Month: December 2015

In Rainbows launched in 2007 without any cover art, so Ars' Sam Machkovech made and published this alternative album cover design for Seattle newspaper The Stranger. It's still his favorite. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Radiohead has been among the most prominent rock bands to embrace the Internet as a music distribution platform—particularly with its pay-what-you-want launch of 2007 album In Rainbows. Since then, its members have frequently spoken out about how musicians have been denied their hard-earned cash by both major labels and music-streaming services.

On Monday, pop music blog Consequence of Sound caught wind of an Italian magazine Q&A with lead singer Thom Yorke before the musician's planned performance at a concert linked to the UN's latest climate talks. According to Consequence of Sound's translation, the chat went all over the place and included Yorke's thoughts about how he discovers new music lately.

"I certainly do not use YouTube," Yorke told La Repubblica. He explicitly called the company out for not paying artists or only paying them "small sums," even though the service runs advertisements before music videos play.

Kyle Orland

I'm thinking about making this my permanent look...

13 more images in gallery

For years now, there's been a lot of digital ink spilled over the risk of looking unintentionally silly while isolated in a virtual reality headset and how that lack of "cool" will affect the use of the resurgent technology (VR Subway Guy notwithstanding). If you want to look intentionally silly while wearing a VR headset, though, it's hard to do better than wearing a Samsung Gear VR headset without the phone or faceplate attached. As the above gallery shows, the result is an instant bug-eyed monster look that we've been told evokes everything from the Mars Attacks! aliens to Disney's bobble fairies to a Thumb Wars thumb to Bubbles from the Trailer Park Boys.

Using the Gear VR as a pair of googly-eyed goggles isn't a new phenomenon. The picture that inspired this collection came from the header image for a Gizmodo review of the Gear VR Innovator Edition that ran almost a year ago (but which we just stumbled upon recently). A few other reviewers had a similar idea around the same time, apparently. Somehow, this look failed to become a widespread meme at the time.

(credit: Internet Archive)

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the founder of a now-shuttered Bitcoin mining company, alleging that it committed $19 million worth of fraud in a Ponzi scheme.

According to the SEC’s civil complaint, Homero Joshua Garza and his companies, GAW Miners and ZenMiner, sold more than 10,000 "investment contracts representing shares in the profits they claimed would be generated from using their purported computing power to ‘mine’ for virtual currency."

Between August and December 2014, the companies sold $19 million worth of these contracts, dubbed "Hashlets."

Adobe's embrace of HTML5 has created its first big casualty: Flash. Not the browser plugin—Adobe said in 2012 that it would continue supporting the plugin for the next five to 10 years—but Flash Professional, the main authoring tool used to create Flash animations.

With the Creative Cloud update coming in January, Flash Professional will sport a new name: Adobe Animate CC. It will still be able to produce Flash (SWF) files and will also continue to support Adobe's standalone AIR runtime, but it also supports building for HTML5 Canvas and WebGL. Adobe says that a third of all content produced in Flash Professional is now HTML5-based, showing that the shift away from its proprietary browser technology is well underway. Flash Professional isn't just for Flash; it's for all kinds of timeline-based interactive animations. The name change makes sense.

There are few fitness trackers under $50, and you'll be hard-pressed to find many good ones in that price range. There are even fewer with subscription plans, but Pivotal Living is incorporating both of these strategies into its devices. The company's Tracker 1 is a basic band that monitors your activity and sleep, giving you full access to its app for the small price of $12 per year. The company has recently come out with its first companion device, the $40 Smart Scale, which is quite affordable compared to other weighty scales that can cost up to $150.

Pivotal Living's mission is to make activity devices accessible for those who need them most. So it makes sense for the company to have both trackers and scales working together and to offer affordable prices for each. According to the Food Research and Action Center, lower income neighborhoods have fewer physical activity resources than higher income neighborhoods, meaning they don't have as much access to parks, recreation centers, and other areas that encourage physical activity. While Pivotal Living's devices lack the advanced features that would appeal to serious athletes, they combine functionality and affordability well enough to motivate those in need of a new way to change their activity and dietary habits.

Design: no unnecessary bells and whistles

Pivotal Living kept things simple with the Tracker 1: it's a black band with a rectangular OLED display that sits on top of your wrist. On its right side is one physical button, which you press to scroll through time, steps, distance, calories, and goal percentage on the screen. It has a snap closure and isn't hard to put on, and otherwise it just kind of sits there—there's nothing extraordinary about the Tracker 1, but you get what you pay for.

(credit: Georgetown)

WASHINGTON DC—In the decades since learning how to splice DNA, scientists have anxiously debated the ethics and ramifications of editing the genetic blueprints of humans—from the moral quagmires of eugenics and made-to-order babies to more nuanced uses in basic research and disease treatments. Do scientists understand enough of human biology to safely become life’s editors? Should researchers be able to edit unviable human embryos for research? If altered genes are heritable, does that infringe on the rights of the next generation? If scientists have the genetic capabilities to cure a disease, do they have an obligation to do it?

There are a lot of questions and huge differences in opinion within the research community. Regulations also vary wildly across the globe, with some countries instituting bans on certain practices and others embracing engineering. But amid the long-smoldering debate, new technology that makes it extremely easy to edit human cells, including germ-line cells (eggs and sperm), has brought theoretical uses closer to reality, reigniting concerns.

On Tuesday, hundreds of researchers from across the globe gathered in Washington, DC for a three-day summit aimed at hashing out the issues of editing human genes. The summit, co-hosted by the US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the UK's Royal Society, is the start of a larger effort by the US National Academies to come up with a consensus study on the use of editing technology. The Academies expect to release the report in 2016.

Uber is partnering with Enterprise to rent cars to potential Uber drivers for $210 a week in a pilot program that’s launching this week in Denver, Colorado.

The ride-share service is targeting potential drivers who either don’t have a car or whose car can’t be used under Uber’s standards—drivers’ cars must be in good condition and under 15 years old.

Uber already has a car leasing program that it runs in partnership with Xchange Leasing in a dozen major markets around the country. But the Enterprise partnership seems to be targeting a more flexible, short-term kind of driver, someone who might only want to drive for Uber for a month rather than six months. The rental, however, can be extended as long as the driver wants (and as long as the driver is in good standing with Uber and Enterprise).

(credit: epSos .de)

From the disposable lids on our morning cup of coffee to bags filled with goodies from our shopping sprees, we interact with plastics on a daily basis. Most of these plastics are now recycled or made from fossil fuels. But that's not how plastics started.

When they were first developed, plastics were made from natural sources. Later, plastics were made from chemically modified materials that were still derived from natural sources. It took until roughly a century ago for fully synthetic plastics to be designed, and synthetic plastics now dominate the market. But increasing concerns over sustainability and depleting petroleum resources have shifted our focus back to plastics derived from natural sources.

When it comes to replacing petroleum-derived chemicals, the Department of Energy has ranked the biomass-derived compounds best suited for the job. At the top of the list is succinic acid, a white, odorless solid. One interesting downstream chemical that can be made using succinic acid is a 4-carbon cyclic chemical called γ-butyrolactone (γ-BL).