Month: March 2017

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In a post-launch update to our initial Nintendo Switch review, we noted that there is no way to externally back up game save data stored on the system. A recent horror story from a fellow writer who lost dozens of hours of game progress thanks to a broken system highlights just how troublesome this missing feature can be.

Over at GamesRadar, Anthony John Agnello recounts his experience with Nintendo support after his Switch turned into a useless brick for no discernible reason last week (full disclosure: I know Agnello personally and have served with him on some convention panels). After sending his (under warranty) system to Nintendo for repair, Agnello received a fixed system and the following distressing message from the company two days later:

We have inspected the Nintendo Switch system that was sent to us for repair and found that the issue has made some of the information on this system unreadable. As a result, the save data, settings, and links with any Nintendo Accounts on your system were unable to be preserved.

Agnello says he lost 55 hours of progress on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as well as more progress on a few other downloadable games. While he was able to redownload the games that were deleted, he'd have to start from scratch on each one (if only all that progress was easily, instantly unlockable in some way...)

Sarah Laszlo puts an EEG headset on a research participant's head. (credit: Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University)

In recent years, funding for research provided by the National Institutes of Health has struggled to keep up with inflation. A recent paper published in Science suggests this could mean bad things for the overall economy. Ana analysis of 27 years of NIH grants shows that 10 percent of them were acknowledged directly in new patents, and the research they funded showed up three times more often.

The authors of this paper analyzed the output of research grants awarded by the NIH, focusing specifically on life-science patents, including patents for drugs, medical devices, and other medical technologies. They did not examine grants in other fields, such as physics.

Between 1980 and 2007, the NIH funded 365,380 grants, nearly half of which were what are called R01-level, which is used to fund large projects. They found that about nine percent of these grants were directly acknowledged by patents, while 31 percent were indirectly linked to new patent applications. The indirect group involved research papers produced using money from the grant; these papers may then be cited in patents.

Palmer Luckey, the person most directly associated with the rise of Oculus as a major force in the growing world of virtual reality hardware, has left parent company Facebook, according to a statement provided to Ars Technica by a Facebook representative:

Palmer will be dearly missed. Palmer’s legacy extends far beyond Oculus. His inventive spirit helped kickstart the modern VR revolution and helped build an industry. We’re thankful for everything he did for Oculus and VR, and we wish him all the best.

Facebook declined to clarify further details about Luckey’s departure and did not specify whether Luckey would issue any official statement on the matter.

After being a major face of the company since Oculus' first public prototype unveiling in 2012, Luckey's public role with the company has been greatly reduced since September, when he was financially linked to an odd Donald Trump-backing "shitposting" group. Luckey quickly apologized for the impact that revelation had on the rest of Oculus as a company after a vocal backlash among some in the VR community. Luckey did not appear at Oculus' annual Connect conference last September after taking a keynote spot at the previous Connect events.

Enlarge / Three students—Jarquiese McCaskey, Jaquan Hawkins and Zaylan Randolph—hold computers as they enter the school library where they will attempt to do work on laptops with very limited Internet access. As testing time for students is ongoing this time of year, students at Monroe Intermediate School in Lower Peach Tree, Alabama are at a disadvantage as Internet capabilities at the school are limited. (credit: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

As cloud computing has become an integral part of the lives of students at public schools, it has increased the importance of a place generations of students have turned to for much more analog learning needs—the library.

Both public and school libraries have always been a source of information for students. And while the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way students do research, cloud-based tools have actually evolved the library's role rather than diminished it. Public computers at libraries have become an extension of the classroom, and they're an important resource for children who don’t have unfettered access to broadband Internet at home. The cloud has only made those public computers more effective.

I’ve seen the change happen myself—my place of employment, a public library in the Washington DC-area, offers 27 Linux stations for youth and adults to use seven days a week. Before the cloud became popular, students asked for help saving their homework to USB Flash drives or frantically tried to e-mail their partially-completed homework during the last minutes of a computer session. Things would get ugly fast—students lost work far too often, and many rationally concluded that library computers were unsuitable for doing homework.

Dino Pulerà

New scientific discoveries about Tyrannosaurs have upended our understanding of the giant predators whose massive populations extended from Asia to the Americas. They had feathers. They ran like birds. And now, a new species that lived approximately 100 to 66 million years ago in Montana has given us our first real look at these dinosaurs' faces.

Carthage College paleontologist Thomas Carr and his team describe the scaly visage of Daspletosaurus horneri in a new paper from Scientific Reports. A typical member of this species would have been about nine meters long and 2.2 meters tall, with its large skull covered in bony ridges and different skin types. The researchers write that D. horneri is "critical to understanding the evolutionary transition from nonbeak to beak along the line to birds, since beaks are specialized epidermal structures." In other words, it's not just badass to reconstruct what a tyrannosaur's face looked like—it also gives us a glimpse of the in-between stages as snouts evolved into beaks.

Enlarge / Exhibit 41 in latest court filing in the defamation suit against Buzzfeed for publishing the Trump dossier. (credit: Federal court documets)

When looking through the latest legal filing in the defamation lawsuit against Buzzfeed and editor Ben Smith that stems from publishing the Trump dossier in full, one might suspect the suit brought by Russian tech mogul Aleksej Gubarev is all fun and games. It feels like some headlines straight out of Buzzfeed, in fact. Gubarev's lawyers almost seem to be trolling the website.

Make no mistake, the lawsuit itself is certainly serious business. It alleges that Buzzfeed, by publishing the dossier in January, falsely portrayed Gubarev as a "significant player" in the Russian government's bid to hack the Democratic National Committee. But the latest legal document's intro looks like this:

If you didn't notice, there's a footnote next to the word "Kitten." In that footnote, Gubarev's legal team writes that there's a cute picture of a kitten on Exhibit 41, (PDF) apparently buttressing the brief's introductory line.