with any lipid. Just program the probe to attach to a lipid specific to the organelle you’re interested in, and it will allow for the same high-resolution, long time-lapse imaging. The research was published this week in Nature Biotechnology.

Source: Nature Biotechnology

A robot that milks scorpions could aid cancer research

A scorpion-milking robot designed to extract and store venom could put an end to the tricky manual method traditionally used by scientists. Researchers at the Ben M’sik Hassan II University in Morocco claim their robot not only speeds up the extraction process, but also makes it safer.

Scorpion venom is used in a variety of medical fields, including cancer research, and the development of anti-malarial drugs. Current harvesting methods include electrical and mechanical stimulation, which can prove deadly for the scorpions and troublesome for scientists, due to electric shocks from the equipment. Not to mention the fact that the mere thought of grasping a venomous arachnid sounds pretty darn terrifying.

The lightweight VES-4 device created by Mouad Mkamel and his team of researchers is a portable robot that can be used in the lab and in the field. It works by clamping the scorpion’s tail and electrically simulating the animal to express droplets of venom, which it captures and stores. The VES-4 wouldn’t be the first robot to be utlized by medical scientists. In the past, robotic devices have been used to design drugs, with researchers also recently suggesting humanoid robots be employed to grow human tissue grafts.

“[VES-4] is designed to extract scorpion venom without harming the animal and to provide more safety for the experimenters,” said Mkamel. “It could [even] be used by one person using a remote control to safely recover scorpion venom remotely.”

The robot has been tested on multiple species of scorpions and can be programmed to remember them via its adjustable settings. It also contains an LED screen that displays the name of the species being milked.

Source: EurekAlert!

Valve is taking control of the competitive ‘Dota 2’ scene

Next month, Valve will host The International 7 at Seattle’s KeyArena. The annual Dota 2 tournament is all but set to break the record for prize pools in eSports for the fourth year running, with over $20 million in the kitty to date. But GabeN & Co is already looking past the headline championships to the next competitive season. While Dota 2 tournaments happen all the time, there are only three “official” Valve events: two “Majors” and The International. Next season, though, the house that Steam built will embrace the wider competitive community in a big way, sponsoring third-party tournaments and creating a new ranking system that will define how 2018’s International plays out.

While the shift signals a much more inclusive approach to official tournaments — creating something of a global league akin to many traditional sports — the third parties running them will have to abide by Volvo’s rules to join the party, and thus relinquish some control to the company. For starters, there will be two calibers of events. “Minors” must have a minimum prize pool of $150,000, and “Majors” at least $500,000 — Valve will bless these tournaments with its own contribution of those minimum values to top up the coffers. Each tournament will also have to include one qualifying team from every region: North America, South America, China, Europe, The Commonwealth of Independent States and Southeast Asia.

To avoid lag issues, each tournament must culminate in a LAN final, and perhaps where the long arm of GabeN is most apparent, Valve “will directly manage the schedule of Majors and Minors to help avoid collisions during the year.” Almost all significant Dota 2 tournaments that run currently will be eligible for Minor or Major status, so Valve is introducing what it calls “Qualifying Points” (and we’ll call QPs) to keep track of all the results. These will be based on the grade of tournament and the size of the prize pool, but will also scale the closer we get to next summer’s International in a sort of crescendo of competition as teams scramble to qualify — no more guaranteed invites next season, you see.

Interestingly, it’s actually individual players that will accrue QPs, not teams. This should result in even more roster changes throughout the season, particularly as teams try to get themselves in the best qualifying shape ahead of The International. The points system won’t stop new players from entering the fold, though, as only the QPs of the top three players on a team will matter. A new leaderboard will show how the standings change throughout the season, too. QPs will serve as a more official rating system among pro players. “Matchmaking ranking” (MMR) — points players amass from winning public games — is currently accepted as the primary skill indicator. But as one wise sensei once said, “MMR is just a number.”

Source: Valve (Dota 2 blog)

BMW video teases the i8 electric roadster

Last week brought news that BMW has spent $5.8 billion developing electric vehicles and is streamlining its products to pay for it (getting by with fewer than the current 100 different steering wheels, for example). As part of that enormous shift in direction, we also learned that the i5 is dead in favor of electrified versions of more mainstream vehicles like the 3 Series. Now, we’re getting a look at what may be the next Bavarian EV on the market, the i8 roadster.

BMW released the above video, with only the slightest bit of text teasing the virtues of “open-top driving pleasure – virtually silent and with zero local emissions.”

We’ve seen the i8 roadster plenty of times before, in concept form going back to 2012, and recently in spy shots with the top up and top down, but BMW’s teaser video is our clearest look yet.

Naturally, it will share the fixed-roof i8’s aluminum chassis and carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic cell. And we’re assuming no changes to the i8 coupe’s total hybrid output of 357 horsepower and 420 pound-feet of torque. The car can turn 0-to-60 mph in 4.2 seconds, and back in 2014 it was Autoblog’s Technology Car of the Year. We’ve been hearing about the coming of this car for a long time, but last we heard it will hit showrooms in 2019. The release of this video might just mean that’s happening.

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