Month: March 2022

After 355 days aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Mark Vande Hei returns to Earth both a NASA record holder and a changed man. Though his run was not as long as Peggy Whitson’s 665 cumulative days spent in microgravity, Vande Hei’s accomplishment is still one of the longest single stints in human spaceflight — and makes him the subject of intensive research into the effects of zero-gravity on humans.

Though NASA’s Human Research Program has spent 50 years studying the effects of spaceflight on the human body, the full impact of long-duration space travel has yet to be exhaustively researched. As humanity’s expansion into space accelerates in the coming decades, more people will be going into orbit — and going much farther — and the medical needs obviously increase along with this. Andrew Tarantola outlines where the research is headed.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• What we bought: The perfect family plug-in hybrid, until it wasn’t

• Android may get its own built-in Bluetooth tracker detection

• EV startup VinFast will build a $5 billion plant in North Carolina

• The Stanley Parable’s rebuilt and expanded ‘Ultra Deluxe’ edition arrives April 27th

• Chrome OS version 100 rolls out today

• Apple will reportedly no longer fix iPhones flagged as stolen or missing

• Roli’s redesigned Seaboard Rise keyboard offers more precise playing

• Traeger’s redesigned Timberline is full of smart grilling tech

Canada will ban sales of combustion-engine passenger cars by 2035

It’ll demand “at least” 20 percent zero-emissions sales by 2026.

Canada has outlined its Emissions Reduction Plan, which will require all new passenger car sales to be zero-emissions models by 2035. The government will gradually put pressure on automakers, requiring “at least” 20 percent zero-emissions sales by 2026, pushing steeply to 60 percent by 2030. Officials didn’t say whether this applied to a make’s product mix or simply the volume of cars sold.

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Here’s why your iPhone auto-updates often arrive late

First, the early adopters test the waters.

Reuters

A Reddit user wrote to Craig Federighi, Apple’s Vice President of Software Engineering, to ask how iOS auto-updates work. Federighi responded, revealing that Apple gradually releases “new iOS updates by first making them available for those that explicitly seek them out in Settings, and then 1-4 weeks later (after we’ve received feedback on the update) ramp up to rolling out devices with auto-update enabled.” Generally, this means it takes a few weeks for iOS auto-updates to reach everyone’s iPhone and, in the case of iPadOS, iPad.

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YouTube TV finally supports picture-in-picture on iOS

It’s pretty late.

Google has begun rolling out a new update for its iOS YouTube TV app. Now both iPhone and iPad users have picture-in-picture functionality. To watch something in PiP mode, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. The video will automatically resize and move across your device’s display. You’ll need to be running iOS 15 or newer — and make sure your app is up to date.

It’s taken its time: Apple’s mobile operating system has supported picture-in-picture functionality on iPad since iOS 13 and iPhone since iOS 14. The feature has also been available on the company’s main YouTube app since last year.

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Intel teases first Arc A-series desktop GPU ahead of summer launch

This is the second delay in as many months.

Intel

Intel’s finally offered a glimpse of its Arc A-series Limited Edition video card, which is arriving sometime this summer — yes, that means another delay. There are no specs or prices, unfortunately, but the double-height design and twin-fan cooling make clear this aims directly at gamers. Early Arc desktop GPUs are expected to support a raft of modern features, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI-based supersampling. It’s still too soon to say if Arc desktop models will offer truly competitive performance. NVIDIA should deliver its first Ampere Next-based GPUs (likely the RTX 40 series) later this year, and AMD will follow suit with the Radeon RX 7000 series.

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