Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: Bethany Brown)

Pregnancy is known to cause permanent physical changes, including hormonal changes and transformations to reproductive and abdominal tissues. But little is known about the effects of pregnancy on the brain, though some previous studies suggested changes to regions associated with emotional regulation.

But a recent study in Nature Neuroscience presents striking findings that pregnancy induces substantial changes in brain structure. This is real evidence that there is a distinct “pregnancy brain." But there's no indication that these changes cause any of the forgetfulness popularly ascribed to pregnant women.

For this study, researchers looked at first-time mothers and used women who had never had children as a control group. Researchers took MRI scans of the mothers both before and after their pregnancy, allowing each woman’s pre-pregnancy brain scan to act as a baseline for understanding her post-pregnancy scan. The brains of the soon-to-be-moms and the controls showed no differences at baseline.

Enlarge / Organizational changes within Apple could explain why we see new Macs like the Retina MacBook less frequently and regularly than we used to. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

In an internal memo circulated yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook reaffirmed the company's commitment to the Mac in general and the Mac desktop in particular. Apple's desktops haven't been updated for years, and the Mac Mini and Mac Pro haven't been refreshed even longer. The lack of updates has prompted speculation and scrutiny among the press and the wider Apple enthusiast community.

Though that memo was circulated to the press, its intended audience was Apple's employees. Cook specifically tries to address doubts among Apple's teams about the Mac's importance:

If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.

Those lines are especially interesting in light of a long report from Bloomberg today that indicates the Mac is "getting far less attention than it once did" inside the company. There are some rational explanations for this, as we've written before: Intel releases new chips less frequently than it once did, and when it does launch new products, they tend to bring only incremental improvements over their predecessors. The Mac also represents less of Apple's revenue than it did even five or six years ago—it usually generates somewhere between 10 and 12 percent of Apple's revenue, compared to 60 percent or more for the iPhone. But persons "familiar with the matter" detail to Bloomberg a few organizational changes that have negatively impacted the Mac and delayed some products past their originally planned ship dates.

When you imagine Neolithic hunter-gatherers, you probably think of people eating hunks of meat around an open fire. But the truth is that many humans living 10,000 years ago were eating more vegetables and grains than meat. Researchers discovered this after an extensive chemical analysis of 110 pottery fragments found in the Libyan Sahara Desert, a region that was once a humid savannah full of lakes, herd animals, and lush plant life.

The pottery was excavated at two archaeological sites: Uan Afuda cave and the Takarkori rock shelter. People inhabited these spots on-and-off for several thousand years, between 8200–6400 BCE. Both sites were occupied shortly after the invention of heat-resistant pottery in Africa 10,000 years ago (pottery was independently invented 4,000 years earlier in Asia). Remains in these places reveal the emergence of a key cultural innovation: cooking and preparing vegetables in clay pots.

The Archaeological Mission in the Sahara. Sapienza University of Rome.

Enlarge / Barry Bowser, seen here in front of the Bakersfield property where he was arrested in 2014. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

BAKERSFIELD, Calif.—Most convicted criminals don't make a point of publicly apologizing for their crimes in the local newspaper. But Barry Bowser, who was convicted in 2015, is no ordinary criminal.

“For shining a laser at a helicopter for three seconds, I lost my entire life,” Bowser wrote in a recent letter to the editor of The Bakersfield Californian. “I am now 54 years old and I have no one and nothing but the clothes I was given when I was released from prison.”

Weighing at least 250 pounds with a wide chest and a handlebar mustache, Bowser has quite a presence. He agreed to meet me near a local supermarket and arrived in dark sunglasses, black sneakers, black-striped shorts with skulls on the edges, and a t-shirt advertising a local orthodontics practice. John Goodman would be a shoo-in for the lead role if there’s ever a Bowser movie.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft Studios)

Nearly eight years ago, Halo Wars landed on Xbox 360 consoles with designs on making an RTS game that truly works with gamepad control. To celebrate the series' impending sequel, currently scheduled to launch in February, Microsoft has come up with an odd promotional move. Finally, you can play Halo's console-minded RTS... with a mouse and keyboard.

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition landed on Xbox One and Windows 10 on Tuesday, and I dove in to offer some quick impressions of what to expect from a PC-ized version of a console-ized version of a PC gaming genre.

How do you get it?

Enlarge / The view from Mount Wycheproof. It's not very spectacular. (credit: Prince Roy)

Google's Project Wycheproof is a new effort by Google to improve the security of widely used cryptography code.

Many of the algorithms used in cryptography for encryption, decryption, and authentication are complicated, especially when asymmetric, public key cryptography is being used. Over the years, these complexities have resulted in a wide range of bugs in real crypto libraries and the software that uses them.

Google's ambition with Project Wycheproof is to ensure that these known flaws are eradicated. The open source project contains a number of test cases that check for these known flaws; currently, there are more than 80 tests for 40 different defects. The project is limited in scope and realistically attainable, hence the name that Google has chosen: Mount Wycheproof is a hill that some claim is the world's smallest mountain. Its peak is 237 meters above sea level and just 43 meters above the surrounding plain. Scaling such a mountain is a straightforward proposition.

Greetings Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we've got a number of deals to share today. Two high-demand products are back at their best prices yet: now you can get a Dell XPS 13 laptop, featuring a Kaby Lake Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD for only $849. You can also snag an XPS 8900 desktop with a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TBHDD for just $599. Both of those sale prices are steals for a couple of Dell's popular PCs, so now's the time to grab them if you've wanted to update your system.

Find the best deals you can get by 12/24 at TechBargains.

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Enlarge / NASA's already got atomic clocks that it can send into deep space. (credit: NASA)

Most scientists who work on dark matter have become convinced that it's made up of WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. WIMPs produce the best match for the data we have on all the effects of dark matter, and they would have been produced early enough in the Universe's history to account for dark matter's early influence on the distribution of regular matter.

But WIMPs aren't the only theoretical game in town. While the other proposals all have various problems—the wrong masses or energies, bad timing, and so on—our failure to actually detect a WIMP has kept them viable. One of the more bizarre ideas is that the Universe itself is filled with what are called topological defects; areas where the Universe's quantum fields haven't reached the same state as the field in which our normal physics operates.

Now, a group of Polish researchers has calculated that the search for this form of dark matter requires nothing more than a few clocks. Very accurate atomic clocks, but clocks nevertheless.