A Bug's Life

Posted by Robert Pearlman

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/nasa-issues-draft-request-for-moving-space-shuttle-discovery-or-orion-capsule/

NASA has taken a step forward to moving an undetermined spacecraft of a various size on an indefinite date to a yet-to-be-decided location.

Or to put it another way: NASA is seeking to learn more about what it would take to remove the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian in Virginia and relocate it to Houston, as compared to transporting a smaller space capsule from anywhere in the country.

The space agency on Thursday (March 19) released a draft request for proposal (DRFP) for the "NASA Flown Space Vehicle Multimodal Transportation Multiple Award Contract," seeking to learn how contractors would approach transporting both "large aerospace vehicles and smaller spacecraft capsules."

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Posted by Jon Brodkin

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/fcc-lets-nexstar-buy-tegna-creating-trump-approved-broadcaster-reaching-80-of-us/

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Nexstar Media Group's $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna, granting a waiver that lets the broadcast giant go way past the national limit on station ownership.

Nexstar said it closed the acquisition late in the day yesterday, immediately after receiving the FCC approval. The deal was also approved by the US Department of Justice, but a group of state attorneys general are challenging the merger in court in an attempt to unwind it.

Opponents say the FCC lacks authority to grant the waiver and that only Congress can change the 39 percent ownership limit. While the FCC says Nexstar will own fewer than 15 percent of TV stations, the cap in the FCC's National Television Ownership Rule is calculated by the percentage of US households reached by a single entity's stations. The Nexstar/Tegna combination will reach 80 percent of TV households in the US, or 54.5 percent when applying what's known as the "UHF discount."

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And the boidies around here in the past week have included the heron in the eco-pond being very up for a closeup, Mr de Mille, parakeets, and several magpie courting couples.

There have been a fair amount of flowers blooming in the spring, trala, for some weeks now, the daffs have been a particular feature, calling Mr Wordsworth, and today there was a massive show of narcissi along one edge of the playing field.

Among the less flamboyant flowers, the Wildflower Corner included grape hyacinths, and dandelions.

The trees along the street are busting out in leaves and blossom.

We also note that toxic nitrogen dioxide pollution in London has fallen to air quality standards in under ten years (rather than the projected nearly 200).

Posted by Beth Mole

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/03/rfk-may-replace-entire-panel-of-cdc-vaccine-advisors-again-ally-lets-slip/

A member of an influential federal vaccine advisory panel made a dramatic claim Thursday afternoon that the panel had been disbanded following a temporary block by a federal judge and would be entirely reconstituted—again. But, just hours later, he retracted the claim, saying that it was merely a possibility.

The claim immediately caused a stir online. Public health experts began to cheer the news, given that most of the current members hold anti-vaccine views and have little to no qualifications for being on the panel—which is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Current members were hand-selected by anti-vaccine health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had summarily fired all 17 experts previously on ACIP. Kennedy's new ACIP members have since held several chaotic meetings in which they voted to roll-back CDC's evidence-based vaccine guidance.

On Monday, Federal Judge Brian Murphy issued a temporary injunction blocking Kennedy's ACIP members and their votes after finding that they were improperly appointed and vaccine recommendations were changed without procedural requirements. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other medical groups, who challenged Kennedy's anti-vaccine efforts.

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Posted by Jacek Krywko

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/perseverances-radar-revealed-ancient-subsurface-river-delta-on-mars/

When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, its primary mission was to scour the remnants of a dried-up Martian lakebed for signs of ancient life. Scientists have been focused on the crater's spectacular Western Delta, a fan-shaped geologic feature deposited by a river flowing into the basin billions of years ago. But now Perseverance’s ground-penetrating radar (called RIMFAX) detected what is likely another, even older river delta buried tens of meters beneath it.

“I think it’s a promising place to look for signs of biosignatures at depth,” says Emily L. Cardarelli. “Microbial life could have potentially developed in those types of environments.” Cardarelli, an astrobiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, led the team interpreting RIMFAX imagery.

Peeking underground

Perseverance’s RIMFAX, the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, continuously fires radar waves into the ground, acquiring soundings each time the rover traveled 10 centimeters. When these radio waves hit boundaries between different types of rock, ice, or sediment layers, some of the signal bounces back. The timing and intensity of these reflections allow scientists to construct a two-dimensional, vertical slice of the subsurface, much like a sonogram of the Martian crust.

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Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/nasa-is-blowing-stuff-up-to-study-the-explosive-potential-of-methalox-rockets/

For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity, hydrazine for its storability and simplicity, hydrogen for its efficiency, and solid fuels for their long shelf life and rapid launch capability.

About 15 years ago, rocket companies started serious development of large methane-fueled engines. SpaceX and Blue Origin now build the most powerful of these new engines—the Raptor and BE-4—each capable of generating more than half a million pounds of thrust. SpaceX's Starship rocket and its enormous booster are powered by 39 Raptors, while Blue Origin's New Glenn and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rockets use a smaller number of BE-4s on their booster stages.

Burning methane in combination with liquid oxygen, these "methalox" engines have several advantages. Methane is better suited for reusable engines because they leave less behind sooty residue than kerosene, which SpaceX uses on the Falcon 9 rocket. Methane is easier to handle than liquid hydrogen, which is prone to leaks and must be stored at staggeringly cold temperatures of around minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 253 degrees Celsius). Methane is also a cryogenic liquid, but it has a warmer temperature closer to that of liquid oxygen, between minus 260 and minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 162 to minus 183 degrees Celsius).

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Posted by Scharon Harding

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/amazon-is-reportedly-developing-an-ai-centric-smartphone/

Amazon is developing a new smartphone over a decade after discontinuing the Fire Phone, Reuters reported today, citing four anonymous “people familiar with the matter.”

Reuters said the phone is codenamed Transformer but couldn’t confirm what it might cost, how much Amazon has invested into development thus far, or how much Amazon expects to make off the device. Like any product reportedly under development, it’s possible that Amazon will never release the phone. Reuters’ sources noted that Transformer could be cancelled over finances or a change in strategy.

When reached for comment by Ars Technica, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on Reuters’ report.

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We live on a street where about a quarter of the houses have Muslim families. This morning I watched our neighbours opposite, who moved in fairly recently and we don't know well, pose for photos outside their house all dressed up in smart clothes. Later on our next door neighbour, who we know well enough to have sent an Eid card, was outside with his toddler and wife, chatting with another neighbour, who is white and not religious AFAIK.

The weather is nice enough that I had the windows open - not enough to overhear any conversations but enough to know that there is chatter and happiness around me. It's nice.

ETA: Our next door neighbour just brought round some food and and a really cute little teapot for us!

Yesterday was far more peopling than usual: a day of meetings and then went to see my niece play the protagonist in Mean Girls: the High School version -- that goes on forever. (I think it's the full theater version but with softened innuendo.) It might be less painful if someone knew how to set the gain on the mics. My niece and the antagonist both have powerful voices. I wish i liked musicals but recent exposure because of my niece has not improved my opinion of the format.

I continue thinking about my relationship to "doing", and refocused on time not intentionally spent. I've realized by "intention" i have excluded things i will do anyway, which historically included journaling  (although for a number of years that has not been as true as perhaps i need). And meals, and relaxing with Christine. Time dealing with physical irritations and discomfort. Digital irritations: application forced upgrades and restarts.  There are many other things in that category, but i think i generally accept that they exist. The solution isn't adding more overhead -- more decisions about priorities and mucking about with lists -- but allowing for the time in intentions and valuing it.

I'm recognizing there are (at least) two other types of time not intentionally spent: avoiding and escaping. I think once upon a time i was "better" with my avoiding time. When work was so hard for me i believe i spent more time journaling and understanding my feelings, framing my frustrations, and clarifying why i was upset -- and then i could move forward. There were also more of the classic "procrastination" behaviors of doing X instead of Y, which i seem to have subverted in some ways. Now neither of Y or X get done.

I think some of the weight -- disappointment? dissatisfaction? --  i am carrying lately is more about how much time i spend in avoiding and escaping. I may be in a viscous circle where having become more aware of intentional vs avoiding vs escaping time i cannot become unaware. As the avoiding feels increasingly out of my control, my frustration escalates, feeding into the emotional demand to escape. In the past, it seemed i could just escape into one novel, and then feel "reset" and get back to business as normal, but that sense of reset seems far less accessible now. All 11 novels in a series later, still not "reset," rereading a trilogy still not "reset."

Ah yes, another type of time not intentionally spent is distraction, which is possibly a variation on avoiding and escaping, but i think its another class altogether.

Posted by Andrew Cunningham

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/major-steamos-update-adds-support-for-steam-machine-even-more-third-party-hardware/

Valve's Steam Machine desktop is currently in a state of involuntary limbo, driven by historically awful pricing and availability for memory and storage chips. AI data centers are absorbing much of what memory manufacturers can produce, leaving much less for enthusiast and hobbyist hardware like the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame VR headset. Even the years-old Steam Deck is currently out of stock thanks to component shortages.

But that hardware uncertainty hasn't stopped Valve from working on the software, and the company released a major update this week. The SteamOS 3.8.0 preview release comes with a long list of changes for the Steam Deck as well as third-party gaming handhelds and other PC hardware, and it also adds "initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware."

Many of the update's improvements come from various upstream Linux components. Valve says the update includes a new Arch Linux base, an updated graphics driver, version 6.16 of the Linux kernel, and a new version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment for Desktop Mode (which now uses Wayland rather than X11).

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Posted by Kiona N. Smith

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/an-early-indigenous-site-may-not-be-early-but-it-doesnt-really-matter/

A landmark site in the peopling of the Americas is several thousand years younger than we thought. While that means very different things about the site itself, it doesn’t change the big picture as much as the researchers who generated the new date are claiming.

University of Wyoming archaeologist Todd Surovell and his colleagues recently took a second look at the age of a site called Monte Verde in southern Chile, and it turns out that people lived there 8,000 years ago—not 14,500, as the archaeologists who first described it claimed.

Monte Verde is about as far from the Bering Land Bridge as you can get without leaving the continents, so its age was the first piece of evidence that people were well-established in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age. But it hasn't been the last, so Surovell and his colleagues’ findings don’t actually change what we now know about the peopling of the Americas—and they definitely don’t put the “Clovis First” hypothesis back on the table.

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Posted by Eric Berger

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/jeff-bezos-throws-his-hat-in-the-ring-for-an-orbital-data-center-megaconstellation-too/

A little more than a month ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk put down a marker of his intent to saturate low-Earth orbit with up to 1 million satellites. Its purpose? Provide always-on data center services around the planet.

Now, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has done something similar with a filing to the Federal Communications Commission of his own, proposing a constellation of up to 51,600 satellites operating in Sun-synchronous orbits at altitudes ranging from 500 to 1,800 km. Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, sought the authority to do this and is calling the constellation "Project Sunrise."

In its filing, Blue Origin argues that terrestrial AI-based data centers will face difficulties scaling up to meet computing demand.

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Posted by Molly Taft, Wired.com

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/the-us-is-looking-at-a-year-of-chaotic-weather/

Despite being declared the third-hottest year on record, 2025 was a relatively quiet year for climate disasters in the US. No major hurricanes made landfall, while the total number of acres burned in wildfires last year—a way of measuring the intensity of wildfire season—fell below the 10-year average.

But starting this week, the West is experiencing what looks to be a record-breaking heat wave, while forecasting models predict that a strong El Niño event is likely to emerge later this year. These two unrelated phenomena could set the stage for a long stretch of unpredictable and extreme weather reaching into next year, compounding the effects of a climate that’s getting hotter and hotter thanks to human activity.

First, there’s the heat. Beginning this week and heading into next, a massive ridge of high-pressure air will bring record-breaking temperatures to the American West. The National Weather Service predicts that temperature records across multiple states are set to be broken in dozens of locations, stretching as far east as Missouri and Tennessee. The NWS has issued heat warnings for parts of California, Arizona, and Nevada, as well as fire warnings for parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Colorado.

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Posted by Jonathan M. Gitlin

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/03/theres-no-sudden-acceleration-problem-with-tesla-feds-say/

One-pedal driving is not causing Tesla electric vehicles to suddenly accelerate when parked, according to federal regulators. For almost as long as Tesla has been selling cars, it has been hit with sporadic accusations of parked cars accelerating when they shouldn't. Known to the industry as "sudden unintended acceleration," the question for regulators is whether the problem is a human one or an engineering one, and over the years, engineers who think they've found the culprit have petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to force a recall. These efforts usually fail, as was the case today, when NHTSA said it would not tell Tesla to recall every EV it built since 2013.

Because electric motors are also generators, EVs use regenerative braking to recover energy when they slow down rather than wasting that kinetic energy as heat (and maybe a bit of sound) via the friction brakes. In many battery EVs and just about any hybrid I can think of, a brake-by-wire system blends the two together—the driver uses the left pedal as normal, and the car slows down. Some automakers (I'm looking at you, Porsche) think this is the only way a driver should slow their EV. But an electric motor can also be programmed to regeneratively brake when the driver lifts their foot from the throttle, and in Tesla's EVs (as well as Rivian's and Lucid's), this is the only way to regen, as there is no brake-by-wire system, only traditional hydraulic friction brakes.

Technically, I just described lift-off regen, but if the car has been programmed to come to a complete stop when you take your foot from the accelerator, that's one-pedal driving. Some EV drivers absolutely love one-pedal driving; others don't. I like one-pedal for low-speed driving or when I want something similar to engine braking. But according to the petition sent to NHTSA in 2023 by a Greek engineer, this causes a "short-circuit" in Tesla drivers' brains.

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Posted by Zach Weinersmith

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waiting

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I hereby release this to Hollywood.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waiting