Month: November 2016

Android for Work—Google's enterprise-focused dual-persona mode for Android—is a great solution for BYODers that need to keep work and personal data separate. Enable it and Android leverages the multi-user framework to you give your work and personal sides separate apps and separate data, while giving admins control over the "work" side of the phone.

When I first checked out Android for Work last year, setup was impossible (just try to find any competing reviews of it out there). Even if you just wanted to see what Android for Work was like, you needed to pay for a Google apps subscription and jump through 10+ screens of IT admin configuration on the Google apps (Now GSuite) dashboard. It was a mess. To try and fix this, Android for Work is launching a demo mode called the "Android Management Experience."

Enlarge / No, not that axion.

This year, the Large Hadron Collider has produced more than 10 times the data that it generated in the previous year's run. While most of that hasn't been analyzed yet, none of the data looked at so far contains an obvious sign of one of the Universe's big mysteries: a dark matter particle. With each year's failure to turn up a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle), it gives us a little more motivation to consider alternatives.

One of the more compelling alternatives is a particle called an axion. Axions were first proposed to solve a different problem in physics, one involving the forces that pulls quarks and gluons together to form things like protons and neutrons. But if axions exist and have mass, they would seem to have the properties needed to produce the effects we ascribe to dark matter.

One nice thing about axions is that, since they have to perform another role, their properties are a bit constrained. Now, a team of researchers have used that fact to calculate the mass we should expect an axion to have. The input parameters to that calculation? Nothing more than the Universe itself.

Greetings, Arsians! We're here again to bring you the latest deals courtesy of our partners at TechBargains. Now you can get a number of devices on discount through Dell's Black Friday Flash Sale, including a great gaming laptop. You can get a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 gaming laptop with a 4K touchscreen and a GTX 960m 4GB GPU for just $735. Normally this notebook would be $1,000, so grab it now if you've been wanting a new gaming device.

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Featured

Enlarge / This is like one of those optical illusions... isn't it?

Given how stingy some companies are with their early review access these days, we were pretty surprised to see the miniature NES Classic Edition show up on our doorstep this morning ahead of its November 11 launch (after being announced back in July). We were even more surprised that Nintendo didn't put the usual embargo on our coverage of the new hardware, meaning we could write about it immediately.

We'll put together a more comprehensive review of the miniature NES re-release sometime next week. For now, though, here are our early impressions after a few hours with Nintendo's latest piece of game-playing hardware.

This thing is really tiny

Sure, we already knew from previous announcements and preview coverage that this wasn't an Xbox-sized system. Even so, it's striking just how minuscule the hardware is in person. The pictures in this piece don't do justice to the impression.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Boston Globe )

While laying out “how winning is done,” Rocky Balboa shrewdly noted that “the world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows.” A new study suggests that point is dead on.

Basketball players that were grimly reminded of their own inevitable demise before playing took more shots and scored more points in a study published in an upcoming issue of Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. The researchers behind the experiments hypothesize that the pep-talk tactic fits with the established “terror management theory,” which proposes that humans are motivated to seek self-esteem, meaning, and symbolic immortality—in this case becoming a famous athlete—in order to manage their fear of death.

"We've known from many studies that reminders of death arouse a need for terror management and therefore increase self-esteem striving though performance on relatively simple laboratory tasks,” Peter Helm, a study co-author and psychologist at the University of Arizona, said in a news release. “However, these experiments are the first to show that activating this motivation can influence performance on complex, real-world behaviors.”