Month: February 2016

I'm standin' here. Your move. You talkin' to me? You talking to ME? (credit: Marek C. Allen)

Raccoons may be adorable, but they have earned the nickname "trash pandas" for a reason. In cities, they'll knock over garbage bins to find food. In the wild, they take the same scorched-Earth approach to all the local wildlife they can fit in their mouths, wrecking ecosystems. Now, a group of scientists has figured out one way to stop them.

Off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, raccoons have invaded several of the Gulf Islands, with less-than-wonderful results. Though they were once kept in check by local bears, wolves, and cougars, these carnivorous predators have been eliminated by humans who viewed them as dangerous. The only natural predators of raccoons left on most islands are domestic dogs.

As a result, island raccoons are living it up—the nocturnal creatures are even coming out during the day to amble around on shore and eat. Raccoons are wolfing down coastal animals like crabs, worms, and fish at an alarming rate. They sometimes eat just part of a crab and then leave the rest of the body floating in the water. As a result, crab and other raccoon-prey species are being decimated.

It's hard to tell from this flat trade show demo image, but trust us, the 3D effect is impressive even without glasses. (credit: Ultra-D)

aQuite frankly, 3D glasses have never failed to be anything but a headache inducing, slightly blurry mess for me. That might be why a recent demo of a new glasses-free 3D TV from Ultra-D blew me away. It just works.

Six years or so after the industry declared that stereoscopic 3D displays were going to be the future of entertainment, 3D TVs are decidedly not the present of entertainment. A combination of relatively wonky glasses technology, high costs, and a general lack of interesting content have turned what was once a hot ticket into an overwhelming market flop, save for a few holdout TV set makers and aging devices like Nintendo's 3DS line.

At least one company thinks they finally have the right combination of technology and timing to give traditional 2D displays some added depth, though. After years of quiet development, StreamTV Networks has started manufacturing displays with its Ultra-D technology—displays that don't require glasses, focal "sweet spots," or much in the way of specially made 3D content. After seeing the technology on display at DICE recently, I found myself less-than-skeptical about stereoscopic TVs for quite possibly the first time ever.

All these Graphiq employees are clearly happy because of their pioneering anti-patent troll success. (credit: Graphiq)

Lumen View Technology sued several small businesses in 2013 over a patent that described little more than online "matchmaking" before its demands for quick $50,000 payoffs ran into a Santa Barbara startup called Graphiq (formerly FindTheBest).

Graphiq CEO Kevin O'Connor, who had also co-founded online ad giant Doubleclick, pledged to spend his own money to defeat Lumen View—and defeat them he did. O'Connor's battle with the patent-holding company has finally come to an end, with the still-unknown owners of Lumen View agreeing to pay him $100,000.

"We took their patent, and we got sanctions against their lawyer," said O'Connor in an interview with Ars. "We probably spent $350,000 to get $100,000. It was worth every cent. It definitely wasn’t the best investment, but goddamn, I feel good. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for those bastards."

Verizon's pre-order page.

If you've had $700 burning a hole in your pocket since the announcement of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, Samsung is now ready to take your money. This page at Samsung.com will direct you to the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge pre-order pages from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Best Buy. You might have a small problem with the storage options, though—only the 32GB version is currently for sale.

Samsung added a microSD card to the Galaxy S7, so you aren't quite as limited with the 32GB version as you would expect. If you wanted a 64GB and 128GB version of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, though, it seems you'll have to wait. A representative from T-Mobile told us the higher storage configurations "will be available as soon as the device is released," and we'd imagine other retailers will be in a similar situation.

With the pre-orders up, this is also the first time we've seen actual prices for the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The carriers haven't really agreed on how much they should charge, so things are complicated.

(credit: NOAA)

At the end of the last ice age the oceans rose rapidly, as much of the water trapped in the large ice sheets was returned to the sea. Over the course of the last century, ocean levels rose again as rising temperatures caused glaciers to melt and the water itself to expand.

In between the two, however, we haven't had a very clear picture of what has been happening. Various records exist from around the world, indicating where the ocean level was in the past. But these numbers are influenced by local changes and don't give a clear picture of any global changes, which can be key to understanding the oceans' response to climate change and predicting where the sea levels are likely to go in the future.

Now, an international team of researchers has taken these local records and built a global database that allows them to track ocean levels for the past 1,500 years or so. And the picture that results looks a lot like that of the temperature reconstructions: centuries of small variations, followed by a sudden rise over the last century. The authors estimate that the oceans haven't seen changes like this in more than 2,800 years.