Month: October 2016

Enlarge / The Switch's HD screen is reportedly a little smaller than that on an iPad Mini.

We might still be more than two months away from additional official information about the Nintendo Switch, but the unofficial information is coming out at a rapid pace. The latest bit of info comes via Eurogamer, which has confirmed with "a number of sources" that the Switch tablet has a 6.2" multitouch screen running at 720p resolution.

That screen size lines up closely with the 6.5 inches we estimated based on a visual analysis of photos provided by Nintendo. The screen size and resolution also line up with alleged Switch development kit specs that circulated earlier this month.

The 6.2" screen size would match up precisely with that on the Wii U, whose GamePad runs at a much lower 480p resolution. At about 240 pixels per inch, the Switch display as described would pack its pixels in tighter than the screen on the smaller PlayStation Vita but wouldn't be quite as dense as the 300+ ppi displays on modern iPhones or the iPad Mini line. And just because the Switch games run at 720p on the tablet doesn't necessarily mean the system wouldn't be powerful enough to handle full 1080p output when docked to a TV.

Enlarge (credit: Future Atlas)

Over time, a funny thing happened to the perception of climate science in some countries: it became just another badge in the culture wars. Public opinion on what this field of science says is now primarily a reflection of which team you’re on politically. While anyone trying to reach across teams to communicate about climate change is likely to be discounted as a result, voices from within a group can get a fairer hearing.

One significant voice about climate change has been Pope Francis, who released a letter (called an “encyclical”) in 2015 titled Laudato si’ (or Praise be to you). The encyclical acknowledges human-caused climate change as an unavoidable reality and frames action as a moral imperative. Many hoped that this might have an impact among Catholics who still doubted climate science.

A group of researchers led by Texas Tech’s Nan Li neatly planned out a pair of before-and-after surveys to assess those hopes with data. So what impact did the encyclical actually have on American Catholics?

Andrew Cunningham

Here’s the good thing: I walked away from Apple’s campus yesterday with a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Here’s the less good thing: it’s not the one with the Touch Bar, the version that Apple actually spent most of its time talking about yesterday. It’s the $1,499 version, the one with the same design, keyboard, trackpad, and screen as the Touch Bar version but with fewer Thunderbolt ports and, again, no Touch Bar. So the version of this laptop I’ve spent the most time with is, for better or worse, the version that most people won’t be as interested in.

Enlarge (credit: Soylent)

Soylent is pulling its meal-replacement powder from the market in light of trickling reports of customer illnesses. As Ars previously noted, the company already pulled its snack bars earlier this month after customers online said they suffered gastrointestinal distress, some "violent." However, in an update late Thursday, the company acknowledged that it had received a small number of similar complaints from customers who consumed the latest powder line, Soylent 1.6. The company now thinks they’re connected and that the link could finally help them identify the source of the problem.

In an online blog post Soylent said:

For the past several weeks, we have worked aggressively to uncover why people were having these negative experiences. This has included product testing, an exhaustive industry search, and discussions with many of our suppliers. Our tests all came back negative for food pathogens, toxins or outside contamination… Interestingly, we didn’t see similar complaints during the 1.5 formulation. This possible connection allows us to narrow the field considerably given there are only a few ingredients that are specific to only our bars and Powder 1.6.

Ars reached out to Soylent to ask what those ingredients are, but we haven’t received a response yet. We’ll update when we do. However, based on online ingredient listings for the three products, the likely top suspects include Whole Algal Flour, Isomaltooligosaccharide (a non-digestible, low-calorie sweetener made of short-chain carbohydrates), and a Soy Protein Isolate.

Google Brain has created two artificial intelligences that evolved their own cryptographic algorithm to protect their messages from a third AI, which was trying to evolve its own method to crack the AI-generated crypto. The study was a success: the first two AIs learnt how to communicate securely from scratch.

The Google Brain team (which is based out in Mountain View and is separate from Deep Mind in London) started with three fairly vanilla neural networks called Alice, Bob, and Eve. Each neural network was given a very specific goal: Alice had to send a secure message to Bob; Bob had to try and decrypt the message; and Eve had to try and eavesdrop on the message and try to decrypt it. Alice and Bob have one advantage over Eve: they start with a shared secret key (i.e. this is symmetric encryption).

Importantly, the AIs were not told how to encrypt stuff, or what crypto techniques to use: they were just given a loss function (a failure condition), and then they got on with it. In Eve's case, the loss function was very simple: the distance, measured in correct and incorrect bits, between Alice's original input plaintext and its guess. For Alice and Bob the loss function was a bit more complex: if Bob's guess (again measured in bits) was too far from the original input plaintext, it was a loss; for Alice, if Eve's guesses are better than random guessing, it's a loss. And thus an adversarial generative network (GAN) was created.

Richard Kim, Faraday Future global design director, left, poses for a photo with Ding Lei, co-founder, global vice chairman, managing director, SEE Pland, Letv, second left, and Nick Sampson, VP of R&D and Engineering at FFZERO1 pre-CES reveal event in Las Vegas on Monday, January 4, 2016. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/ AP Images for Faraday Future) (credit: AP)

Back in January at CES, we got our first introduction to Faraday Future. It's an electric vehicle manufacturer that aims to take on Tesla (as well as the rest of the auto industry) with a family of long-range EVs built on a common platform. The LA-based startup—backed by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting—met with a slightly underwhelming response at CES when the company showed us a concept EV hypercar, but now we've had our first glimpse of its first consumer product, seen being tested on track.

As is usual in the case of pre-production vehicles, the EV is heavily disguised, so we can't infer too much about the styling, but the company told Ars we can expect to see more leading up to an official reveal at CES in January 2017.

The company also joined forces with Dragon Racing in Formula E this season, and one of its drivers (Jerome D'Ambrosio) finished seventh in the opening round of the championship earlier this month. For this season, Faraday Future will help Dragon Racing with software development for the team's race cars, but next season we expect the cars to run with Faraday Future's motor/generator units and inverters as well. Several companies with EV R&D programs are now represented in the racing series, using it as a testbed for their technology.