California Governor Gavin Newsom today signed a bill into law allowing college athletes to get paid for endorsements, setting up a battle between the state government and the NCAA.
The NCAA strongly opposes California's Fair Play to Pay Act and has threatened to sue the state and prohibit California colleges from competing in NCAA events, even though the new law doesn't actually require colleges to pay athletes. Instead, the act allows student athletes to hire agents and get paid by third parties for sports-related endorsements.
"Colleges and universities reap billions from these student athletes' sacrifices and success but block them from earning a single dollar. That's a bankrupt model," Newsom said in his announcement of the bill signing. When it takes effect in 2023, the new law will make California "the first state in the nation to allow student athletes to receive compensation from the use of their name, image, and likeness," the announcement said.
Over the years we’ve seen the Raspberry Pi crammed into almost any piece of hardware you can think of. Frankly, seeing what kind of unusual consumer gadget you can shoehorn a Pi into has become something of a meme in our circles. But the thing we see considerably less of are custom designed practical enclosures which actually play to the Pi’s strengths. Which is a shame, because as the MutantC created by [rahmanshaber] shows, there’s some incredible untapped potential there.
The MutantC features a QWERTY keyboard and sliding display, and seems more than a little inspired by early smartphone designs. You know, how they were before Apple came in and managed to convince every other manufacturer that there was no future for mobile devices with hardware keyboards. Unfortunately, hacking sessions will need to remain tethered as there’s currently no battery in the device. Though this is something [rahmanshaber] says he’s actively working on.
The custom PCB in the MutantC will work with either the Pi Zero or the full size variant, but [rahmanshaber] warns that the latest and greatest Pi 4 isn’t supported due to concerns about overheating. Beyond the Pi the parts list is pretty short, and mainly boils down to the 3D printed enclosure and the components required for the QWERTY board: 43 tactile switches and a SparkFun Pro Micro. Everything is open source, so you can have your own boards run off, print your case, and you’ll be well on the way to reliving those two-way pager glory days.
We’re excited to see where such a well documented open source project like MutantC goes from here. While the lack of an internal battery might be a show stopper for some applications, we think the overall form factor here is fantastic. Combined with the knowledge [Brian Benchoff] collected in his quest to perfect the small-scale keyboard, you’d have something very close to the mythical mobile Linux device that hackers have been dreaming of.
Martians invade Earth in The War of the Worlds, a new BBC adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel.
The BBC dropped the first trailer for its upcoming adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. The three-part miniseries is set in Edwardian England—just a few years after Wells published his novel—and it looks to be a fairly faithful treatment of the source material, as the people of Earth fight to survive in the face of a Martian invasion.
(Spoilers for the 1897 novel below.)
First serialized in 1897, The War of the Worlds was published as a book the following year and has remained print ever since. Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, the story opens with astronomers on Earth observing what appear to be explosions on the surface of Mars through their telescopes. Soon after, a meteor falls to Earth, which turns out to be a capsule housing large, tentacled aliens. The creatures do not come in peace; instead, they use their tripod fighting machines to destroy much of the town of Woking and its surroundings with their heat rays and poisonous black smoke.
Today, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 13.1.2, as well as watchOS 6.0.1. All of the updates are focused on bug fixes.
The iOS release fixes an issue that prevented Bluetooth connectivity, plus others that stopped the Camera app and the flashlight from functioning in certain situations. Both the iOS and iPadOS updates fixed a bug that left a progress bar still visible after iCloud Backup completed its task. The updates also righted another issue affecting shortcuts on HomePods.
For institutions with high traffic, such as schools and movie theaters, it can be difficult to keep track of individuals moving in and out, especially without a critical mass of security. For schools especially, keeping track of student attendance and preventing kids from leaving campus in the middle of the day can be a costly problem.
The solution that Tunisian engineers [Michael Djimeli], [Darius Koliou], and [Jinette Tankoua] came up with was to create a smart gate that only turns when checks are carried out by designated security officers. The design is retrofitted to existing school turnstiles in his hometown of Monastir, Tunisia, and uses an RFID card, biometric devices, and a host of access controls to ensure that the student attempting to turn the turnstile is validated first.
The smart gate uses a few methods for identification – either by RFID, fingerprint, facial recognition, or by reading a QR code. An external database stores each user’s data and their transaction history, effectively storing their attendance data. In addition to relaying the information to an administrator, the smart gate also checks the credit of the user — whether they’ve paid the entrance fee for a movie theater, or whether they’re permitted to exit school grounds as a student.
A Raspberry Pi is used as the card collector, relaying information on transaction data over WiFi. Meanwhile local identification information via biometric devices and key fobs are relayed to the processor over Bluetooth. There are also plans to develop a mobile app to track the status of the smart gate remotely.
While the full systems integration isn’t published yet, there are several photos of the control box, which shows the components used for the first smart gate. The mechanical design was successfully tested on the IUC Douala Cameroon university campus (with 35-45 students identified per minute), and the project will hopefully be repeated within more schools in the coming year.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has found a new leader for its Solar System exploration program, and the choice of Bobby Braun signals a willingness to adapt to the changing world of aerospace.
Braun, an engineer who specializes in cutting-edge technology, will join the NASA laboratory from the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he served as dean. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (or JPL) has led NASA's efforts to explore the Solar System with uncrewed spacecraft from the beginning.
"JPL has always been a special place to me," Braun said in an interview. "It is the center of our nation's planetary exploration efforts, with flagship missions that have rewritten our textbooks." Those missions have included the Voyager excursions through and beyond the Solar System, dedicated probes to Jupiter and Saturn, and multiple landings on Mars.
If the current Administration of the United States has their way, humans will return to the surface of the Moon far sooner than many had expected. But even if NASA can’t meet the aggressive timeline they’ve been given by the White House, it seems inevitable that there will be fresh boot prints on the lunar surface within the coming decades. Between commercial operators and international competition, we’re seeing the dawn of a New Space Race, with the ultimate goal being the long-term habitation of our nearest celestial neighbor.
But even with modern technology, it won’t be easy, and it certainly won’t be cheap. While commercial companies such as SpaceX have significantly reduced the cost of delivering payloads to the Moon, we’ll still need every advantage to ensure the economical viability of a lunar outpost. One approach is in situ resource utilization, where instead of transporting everything from Earth, locally sourced materials are used wherever possible. This technique would not only be useful on the Moon, but many believe it will be absolutely necessary if we’re to have any chance of sending a human mission to Mars.
One of the most interesting applications of this concept is the creation of a building material from the lunar regolith. Roughly analogous to soil here on Earth, regolith is a powdery substance made up of grains of rock and micrometeoroid fragments, and contains silicon, calcium, and iron. Mixed with water, or in some proposals sulfur, it’s believed the resulting concrete-like material could be used in much the same way it is here on Earth. Building dwellings in-place with this “lunarcrete” would be faster, cheaper, and easier than building a comparable structure on Earth and transporting it to the lunar surface.
Now, thanks to recent research performed aboard the International Space Station, we have a much better idea of what to expect when those first batches of locally-sourced concrete are mixed up on the Moon or Mars. Of course, like most things related to spaceflight, the reality has proved to be a bit more complex than expected.
The Gravity of the Situation
That you could mix lunar regolith up into a substance that would harden like concrete was never really in question. Chemically it all checks out, and there were even some very promising experiments done with samples returned from the Apollo missions. But while scientists could expose the resulting mixture to a vacuum easily enough, there was no way to study how it would cure in low-gravity environments.
Short of going to the Moon or Mars and trying it in field, the only way to see how extraterrestrial concrete would behave on these worlds is by simulating their gravity in space. Here on the surface of the Earth, there’s no way to lower the force of gravity, but in space you have the luxury of starting from what’s effectively zero. Aboard an orbiting spacecraft, a sample can be placed inside of a centrifuge and spun up to simulate the roughly 17% of Earth’s gravity it would be subjected to on the Moon, or 38% in the case of Mars.
Which is exactly what astronauts aboard the ISS did during the Microgravity Investigation of Cement Solidification (MICS) experiment. Pouches filled with a hydrated cement mixture were placed in the Multi-use Variable-g Platform (MPV), a commercially owned and operated centrifuge that can be run from 0.1 to 2G. Samples were spun up to expose them to artificial gravity equal to what they would experience on the surface of the Moon and Mars, while control samples were left to cure in the normal microgravity environment aboard the ISS.
The Science of Concrete
The impact of varying gravitational strength on curing concrete might not be immediately obvious. Here on Earth the process seems so simple: just mix it up with some water, let it sit out, and in 24 hours or so you have a solid block. To understand the situation better, we first need to look at what concrete actually is, and what’s happening at the microscopic level as it cures.
Firstly, while there’s a tendency to use the terms interchangeably in casual conversation, concrete and cement are not the same thing. Concrete is actually the end result of mixing an aggregate (sand, gravel, etc) with cement, which acts as a binder to hold it all together. Put another way, you can have cement without concrete, but you can’t have concrete without cement. Research performed during the MICS experiment has therefore focused on cement, as that’s the first step towards producing concrete strong enough to actually build a structure.
While curing, two different processes are occurring inside the concrete. The aggregate, being heavier than the cement, has a tendency to slowly sink towards the bottom. At the same time, the cement is crystalizing which “glues” the aggregate in place. Striking a balance between aggregate sedimentation and cement crystallization is key to producing a strong final product, but as both processes are heavily dependent on gravity, the strength of concrete cured in low or zero G has always been a topic of debate.
Early Results
Researchers from Pennsylvania State University and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center are still analyzing the returned cement samples, but so far they’ve already made some very interesting observations. Further experiments will almost certainly be required before any kind of definitive statement can be made, but clearly we’ve got a lot to learn before the first concrete structures can be poured on the surface of the Moon.
The good news is that lower gravity leads to reduced sedimentation. Without Earth’s gravity to pull the heavier material down to the bottom of the mixture, the cured concrete should be of a more uniform density and therefore stronger. It also means that the ratio of aggregate to cement can potentially be increased, resulting in a denser concrete than would normally be possible on Earth.
Unfortunately, the samples also show that the crystalline structure of the space-cured cement is more porous than its terrestrial counterpart. The hardened cement contains voids which are likely due to the fact that air bubbles in the mixture are less likely to rise to the surface under reduced gravity. Future experiments will likely focus on ways to reduce the number of air bubbles that remain in the cement as it cures, potentially via mechanical vibration or exposure to a low-level vacuum. While it might seem that exposing the cement to the total vacuum of space would solve the issue, previous experiments have shown that this causes the water in the mixture to sublimate; with the water drawn out, the curing process stalls and the cement never hardens.
Put simply, the structure of space concrete is nearly the opposite of traditional concrete. On Earth, gravity causes aggregates to sink to the bottom while air bubbles rise to the top. But in reduced gravity, there’s a tendency for everything to stay in suspension. When cured, this results in a material that’s more uniform but considerably less dense than it is on Earth. How this will affect the final strength of the concrete and its usability as a building material off-world is yet to be seen. Until then, affordable housing will remain one of the many challenges of living on the Moon.
Cinemood is a $300 ultra-portable, lithium-ion powered projector in a lightweight (8oz) form factor roughly the size of a Rubik's Cube. It's an Android device with no video input that projects from factory pre-loaded videos or onboard streaming apps like Netflix or YouTube at 640x360—and it's not a short-throw projector, either. In our testing, Cinemood needed a 12-foot throw distance to display a rather washed-out image about the size of a 65" TV set.
In order to avoid burying the lede, you might as well know up front, we do not recommend this device at this price—but we do have some good alternatives for you at the end of the review if you're in the market for a relatively cheap and portable projector.
This is not a large device. My 14" laptop, pictured, absolutely dwarfs the Cinemood box, let alone Cinemood itself. [credit: Jim Salter ]
A tale of two projectors
Before we get into the real review, let's talk a little inside baseball. A couple of months ago, a vendor I'd never heard of pitched me on reviewing Vava—a high end, 4K resolution, ultra-short-throw home theater projector with a $2,500 price tag. This projector claimed to provide a 150" display from only a few inches' distance, a Harmon-Kardon sound system, and more. I said sure, sounds fun.
It seems like the physics of silicon long ago replaced the chemistry of silver as the primary means of creating photographs, to the point where few of us even have film cameras anymore, and home darkrooms are a relic of the deep past. Nobody doubts that the ability to snap a quick photo or even to create a work of photographic genius with a tiny device that fits in your pocket is a wonder of the world, but still, digital photographs can lack some of the soul of film photography.
Recapturing the look of old school photography is a passion for a relatively small group of dedicated photographers, who ply their craft with equipment and chemistries that haven’t been in widespread use for a hundred years. The tools of this specialty trade are hard to come by commercially, so practitioners of alternate photographic processes are by definition hackers, making current equipment bend to the old ways. Pierre-Loup is one such artist, working with collodion plates, hacked large-format cameras, pinholes camera, and chemicals and processes galore – anything that lets him capture a unique image. His photographs are eerie, with analog imperfections that Photoshop would have a hard time creating.
Join us as Pierre-Loup takes us on a tour through the world of alternative photography. We’ll look at the different chemistries used in alternative photography, the reasons why anyone would want to try it, and the equipment needed to pull it off. Photography was always a hack, until it wasn’t; Pierre-Loup will show us how he’s trying to put some soul back into it.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.
On September 26, a data center in a former NATO military bunker in the town of Traben-Trarbach, Germany was raided by police, according to a report by the Associated Press. Set up by a man who authorities describe as a 59-year-old Dutchman, the "CyberBunker" offered "bulletproof" hosting services—promising to keep hosted sites secure from law enforcement actions and operational regardless of legal demands.
According to authorities, the bunker housed the servers for a multitude of "dark web" sites selling drugs, hosting child pornography, and conducting other illegal activities. Among the sites hosted was "Wall Street Market," which authorities claim was one of the world's largest criminal marketplaces—selling drugs, stolen financial data, and hacking tools—until it was taken down earlier this year. The Traben-Trabach data center was also involved in a 2016 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Deutsche Telekom.
Seven people were arrested, and six other suspects, including two Dutch nationals, are still being sought by police. The raid was part of a coordinated law enforcement action at five locations by authorities in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Luxembourg.
A few weeks ago, we asked folks at both the main and fashion-specific Rainbow Six subreddits to share pictures of their Rainbow Six: Siege operators and loadouts. We took some of those submissions and shared them with Ubisoft Presentation Art Director Alex Karpazis to get his expert take on the style and the strategy behind these character choices.
Karpazis has plenty to say about the purely superficial bits of Rainbow Six style, calling out some rocking "Twitch Prime purple hair" in particular. But he also gets into how that style can affect gameplay, as with different gun sights that "obscure different parts of the screen" when trying to make your shot. There's also some general strategy advice mixed in, especially for people who accidentally kill their hostages with Fuze's grenade-spreading gadget.
A peek behind the scenes during the shoot.
We also convinced Karpazis to show off his own in-game loadouts and stats, a process he preceded by saying "Nobody is good at Rainbow, including me... Please be gentle, I get it."
On Tuesday, D-Wave announced the details of its next-generation computation hardware, which it's calling "Advantage," and released a set of white papers that describe some of the machine's performance characteristics. While some of the details of the upcoming system have been revealed earlier, Ars had the chance to sit in on a D-Wave users' group meeting, which included talks by company VP of Product dDsign, Mark Johnson and Senior Scientist Cathy McGeoch. We also sat down to discuss the hardware with Alan Baratz, D-Wave's chief product officer. They gave us a sense of what to expect when the machine comes online next year.
Part of the landscape
D-Wave's hardware performs a form of computation that's distinct from the one being pursued by companies like Google, Intel, and IBM. Those companies are attempting to build a gate-based quantum computer that's able to perform general computation, but they've run into known issues with scaling up the number of qubits and limiting the appearance of noise in their computations. D-Wave's quantum annealer is more limited in the types of problems it can solve, but its design allows the number of qubits to scale up more easily and limits the impact of noise.
It's easiest to think of a D-Wave as exploring an energy landscape filled with hills and valleys. It specializes in finding the lowest valley in one of these landscapes and avoids getting stuck in a local valley by using quantum effects to "tunnel" through intervening hillsides. That can be used to perform calculations, but only if the calculation can be structured so that it looks like an energy minimization problem.
We no longer use floppy disks on the vast majority of computers, but a recent Old New Thing blog post from Microsoft sheds light on one of their possible unexpected legacies. It seems Windows disk cache items expire after two seconds, and as the post explains this has its origin in the development of MS-DOS 2.0.
Disks, especially floppy disks, are slow compared to computer memory. A disk cache is a piece of memory into which the operating system puts frequently loaded items to speed up access and avoid its having to repeatedly access the disk. They have an expiry time to ensure that the cache doesn’t become clogged with data that hasn’t been needed for a while.
IBM PC floppy drives didn’t implement any form of notification for a disk eject, so it became quite possible for a disk to be ejected while the operating system still believed cached data from it to be valid. Thus a pair of Microsoft engineers tried their hardest to swap floppy discs as fast as they could, and it was discovered to be an impossible task in under two seconds. This became the cache expiry time for a Microsoft OS, and thus we’re told the floppy’s legacy lives on as more than just the ‘save’ icon.
As this is being written the Internet is abuzz with a viral Tweet about railroad gauges having an origin in the width of a Roman horse, that rail historians are debunking with a reference to the coal tramways of [George Stephenson’s] Northern England. It’s thus sometimes dangerous to take simple soundbite origin stories at face value, but since in this case our source is Microsoft themselves we think we can take it as being close to the horse’s mouth. Even if it isn’t a Roman horse.
IBM floppy drive image: Michael Holley [Public domain].
We don’t know how older people navigate around their environments, only that they don’t do it as well as they once did. It has been posited that they favor egocentric strategies, focusing on the relationship between themselves and the objects around them. That could reduce their perspective on the environment compared to allocentric strategies, which focus on the relationships among the objects, regardless of viewpoint.
Either way, they need to use the objects around them as visual cues. A new study suggests that their declining navigation skills aren't the result of a change in strategy but that they occur even before they get to that, in how they process visual cues.
People generally harness two types of visual cues for navigation. Geometric cues include things like the brick walls of a building or a hedge border; landmarks like that really gnarled dead tree trunk or that broken street lamp. Children like geometric cues, and young adults favor landmarks.
It’s fair to say that 2019 has not been a good year for the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, as its new 737 MAX aircraft has been revealed to contain a software fault that could cause the aircraft to enter a dive and crash. Now stories are circulating of another issue with the 737, some of the so-called “Pickle forks” in the earlier 737NG aircraft have been found to develop cracks.
It’s a concerning story and there are myriad theories surrounding its origin but it should also have a reassuring angle: the painstaking system of maintenance checks that underpins the aviation industry has worked as intended. This problem has been identified before any catastrophic failures have occurred. It’s not the story Boeing needs at the moment, but they and the regulators will no doubt be working hard to produce a new design and ensure that it is fitted to aircraft.
The Role of the Pickle Fork
For those of us who do not work in aviation though it presents a question: what on earth is a pickle fork? The coverage of the story tells us it’s something to do with attaching the wing to the fuselage, but without a handy 737 to open up and take a look at we’re none the wiser.
Fortunately there’s a comprehensive description of one along with a review of wing attachment technologies from Boeing themselves, and it can be found in one of their patents. US9399508B2 is concerned with an active suspension system for wing-fuselage mounts and is a fascinating read in itself, but the part we are concerned with is a description of existing wing fixtures on page 12 of the patent PDF.
The pickle fork is an assembly so named because of its resemblance to the kitchen utensil, which attaches firmly to each side of the fuselage and has two prongs that extend below it where they are attached to the wing spar.
For the curious engineer with no aviation experience the question is further answered by the patent’s figure 2, which provides a handy cross-section. The other wing attachment they discuss involves the use of pins, leading to the point of the patented invention. Conventional wing fixings transmit the forces from the wing to the fuselage as a rigid unit, requiring the fuselage to be substantial enough to handle those forces and presenting a problem for designers of larger aircraft. The active suspension system is designed to mitigate this, and we’d be fascinated to hear from any readers in the comments who might be able to tell us more.
We think it’s empowering that a science-minded general public can look more deeply at a component singled out in a news report by digging into the explanation in the Boeing patent. We don’t envy the Boeing engineers in their task as they work to produce a replacement, and we hope to hear of their solution as it appears.
On September 21, the WHO released an unusual statement outlining a series of unofficial reports from the country. The first was that a doctor who had recently traveled to Uganda had returned to Tanzania with a “suspected” case of Ebola. Testing performed by the Tanzanian National Health Laboratory reportedly indicated that the doctor was positive for the virus. She died September 8 in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, after traveling extensively throughout the country. Subsequent unofficial reports to the WHO indicated that there were several other suspected cases as well as contacts in quarantine in various sites in Tanzania.
The Tanzanian government has said that there have been no cases of Ebola and that no suspected cases are “admitted anywhere” in the country. But, officials there have been remarkably slow to respond to the WHO’s requests for information, have failed to provide critical details about the cases, have not offered alternative explanations for the illnesses and death, and have refused to perform confirmatory tests to ensure that the disease is not spreading, according to the WHO.