Facebook is building a smartwatch as part of its ongoing hardware efforts, according to a new report from The Information. The device is said to be an Android-based smartwatch, though the report does not say whether Facebook intends for the device to run Google’s Wear OS. It also says Facebook is working on building its own operating system for hardware devices and that future iterations of the wearable may run that software instead.
The smartwatch would have messaging, health, and fitness features, the report says, and would join Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality headsets and Portal video chat devices as part of the social network’s growing hardware ecosystem. Facebook is also working on branded Ray-Ban smart glasses to come out later this year as part of its ongoing Project Aria initiative, an augmented reality project the company has been working on for some time now. Facebook declined to comment.
The social networking giant’s hardware ambitions are no secret. The company has more than 6,000 employees working on various augmented and virtual reality projects and as part of existing hardware divisions like Oculus and Portal, as well as experimental initiatives under its Facebook Reality Labs division, Bloomberg reported last month. And although Facebook has not expressed a strong interest in health and fitness devices in the past, the company does have a track record in wearables with its Oculus headsets and forthcoming smart glasses.
Facebook also acquired the neural interface startup CTRL-Labs in 2019. CTRL-Labs specialized in building wireless input mechanisms, including devices that could transmit electrical signals from the brain to computing devices without the need for traditional touchscreen or physical button inputs. The startup’s intellectual property and ongoing research may factor into whatever wearables Facebook builds in the future — including a smartwatch, smart glasses, or future Oculus headsets.
Update February 12th, 6:22PM ET: Noted that Facebook declined to comment.
NASA’s Psyche mission, an uncrewed expedition to an unusual asteroid of the same name, is entering the final stages of preparation.
After years of testing and development for the scientific instruments that will analyze the metallic asteroid, NASA is ready to send individual components to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). There, engineers will begin to integrate and assemble the full spacecraft, according to a JPL press release.
“It’s really the final phase, when all of the puzzle pieces are coming together and we’re getting on the rocket. This is the most intense part of everything that happens on the ground,” Psyche principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton said in the release.
Hitting Deadlines
If all continues to go well, the spacecraft will be ready well in advance of its planned launch in August 2022. NASA expects that final testing and assembly will last until spring 2022, when it will eventually be sent down to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“The project has made tremendous progress, particularly given the world around us and COVID-19 and dealing with the constraints that imposes,” Psyche project manager Henry Stone said in the press release. “We’re in very good shape. We’re on track and have a plan to go forward to make launch.”
Poking Around
During its 21-month orbit around Psyche, NASA’s spacecraft will take images of the asteroid while also studying its surface and — if it finds one — its magnetic field.
The asteroid seems to have a much higher metal content than a typical space rock, prompting scientists to suspect that it’s really the exposed core of a planet that broke apart. Depending on what the mission finds, NASA’s spacecraft may reveal new information about how our planet formed as well.
U.S. stock index futures declined in overnight trading as a surge in speculative trading by retail traders continued to cause hedge funds to take off risk and worried investors about a market bubble. The losses build on last week’s decline, which was the worst for the market since October.
Futures contracts tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 270 points, indicating a 271-point loss at the opening bell. S&P 500 futures slipped 1%, while Nasdaq 100 futures fell 1.2%.
The Dow dropped 620 points on Friday, or 2%, to close below the 30,000 level for the first time since December. The Nasdaq Composite also slipped 2%, while the S&P 500 fell 1.9%.
For the week, all three major averages slipped more than 3% for their worst weekly performance since October. The Dow and S&P also posted losses for January — the first negative month in four — although the Nasdaq did manage to post a gain for the month.
Friday’s dip came amid a frenzy of activity by retail investors in heavily-shorted stocks including GameStop and AMC Entertainment, which fueled concerns about the overall health of the market. Goldman Sachs noted that the current short squeeze is the worst in 25 years.
“This week’s events may have turned markets on their heads, but fear indicators imply that we may have seen the worst of the degrossing,” Jefferies wrote in a note to clients over the weekend. Barclays added that it’s unlikely that the impact of the short squeezes will ripple through the broader market.
“The ongoing short squeeze in a few stocks by retail investors has raised concerns of a broader contagion,” the firm wrote in a recent note to clients. “While we believe there is more pain to come we remain optimistic that it is likely to remain localized.”
Meanwhile, a group of 10 Republican senators sent President Joe Biden a letter on Sunday, urging him to consider a smaller, scaled down Covid-19 relief proposal. His current plans calls for $1.9 trillion in additional fiscal stimulus. The alternative proposal comes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the chamber will move to pass a budget resolution, the first step toward approving legislation through reconciliation. The process would enable Senate Democrats to approve an aid measure without GOP votes.
Elsewhere, another busy week of earnings is coming up with 99 S&P companies set to report. Alphabet, Amazon, Alibaba, Snap, Exxon, Biogen, Pfizer and Chipotle are among the names set to report this coming week. Thursday is the busiest day of the earnings season.
“We believe the medium-term path for the market remains higher,” noted Mark Haefele, global CIO at UBS Wealth Management. “In a similar pattern to the previous two quarters, corporate earnings for 4Q20 are exceeding expectations by a significant margin.”
He added that a stimulus package as well as investors looking beyond delays to vaccine production and distribution should further boost stocks.
– CNBC’s Jacob Pramuk contributed reporting.
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NASA engineers are studying the feasibility of building a massive, kilometre-wide radio telescope on the moon that would dwarf anything we could build on Earth.
The telescope, which would be constructed by robots, would take the form of a huge, wire-mesh antenna in a dish shape that would hang suspended in a three-kilometre-wide crater on the far side of the moon.
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would provide a unique perspective on the early universe, though it likely won’t be built for decades, according to NASA robotics engineer Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, who is leading the project.
“We all want to know what happened. How did the universe evolve? What happened after the Big Bang?” Bandyopadhyay told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.
In the 14 billion years since that event, the light waves from that era have been stretched out from tiny fractions of a millimetre to more than 10 metres as the universe expanded. They’re now extremely long radio waves, and those can’t be seen on Earth “because the ionosphere absorbs it,” said Bandyopadhyay.
“So we want to go somewhere away from [Earth] so that we can get a picture of the Big Bang and evolution of the universe.”
Telescope size presents challenges
The problem, however, is that in order to capture those wavelengths, not only does this telescope need to be on the moon, it needs to be very large, which makes it hard to build.
There are giant radio telescopes on Earth, which observe shorter radio wavelengths that do penetrate the atmosphere. The 300-metre-wide Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico — recently demolished in a catastrophic accident — or the 500-metre-wide FAST telescope in China represent significant engineering challenges.
Deployment of the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would be done by robotic rovers, that would unfold the massive aluminum-mesh antenna. (Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay)
Standalone, self-supporting, dish-shaped radio telescopes can only get to a certain size, based on the strength of the materials they’re made from and the need to resist wind loads. To avoid these issues, the largest radio telescopes are built into natural features in the terrain. Arecibo and FAST, for example, were built in natural, dish-shaped sinkholes.
Building such a telescope on the moon is, in one sense, easier. The lower gravity on the moon means a larger structure can be built with lighter materials. No atmosphere means no windstorms or other earthly environmental risks, though there are challenges from the moon’s harsh temperatures.
According to Bandyopadhyay, the moon also has no shortage of appropriately shaped terrain structures in the form of ubiquitous impact craters.
“These craters seem like natural places to put this dish-shaped telescope because the crater also looks like a bowl.”
To find a crater candidate, Bandyopadhyay and his team combed over detailed pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and discovered more than 80,000 suitable craters on the far side of the moon.
Origami-inspired transport and construction
While the location would provide advantages, there are unique and significant challenges to building on the moon, in particular the harsh working conditions and the difficulty of transporting materials.
The team studied a range of scenarios for how a telescope might be constructed and transported to the moon. The one they have arrived at is inspired by Japanese paper folding, said Bandyopadhyay.
“Origami is the art of folding paper into smaller and more interesting designs. But in space, origami is extensively used to take these large structures, like a large dish of one kilometre, and we can literally fold it multiple times and make it into a pretty small structure.”
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope would be sensitive to frequencies that are blocked by Earth’s ionosphere, and would also be shielded from radio noise from Earth broadcasts. (Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay)
The antenna would be built on Earth in the form of a large, but extremely lightweight net-like structure made of conductive aluminum wire. It would be carefully folded into a package that would fit inside the nose cone of a large rocket, possibly the Space Launch System that NASA is currently developing.
Once launched, the antenna would be carried to the moon and land on the floor of the crater into which it would be installed. Then it would need to be deployed.
“We will have these robots that will go down … to the lander and then pull lift wires that will connect to the lander sitting at the crater floor,” Bandyopadhyay said.
These lift wires would be anchored on the crater rim and as they are winched up, the antenna would unfold and deploy. Ultimately the net-like antenna would be suspended over the crater floor, looking a little like a dish-shaped spider web.
The tension in the wires would be adjusted to result in the appropriate dish shape to receive radio signals from space and reflect them to a receiver.
All of this technology (the launch rocket possibly excepted) is available today, said Bandyopadhyay.
The robots, for example, are currently being tested at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“These robots are called DuAxel, and they are actively being built at JPL for over a decade now. And these robots have the speciality that they can go down almost steep terrain like just cliff faces.”
For now, this is an early stage engineering feasibility study, rather than a fully developed mission proposal, but Bandyopadhyay suggests it would certainly be expensive and would be a very high-profile endeavour for NASA.
“Cost is a big uncertainty right now. Right now, all I can say is we think this will be a flagship-class mission.”
Given that, it’s likely decades away, at least.
“Space is hard,” said Bandyopadhyay. “I would be surprised if I could see this launched and deployed before I retired, and I’m a young scientist.”
