Month: September 2016

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For teens, a face full of oozing, bulging, and bursting zits is sure to mortify. But the puss-spewing horror may be a sign of a glowing godsend to come.

Those who suffer through acne early in life are likely to have longer telomeres (protective DNA caps on the ends of chromosomes) in their white blood cells—a feature that suggests their cells may age more slowly. The finding, published Wednesday in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, may finally explain a phenomenon dermatologists have long noted: that past acne sufferers tend to have more youthful looking skin, with less wrinkling and thinning, compared to peers who never battled blemishes.

“Our findings suggest that the cause could be linked to the length of telomeres, which appears to be different in acne sufferers and means their cells may be protected against ageing,” lead author of the study, Simone Ribero, a dermatologist at King’s College London, said in a statement.

Within the first few weeks of Volkswagen's diesel shenanigans becoming public knowledge, the company's board decided that electrification would have to be the way of the future. And earlier this year, the company got more concrete about those plans, forecasting that 20 to 25 percent of its sales in 2025 would be electric vehicles. While we'd already seen veiled production EV concepts from Audi and Porsche, at the Paris Motor Show on Wednesday VW revealed the I.D. concept, a battery electric vehicle that VW says will go into production in 2020.

The I.D. features a 125kW motor, batteries good for 250 to 375 miles' range (400 to 600km) according to VW, and it's the first car to use VW Group's Modular Electric Drive (MEB) platform. (The Audi e-tron and Porsche Mission-e concepts linked above both predate MEB.) The I.D. will be launched as a model parallel to VW's very successful Golf, and the dimensions look roughly similar based on the provided images of the car.

VW also tells us that the car is our first look at the marque's plans for autonomous driving. A self-driving mode will apparently be available from 2025, and when in automated mode, the steering wheel recesses into the dash.

Back in April, we told you about Project SAM, a Chevrolet Corvette specially modified by Arrow to enable the vehicle to be driven by Sam Schmidt. Schmidt is a successful IndyCar team owner these days, but he used to be an IndyCar driver until an accident in 2000 paralyzed him from the neck down. On Wednesday, Nevada—which has a reputation as an early adopter when it comes to automotive technology—issued Schmidt the first "autonomous vehicle restricted driver's license."

Project SAM works with a combination of head tracking (for the steering) and a sip-and-puff controller for the throttle and brake. The system is sensitive enough to let Schmidt actually drive the car to its potential; at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb this year, Schmidt gave a demonstration run up the mountain on race day. His co-driver, Robby Unser, confirmed to Ars that Schmidt did not take things easy.

However, Schmidt's license does come with a few restrictions. For one thing, like the autonomous vehicle testing licenses granted by the state to Google, it's only valid within Nevada. Also, Project SAM can't go out if there's snow or ice on the road, and there needs to be a pilot car ahead as well as a licensed driver ready to take control of the Z06 if necessary.

Enlarge / Humans living in Argentina 14,000 years ago were hunting giant armadillos. This one looks especially grumpy. (credit: Heinrich Harder)

For over a decade, evidence has been piling up that humans colonized the Americas thousands of years before the Clovis people. The Clovis, who are the early ancestors of today's Native Americans, left abundant evidence of their lives behind in the form of tools and graves. But the mysterious pre-Clovis humans, who likely arrived 17,000 to 15,000 years ago, have left only a few dozen sources of evidence for their existence across the Americas, mostly in the form of campsites where they processed animals during hunting trips. Now a fresh examination of one such campsite, a 14,000 year-old hunter's rest stop outside the city of Tres Arroyos in Argentina, has given us a new understanding of how the pre-Clovis people might have lived.

Archaeologists are still uncertain how the pre-Clovis people arrived in the Americas. They came after the end of the ice age, but at a time when glaciers and an icy, barren environment would still have blocked easy entrance into the Americas via Northern Canada. So it's extremely unlikely that they marched over a land bridge and into the Americas through the middle of the continent—most scientists believe they would have come via a coastal route, frequently using boats for transport. That would have explain why many pre-Clovis sites are on the coast, on islands, or on rivers that meet the ocean.

These early settlers were hunter-gatherers who used stone tools for a wide range activities, including hunting, butchery, scraping hides, preparing food, and making other tools out of bone and wood. Many of the pre-Clovis stone tools look fairly simple and were made by using one stone to flake pieces off the other, thus creating sharp edges. At the campsite in Argentina, known as the Arroyo Seco 2 site, archaeologists have found over 50 such tools made from materials like chert and quartzite. They're scattered across an area that was once a grassy knoll above a deep lake, which is rich with thousands of animal bone fragments that have been carbon dated to as early as 14,000 years ago. There are even a couple dozen human burials at the site, dated to a later period starting roughly 9,000 years ago. The spot has the characteristic look of a hunter's camp, used for processing animals, that was revisited seasonally for thousands of years.

An HP Officejet ink cartridge, just $26.99. (credit: HP)

HP Inc. today said it will restore the ability of certain OfficeJet printers to use third-party ink cartridges, after being criticized for issuing a firmware update that rejects non-HP ink.

But HP is still defending its practice of preventing the use of non-HP ink and is making no promises about refraining from future software updates that force customers to use only official ink cartridges.

HP made its announcement in a blog post titled "Dedicated to the best printing experience."

Enlarge / Amazon's new Fire TV Stick and its Alexa remote. (credit: Amazon)

It's a good time to be in the market for a streaming TV box. Roku just updated its lineup earlier this week with the tiny $30 Roku Express and some mainstream boxes that bring 4K video support for less than $100. Google is expected to release a 4K version of its popular Chromecast dongle at its product event next week. And Amazon has just announced a new version of its $40 Fire TV Stick.

For most people, the most noticeable upgrade will be the included Alexa Voice Remote, which can be used to search for media, launch apps, and control playback, among other things. Voice input can go a long way toward solving the normally frustrating experience of tapping out text using a giant on-screen keyboard, and Amazon is offering the feature in a cheaper package than either Roku or Apple.

4K TV and streamers are becoming more common and more affordable, but the Fire TV Stick is still aimed primarily at people with 720p and 1080p TVs and relatively basic needs. It's still getting a few hardware upgrades that should make the experience better, though. It trades its dual-core Broadcom SoC for a quad-core MT8127 chip from MediaTek. Its 1.3GHz ARM Cortex A7 cores and quad-core ARM Mali 450 GPU would be laughably outdated in any smartphone, but they're well-suited for 1080p media streaming and should provide a noticeable improvement to UI fluidity and general responsiveness. The SoC also supports 1080p decode for h.265/HEVC content.

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In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration sent letters out to beverage makers warning that their caffeinated, alcoholic drinks were “unsafe.” The federal admonishment followed an exceptional string of reports that college kids were getting black-out drunk and severe alcohol poisoning after consuming them. Mixing alcohol and high levels of caffeine is a dangerous combination, the FDA and health experts cautioned; the drinks amp people up while dousing their ability to sense their own intoxication, leading to more drinking and riskier behavior.

But according to new research, highly caffeinated beverages can be linked to serious trouble.

In a six-year study following 1,000 college students, researchers found that the more non-alcoholic energy drinks a person reported throwing back, the more likely they were to drive drunk. The finding squares with past studies that have linked alcoholic energy drinks to such dangerous behaviors. However, the study, published Tuesday in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, is the first to decouple the bad effects of alcohol from those of the energy drinks alone.