NASA will soon start testing what is dubbed as the world’s first commercial spaceplane capable of orbital flight, which will eventually be used to resupply the International Space Station. The agency is set to take delivery of Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser, which should provide an alternative to SpaceX spacecraft for trips to the ISS.

In the coming weeks, the spaceplane (which is currently at Sierra Space’s facility in Colorado) will make its way to a NASA test site in Ohio. The agency will put the vehicle, which has been named Tenacity, through its paces for between one and three months. According to Ars Technica, NASA will conduct vibration, acoustic and temperature tests to ensure Tenacity can survive the rigors of a rocket launch. NASA engineers, along with government and contractor teams, are running tests to make sure it’s safe for Tenacity to approach the ISS.

All going well, Tenacity is scheduled to make its first trip to space in April on the second flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. The rocket has yet to make its own first test flight, which is currently expected to happen in December. However, given how things tend to go with spaceflight, delays are always a possibility on both fronts.

The spaceplane has foldable wings, which allow it to fit inside the payload of the rocket. On its first mission, Tenacity is scheduled to stay at the ISS for 45 days. Afterward, it will return to Earth at the former space shuttle landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida rather than dropping into the ocean as many spacecraft tend to do. Sierra says the spacecraft is capable of landing at any compatible commercial runway.

“Plunging into the ocean is awful,” Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice told Ars Technica. “Landing on a runway is really nice.” The company claims Dream Chaser can bring cargo back to Earth at fewer than 1.5 Gs, which is important to help protect sensitive payloads. The spaceplane will be capable of taking up to 12,000 pounds of cargo to the ISS and bringing up to around 4,000 pounds of cargo back to terra firma. Sierra plans for its Dream Chaser fleet to eventually be capable of taking humans to low-Earth orbit too.

As things stand, SpaceX is the only company that operates fully certified spacecraft for NASA missions. Boeing also won a contract to develop a capsule for NASA back in 2014, but Starliner has yet to transport any astronauts.to the ISS. Sierra Nevada (from which Sierra Space was spun out in 2021) previously competed with those businesses for NASA commercial crew program contracts, but it lost out. However, after the company retooled Dream Chaser to focus on cargo operations for the time being, NASA chose Sierra to join its stable of cargo transportation providers in 2016.

Dream Chaser’s first trip to the ISS has been a long time coming. It was originally planned for 2019 but the project was beset by delays. COVID-19 compounded those, as it constricted supply chains for key parts that Sierra Space needed before the company brought more of its construction work in house. The company is now aiming to have a second, human-rated version of Dream Chaser ready for the 2026 timeframe.

NASA has long been interested in using spaceplanes, dating back to the agency’s early days, and it seems closer than ever to being able to use such vehicles. Virgin Galactic (which just carried out its fifth commercial flight on Thursday) uses spaceplanes for tourist and research flights, its vehicle is only capable of suborbital operations. With Dream Chaser, Sierra has loftier goals.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-commercial-spaceplane-capable-of-orbital-flight-is-ready-for-nasa-testing-185542776.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – A commercial spaceplane capable of orbital flight is ready for NASA testing

It looks like Meta may be pumping the brakes on one of its more aggressive, and unpopular, growth-hacking tactics for Threads. The company appears to be working on a new privacy setting so Threads users can opt-out of having their posts cross-posted to Facebook and Instagram feeds.

The unreleased feature was spotted by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who often uncovers early versions of social media features before they officially launch. Paluzzi shared screenshots of a new “suggesting posts on other apps” toggle in Threads’ privacy settings.

The feature comes barely a week after the company acknowledged that it was promoting users’ Threads posts in Facebook feeds in an effort to boost Threads. While Meta has used similar tactics to promote its other apps in the past, the move has been widely unpopular among Threads users, many of whom are not active on Facebook and see the promotions as an intrusive overreach. Meta said last week it was “listening to feedback” in response to user complaints about not being able to opt out.

Notably, it appears as if Meta still intends to automatically enable cross-posting as a default setting. “If your profile is public, your posts may be suggested on other apps so people can discover and follow you,” the opt-out screen states.

The back and forth over the feature comes as Meta has steadily ramped up its efforts to boost Threads growth. The Twitter clone has been growing again in recent weeks, and currently has about 100 million monthly users. Mark Zuckerberg recently said he sees a path for the app to become Meta’s next billion-user service. But in order to reach that many people, the company will need to lean hard on its other apps to attract new sign-ups.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-will-stop-forcing-your-threads-posts-onto-facebook-and-it-cant-come-soon-enough-174835068.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Meta will stop forcing your Threads posts onto Facebook and it can’t come soon enough

Meta just released an experimental new A/B testing feature for Reels on Facebook, allowing creators to experiment with different captions and thumbnail images to create the perfect clips. The tools are part of the pre-existing Professional Dashboard, which already provides plenty of useful metrics, like view count insights and more.

Here’s how it works. When creating a Facebook Reel on your mobile device, you can insert up to four different caption and thumbnail combinations. This starts a testing phase for the content. Whichever one gets the most views will automatically be displayed on your page as the “winning variant.” It seems fairly simple.

The company’s also working on incorporating generative AI to help create unique caption and thumbnail options, though that feature is still being worked out. The ultimate goal here is to ensure user-generated content gets as many eyeballs as possible. This increases Facebook’s traffic and potentially gives creators some money in the process, thanks to Meta’s bonus program.

To that end, there’s a new system in place that awards achievement badges for leaping past certain metrics. A digital badge isn’t as good as money, but it’s something (I guess.) Meta does say that these badges could help creators achieve increased visibility of their content, via an awarded Rising Creator label.

That’s not the only tool that rolled out today. There’s also a new feature that lets you quickly whip up Reels from pre-existing video posts and livestreams. The Professional Dashboard has new content management tools to help users keep track of all of this stuff. Previously, creators could only access content performance on a post-by-post basis, but now the dashboard gives you a more holistic view of things.

It’s interesting that this feature dropped on Facebook and not Instagram, as Reels are more integral to the latter than the former. We’ll update you if and when the company debuts these tools for Instagram users.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-made-an-ab-testing-tool-to-help-users-optimize-their-reels-on-facebook-171323994.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Meta made an A/B testing tool to help users optimize their Reels on Facebook

For the third time in less than two years, I have COVID-19. Whenever an illness has forced me to stay in bed, my comfort food has been gaming. In 2009 I played through all of Assassin’s Creed II in a feverish, swine flu-induced haze. When I was sick with COVID for the first time, I jumped into Red Dead Redemption 2 blind, and found a story about sickness and human mortality. Now, during one of the most stacked years in recent gaming history, I find myself under the covers not with Starfield, Spider-Man 2 or any of the other big fall releases. Instead, my bedside companion is a small Apple Arcade exclusive called Japanese Rural Life Adventure.

I discovered this gem through an X account that tweets about upcoming indie games. I took one look at Japanese Rural Life Adventure and knew I had to play it. The game features a beautiful pixel art style, and a pastoral setting evocative of anime classics like Only Yesterday and Wolf Children. What I didn’t expect to find was a heartwarming experience about the importance of community.

In its opening hours, Japanese Rural Life Adventure plays out much like Stardew Valley or, for that matter, any other farming sim made in the past two decades. When the game’s protagonist first arrives in the countryside, they find their new home in disrepair, nearly every inch of the surrounding fields overgrown with weeds. But following a predictable start, the game shows its true character.

Almost uniquely among other games in the genre, Japanese Rural Life Adventure doesn’t include any romantic partners for the player’s character to pursue. Nearly everyone you meet is elderly. They complain of aching bones, bad backs and a dim future where there aren’t any young people to carry on their community’s traditions.

“I was born and raised in the city, in a big town. I have no memories of playing in rivers, climbing mountains, or anything like that,” Takeo Fujita, the founder of Japanese Rural Life Adventure developer GAME START, told me over email. “I have no older relatives living in the countryside. In other words, you could say that the ‘gentle and simple countryside’ found in Japanese Rural Life Adventure comes from a sense of longing that I felt watching and reading Japanese TV dramas and manga.”

Longing for a simpler life is something that pervades Japanese Rural Life Adventure – not just its setting, but also its mechanics and the scale of its gameplay. For all the time I’ve put into the game, I have not become a farming mogul. At most, it’s possible to plant and maintain four fields for growing rice and produce, alongside a few fruit trees. In fact, there’s only so much “work” for your character to do in a single day. And the days, compared to those in Stardew Valley or recent Harvest Moon entries, are long, adding to the sense of a slower pace of life.

Japanese Rural Life Adventure consistently pushed me to slow down and appreciate everything it had to offer beyond farming: fishing, bug catching, cooking and photographing wildlife, all of which have their own fun minigames associated with them. Sometimes, I would just let my character rest on the front porch to watch a cherry blossom tree shed its pedals or to bask in the sparkle of fireflies at night.

At first, Japanese Rural Life Adventure limits players to the small area around their farm. More often than not, advancing the plot or opening a new section of the game involves helping others. Before I could buy seeds to grow my first batch of cucumbers and daikon radishes, I first had to build a bench for an old peddler lady to sit and rest. After completing a few of the game’s early objectives, including the partial restoration of a local Shinto shrine, the nearby town unlocks.

The town is in a sorry state when you first visit. The roads are weed-ridden and potholed. Nearly every building is falling apart. The young people are long gone. It’s one step removed from becoming a ghost town.

As it turns out, this town is the heart of Japanese Rural Life Adventure. After exploring it for a bit, I meet the village head, who tasks my character with restoring the decaying roads and buildings, including a Buddist temple and schoolhouse, all in hopes of bringing tourists who will help revitalize the local economy.

I didn’t expect this from Japanese Rural Life Adventure. In Japan, declining birth rates and one of the world’s oldest populations threaten to erase rural life as the country knows it. A 2019 Bloomberg article, citing data from the Japan Policy Council, frames the stakes succinctly: “If current trends continue, by 2040, 869 municipalities – nearly half of Japan’s total – will be at risk of vanishing.”

Fujita says GAME START didn’t set out to create a game about the plight of his country’s towns and villages. “When developing games, we do not consider difficult themes such as vanishing rural communities or population aging. We believe that games should be something you can enjoy and forget about everyday life,” he said. “‘Growth’ and ‘development’ are elements that can make a game attractive to prospective players. So we adopted ‘village regeneration’ as one of the themes of the game.”

To some extent, all games like Japanese Rural Life Adventure share an interest in community. After all, it’s safe to say part of the reason why so many people love Stardew Valley is because of Pelican Town and all the weird and wonderful characters that inhabit it. However, in orienting almost all of the player’s actions towards the betterment of its unnamed town, Japanese Rural Life Adventure puts community front and center in a way I hadn’t seen in the genre before. It’s also that focus that makes the game feel fresh and compelling.

Take the restoration project I mentioned earlier. The village head compensates the player for completing the tasks he assigns to them, but I found the money I earned was often only enough to cover the costs of the next repair I needed to complete. More rewarding was seeing the results of my efforts. The project culminates in a summer festival that requires a significant investment from the player, both in terms of time and money spent. Before I could even start preparing for the event, I first had to repair and repaint the torii gates of the temple where the town planned to hold the festival. It was also up to me to produce the 21 chochin lanterns needed to light everything. This task consumed a few hours of my time, but the reward was a beautiful night time celebration that felt like a culmination of everything I had done up to that point. The fact I won a young koi fish to release in the pond in front of my house was a bonus.

Often, Japanese Rural Life Adventure doesn’t feature a lot of mechanical sophistication. Watering plants is as straightforward as a single tap, and most other tasks involve either foraging or buying the right items, but what it has a lot of is heart. That was something I needed.

Japanese Rural Life Adventure is currently available on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-arcade-exclusive-japanese-rural-life-adventure-review-170006419.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Apple Arcade exclusive ‘Japanese Rural Life Adventure’ is a surprising story of rebirth

Amazon just bundled together the fourth-gen Echo and the fifth-gen Echo Dot in a sale that represents significant savings for both devices. You can snag both for $83, which is a discount of nearly $70 if you bought each separately. The bundle’s even available in multiple colors, including white, blue and black. You can’t mix and match hues, however, for the contrast hounds out there.

The bundle includes the fourth-gen Echo, originally released in 2020. In our review, we said that the speaker “punches above its weight” and praised the reasonable price. Well, if the price was reasonable at $100, it’s certainly reasonable now. The Echo is more or less the gold standard when it comes to basic smart home speakers and gives you access to Alexa, premium sound quality (for a small ball that sits on a counter) and an easy-to-use microphone array.

We also noted that this thing sounds even better when paired with another device for the purposes of stereo or multi-room sound. That’s where the Echo Dot comes in.

The bundle also includes the fifth-gen Echo Dot. This speaker may not be as powerful as its older sibling, but it still offers plenty of nifty features, including surprisingly robust sound, a temperature sensor and built-in Eero capabilities. There’s a reason why it made our list of the best smart speakers. You can pair the Dot with the regular Echo for stereo sound in one room or for delivering audio to multiple rooms at once. It’ll be like the music is traveling with you, resembling the line at a highly personalized Disney ride.

It’s worth noting that both of these devices are a generation behind, as there’s a newer Echo Dot with a built-in clock and a fifth-gen standard Echo. Still, the bundle’s a pretty good deal.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-selling-an-echo-and-echo-dot-bundle-for-83-as-an-early-black-friday-deal-162027983.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Amazon’s selling an Echo and Echo Dot bundle for as an early Black Friday deal

Brave joins the growing list of browsers that come with built-in generative AI assistants. The open source browser developer has started rolling out an update for Brave on desktop, which gives users access to its AI assistant Leo. Brave introduced Leo through its Nightly experimental channel back in August and has been testing it ever since. The assistant is based on the Llama 2 large language model, which Microsoft and Meta had developed together for commercial and research purposes. 

Like other AI assistants, users can ask Leo to do various tasks, such as creating summaries of web pages and videos, translating and/or rewriting pages and even generating new content. The Llama 2-powered Leo is available for free to all users, but Brave has also introduced a paid version capable of “higher-quality conversations.” Leo Premium, as it’s called, is powered by Anthropic’s Claude Instant and can produce longer and more detailed responses. Users will have to pay $15 a month for it, but they will also get priority queuing during peak periods and early access to new features. 

In its announcement, Brave Software emphasized that Leo preserves users’ privacy. The developer said that conversations with Leo are not persisted on its servers and that the assistant’s responses are immediately discarded and “not used for model training.” It also explained that it doesn’t collect IP addresses and retain personal data that can identify a user. Plus, users don’t even have to create an account to use Leo. 

Back in July, Brave came under fire after it was accused of selling copyrighted information to train artificial intelligence models without consent. “Brave Search has the right to monetize and put terms of service on the output of its search-engine,” the company’s Chief of Search, Josep M. Pujol, said at the time in response to the allegations. “The ‘content of web page’ is always an excerpt that depends on the user’s query, always with attribution to the URL of the content. This is a standard and expected feature of all search engines.”

Brave is rolling out Leo on desktop in phases over the next few days. Those using the browser on their Android and iOS devices, however, will have to keep an eye out for its release on mobile in the coming months. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/braves-ai-assistant-comes-to-its-desktop-browser-160010918.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Brave’s AI assistant comes to its desktop browser