Author: easyfilo

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.”

Enlarge / A Roku streaming box. (credit: Ars Technica)

TV-streaming platform Roku is looking to expand beyond dongles and software deals to make its own TV hardware, according to a report in Insider.

The story appears to be based on two sources with different levels of familiarity with Roku’s plans. The first is someone who participated in a Roku focus group. “They showed different models, feature sets, and names, sizes, price points,” the participant said.

Second, the article cites an executive who says that making TVs has been on Roku’s roadmap for over a year. The executive is quoted briefly and provides a little more detail, saying, “The analysis has been done. They recognized that owning the last bit of branding made a lot of sense, particularly if you are going into content.”

Enlarge (credit: Slimak et al. 2022)

According to a recent study, a child’s tooth unearthed from an old layer of a cave floor in Southern France belonged to a member of our species. If so, the tooth is now the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens living in Europe, and its presence means that our species shared Europe (or parts of it) with Neanderthals for at least 10,000 years. But other fossils from the site suggest that the Pleistocene tale of two species was more complex than we’ve realized.

Finding the first Homo sapiens in Europe

People lived at Grotte Mandrin, a rock shelter in Southern France’s Rhone Valley, for tens of thousands of years. Until roughly 54,000 years ago, those people were Neanderthals. In the oldest layers of cave floor sediment, archaeologists unearthed a child’s molar. Based on its shape and dimensions, the tooth once belonged to a Neanderthal child, which was exactly what paleoanthropologists would expect in a layer of sediment between 79,000 and 62,000 years old.

An adult Neanderthal molar from the next layer up, dated to between 69,000 and 56,000 years old, was also not startling to anthropologist Ludovic Slimak, of Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and his colleagues. But a child’s molar unearthed from the next layer—somewhere between 56,800 and 51,700 years old—was a real surprise. The tooth’s size and shape was clearly not Neanderthal; when Slimak and his colleagues compared it to other upper second molars, they found that it fit best with very early members of our own species.