Month: April 2017

Enlarge / This is Tim Cook's unimpressed face. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Uber's misfortune continues. In a profile on CEO Travis Kalanick published yesterday, the New York Times says that the Uber CEO was called into Apple for a private meeting with CEO Tim Cook. Kalanick had directed Uber's developers to break Apple's App Store rules—he wanted the Uber app to collect unique hardware data about every iPhone it was installed on, something Apple's App Store rules doesn't allow. To obscure this from Apple's App Review team, Kalanick asked his engineers to make it so that the app wouldn't collect that data from anyone at Apple's headquarters.

This was eventually noticed by Apple engineers working off-campus, prompting the meeting with Cook. Cook told Kalanick to stop collecting the data or face ejection from the App Store, cutting it off from a wide swath of its user base. Kalanick agreed.

The report isn't clear on what data, exactly, Uber was collecting, but sleuthing from developer and security researcher Will Strafach found that a 2014-era build of the Uber app was grabbing serial numbers from every iPhone it was installed on. The meeting between Kalanick and Cook apparently happened at some point in 2015. As of iOS 10, it's no longer possible for apps to reach outside of their sandbox to access this information (Apple also prohibited apps from grabbing devices' longer Unique Device Identifier, or UDID, back in 2012).

Enlarge / Verizon FiOS's new top speed and starting price for bundles. (credit: Verizon)

Verizon is now selling what it calls "FiOS Gigabit Connection" for $69.99 a month in a change that boosts top broadband speeds and makes lower prices available to many Internet subscribers.

Actual bandwidth will be a bit lower than a gigabit per second, with "downloads as fast as 940Mbps and uploads as fast as 880Mbps," Verizon's announcement today said. The gigabit service is available in most of Verizon's FiOS territory, specifically to "over 8 million homes in parts of the New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Richmond, Va., Hampton Roads, Va., Boston, Providence and Washington, D.C. areas," Verizon said.

Verizon's FiOS territory includes more than 14 million homes, of which about 5.7 million subscribe to Verizon's fiber Internet service. Verizon provided this link for checking gigabit availability.

Enlarge / Intel Optane Memory. Engineering sample, but we hope it's the same as retail hardware.

3D XPoint (pronounced "crosspoint," not "ex-point") is a promising form of non-volatile memory jointly developed by Intel and Micron. Intel claims that the memory, which it's branding Optane for commercial products, provides a compelling mix of properties putting it somewhere between DRAM and NAND flash.

The first Optane products are almost here. For certain enterprise workloads, there's the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X, a 375GB PCIe card that offers substantially lower latency than comparable flash drives and can boast high numbers of I/O operations per second (IOPS) over a much wider range of workloads than flash. Intel isn't letting reviewers actually use the P4800X, however; the first testing of the hardware, published earlier this week, was performed remotely using hardware on Intel's premises.

For the consumer, there's Intel Optane Memory. It's an M.2 PCIe stick with a capacity of 16GB ($44) or 32GB ($77), and it should be on sale today. Unlike the P4800X, Intel is letting reviewers get hold of Optane Memory or at least something close to it: the part we received was branded "engineering sample," with no retail branding or packaging. The astute reader will note that 16 or 32GB isn't a whole lot of storage. Although the sticks can be used as conventional, if tiny, NVMe SSDs, Intel is positioning them as caches for spinning disks. Pair Optane Memory with a large cheap hard disk, and the promise is that you'll get SSD-like performance—some of the time, at least—with HDD-like capacity.

Enlarge / Early Man had a sweet mullet. (Photo By DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images / DEA Picture Library)

While natural selection is a big part of evolution, the theory now embraces much more than that. One of the big concepts that explains a lot of the pattern of evolution throughout history is called "adaptive radiation." Adaptive radiation is a process in which environmental changes create new resources, challenges, and environmental niches, enabling rapid diversification of organisms from a single ancestral species.

Adaptive radiation provides a sound explanation that captures the effects of the interactions among organisms on species diversification. However, non-biological effects—the details of how environmental changes interact with species—are not easy to incorporate into this model and have not been extensively explored.

In a recent investigation published in PNAS, a team of scientists developed a method to test how non-biological variables influence the rates of trait evolution within a group of related species. This method was based on a framework that compares evolutionary trajectories, which the scientists validated through intensive simulations.

Enlarge / Flanked by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, left, and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, right, President Donald Trump called the International Space Station on Monday. (credit: NASA TV)

Early on Monday morning, NASA's veteran astronaut Peggy Whitson set a US record for cumulative time in space, surpassing Jeff Williams' record of 534 days. To honor her achievement, President Donald Trump called Whitson from the Oval Office, flanked by his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and another NASA astronaut, Kate Rubins.

The conversation was cordial, and President Trump was gracious in congratulating Whitson and asking about her science activities on the space station. After Whitson explained various engineering efforts, including the recycling of urine into water to make for a closed-loop environmental system, Trump replied, "Well that's good, I'm glad to hear that. Better you than me."

During the call, the president also asked about NASA's Journey to Mars and whether any of the astronauts, including Whitson, Rubins, and Jack Fischer, wanted to go to Mars. They all did. "Tell me, for Mars, what do you see a timing for actually sending people to Mars. Is there a schedule, and when do you see that happening?" he then asked.