Month: February 2016

Artist's conception of Nintendo's new VR-focused NX console (not really).

Two decades after the flop of the Virtual Boy and after years of saying that virtual reality isn't a good fit for its company philosophy, Nintendo has joined the swelling ranks of tech companies interested in VR. The news comes from a Nintendo earnings call out of Japan last night, during which Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima reportedly said the company is "looking into" VR.

Nintendo didn't provide any other details about any potential VR plans, but the tidbit is especially interesting considering Nintendo's work on the still shadowy NX console, first mentioned last March. Since that announcement, we've been left guessing about a project Nintendo has only said is "the new hardware system with a brand-new concept." With the Wii U seemingly not powerful enough to drive a really convincing, high-res VR headset, it's not ridiculous to think that Nintendo has been "looking into" VR as an integral part of its new NX hardware.

If Nintendo has been working on a VR system this whole time, though, it has done a good job of hiding it. Until today, the company has been consistently bearish on the kind of VR technology that has excited much of the gaming industry. When asked about VR plans back in 2014, Nintendo Senior Director of Corporate Communications Charlie Scibetta told Ars that the company "[tries] to innovate on our own and not necessarily follow what others have done just for the sake of doing that."

(credit: Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Most of the mutations associated with autism spectrum disorder affect genes involved in brain development, as you’d expect. But there’s also a link between the immune system and ASD: viral infection during pregnancy may lead to more cases of ASD in children. A new study published in Science links a specific immune signaling molecule known as interleukin-17a to this phenomenon.

Studies of humans show that viral infection during pregnancy is correlated with an increase in ASD in the ensuing children, though this connection is not yet fully understood. A fundamental tenet of epidemiology is that correlation is not causation, which means that the association between viral infection and ASD doesn’t necessarily mean that catching a virus during pregnancy causes ASD in the baby.

Controlled experiments of pregnancy-related exposures can’t ethically be conducted in humans, so the authors of this paper use mouse models instead. In these mice, when pregnant females are infected with a dsRNA sequence that mimics a viral infection, their offspring show behavioral symptoms typical of ASD. In rodents, ASD-like symptoms include a lack of interest in social interaction, stereotyped repetitive behaviors, abnormal communication behaviors, and other social deficits, all of which can be examined using behavioral tests.

Morgan Motor Company

The Aero 8 is a no-nonsense modern sports car powered by a BMW V8. You used to have to wait five or six years between ordering a Morgan and delivery. That's now down to six to 12 months, the company says.

5 more images in gallery

The Morgan Motor Company—best known for still using postwar styling and wooden body frames for some of its cars—will have a full hybrid and electric range within the next three years. The British car maker is going to invest $8.6 million (£6 million) to develop hybrid and electric powertrains for all the models in its range by 2019, working in conjunction with Delta Motorsport and Potenza technology.

Despite the retro image of Morgan's cars—the company does still use ash wood as a structural material, even in 2016—the company has actually been quite forward-looking over the past decade. The Aero 8 (introduced in 2007) has an up-to-date aluminum chassis and modern aerodynamics, even if it looks like it stepped out of the pages of an alternative history novel.

"We have been involved in the research and development of new propulsion technology since the inception of the LifeCar project almost ten years ago. We are now ready to develop the best hybrid and electric drive-train solutions for production implementation before the end of the decade," said Steve Morris, Morgan's boss.

Artist's impression of W2246-0526, a galaxy shining in infrared with the luminosity of 350 trillion suns. (credit: ESO)

Brightness can mean different things. A nearby candle is brighter than an identical one in the distance. To avoid confusion, astronomers use the word "luminosity" rather than brightness to indicate the total amount of light that an object puts out. By that measure, W2246-0526 is the brightest—the most luminous—galaxy in the observable Universe.

A group of researchers has now taken advantage of the abilities of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to take a look inside W2246-0526 and see what’s going on there.

The cause of the brightness is not mysterious. The galaxy’s incredibly bright core, which outshines the rest of its stars by a factor of over 100, is home to a very active supermassive black hole (SMBH). While nearly every galaxy houses a SMBH, only the most active ones earn the title of quasar. ("Active" in this context means that the black hole is rapidly consuming a lot of matter, producing its incredible light output through friction as it does.)

LOOK INTO MY TEETH AND DESPAIR. (credit: Ray Troll)

Nicknamed the "buzzsaw shark," this 270 million-year-old creature is actually an extinct relative of the ratfish called a Helicoprion. Its bizarre tooth arrangement has confused scientists for over a century, but one artist finally got it right.

Ray Troll, whose art show about Hilicoprion has been touring the US for the past three years, has been on the front lines of scientific research about one of the strangest fossils ever found. When geologist Alexander Petrovich Karpinsky discovered the creature's tooth whorl in 1899, at first he thought it was a kind of ammonite because the teeth looked so much like the ammonite's spiral shell.

Paleo expert Brian Switek writes that it took Karpinsky a little while to realize that it was actually part of a larger animal. Over the next century, many different paleontologists offered explanations for what it might be, including a defensive formation on Helicoprion's nose, a ridge on its back, or even sticking out of its mouth like a spiky, curled tongue.