Month: January 2020
Maxar and NASA will demonstrate orbital spacecraft assembly with a new robotic arm
NASA has awarded Maxar an estimated $142 million contract to demonstrate in-orbit spacecraft refueling and assembly of new components using a custom robotic platform in space. The space infrastructure dexterous robot, or SPIDER, program will be part of NASA’s Restore-L mission to demonstrate automation of proposed orbital tasks like reconfiguring…
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Fast 9 takes place in an alternate reality where RED’s Hydrogen phone succeeded
The Fast and the Furious franchise is one full of improbability, a place where the laws of physics, science, and logic are thrown aside in favor of the inexorable powers of things like muscle cars, nitrous, and “family.” But the newly released trailer for F9 (the official name for the…
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Podcast app Overcast adds automatic intro skipping and overhauled Voice Boost feature
App developer Marco Arment has a new update out today for his popular mobile podcast player Overcast. In a detailed blog post, Arment says the new version of Overcast now comes with a totally overhauled volume normalization feature, called Voice Boost 2, that relies on “dramatically more sophisticated methods, leading…
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Customer feedback is a development opportunity
Kyle Lomeli Contributor Kyle Lomeli is the CTO and a founding engineer at CarGurus.com. Online commerce accounted for nearly $518 billion in revenue in the United States alone last year. The growing number of online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay will command 40% of the global retail market in 2020.…
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The top 5 Super Bowl 2020 commercials we can’t wait to see
Ad breaks are seldom included in the fun of television broadcast. In fact, we often mute or ignore them entirely until our show returns. But there’s one night in February when the ad break is finally accepted, celebrated even – the Super Bowl. As the Chiefs and 49ers train, the…
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A Russian satellite seems to be tailing a US spy satellite in Earth orbit
A Russian satellite has positioned itself uncomfortably close to an American spy satellite in orbit around Earth, leading space trackers to speculate that the foreign vehicle is doing some spying of its own. The Russian spacecraft is meant to inspect other satellites, and experts in the space community believe it…
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