Month: August 2016

Emoji have become important. They’ve permeated our conversations and our messaging apps and our popular culture to a degree that no one could have anticipated just a few years ago, and when your phone or computer gets an update, new emoji are often featured prominently in the release notes or even announced in their own press releases.

That the “language” is so universal and recognizable is due in large part to the Unicode Consortium, the group of major tech companies in charge of defining and approving new emoji (and dozens of other character sets, besides). Every year, it proposes, discusses, and approves new additions to the language, and that heavyweights like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have become so diligent about supporting new versions is a rare victory for standards in an age where every tech company on Earth is trying to lock you into its own proprietary silo.

But the Unicode Consortium can only do so much to influence the way any given emoji looks and is interpreted. Every new version of the Unicode spec includes a description of each character, a sample image, and other broad recommendations for implementation, but companies implementing the spec are free to represent the emoji pretty much however they want. And as the language’s range of expression continues to grow, so do the opportunities for misunderstanding.

(credit: Christian Petersen / Gett Images)

It’s not often that you can say you’re in better shape than an Olympic athlete. But an American adult is half as likely as an Olympian to have cavities, based on data from the CDC and from a 2013 study of athletes competing in the 2012 London Olympics. And three-quarters of these Olympians had gingivitis.

Of course, the demands of Olympic-level training set these athletes apart from the rest of us. Thirty percent of the athletes studied had taken a blow to the mouth, jaw, or face. And the average person doesn’t need an Olympic marathoner’s high-carb diet or sports drinks, which can contribute to tooth decay and other problems.

Professor Ian Needleman, who co-authored the 2013 study, explained in an interview with Ars the additional risk factors that Olympic athletes face. Needleman, of the Centre for Oral Health and Performance at the UCL Eastman Dental Institute in London, noted that “there’s good evidence that during high-intensity training, immunity is challenged.” Prolonged training also leads to dehydration in the mouth, he said, “and we have very good data showing that dehydration reduces saliva’s protection” against tooth decay, dental erosion, and gum disease.

(credit: Kim et al., Science (2016))

Touchscreens have transformed the way we interact with electronics, enabling the development of elegant handheld devices. But currently, their screens are limited to a fixed size. As flexible and wearable electronics are in development, the touchscreens we'll need in the future will have to be both flexible and biocompatible. In an investigation recently published in Science, researchers have designed an ionic touchscreen that boasts stretchability and biocompatibility, allowing easy integration with the human body.

The team selected a hydrogel-based material for their work. Hydrogels are soft, water-filled polymer networks; their mechanical properties are similar to those of certain tissues, and they can be made of biocompatible materials. As an added bonus, they’re highly transparent. In this case, the scientists selected an ionic hydrogel—a polyacrylamide base containing lithium chloride salts.

For a gel to function as a touchscreen panel, it has to conduct electricity, which is why there's lithium chloride present. To produce a uniform electrostatic field across the panel, voltage was applied at all the panel corners. When a person touches the panel with their finger, the finger acts as a conductor that is grounded. As a result, a potential difference is generated between the electrode and the touch point causing the current to flow from the electrode through the finger.

When Metal Gear Solid series auteur Hideo Kojima left Konami under extremely strained circumstances last year, many worried about what the corporate parent would do with the storied Metal Gear franchise IP it still controlled. Well worry no longer: the newly announced Metal Gear Survive stays true to the series' long-established roots of stealth action, amazing visuals, and multiplayer, interdimensional battles against zombie hordes.

Wait, what was that last part?

Yes, despite the Metal Gear branding, Survive looks like it couldn't be much more different from the well-known Metal Gear Solid games. Set just after the events of Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, the online multiplayer game will let four characters from that game's Mother Base fight together to survive against "living biological threats" in "a distorted desert landscape" that's part of "an alternate timeline caused by unexplained wormholes forming in the sky," according to a press release.