Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Xbox One is officially the first video game console to support digital purchase refunds by default. The new "self-service refund" system was announced on Wednesday on the console's "Alpha" preview ring, which is normally used to test and tease other upcoming features to the system's interface, and it confirmed that the refund process will soon land both on Xbox One consoles and the Windows Store marketplace on Windows 10 PCs.

The announcement later appeared on support forums for Xbox's Alpha group, but its effects have already begun propagating to normal users, who now can follow the below steps to request online-purchase refunds for qualifying software.

Microsoft's self-service refunds work much like returns do on PC game-download service Steam. Shoppers have up to 14 days after purchasing a game or app to request a refund, and that will only work if the software in question has not been used for more than two hours while owned.

The ant in the red circle has lost two of its legs, and here you can see other ants picking it up to carry it back to the safety of the nest. There, it will recover full running ability within 24 hours. (video link)

Though many ants spend their lives peacefully tending fungus farms and herds of aphids, others have it much rougher. Such is the case with the ant species Megaponera analis, native to many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, whose days are spent endlessly hunting termites to eat. In fact, a typical M. analis will engage in at least two battles per day with nests of angry termites. They sustain so many injuries that these ants have developed something that is extremely rare in the insect world: M. analis has learned how to rescue and rehabilitate ants that suffer extraordinary injuries on the battlefield.

University of Würzburg ecologist Erik Thomas Frank and his colleagues spent over two years observing M. analis in Comoé National Park in the northern Côte d’Ivoire, tracking 52 colonies that conducted 420 termite nest raids. They recorded their findings in a paper for Science Advances, unveiling a society where combat and altruism have evolved side by side. Their work could also shed light on why rescue behavior has evolved among mammals, too.

Ohio Office of the Inspector General

Inmates at a medium-security Ohio prison secretly assembled two functioning computers, hid them in the ceiling, and connected them to the Marion Correctional Institution's network. The hard drives were loaded with pornography, a Windows proxy server, VPN, VOIP and anti-virus software, the Tor browser, password hacking and e-mail spamming tools, and the open source packet analyzer Wireshark.

That's according to a new report (PDF) from the Ohio Office of the Inspector General, which concluded that the geeky inmates obtained the parts from an onsite computer skills and electronics recycling program. The agency's IT department, according to the report, initially was alerted to a connected device, using a contractor's stolen credentials, that had "exceeded a daily Internet usage threshold." The computers were operational for about four months. After a three-week search, they were discovered above a training room closet in an area off limits to unsupervised inmates. Ultimately, the authorities traced cable from a networking switch to find the devices that were assembled with discarded computers from an Ohio aircraft parts company and an Ohio school district.

Life on Earth may have started with a bang. (credit: Don Davis/NASA)

There aren't a lot of individual experiments that have ended up being staples of high school textbooks, but Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did one of them. Miller and Urey are the people who sealed up a mixture of gases meant to model the Earth's early atmosphere and jolted the gas with some sparks. What emerged was a complex mix of chemicals that included amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

It was a seminal experiment in that it gave researchers one of the first avenues to approach the origin of life experimentally, but its relevance to the actual origin of life has faded as the research it inspired began to refine our ideas. A French-Czech team of researchers decided to give it another look, using a source of energy that Miller and Urey hadn't considered: the impact of a body arriving from space. The result? The production of all four of the bases found in RNA, a close chemical cousin to DNA and equally essential to life.

Conceptual shifts

There are two reasons that the Miller-Urey experiment gradually fell out of favor. The first is conceptual. At the time, people focused on life's dizzying web of chemical reactions, almost all of which are catalyzed by proteins, so it was hard to envision life without proteins. The formation of amino acids could enable the formation of proteins and thus seemed to provide an obvious route to a primitive biochemistry. Genetic material could be added later.

Enlarge (credit: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

BlackBerry has won $815 million in an arbitration battle against Qualcomm over royalty payments, the company said today. The award also will include interest and attorneys' fees, which have not yet been determined.

Little detail is available about the proceedings, which ended on March 3 but were only made public today. Essentially Qualcomm agreed to put a cap on certain royalty payments, and there was a disagreement over whether or not that cap applied to some large payments made by BlackBerry, which uses Qualcomm chips in its phones.

The award comes at a time when Qualcomm is fighting Apple in a high-stakes patent lawsuit. Apple sued Qualcomm in January, saying Qualcomm illegally withheld $1 billion in rebate payments and that Qualcomm routinely demands patent royalties "for technologies they have nothing to do with."