Month: September 2016

(credit: OpenOffice)

OpenOffice, once the premier open source alternative to Microsoft Office, could be shut down because there aren't enough developers to update the office suite. Project leaders are particularly worried about their ability to fix security problems.

An e-mail thread titled, "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" was started yesterday by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board.

"It is my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together," Hamilton wrote.

For the past several years, a group of researchers have been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we've seen before.

The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: they built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe that leads into the bunker. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal.

Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski's team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a "colony" in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera. Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft.

Enlarge / Screen grab of SpaceX static fire anomaly from YouTube video. (credit: USLaunchReport.com)

During eight years on Twitter and more than 21,500 tweets, I have used the F-word just one time, on the afternoon of April 8, 2016. Watching a Falcon 9 rocket fall out of the sky and somehow, miraculously, come to fiery stop on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean—the moment overcame me. That first sea-based landing may be the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.

It is unprofessional to simultaneously report on, and be a huge fan of, subjects journalists cover. But there are very few space reporters who don’t marvel at the kinds of things SpaceX has done and is trying to do. I count myself among them. That doesn’t mean the company can do no wrong, nor should it be free from criticism. And having talked to myriad people in the space industry after Thursday’s accident, from new space zealots to big aerospace barons, one thing has become crystal clear. The booster that two NASA astronauts might climb on top of in two years—or less—has just suffered two failures in 15 months.

SpaceX is an amazing company, doing amazing things. But right now there’s really just one thing the company should focus on, and that’s meeting the needs of its biggest customer. That is not a satellite company. It is not Red Dragon. It is not the hordes of adoring fans eager to hear about the Mars Colonial Transporter. It is, rather, NASA, America’s stodgy space agency that has stood by the company for the better part of a decade.

Enlarge / A scene from Another Metroid 2 Remake, one of many fan games recently taken offline by Nintendo DMCA requests.

Online game distributor Game Jolt has removed over 500 fan games from its public pages after it says it received a DMCA request from Nintendo, highlighting a more-focused crackdown on such games from the 3DS and Wii U maker.

The DMCA request, which has been republished by Game Jolt in the name of transparency, focuses on fan games that use the characters, names, and locations of the Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon franchises. The list of affected games ranges from standard copyright and trademark infringement like Mario Minecraft and Pokemon: PewdiePie Edition to more explicitly brand-damaging titles like Mario on Drugs and Pokemon: Death Version.

Game Jolt says affected titles will still be accessible by the creators in a "locked" mode, to ensure no one loses access to their own data. A Nintendo representative was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars.

Enlarge (credit: Alienware)

Alienware has been unsurprisingly busy since E3, where the company announced powerful VR-ready desktops, as well as its OLED 13-inch gaming notebook. But the news doesn't stop there: Alienware recently announced an update for its other gaming notebooks—the Alienware 15 and 17 models—which includes a slight redesign, VR capabilities, and eye-tracking technology.

The new laptops look nearly identical to the original models, but closer inspection reveals a refined design. Alienware has abandoned the slanted corners of its older laptops in favor of an overall design that's 20 percent thinner and allows for more efficiency. One of the biggest changes is the "disappearing" hinge design: the lid of Alienware's new notebooks is set about an inch inward onto the chassis, so when you open it, the lid seems to disappear into its base. Yes, that means that part of the laptop's chassis sticks out behind the hinge, but Alienware explains that it moved the heat exchanger to that spot, which in turn allowed the new notebooks to be slimmer than previous models.

Aside from the hinge change, the other design alterations are minimal, and Alienware was vague about the small changes to the notebooks' keyboards. The company mentioned the new keyboard's additional 2.2mm of travel, but the keyboard I had time with felt nearly identical to its much-loved predecessor. The strips of light have been moved from the top of the lid to its edges and the chassis' sides, and the trackpads light up as well. Each model has a Windows Hello camera embedded near the display for quick access to Hello's privacy features. Overall, the new laptops lose a bit of that futuristic feel, but they gain a dark elegance thanks to their anodized aluminum, magnesium alloy, and carbon fiber construction.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | BSIP)

In a final ruling announced Friday, the Food and Drug Administration is pulling from the market a wide range of antimicrobial soaps after manufacturers failed to show that the soaps are both safe and more effective than plain soap. The federal flushing applies to any hand soap or antiseptic wash product that has one or more of 19 specific chemicals in them, including the common triclosan (found in antibacterial hand soap) and triclocarbon (found in bar soaps). Manufacturers will have one year to either reformulate their products or pull them from the market entirely.

As Ars has reported previously, scientists have found that triclosan and other antimicrobial soaps have little benefit to consumers and may actually pose risks. These include bolstering antibiotic resistant microbes, giving opportunistic pathogens a leg up, and disrupting microbiomes. In its final ruling, issued Friday, the FDA seemed to agree. “Consumers may think antibacterial washes are more effective at preventing the spread of germs, but we have no scientific evidence that they are any better than plain soap and water,” Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), said in a statement. “In fact, some data suggests that antibacterial ingredients may do more harm than good over the long-term.”

Back in 2013, the FDA first proposed the ban and called on soap manufacturers to submit data that would show that their products were both harmless and could out compete plain soap in de-germing humans. The agency reports that manufacturers either didn’t bother submitting data or offered up data that wasn’t convincing. In the meantime, many manufacturers have already started phasing out triclosan and other antimicrobial compounds from their products.