Month: February 2022

Enlarge / A Peloton stationary bike for sale at the company’s showroom in Dedham, Massachusetts. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

As Peloton’s stock price began to tumble last autumn and just months after a costly recall of the connected fitness company’s expensive treadmills, its executives were confronted with a new crisis.

In September last year, staff at Peloton warehouses, which receive high-end bikes originally manufactured in Taiwan, noticed that paint was flaking off some of the exercise machines.

The cause was a build-up of rust on “non-visible parts” of the bike—the inner frame of the seat and handlebars—and did not affect the product’s integrity, Peloton recently told the Financial Times.

Enlarge / Say so long to the original PSVR’s glowing blue lights (credit: PlayStation Blog)

It was just shy of a year ago today that Sony first announced the (then-unnamed) PlayStation VR2. Today, the company showed off the first photos of the upcoming PS5-compatible headset’s design, highlighting a number of aesthetic and functional changes over 2016’s original PSVR.

In a blog post Tuesday morning, Sony confirmed that the PSVR2 will mimic the general ergonomics and balancing of the first PSVR. That means an adjustable headband that tucks under the back of the skull and around to the front of the forehead, offering a base for an adjustable scope area that hangs down in front of the eyes. We called that design “exceedingly comfortable” when we reviewed the first PSVR back in 2016, so we’re glad Sony hasn’t messed with those ergonomics too much this time around.

A side view highlights the headband and hanging scope design. (credit: PlayStation Blog)

As far as significant design changes, the PSVR2 will now offer a lens adjustment dial that can slide each lens side to side in order to match the player’s interpupillary distance. Getting a good match there can be key to providing a sharp focus and preventing eye strain and motion sickness in VR, which is why such lens sliders have been a common feature on headsets like the Oculus Rift and Quest for years now.

Enlarge / Image of a recent Aeon 1 engine hot fire test. (credit: Relativity Space)

Relativity Space intends to use the small Aeon 1 engine it is developing to power its first rocket for only a few flights. Instead, the company plans to quickly perform a “block upgrade” for the Terran 1 rocket, which will serve as a bridge to the much larger, more capable Terran R rocket.

“We’ve always envisioned Terran 1 being a development platform,” said Tim Ellis, the co-founder and chief executive of Relativity Space, in an interview with Ars.

The California-based company, which seeks to 3D-print the majority of its rocket parts, is continuing to work toward the first launch of Terran 1 this year. Powered by nine Aeon 1 rocket engines, this small rocket has a lift capacity of 1.25 metric tons to low Earth orbit. This first Terran 1 mission will not carry any customer payloads in order to focus on the rocket itself and is called “Good Luck, Have Fun.” The name is a reference to what players say to one another before a video game begins, Ellis said.

Enlarge / Tablets of ivermectin. (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

The antiparasitic drug ivermectin failed to treat COVID-19 in yet another randomized clinical trial, but the drug remains popular amid the pandemic thanks to Republican politics. That’s the takeaway from two separate studies published Friday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Together, the studies raise yet more concerns for the use of ivermectin against the pandemic virus—as well as the reasons behind its use, which appear politically motivated.

“Political affiliation should not be a factor in clinical treatment decisions,” the Harvard researchers behind one of the studies concluded. “Our findings raise concerns for public trust in a non-partisan health care system.”