Month: March 2017

Enlarge / The smartphone-based semen analyzer tests for male infertility in seconds from the privacy of home with a 3D-printed setup costing less than $5, which can analyze most semen samples in less than 5 seconds. (credit: Vignesh Natarajan)

The male equivalent of the at-home pregnancy test may have just landed.

With a simple smartphone device and a chip that slurps up sperm, men can easily and cheaply measure the count and motility of their swimmers. The test is about 98 percent accurate, takes less than five seconds, and requires no training to run, Harvard researchers report Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. It’s also cheap—the device and the microfluidic chip cost just $4.45 total to manufacture.

Researchers are hopeful that the invention will help couples trying to have children—as well as those trying not to. Worldwide, it's estimated that more than 30 million men face fertility issues at some point. And couples in developing countries or remote areas may not have easy access to fertility clinics. On the flip side, those who undergo vasectomies are encouraged to monitor their sperm counts afterward to make sure the procedure worked. A simple, mobile phone-based test could help both groups.

The historical record of video games received a strange shake-up on Wednesday from Ed Fries, the ex-Microsoft executive who had a huge part in the creation of the original Xbox. Fries took to his personal blog, which typically covers the world of retro gaming, to announce a zany discovery: he had found the world's earliest known arcade game Easter egg.

His hunt began with a tip from Atari game programmer Ron Milner about the 1977 game Starship 1. This tip seemingly came out of nowhere, as the duo were talking about an entirely different '70s arcade game, Gran Trak 10, which Fries was researching separately. Starship, Milner said, had a few special twists that didn't all make it to market, but one did: a secret message to players. The game would display "Hi Ron!" if players put in the right combination of button commands. This type of thing is better known to gaming fans as an Easter egg, and more than a few Atari games had them as a way to include the developer's name (which Atari never put in games or on cabinets).

Milner didn't tell anyone at Atari about the secret message for 30 years, he told Fries, and one reason is because he'd forgotten how to trigger it.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart)

About 17,000 AT&T wireline technicians and call center employees went on strike in California and Nevada today while filing an unfair labor charge to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleging that AT&T violated federal law.

"The company has shown disrespect to the bargaining process by changing the work assignments of workers without bargaining as required by federal law," the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union said in its strike announcement. "Further, AT&T reneged on an agreement to resolve the dispute without any explanation."

The CWA said that AT&T "is asking its workers to do more for less—keeping them from their families with unpredictable overtime, undercutting pay and advancement, offshoring good jobs, and pushing more health care costs onto employees."

Enlarge / The evolution of the vortex over femtoseconds. (credit: Spektor et. al.)

The late 20th and early 21st century have seen a revolution in the study of light. Far from the old days of seeing things dimly through microscopes, we are now in the position to freeze light, use it to make materials transparent, and watch it spiral around on a gold surface.

Watching light do its thing is very difficult. This sounds a bit silly, as we observe the world through the effects of light. But what we actually see is an average effect. Light, shade, colors, and texture all come to us via the intensity of light, provided by lots of individual photons. We are in no position to see the femtosecond flickering of the field that averages to our spectacular view of the world.

All the interesting stuff we see is related to the amplitude and phase of the light field, though. And the amplitude of a light wave changes very fast, going through a complete cycle in two to three femtoseconds. The wavefront (phase) also travels very fast, moving around 300 nanometers every femtosecond. Tracking this sort of motion is tricky, but it reveals all sorts of intriguing stuff.

Consider this your regularly scheduled reminder that the Internet Archive continues to host some of the coolest relics of nerd history. Now, the scan-and-upload team led by Jason Scott delivers quite the piece of video game nostalgia: the Atari Coin Connection.

Long before consumer magazines and fan newsletters ruled the industry, Atari's first publication launched in 1976 to an audience of businesses and arcade operators. The publication existed to simultaneously promote new arcade games and offer operator advice for existing machines, and full archives of the mostly black-and-white newsletter can now be accessed in the form of pristine scans. Scott confirmed to Ars that these scans have been sitting on other sites for roughly eight years. "I have been handed a pile of manuals, newsletters, and magazines today—about 20 gig—and while a lot were already on the Archive, a bunch weren't, so I'm reconciling that," Scott said to Ars via e-mail. As a result, they're bound to receive much more attention and love.

Enlarge

The Supreme Court issued a 5-2 opinion (PDF) today allowing cheerleading uniforms to be copyrighted. The case, Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, is expected to have broad effect in the fashion world and beyond. A group of 3D printing companies had also asked the high court to take up the case, asking for clarity on how to separate creative designs, which are copyrightable, from utilitarian objects that are not.

The case began when Varsity Brands, the world's largest manufacturer of cheerleading and dance-team uniforms, accused Star Athletica of infringing its copyrighted designs. Star Athletica fought back in court, saying the chevrons and stripes on the uniforms had a utilitarian function—namely, to identify cheerleaders as cheerleaders. Noting that Varsity Brands had sued or acquired several other competitors, Star's lawyers complained that Varsity's aggressive litigation led to high uniform prices, "to the detriment of families everywhere."

The district court sided with Star, saying the designs couldn't be separated from the uniform's utilitarian function. But a panel of judges at the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit disagreed, saying there was no utilitarian need for stripes and chevrons and that "a plain white cheerleading top and plain white skirt still cover the body" and allow for jumps, kicks, and flips.

Tony Shaff, 44 Pages

AUSTIN, Texas—If you ever attended a pediatric dentist or loved reading between the ages of two and 12, chances are good you've come across Highlights. The legacy kids' magazine turned 70 in the summer of 2016, and throughout the decades it has been a cultural constant. Everyone knows about hidden picture searches or the long-running Goofus and Gallant comic, but poetry from Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes has also graced its pages (and unpublished submissions from the likes of Walter Cronkite sit in the archives). The Highlights brand has become such a part of the American fabric that it has been referenced in pop culture across decades, in everywhere from Beavis and Butthead to The Colbert Report, Mad Men, The Simpsons, Blackish, and Arrested Development.

If you haven't recently flipped through the magazine, Highlights will likely surprise you after all these years. A new documentary called 44 Pages (which is the magazine's constant size, since there's no advertising) chronicles Highlights' history, process, and philosophy in the run-up to its 70th anniversary edition in June 2016. At South by Southwest, the film showed that Highlights is a more complex publication than your younger-self ever recognized. Now, as it has done throughout its history, Highlights quietly packs real, grown-up science and tech into each issue as seamlessly as it hides a hammer within the bark of some illustrated tree.

Ferrari

Good news, everyone: the 2017 Formula 1 season starts this weekend. As has become tradition, the first race of the year is in Melbourne, Australia, meaning those of us in Europe or North America can expect a late night or very early morning. This will be the first year under new management—with Liberty having purchased F1 from CVC, ousting Bernie in the process—and also the first year for new aerodynamics regulations and new tires. The two preseason tests have come and gone, but yet again—and despite more than 20 years following the sport—I still have no idea who's going to come out on top.

Black and round

The principal complaint about F1 in recent years—along with inaudible engines, exorbitant ticket prices, and the boredom of overwhelming Mercedes domination—has been the Pirelli tires. Specifically, it's about the tires' inability to cope with more than one heat cycle. With most racing slicks, if you push too hard and overheat the tire, backing off for a few corners lets them cool down, and everything goes back to normal. But when the F1 Pirellis of the past few years overheat, they're ruined. (It's possible this is caused by a particular chemical used in the manufacturing process that makes the tire compound extrudable.) That won't be the case this year; now the tires will suffer little to no drop-off or degradation, so expect a lot of one-stop strategies, at least for the first few races.