Month: March 2017

Enlarge / You know why that kid is smiling. (credit: Getty | Imgorthand)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a pool in good use by humans will contain pee.

As Ars has reported before, those disturbing warm spots create harmful chemicals. Urine and chlorinated water react to form trichloramine and cyanogen chloride. At certain doses, these can cause respiratory and eye irritation. At high doses, cyanogen chloride can kill—it’s considered a chemical warfare agent. The levels found in pools, however, are nearly negligible. Long-term exposure by professional swimmers and pool workers may be linked to asthma, but otherwise it’s unlikely to cause many problems. And as Ars has also reported, you’d need a hellish scenario of two-parts water, one-part chlorine, and the wee of three million people in a pool to get to a lethal situation.

Still, it’s hard not to be curious about how much pee we let slip while taking a dip—and now we have the answer.

Enlarge (credit: Matthew Dodd)

The study of life’s history on Earth is an ongoing effort to follow the thread further and further back in time. As amazing and fascinating as a few billion years’ worth of fossils are, we still ultimately want that Holy Grail that illuminates the origins of life on Earth. Unfortunately, that goal collides with the fact that the earliest evidence stands the least chance of being preserved through the eons for us to find.

Each new find that purports to supplant the earliest known signs of life is virtually guaranteed to be controversial, subject to poking and prodding from skeptical scientists uncertain that every competing (non-living) explanation can be ruled out. Last August, for example, a paper claimed to show the remnants of stromatolites (small mounds built by communities of shallow water microorganisms) in 3.7 billion-year-old rocks in Greenland. Similar fossils from Australia that come in at about 3.5 billion years old are generally accepted as legit, but anything older is still subject to scientific debate.

Now, a new study led by University College London PhD student Matthew Dodd describes evidence of what the researchers believe to be seafloor bacteria that lived at least 3.7 billion years ago.

Uber is already under suspicion of fostering a culture of sexual harassment, and the ride-hailing service appears worried about losing customers. But things just got a bit more toxic. An Uber driver released dashcam footage to Bloomberg News of him and his rider, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, in a heated argument about mileage prices.

The exchange, recorded by the driver named Fawzi Kamel, ended ugly after the driver accused Kalanick of reducing rates to the point of Kamel saying he went bankrupt.

"Bullshit," the CEO of the $69 billion company is overheard saying on the video that was recorded Super Bowl Sunday in San Francisco.

Enlarge (credit: Cali4Beach)

Visit any news organization's website or any social media site, and you're bound to find some abusive or hateful language being thrown around. As those who moderate Ars' comments know, trying to keep a lid on trolling and abuse in comments can be an arduous and thankless task: when done too heavily, it smacks of censorship and suppression of free speech; when applied too lightly, it can poison the community and keep people from sharing their thoughts out of fear of being targeted. And human-based moderation is time-consuming.

Both of these problems are the target of a project by Jigsaw, an internal startup effort at Google. Jigsaw's Perspective project is an application interface currently focused on moderating online conversations—using machine learning to spot abusive, harassing, and toxic comments. The AI applies a "toxicity score" to comments, which can be used to either aide moderation or to reject comments outright, giving the commenter feedback about why their post was rejected. Jigsaw is currently partnering with Wikipedia and The New York Times, among others, to implement the Perspective API to assist in moderating reader-contributed content.

But that AI still needs some training, as researchers at the University of Washington's Network Security Lab recently demonstrated. In a paper published on February 27, Hossein Hosseini, Sreeram Kannan, Baosen Zhang, and Radha Poovendran demonstrated that they could fool the Perspective AI into giving a low toxicity score to comments that it would otherwise flag by simply misspelling key hot-button words (such as "iidiot") or inserting punctuation into the word ("i.diot" or "i d i o t," for example). By gaming the AI's parsing of text, they were able to get scores that would allow comments to pass a toxicity test that would normally be flagged as abusive.

Enlarge (credit: aling_)

Everything from solar power panels to everyday electronics relies on advanced materials and manufacturing processes. But some interesting things are also being made with some old-school tech: plants. Recently, researchers have demonstrated the ability to create electronic plants, or e-Plants, which made their own localized analog and digital circuits. These technologically savvy plants were produced using the existing plant vascular system, so first-generation models are limited by the nature of their leafy hosts.

Now, a team of researchers has developed a new method to produce e-Plants, in this case getting a rose (Rosa floribunda) to produce its own wiring and even supercapacitors.

Energy transport

To make an effective e-Plant, you need a system for energy transport. In the past, development of long-range conducting wires within plants has been a challenge due to material limitations. In particular, the chemicals used to make the wiring within a living plant have suffered from issues such as clotting, toxicity, or failure to spread throughout the plant.

Weather Bell

Houston meteorologist Matt Lanza recently noted that a city on the upper Texas coast, Galveston, had been setting a staggering number of high temperature records this winter. About one-fourth of the days saw record highs, so Lanza reached out to the local forecast office of the National Weather Service to see if they had any concerns about thermometer calibration or recent land-use changes at Scholes Field in Galveston, where the temperature is recorded. No, he was told, it has just been that "sort of winter."

From the period of November through February, Galveston ended up setting a total of 31 record high temperatures. And it is not like Galveston is a recently thrown-up beach community; the city it has a history that goes back two centuries. It formerly served as the capital of the Republic of Texas, and it has formal meteorological records that date all the way back to 1874.