Month: July 2017

In May, we published a story about how police body cams can be employed in the worst way—for planting evidence, or staging a crime scene. In what was among the first instances of its kind, we revealed that a Colorado cop had staged the body cam footage of the search of a vehicle in which he is seen finding drugs and cash. Pueblo prosecutors dropped the drug charges, and the Pueblo Police Department said it disciplined the officer, as an internal matter. No charges against the officer were lodged.

Now there's word of another such incident in Baltimore, related to video from a January drug arrest. The officer's trickery was revealed by the fact that his body cam, by default, retained footage for 30 seconds before it was activated to begin recording. During that time, according to the footage and the Baltimore public defender's office, officer Richard Pinheiro puts a bag of pills in a can in an alley and walks out of the alley.

The Axon cam's initial 30 seconds of footage, by default, doesn't have sound. After 30 seconds, viewers of the video can both see and hear the officer looking for drugs in the alley. Lo and behold, he finds them in the same soup can that he placed them in, according to the footage, which was released Wednesday. Pinheiro can then be heard yelling "yo" to his fellow officers, telling them he found drugs in the alley.

Enlarge / Ars Technica's Creative Director Aurich Lawson is on vacation. When that's the case, this is what happens to our "art department." (credit: id Software / Sam Machkovech)

Multiple Doom-related stories landed on the nerd newswire on Wednesday, and they focused on decidedly different eras of the decades-old series. Bethesda announced a significant freebie for the game's 2016 version, while original Doom fans received a pretty random trivia reveal from none other than John Romero himself.

The shooting series' co-creator and level designer took to his official blog on Wednesday as a response to an informal Twitter poll he'd posted days earlier. Romero had asked fans which of his old game series they'd like to hear "a piece of trivia" about, and 40 percent of roughly 2,000 votes were cast for Doom. He responded by unearthing a previously unrevealed story about the game's cover art, which he can personally vouch for.

More precisely, Romero revealed that he was the model for the helmeted, devil-blasting "Doomguy" on its iconic box cover.

Enlarge / Cows. (credit: Getty | KARL-JOSEF HILDENBRAND)

An 11-year-old cow in Alabama tested positive for an “atypical” strain of the prion disease Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

The cow tested positive for the strain, called L-type BSE, during routine surveillance at a livestock market where the animal had started exhibiting clinical signs. The USDA stressed that the case posed no health threat and would not change the country’s international risk status, and thus it would not cause any beef trade issues.

“This animal never entered slaughter channels and at no time presented a risk to the food supply or to human health in the United States,” the USDA said in a statement.

Though Guillermo del Toro took Hollywood by storm with movies like Hellboy and Pacific Rim, he truly made his mark with gothic indies like the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth and the sumptuous Crimson Peak. Now he's back with The Shape of Water, another intimate look at the inner lives of monsters and the humans who love them.

Anyone who has been immersed in del Toro's lush, magical films knows he's a master of design, especially when it comes to creatures. Nearly all of his movies deal with the idea that monsters are better people than their human counterparts, and he always manages to get us to identify with giant hellbeasts and gore-soaked ghosts. Though del Toro's monsters have always been mesmerizing and gorgeous, The Shape of Water is the first of his movies to deal overtly with a human falling in love with one of these otherworldly creatures.

Like Pan's Labyrinth and Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water is also a period piece. Set in the early 1960s during the Cold War, it's about Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute janitor working at what seems to be a top-secret government facility. She's assigned to clean a lab where the government has imprisoned a beautiful, intelligent fish-like man (Doug Jones), sort of a glimmering cross between the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Aquaman.