Month: August 2016

Enlarge (credit: US DOD)

Technology has changed sports by offering things like instant replay and the ability to determine precisely where a ball is relative to lines on the field and court. But these offerings don’t always sit well with players and fans, who may worry about the loss of some human influence on the run of play. It has been said that no technology is value-neutral, that it will-—in undetermined ways—influence anything it is applied to. Technology has now been applied to many sports, which have changed as a result, as evidenced by one of the oldest sports around.

Fencing is an old sport. The earliest evidence of it comes from Egypt during the reign of Ramses III. A relief carving from roughly 1190 BCE in the temple of Madinat Habu depicts combatants wearing masks and wielding weapons as part of a bout or tournament. The modern sport has its earliest roots in 15^th century Spain, where Diego de Valera wrote Treatise on Arms, a manuscript discussing swordsmanship for duels and self-defense.

Fencing can be traced through the European Renaissance. Eventually, dueling weapons and blade weapons fell out of favor, replaced by black powder and guns. For swords, this was reflected in a change in nature from a cutting to a thrusting action coupled with more skilled swordsmanship. These changes favored using agility and speed as opposed to brute force.

For the past two decades, scientists have analyzed every minute detail of Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old natural mummy found in the ice of the Italian Ötztal Alps. But one remaining mystery was the provenance of his clothing, made from leather and fur. Now, thanks to refined techniques in DNA sequencing, a team of scientists has identified how the clothing was made—and discovered something surprising about Ötzi's domestic habits.

Ötzi lived during the Copper Age, when humans had been domesticating animals for a few thousand years, and our cutting-edge technologies included stone tools and fired pottery. From previous studies, we know that Ötzi was likely murdered by an arrow and a blow to the head. We also know he suffered from arthritis, and he ate a meal of deer and berries before he died.

The team's new findings, published in Nature Scientific Reports, are as much a demonstration of DNA sequencing wizardry as they are about ancient fashion. It's incredibly difficult to get genetic material out of tanned hides, because they've generally been scraped, heated, and exposed to fatty acids. Plus, the hides and furs themselves had disintegrated. But the researchers used several methods for extracting DNA from the hides that made up Ötzi's shoelace, hat, loincloth, coats, leggings, and quiver. First they compared the strands of DNA they did find with other mapped genomes to identify species. Then the researchers targeted very small, specific regions in the DNA for reconstruction to learn more about the animals' relationships with today's domestic breeds.

Microsoft today released its PowerShell scripting language and command-line shell as open source. The project joins .NET and the Chakra JavaScript engine as an MIT-licensed open source project hosted on GitHub.

Alpha version prebuilt packages of the open source version are available for CentOS, Ubuntu, and OS X, in addition, of course, to Windows. Additional platforms are promised in the future.

Announcing the release, Microsoft's Jeffrey Snover described the impetus for the move: customers liked the use of PowerShell for management, remote control, and configuration but didn't like that it was Windows-only. To address this concern, Microsoft first had to bring .NET, and then PowerShell itself, to Linux and other platforms. Snover says that PowerShell will be extended so that remote scripting can natively use ssh as its transport instead of Windows remoting.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T's entry-level smartphone data plan that offers 300MB for $20 a month will no longer be available to new customers beginning August 21. Additionally, the current 2GB plan that costs $30 will be replaced by a $30 plan offering only 1GB. A new $40 plan will offer 3GB, while $60 will provide 6GB, replacing today's $50 5GB plan.

On the plus side for customers who buy the lowest-cost data plans, AT&T is changing its phone access charge to $20 a month per device. You need to add the data and device access charges together to get the monthly cost before miscellaneous fees. Currently, AT&T imposes a $25-per-month access charge on plans with 5GB or less and $15 on bigger plans. Going forward, the $20 charge will apply regardless of size, with some exceptions—two-year contracts will still have access charges of $40 a month.

These changes are part of a revamp of AT&T's Mobile Share Value plans. In some cases, the new data prices offer better value. For example, it will cost $90 to get 16GB, while today it costs $100 for 15GB. The dollar-per-gigabyte value gets better from there. While today you'd pay $175 for 25GB and $225 for 30GB, next week it will cost $110 for 25GB and $135 for 30GB. The plans come with mobile hotspot capability, rollover data, and unlimited talk and text.