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The key moment came 38 minutes after Starship roared off the launch pad
SpaceX wasn’t able to catch the Super Heavy booster, but Starship is on the cusp of orbital flight.
SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for a even larger, upgraded vehicle to debut on the next test flight.
The world’s biggest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas at 4 pm CST (22:00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico propelled by 33 Raptor engines arranged on the bottom of its first stage booster, known as the Super Heavy.
A few miles away, President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX founder Elon Musk to witness the launch. The SpaceX boss became one of Trump’s most crucial allies in this year’s presidential election.
A year after ditching waitlist, Starlink says it is “sold out” in parts of US
SpaceX’s Starlink doesn’t have enough capacity for everyone who wants it.
The Starlink waitlist is back in certain parts of the US, including several large cities on the West Coast and in Texas. The Starlink availability map says the service is sold out in and around Seattle; Spokane, Washington; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Sacramento, California; and Austin, Texas. Neighboring cities and towns are included in the sold-out zones.
There are additional sold-out areas in small parts of Colorado, Montana, and North Carolina. As PCMag noted yesterday, the change comes about a year after Starlink added capacity and removed its waitlist throughout the US.
Elsewhere in North America, there are some sold-out areas in Canada and Mexico. Across the Atlantic, Starlink is sold out in London and neighboring cities. Starlink is not yet available in most of Africa, and some of the areas where it is available are sold out.
Microsoft and Atom Computing combine for quantum error correction demo
New work provides a good view of where the field currently stands.
In September, Microsoft made an unusual combination of announcements. It demonstrated progress with quantum error correction, something that will be needed for the technology to move much beyond the interesting demo phase, using hardware from a quantum computing startup called Quantinuum. At the same time, however, the company also announced that it was forming a partnership with a different startup, Atom Computing, which uses a different technology to make qubits available for computations.
Given that, it was probably inevitable that the folks in Redmond, Washington, would want to show that similar error correction techniques would also work with Atom Computing’s hardware. It didn’t take long, as the two companies are releasing a draft manuscript describing their work on error correction today. The paper serves as both a good summary of where things currently stand in the world of error correction, as well as a good look at some of the distinct features of computation using neutral atoms.
Atoms and errors
While we have various technologies that provide a way of storing and manipulating bits of quantum information, none of them can be operated error-free. At present, errors make it difficult to perform even the simplest computations that are clearly beyond the capabilities of classical computers. More sophisticated algorithms would inevitably encounter an error before they could be completed, a situation that would remain true even if we could somehow improve the hardware error rates of qubits by a factor of 1,000—something we’re unlikely to ever be able to do.
Niantic uses Pokémon Go player data to build AI navigation system
Visual scans of the world have helped Niantic build what it calls a “Large Geospatial Model.”
Last week, Niantic announced plans to create an AI model for navigating the physical world using scans collected from players of its mobile games, such as Pokémon Go, and from users of its Scaniverse app, reports 404 Media.
All AI models require training data. So far, companies have collected data from websites, YouTube videos, books, audio sources, and more, but this is perhaps the first we’ve heard of AI training data collected through a mobile gaming app.
“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” wrote Niantic in a company blog post.
Automatic braking systems save lives. Now they’ll need to work at 62 mph.
Regulators have ordered an expansion of the tech, but the auto industry says the upgrade won’t be easy.
The world is full of feel-bad news. Here’s something to feel good about: Automatic emergency braking is one of the great car safety-tech success stories.
Auto-braking systems, called AEB for short, use sensors including cameras, radar, and lidar to sense when a crash is about to happen and warn drivers—then automatically apply the brakes if drivers don’t respond. It’s a handy thing to have in those vital few moments before your car careens into the back of another. One industry group estimates that US automakers’ move to install AEB on most cars—something they did voluntarily, in cooperation with road safety advocates—will prevent 42,000 crashes and 20,000 injuries by 2025.
A new report from AAA finds these emergency braking systems are getting even better—and challenges automakers to perfect them at even higher speeds.
Apple TV+ spent $20B on original content. If only people actually watched.
Apple TV+ has a lot of prestige, but not a lot of viewers.
In the streaming world, Apple has a reputation for quality, thanks to its Apple TV hardware and Apple TV+ streaming service. The latter is best associated with original shows and movies surrounded by award buzz and critical acclaim. But despite that success, Apple’s streaming service has hardly made a dent in the market at a time when interest in streaming services is bigger than ever.
Apple TV+ launched in 2019. Since then, the company has spent over $20 billion to build an impressive library of original content, Bloomberg reported earlier this year. Yet, despite a highly regarded library of shows and movies with big names in acting and directing, Apple TV+ only garnered 0.3 percent of US screen viewing time in June 2024, per Nielsen.
In July, Bloomberg aptly underscored how minimally competitive Apple TV+ is, writing: “Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.”
Cable companies and Trump’s FCC chair agree: Data caps are good for you
Data caps reflect “highly competitive environment,” cable lobby tells FCC.
The Federal Communications Commission’s plan to investigate and potentially regulate data caps is all but dead now, after President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he will promote Commissioner Brendan Carr to the chairmanship role.
The FCC last month voted 3–2 to open a formal inquiry into how broadband data caps affect consumers and whether the commission has authority to regulate how Internet service providers impose such caps. The proceeding is continuing for now, as the FCC comment and reply comment deadlines are November 14 and December 2. You can view the docket here.
Broadband industry lobby groups knew they would face no possibility of data-cap regulation once Trump won the election. But they submitted their comments late last week, making the case that data caps are good for customers and that the FCC has no authority to regulate them—the same arguments that Carr made when he dissented from the vote to open an inquiry.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrives with a “full digital twin” of Earth
Machine learning generates the closer-up ground in this very big sequel.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is out today (Xbox/PC, Steam), and it packs in a whole lot of simulation. It’s hard to imagine topping the 2020 version, which contained the entire world, at scale, 3D modeled and able to be flown over. It had real-time weather and rather detailed physics. You could theoretically fly a helicopter back to your high school football field and land on it, like 15-year reunion royalty. What could come next?
A lot, including a world simulation that Microsoft repeatedly describes as Earth’s “full digital twin.” There are few, if any, real “reviews” up yet, given the size of the game and seemingly late access for reviewers. As such, I offer up all the notable things packed into this latest release so that those with flight sticks, patience, and a desire to get way up yonder can decide whether to take off.
It’s a whole lot smaller, at least on first install. The 2020 version would take about 130GB on first grab (or 90GB if you manually loaded in 10 DVDs), but 2024 is “around 30” gigabytes, according to Asobo CEO Sebastian Wloch, who spoke with TechRadar. This should also be a major boon to those playing on Xbox, where space is more constrained.
Scientist behind superconductivity claims ousted
After claims of high-temp superconductivity were retracted, Ranga Dias lost his university job.
University of Rochester physicist Ranga Dias made headlines with his controversial claims of high-temperature superconductivity—and made headlines again when the two papers reporting the breakthroughs were later retracted under suspicion of scientific misconduct, although Dias denied any wrongdoing. The university conducted a formal investigation over the past year and has now terminated Dias’ employment, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“In the past year, the university completed a fair and thorough investigation—conducted by a panel of nationally and internationally known physicists—into data reliability concerns within several retracted papers in which Dias served as a senior and corresponding author,” a spokeswoman for the University of Rochester said in a statement to the WSJ, confirming his termination. “The final report concluded that he engaged in research misconduct while a faculty member here.”
She declined to elaborate further on the details of his departure, and Dias did not respond to the WSJ’s request for comment. Dias did not have tenure, so the final decision rested with the Board of Trustees after a recommendation from university President Sarah Mangelsdorf. Mangelsdorf had called for terminating his position in an August letter to the chair and vice chair of the Board of Trustees, so the decision should not come as a surprise. Dias’ lawsuit claiming that the investigation was biased was dismissed by a judge in April.
Ars has been following this story ever since Dias first burst onto the scene with reports of a high-pressure, room-temperature superconductor, published in Nature in 2020. Even as that paper was being retracted due to concerns about the validity of some of its data, Dias published a second paper in Nature claiming a similar breakthrough: a superconductor that works at high temperatures but somewhat lower pressures. Shortly afterward, that paper was retracted as well. As Ars Science Editor John Timmer reported previously:
Dias’ lab was focused on high-pressure superconductivity. At extreme pressures, the orbitals where electrons hang out get distorted, which can alter the chemistry and electronic properties of materials. This can mean the formation of chemical compounds that don’t exist at normal pressures, along with distinct conductivity. In a number of cases, these changes enabled superconductivity at unusually high temperatures, although still well below the freezing point of water.
Dias, however, supposedly found a combination of chemicals that would boost the transition to superconductivity to near room temperature, although only at extreme pressures. While the results were plausible, the details regarding how some of the data was processed to produce one of the paper’s key graphs were lacking, and Dias didn’t provide a clear explanation.
The ensuing investigation cleared Dias of misconduct for that first paper. Then came the second paper, which reported another high-temperature superconductor forming at less extreme pressures. However, potential problems soon became apparent, with many of the authors calling for its retraction, although Dias did not.
“Windows 365 Link” is Microsoft’s $349 thin client for Windows in the cloud
Small, plastic thin client is Microsoft’s first “Cloud PC,” launches in April.
Microsoft is announcing some new hardware today, but it’s a bit different from a typical Surface device. The Windows 365 Link, which launches in April for $349, is a mini desktop PC that exists exclusively to connect to the Windows 365 cloud service rather than running Windows locally.
The Windows 365 Link is a plain black plastic box with a Windows logo imprinted on the top—it looks like a smaller, squarer version of the Windows Dev Kit 2023, an Arm desktop that Microsoft released for developers a couple of years ago. The box has one USB-A port on the front for easy access. On the back, you get a single USB-C 3.2 port, two more USB-A ports, a full-size DisplayPort, a full-size HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and a power jack.
Windows Central reports that the device is fanless, uses an unspecified Intel processor, and includes 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. It runs a cut-down Windows variant that exists only to connect to local peripherals and make contact with Microsoft’s Windows 365 service. When not connected to the Internet, the PC is mostly non-functional, though there is presumably some kind of basic UI available for connecting to networks and accessories locally.