Month: March 2016

The more money that is spent on recovery efforts for an endangered or threatened species, the more likely that species is to recover. It’s an intuitive link, although intuitive links aren’t always borne out by reality. But in the US, where a large amount of funding for endangered species recovery efforts comes from the government, the money being spent often falls well short of what's needed, leaving many species to flounder.

Arizona State University researcher Leah Gerber has analyzed government spending on endangered species, finding ways to make the process more efficient. She found that some species are declining despite receiving more funding than they request, making them “costly yet futile,” she writes in a PNAS paper. Redirecting this extra funding could help us to save many more species.

There are currently around 1,500 species listed as endangered or threatened in the US, half of which are at high risk for extinction. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is set to assess approximately 800 more species for inclusion in the list within the next two years. The recovery plans for these species require $1.21 billion/year, but in reality, only a quarter of this budget is actually spent. It’s a “capacity challenge”, Gerber writes—the funding that's made available for recovery efforts is just not sufficient to meet the flood of demand.

A few weeks before the launch of the Planet Coaster closed alpha—a perk for those who bought the "Early Bird Edition" of the game—Frontier Developments' Jonny Watts is scolding his team. Rather then work on squashing bugs in the game's complex path-finding system, or making sure that the tiny details on flat (pre-made) rides were correct, they were making roller coasters and theme parks. Some of them had been at it for days, obsessively chipping away at their creations using tools like environmental deformation and coaster editing that wouldn't even be in the alpha.

"We still have jobs to do," he told them.

Deadlines or not, how better to show a game works than a group of people who can't stop playing it? At the very least, there was plenty to show on press day. There are wonderfully complex roller coasters that slide effortlessly through the sides of hills and across other rides, and parks with a slick pirate theme made up of carefully placed wooden barrels and caged skeletons. Most impressive is a coaster that twirls around a huge tree in the middle of a park, a product of careful track placement and the game's pre-production environmental deformation tools.

The ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived.

One palatial residence in Herculaneum contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas. It was long believed that these scrolls would never be readable. But now, a massive X-ray microscope at the European Radiation Synchrotron Facility has allowed researchers to see what was written on these ruined documents.

The trick was discovering that the ink used by scribes over 2,000 years ago actually contained fairly large traces of metals, including lead. This came as a surprise to a group of researchers experimenting with the scrolls at the synchrotron, and they subsequently published their discovery in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These papyri contain the oldest examples of metallic ink in the Greco-Roman world; previously, archaeologists dated the Roman use of metallic ink to the fifth century, though the Egyptians had been known to use it long before. This is a welcome discovery for students of ancient Greco-Roman scrolls, because it means that other scientists can use a technique called scanning X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to see wisps of lead in the outlines of letters.

Apple (AAPL) is in "advanced talks" to acquire British chip design company Imagination Technologies (IMG), according to a source with knowledge of the discussions. When Ars sought comment, Imagination Technologies refused to deny any such planned takeover.

Imagination Technologies is primarily known for its PowerVR line of GPUs, which Apple has used in its mobile A-series SoCs since the A4, which powered the iPhone 4 and 4th-gen iPod Touch.

Imagination has tried to diversify into other areas, including specialised ray tracing GPUs, MIPS CPUs, and DIY/IoT stuff, but nothing has really stuck. In February this year, the company announced that long-time CEO Hossein Yassaie would be stepping down and that it would begin the process of restructuring the business. Then last week, in mid-March, the company announced that, as part of the restructuring, it would be axing 350 jobs and focusing on PowerVR.

(credit: Andrew Williams)

With the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR all due for release before the end of the year, there's no doubt 2016 is the year of virtual reality. And yet, with such a focus on headset hardware, it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of software and content needed to make VR work. Enter Nokia.

Now freed from the cut-throat mobile market, the Finnish company is hoping to kickstart VR content creation with the Ozo, a high-quality VR camera with eight camera sensors and eight microphones spread across a not-quite-sphere. It outputs 360-degree 3D video and surround audio through a single cable, bypassing all the issues faced when trying to get the same effect from a DIY assemblage of GoPro or Red cameras.

Before you get your credit card out, ready to be the first VR YouTuber with 10 million subs, there's one caveat we must point out: the Nokia Ozo costs an eye-watering €55,000 (£43,000, $60,000). This is most definitely a professional tool, not merely something to help with shooting interminable holiday panoramas.

A recent paper co-authored by MIT researchers did the math on how best to allow competing traffic through an intersection. The results, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, suggest that once cars can connect to city infrastructure, traffic lights will be a suboptimal way to regulate traffic through city streets.

Instead, the paper suggests, cars should talk to computers at intersections and be allowed through the crossing via a slot-based system, without the need for yellow lights. Better yet, once fully autonomous vehicles hit the road, even greater efficiencies could be realized by having the cars talk to each other to form platoons that move through intersections.

The researchers start by acknowledging the inadequacies of the 150-year-old traffic light—at any given intersection, they say, there are so many variables that any one breakdown in the flow of traffic can be disastrous for the whole intersection. "This explains why traffic can rapidly deteriorate in cities, resulting in widespread congestion and immense societal and environmental costs,” the paper notes.

The Xiaomi Mi 5.

9 more images in gallery

While Samsung and its Galaxy S7 mostly competes with high-end devices like the iPhone, Xiaomi makes its money attacking the mid- and low-end of the market. The company is all about bang-for-your-buck, often delivering very good specs at low prices. How low? Like most flagships, the Xiaomi Mi 5 sports the new Snapdragon 820 processor and a USB Type-C port, all for the distinctly not-flagship price of RMB 1999 (~$305). You could buy two of these for the price of a Galaxy S7 or LG G5. The catch is that the Mi 5 is currently only available in China.

But the Mi 5 might be the phone that Xiaomi uses to finally break into the Western market. Despite its name, Mobile World Congress generally focuses on phones for Europe and the US, and Xiaomi's first-ever appearance may be a sign of things to come. Xiaomi is also sending review units to a few US press outlets—we didn't import this one. The company opened online stores for products like its earbuds and headsets in the US, UK, France, and Germany, but the stores don't sell smartphones yet.

Design and build quality

The Mi 5 is very much a "budget flagship" phone: it feels and performs like a high-end device, but Xiaomi saves money by trimming features where most customers won't notice. The Mi 5's Snapdragon 820 only runs at 1.8GHz instead of the 2.15GHz you'd get on a Galaxy S7. The Mi 5 skips the crazy smartphone display resolution wars by going with a sensible 5.1-inch 1080p screen. The 428 PPI will lose a spec sheet battle with a 577PPI Galaxy S7, but when you consider an iPhone 6S only has a 326 PPI screen, 428 PPI is just fine. You get "only" 3GB of RAM, a full 1GB less than you'd get on the S7, but that's still plenty. There's no out-of-control spec creep, and you even get some important extras, like a fingerprint reader, NFC, an IR blaster, dual SIM cards, and the USB Type-C port I mentioned earlier.