Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

A large, out-of-control piece of space debris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean last week, passing over much of the United States.

China launched the the Long March 5B rocket on May 5 from the Wenchang launch site in order to deploy a test model of its upcoming crew capsule. After a week in orbit, the nearly 18-metric-ton core stage re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the largest piece of uncontrolled space debris to re-enter the atmosphere since 1991, as Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell noted on Twitter.

After the launch, the rocket began a week-long orbit. The U.S. military soon started tracking the rocket’s core stage. After a trajectory that took it over heavily populated areas such as New York and Los Angeles, the rocket hit the ocean off the coast of West Africa. Uncontrolled reentries and eventual crash sites are difficult to model, since scientists don’t fully understand the complex dynamics of the upper atmosphere, Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office, said in a 2018 statement. Such debris can travel vast distances in short stretches of time.

The 176-foot Long March 5B rocket is designed to bring large payloads, like components of China’s upcoming space station, into orbit. This mission deployed a prototype crew capsule that would be used to bring astronauts into orbit, as well as an experimental cargo return capsule, which malfunctioned as it returned into the atmosphere, reports Spaceflight Now.

This all might remind you of the 2018 uncontrolled reentry of the Chinese satellite Tiangong-1, a relatively small piece of space debris that crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The Tiangong-2 rocket reentered the atmosphere in the South Pacific as part of a controlled deorbiting last year.

But the Long March 5B core stage stands out in its size. While most of the rocket would have burned up in the atmosphere, some of the denser parts could potentially survive the descent and cause localized damage on the ground, McDowell told CNN. 

The largest piece of space junk to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere was the Skylab space station in 1979; the larger Mir space station returned to the Earth as part of a controlled reentry in 2001.

Earth is really big and mostly water, so the odds of death-by-space-debris are exceedingly slim. Still, we’re launching more satellites all the time, so it’s something that space agencies are increasingly having to consider. Freak accidents do happen, though: In 1997, a woman in Oklahoma was struck (but nt injured) by a piece of metal from a disintegrating rocket.

To discourage cheating, high schools and colleges limit what gadgets can be brought into an exam, and they require students to use very basic calculators if math is involved. But that doesn’t mean cheating is impossible, it just requires considerably more effort, like upgrading a dumb Casio calculator with a secret screen, wifi, and even messaging functionality.

Some of the nation’s top health leaders are in coronavirus quarantine, including its leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a worrying sign that the virus is managing to spread between the people in charge of making highly important decisions about the pandemic. According to the New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr.

They’re better for the environment than a gas-guzzling car, but the other big advantage of commuting every day on an electric bike is that they’re easier to park. With Poimo, a prototype inflatable e-bike created at the University of Tokyo, you don’t even need to find a bike rack when you get to work, just an empty backpack to stash your ride. Inflating the Poimo (short for Portable and Inflatable Mobility) is no more challenging than inflating an air mattress.

More than two years later, the battle between ex-Google engineer James Damore and the company is over, although we won’t know much about how it ended. Earlier this week, Damore and three other menasked a California court to dismiss the lawsuit, which claimed that the company discriminated against conservative white men. Google also joined their request for dismissal.

Accidentally hitting reply-all on an email thread was one of the earliest online faux pas to emerge. This week, Microsoft began rolling out a feature to help save future inboxes from ever knowing the horror. Aptly named “Reply All Storm Protection,” it detects possible reply-all screw-ups and essentially puts all recipients on a temporary time-out to keep them from spamming requests to be taken off the thread or trolling everyone’s inboxes.

Joined by Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey, Kamala Harris is pushing new legislation that would provide up to $2,000 a month for every U.S. resident. There’s another term for that: a universal basic income. While UBIs are usually associated with the magical thinking that we’ll at some point reach a fully-automated post-work economy, the closest America came to instituting one was arguably through vast expansions of unemployment benefits during the Great Depression.

Paul Vasquez, the colorful character behind the viral “double rainbow” video, has died. Vasquez, 57, died Saturday in the emergency unit at the John C. Fremont Hospital in Mariposa, California, a spokesperson for the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Gizmodo. The spokesperson did not comment on Vasquez’s cause of death; however, Vasquez posted on Facebook late last week that he was being tested for covid-19.

Days after South Korea relaxed its social distancing measures, Seoul, its capital city, has tightened them once more after dozens of new coronavirus cases were linked tobars and nightclubs. On Saturday, the mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, shut down the city’s bars and clubs and claimed that at least 40 infections were connected to the venues.

Coronavirus has upended lives in countless ways, and of those, my inability to unlock my iPhone with Face ID while wearing a mask in public spaces is not that consequential. But, fuck, it’s so annoying. According to CNBC, Apple is preparing to roll out a feature in iOS 13.