Month: March 2016

Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, in an Amnesty International ad that will be distributed by Adblock. (credit: Amnesty International via Mashable)

Users of the Adblock browser extension may see something today they're not used to when they surf the web: ads.

The ad-blocking giant, which claims to have 50 million users, will still remove advertisements from the web. But instead of showing the "peaceful, blank spaces you're accustomed to not noticing," Adblock will replace publishers' ads with banners supporting Amnesty International.

The Amnesty ads, which mark March 12 as the "World Day against Cyber Censorship," are a cause that Adblock believes is worthy enough to, well, advertise. The company says the messages, from US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, and Russian punk band Pussy Riot, are a one-day exception to its business as usual.

(credit: Hernán Piñera)

The Department of Justice has opened another legal front in the ongoing war over easy-to-use strong encryption.

According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, prosecutors have gone head-to-head with WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that "as recently as this past week," federal officials have been "discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption."

The case, which apparently does not involve terrorism, remains under seal.

(credit: Getty Images)

In vitro fertilization (IVF) accounts for up to five percent of babies born in developed countries, and the technique has yielded some five million people ever since Louise Brown was born in the UK on July 25, 1978. And that’s just humans; the technology has been a huge boon in breeding farm animals. Yet there are hints that the procedure can have some unwanted effects on the resultant embryos. One such indication is a skewed sex ratio.

The sex ratio of a population should be roughly fifty-fifty. That ratio is sensitive, and possibly adaptive, to a number of environmental factors like maternal nutrition and population density. It's thus viewed as an indicator of reproductive health.

But in 1991, it was noted that IVF generates more bulls than heifers; the same skewing towards males has since been seen in pigs, mice—and, yes, people. A new paper in PNAS offers an explanation of what is going on and how to fix it.

(credit: Mitchell Weinstock)

Director Gavin Hood is bursting to talk about his new project, Eye in the Sky. That's probably because his film, which debuts this weekend, involves many modern-day topics of discussion—things like the evolution of drone technology or the ethical implications of autonomous warfare.

What catches your eye first about Eye in the Sky is the tech. Even though Hood's movie is about drone warfare, the military-grade drone cruising over Kenya is not really what Eye in the Sky is about. Besides a few quick CGI-ish shots of a Reaper in flight, the bulk of the spying is done by an amusingly mechanical hummingbird drone and a tiny, camera-rigged mechanical beetle. Hood said that while the two drones aren't exactly plucked from a current military reality, both are based on prototypes that have been built (in the case of the hummingbird) or described as micro-air vehicles or MAVs (in the case of the beetle).

The director added that he didn't want to get too hung up on what's current today, because drone technology is changing quickly:

(credit: Getty Images)

Frieda Klotz visited the ‘world’s first cyborg fair’ with one question: are cyborgs a real thing, or are these people just kidding themselves? Her article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Michael Bareev-Rudy never expected to have his finger implanted with a magnet. But in November 2015, the 18-year-old decided to embed a 3 mm x 1 mm magnet in his index finger at an event held in Dusseldorf, Germany. A crowd gathered to watch as a man in a smart grey suit and green surgical mask carefully sliced open the sandy-haired 18-year-old’s finger.

“After this he cuts with a scalpel on the side of my finger—yes, he cuts my finger open,” Michael recalled moments later, looking decidedly pale as he smiled nervously before the flashing cameras. After sterilizing the table and numbing Michael’s finger with a local anesthetic, “he uses—I don’t really know how to describe this tool—it was like a pen, sharp on the end with a little spoon on the top. He carved a tunnel through my finger to get the magnet inside and then he tried to put it there.” Because the magnet refused to slip easily into the young man’s finger, they had to try six times before succeeding.

Don't let the flowers fool you; it's going to be a deadly spring.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think. This review contains NO SPOILERS of the Pandemic Legacy experience.

Pandemic Legacy is, at this writing, the best board game ever made. That's not my judgment—it represents the collective wisdom of Board Game Geek users, who have catalogued more than 82,000 games and have rated Pandemic Legacy the best of the lot.

That's high praise for a game that only appeared a few months ago at the end of 2015. So what makes it so remarkable?