Month: May 2016

(credit: Honda)

Modern supercars and hypercars are blazingly fast. Ironically, the sensation of speed they generate is often dampened by the fact that you often can't see a thing from the driver's seat.

Blame a combo of safety priorities and style. Over the last decade, crash and rollover regulations have dictated more robust cabin structures characterized by ever thicker, vision-blocking A-pillars. The regulations coincided with an in-vogue design language that gave us "turret-style" cabins from which to peer out.

With the new NSX, then, it's refreshing to see Honda put an emphasis on visibility in the design of its halo car rather than cobbling together a few sensors and a backup camera in the name of "safety." It's also not surprising. Cast your mind back to the 1980s/'90s heyday of Honda/Acura and you'll recall the pride Honda took (and the praise it received) in its airy cabins with low beltlines and superior visibility. The first generation NSX was lauded for its performance, dependability, and functionality, including cockpit visibility.

(credit: Sony)

Amidst the rumors that it could be killing off some of its smartphone lines, Sony just announced a new Xperia smartphone. The Xperia XA Ultra is being pushed as the "perfect nighttime selfie" phone with its 16-megapixel front-facing camera, low-light sensors, and optical image stabilization for blur-free shots.

The "selfie" appeal comes from the powerful front camera, but the rear camera is formidable as well at 21.5MP. The front camera also has a "gesture control" feature which lets you wave your hand in front of the lens to start a shutter timer. Aside from strong cameras, the Xperia XA Ultra is designed with a huge, 6-inch borderless screen and is supposed to last up to two days on a single charge. That's quite a claim since the handset only has a 2,700 mAh battery. A quick charger will be available for the handset, allowing it to get 5.5 hours of battery life with just 10 minutes of charging.

While Sony's previously announced Xperia X and X Performance tout top specs, the XA Ultra instead will impress with its cameras and large display. It's powered by an eight-core MediaTek MT6755 processor and comes with just 3GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, which is expandable via microSD card to 200GB.

The GTX 1080 should be a generational leap, a moment that, like the Titan before it, redefines consumer graphics card performance—and in many ways, it is. Yes, the GTX 1080 is the new world's fastest graphics card, and yes, it's faster than the likes of the now-redundant GTX 980 Ti and Titan X by as much as 35 percent in real-world use. Compared to the 980, it's faster still, by as much as 62 percent. For those that that want the very best graphics card right now, the 1080 is it.

But it's hard to shake the feeling that the GTX 1080 could have been so much more.

Despite its many innovations—it's the first graphics card based on its new Pascal architecture, the first with GDDR5X memory from Micron, and the first to be manufactured on a smaller, more efficient TSMC 16nm FinFET manufacturing process—the 1080's performance gains aren't entirely unheard of. The 680 was roughly 30 percent faster than the 580, as was the 780 over the 680—and those didn't feature a brand new manufacturing process.

(credit: StatCounter)

Firefox has gingerly pulled ahead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Edge browsers for the first time across the globe.

Mozilla’s Firefox grabbed 15.6 percent of worldwide desktop browser usage in April, according to the latest numbers from Web analytics outfit StatCounter.

However, neither browser threatens the market leader—Google’s Chrome continues to command two thirds of the market.

Bees work with nectar over their wax honey pots in a laboratory colony of Bombus impatiens. University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA. (credit: Alexander Wild)

It would seem that almost every possible mating arrangement exists in the animal kingdom, from lions with their prides and ants with their colonies, to cheating birds and monogamous voles. But new research reveals that social animals have only two basic options when it comes to reproduction. They can be monogynous like ants, with only one female who mates; or they can be polygynous like chimps, with many females who mate. Depending on which evolutionary trajectory the animals follow, their population size will either grow into the millions or remain relatively small.

How many breeders?

A group of zoologists write about this finding in a new paper published in Royal Society Open Science. They analyzed 293 different social species, including reptiles, birds, insects, and mammals, and asked two simple questions about each one: How many females live in each group of these animals; and how many of those females are "breeders," capable of reproduction? Study co-author Eileen Lacey, a biologist at University of California-Berkeley, told Ars by phone that it was surprisingly hard to find this data. "In all the studies of social animals, very few people reported critical information like how many individuals are breeding versus not," she said. Nevertheless, she and her colleagues gathered enough data to perform a statistical analysis of the relationship between number of breeders and female population size.

"The proportion of breeders in societies with more than one reproductive female appeared to be dependent upon the total number of females in the group; when societies with multiple breeding females from all taxa (ants, wasps, mammals, birds) were pooled, we found that the proportion of breeders decreased significantly with the total number of females in the group," the researchers wrote in their paper.