Month: December 2015

Sidecar and its rivals, Lyft and Tickengo, hope to make carsharing in San Francisco more social and more efficient. (credit: Sidecar)

Rideshare and delivery company Sidecar announced on Tuesday that it would be shuttering its services at 2pm Pacific Time, December 31, 2015.

Sidecar was one of the pioneering rideshare services, along with Lyft and Uber, but the two latter companies have succeeded in securing extraordinary amounts of funding, whereas Sidecar hasn't had quite so many dazzling headlines. Sidecar helped drivers connect with individual passengers, organized carpools, and made deliveries. In May, Re/code reported, Sidecar began delivering medical marijuana to San Francisco residents if they had a doctor’s note.

Sidecar CEO Sunil Paul wrote on Medium today that the company is not dissolving completely but instead ending its primary services in order to "work on strategic alternatives and lay the groundwork for the next big thing.” A spokesperson for Sidecar told Ars the company would not elaborate on what the next big thing is, exactly.

(credit: PROVille Misaki/Flickr)

Contagious cancers were thought to be exceedingly rare—after all, researchers only knew of three kinds in the world. But now, there’s a fourth. And it’s raising some big questions about scientists’ understanding of cancer.

This week, scientists report finding a new type of transmissible tumor in Tasmanian devils, the famous marsupials of the Australian island state. It’s the second type of infectious cancer seen in devils and the fourth type overall. The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has left the study authors questioning whether infectious cancer cells are more common than expected or if there’s something about Tasmanian devils that makes them uniquely susceptible to catching deadly tumors—or maybe both.

“Regardless,” the authors wrote, more research on these infectious tumors “promises to illuminate important concepts underpinning cancer evolution.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Stupid Patent of the Month" for December isn't owned by a sketchy shell company, but rather the Microsoft Corporation. The selection, published yesterday, is the first time the EFF has picked a design patent as the SPOTM. The blog post seeks to highlight some of the problems with those lesser-known cousins to standard "utility" patents, especially the damages that can result.

The chosen patent (PDF), numbered D554,140, would seem to be one of those things that's so simple it raises some basic philosophical questions about the patent system. That's because it's just a slider, in the bottom-right corner of a window, with a plus sign at one end and a minus sign at the other. That's it.

The patent was highlighted earlier on the blog of Sarah Burstein, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma who studies design patents and uses her blog to highlight some... interesting... examples. Many companies are getting design patents for things that are clearly functional in nature, like a Socket Wrench Tooth, or a rock dust blower, or even—really—a Quaker Oats granola bar.

(credit: Jonathan E. Shaw/Flickr)

Gimmicky diets, flavor fakery, and sham sweets all try to bamboozle the brain out of wanting sugary treats and calorie-packed happy hour drinks. But scientists may have found an all-natural way to simply switch off those corrupting cravings.

When researchers gave mice and monkeys an added dose of a mammalian liver hormone called Fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21), both species voluntarily went off sweets, even artificial ones. And mice previously hooked on alcoholic beverages were more content with plain water after the hormone therapy. The results, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, follow a series of studies that suggest FGF21 is a key metabolic regulator that may be helpful in treating obesity and type 2 diabetes. Clinical trials are already underway.

Those previous studies suggested that FGF21, made mostly in the liver but also in fat tissue and the pancreas, can help regulate glucose and lipid metabolism in the body. Many food inputs and hormonal cues, some complex, some simple, can tweak metabolism. Studies suggested that FGF21 gets involved by crossing the blood-brain barrier and grabbing onto a specific complex of proteins on the outside of cells in the central nervous system. By clamping on, the hormone can activate signals within the brain that ultimately alter food intake.