Month: July 2017

Enlarge / Rick and Morty on a Nintendo Switch?! It's thanks to Niconico, a Japan-only video streaming app that works on any Switch in the world. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

For all of the things we like about the Nintendo Switch, its lack of serious app or multimedia support has become increasingly frustrating. Switch owners had to wait a full four months for the system's first true media-streaming app, which finally launched late Wednesday—and for most of the world, it will require jumping through quite the language-barrier hoop.

The honor belongs to Niconico, a video-streaming app from the popular Japanese video service of the same name. This free app is now available to all Nintendo Switch owners, regardless of their country of origin. To download it, users will need at least one Japanese Nintendo eShop account set up on their Switch—and in good news, the installation is not only easy but free. This is thanks to the Nintendo Switch's utter lack of region-locking. (Niconico has previously released video apps for the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS systems, but those are region locked.)

The English-speaking friendliness ends as soon as the app boots, however. Having installed and tested the app on an American Switch, I can report that Niconico does the trick, so long as users are fine with a complete lack of language options. You'll need to tap through Japanese-language menus before watching your first video. Doing this creates a free Niconico account attached to your Nintendo Network ID.

Enlarge / Sometimes, reality is alarming. (credit: Jim Nix)

One of the challenges of discussing climate change is that it really is that bad. Completely realistic projections of things like sea-level rise, loss of agricultural productivity, and so on can sometimes sound like a disaster movie.

This is a bit of a problem in two ways. The first is that people naturally tend to dismiss possible future outcomes that they don't want to believe will happen. The second is that, since its predictions are for very negative changes, all of climate science has been branded "alarmist." In fact, if you do a web search for "alarmist," the first results that aren't basic definitions or the Alarmist Brewery are all about climate change.

This week, however, we were provided with a number of indications that accusations branding all climate science as alarmism simply aren't true. In response to a couple of articles that were a tad overly pessimistic about our future, climate scientists have stepped in to provide more realistic perspective about our future.

Enlarge / The inflatable lunar/Mars analog habitat, or ILMAH. (credit: Microbiome, 2017)

For many Earthlings, our planet is teeming with airborne pollens, spores, and toxins that clog schnozes and turn windpipes wheezy. Sadly, jumping to space rocks may not help, a new NASA study suggests.

In a 30-day simulation of living life on another planet, NASA researchers found that fungi followed artificial astronauts and set up their own colonies. Many of those small space explorers excel at surviving in extremely harsh conditions, such as those in the salty, acidic high-altitude soils of the Indian Himalaya or the radioactive remains at Chernobyl. And several of the fungi that piggybacked off-world in the simulation are associated with allergies and asthma indoors, the researchers report this week in the journal Microbiome.

“The statement ‘wherever humans go, microbes hitchhike along with them’ is true for fungi also,” Kasthuri Venkateswaran, lead study author, told Ars. He works in the Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “At present, most of our studies have been conducted to know the dynamic changes regarding bacteria, not fungi,” he notes. “This is the first study that examined the fungal changes in a confined environment for at least 30 days of human habitation in isolation using molecular methods.”