Month: January 2016

Coffee is one of the most popular drinks worldwide, with countless cups of the dark, alluring elixir brewed up each day. And, lucky for those coffee-guzzlers out there, mounting data suggest it’s good for you; moderate coffee drinking has been linked to lowered risk of cardiovascular disease, liver diseases, diabetes, and an overall lowered risk of dying too soon.

But, as coffee-lovers happily continue sipping their morning fix with a dash of self-satisfaction, it’s worth noting that not every cup of coffee is equal. Brewed coffee can vary wildly in its flavor and chemical make-up, particularly the chemicals linked to health benefits. Everything that happens before the pour—from the bean selection, roast, grind, water, and brew method—can affect the taste and quality of a cup of joe.

So far, there’s little to no data on the health impact of drinking one type of coffee over another. In studies linking coffee to lowered risks of disease and death, researchers mostly clumped all coffee types together, even decaffeinated coffee, in some cases. But, there is a fair amount of data on individual components of coffee that are flavorful and beneficial—and how to squeeze as much them as possible into your mug. Here’s what the science says:

It's been about two months since I've vacuumed my house, and the floor has never been cleaner. That's because I haven't been doing it—a robot has. For the past two months we've had a Neato BotVac Connected rolling around the house, the latest robo vac in Neato's lineup. Like all Neato robots, this has a spinning LIDAR unit that maps out the house. In this new "Connected" version, it's got Wi-Fi and a smartphone app.

The household name in household robots is definitely iRobot's Roomba, a round robotic vacuum cleaner that popularized the idea of having a little bot clean up after you. The fundamentals of the Roomba haven't changed much since its introduction: it's a vacuum on motorized wheels with a bumper plate in the front. When the plate bumps into something, the robot knows it hit an obstacle and changes directions. Start a Roomba on floor and usually it will spiral outward until it hits a wall, try to feel out the perimeter of the room, and then ping pong all across the center of the house in an attempt to cover the interior space.

Most Roombas can't "see." Its only window to the outside world is the little bumper plate—it feels its way around a space by running into stuff. Roomba will say it takes this limited information and runs it through an algorithm to be a little smarter than "randomly driving around," but to the human eye, there's little logic to where the little disk is driving.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The Rolex 24 at Daytona is the start of the American sportscar racing season. Since it happened to coincide with my 40th birthday, we decided to fly down to Florida to check it out. The main event is a 24-hour race for the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, which you might remember last year as the Tudor United SportsCar Championship. The race involves four different classes of car racing on track at the same time.

The fastest cars race in the Prototype class, a mix of older Daytona Prototypes (tubeframe race cars) and LMP2s (carbon fiber prototypes that race at Le Mans). Next quickest are the GTLM cars, which are factory-supported racecars based on roadgoing machines like the Corvette Z06 and Porsche 911. Both Prototypes and GTLM feature lineups of professional drivers, many of whom are world-class. Several stars of NASCAR and IndyCar were in the field this year.

The next two classes are pro-am, where wealthy amateurs are joined by professional hotshoes. There are the Prototype Challenge cars, which are all identical open-cockpit cars with Chevy V8s. The other pro-am class is GTD, which this year uses the GT3 technical ruleset. Like the GTLM cars, these are based on road-going machines like Lamborghini Huracáns and Dodge Vipers, but there is less room for technical development.

It's been an action-packed race so far (with almost six hours left to run at the time of writing). Who wins is anyone's call. You can catch the end of the race on Fox Sports or streaming via the IMSA website or app.

Attention all would-be OPA members: Du sif wang wit milowda fo yam seng unte revelushang! (Translation—join us for drinks and revolution!)

This Wednesday, February 3, 2016, come join Ars’ Tech Culture Editor Annalee Newitz and me at Longitude bar in downtown Oakland, California. Not only will you be among friends and fellow fans of The Expanse, but you’ll be able to hang out and learn Belter from the man who created it—Nick Farmer, the language consultant for the show.

Farmer is well-trained in many languages, including Swedish, Spanish, and a smattering of others to various degrees. At Longitude, he'll give all of us a basic lesson in Belter 101—a fascinating and poorly-understood (at least by us Earthers) creole.

SLOAT, CALIFORNIA—Plumas County is rural, mountainous, and at the far north of the Sierra Nevada Range. In area, it is larger than the individual states of Rhode Island and Delaware, but the population here is under 20,000. It all makes for a beautiful place to live, but some amenities that are common in more densely populated areas can be hard to come by.

High-speed Internet access that’s reliable across all seasons of the year is one clear example. In 2014, the local cable TV provider (New Day Broadband) went bankrupt, taking with it the only source for cable-based Internet access in the town of Quincy, California. It was also the only tethered high-speed provider accepting new customers. AT&T used to offer DSL in the area, but the company stopped taking on new clients and does not allow existing customers to transfer service. And while both satellite Internet access and multiple WISPs (wireless ISPs) are available, both of these delivery methods face reliability challenges in stormy, snowy weather (a common occurrence for this area in the winter).

With that in mind, you can imagine my surprise when in recent years I learned a local ISP—Plumas Sierra Telecommunications—now offers fiber to the doorstep. This new availability of reliable, high-speed Internet access allowed me to shift from an office job to telecommuting, meaning my wife and I could return to the rural Sierra Nevada after 15 years of living in the metropolis of Southern California.

Recently, Sam Tenakhongva, a teacher living on the Hopi reservation in northern Arizona, bought a Chevrolet pickup truck equipped with integrated 4G LTE. As the company’s advertising boasts, the feature was novel for a commercial vehicle and unprecedented for a truck. Intrigued, Tenakhongva decided to take advantage of a free trial.

It didn’t take long for him to eschew the service. The truck only connected when Tenakhongva was in a 4G network and, given the region’s limited broadband access, Tenakhongva knew such an occurrence would be too rare to justify the cost.

Today, this situation rings true for an overwhelming majority of American Indians living on reservations. This year, the Federal Communications Commission reported that 41 percent of Americans living on tribal lands lacked access to broadband (which the FCC currently defines as 25Mbps for downstream speeds and 3Mbps for upstream speeds); that number leaps to 68 percent for those in rural areas of tribal lands.

The social-networking site Facebook, and its Instagram photo-sharing service, are prohibiting person-to-person firearms transactions and related firearms advertising on the popular platforms.

The Friday move comes almost a month after President Barack Obama announced an executive initiative requiring those selling guns—whether at a flea market or online—to register as a firearms dealer and to perform background checks on gun purchasers. The White House has urged Silicon Valley to bake encryption backdoors into its wares, and has also urged social media companies to make it difficult for unlicensed gun dealers to sell firearms on their networks. Silicon Valley, however, has publicly balked at calls for encryption backdoors. Facebook's changeover is part of its updated terms of service that also prohibit its 1.6 billion monthly visitors from selling marijuana, pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs.

The company will remove posts reported by its users that violate the policy, which had already prohibited firearms sellers from promoting "no background checks required." Licensed dealers, which by law must perform background checks, may still advertise as long as transactions occur outside Facebook properties. Minors have already been shielded from seeing pages advertising guns. Repeat violators of Facebook's policy, designed to clamp down on unregulated gun sales, could be banned from the social network.

"The best camera," goes the old saying, "is the one you have with you." It’s true, too—spend just a few minutes browsing places like /r/pics and you’ll find stunning image after stunning image taken on a wide variety of cameras, from DSLRs with telephoto lenses all the way down to smartphones. A modern smartphone is equipped with a hell of a lot of picture-taking power and can spit out pro-looking images without a whole lot of effort, and nearly everyone has one on them all the time. Does that mean, then, that the best camera today is a smartphone?

We explored this in our October 2014 "iPhone vs. DSLR" shootout—and we learned a lot. The first lesson was, at least according to a whole lot of people, that I suck at photography. And that’s all right—I do suck at photography. Most of the images I take are properly called "product photography," done inside in studio conditions with lots of lights and not necessarily a lot of variation in settings. Shooting in the real world is a lot more complicated.

More importantly, we proved conventional wisdom right. A smartphone does take awesome pictures, so you don’t need a DSLR, two bags of gear, and a tripod unless you really need an expensive DSLR, two bags of gear, and a tripod.