Month: August 2017

Google Allo, Google's latest attempt to stay relevant in the instant messaging market, is finally going to work on something other than a single smartphone. Google is launching a web interface for the struggling instant messaging service.

Google Allo launched in September 2016, and it was missing so many basic messaging features it was dead on arrival. It only worked on phones, leaving tablets, laptops, and desktops out in the cold. It couldn't be used on multiple devices at once. It didn't work with SMS messages, so you couldn't talk to your friends that weren't on Allo. It didn't even pull information from your Google account, needing a name and picture at registration. Instead of working to quickly fix these gaps in core functionality, the Allo team burned through their first year (and all their launch hype) launching superfluous features like additional stickers and animated gif support.

Enlarge / Teams now have three more months. (credit: Google Lunar XPRIZE)

The $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE was announced nearly a decade ago, with the goal of landing a privately funded robot on the Moon that travels more than 500 meters and returns high-definition images and video to Earth. It had an ambitious timeline of just five years. But like almost all big projects in aerospace, this deadline kept slipping to the right. In 2015, it was extended to require a launch by the end of 2017.

By this year, five teams remained in the competition—SpaceIL, Moon Express, Synergy Moon, Team Indus, and Hakuto. Each had attained a contract to meet the requirement to launch a mission to land on the Moon by the end of this year to claim the bulk of the prize money. But still, no one seemed quite ready to launch to the Moon just yet.

In recognition of this, the prize organizers have extended the deadline for completion of the mission to March 31, 2018, giving each of the groups an additional three months. Organizers also added incremental prizes along the way, $1.75 million for completing one orbit around the Moon or entering a direct-ascent approach to the lunar surface, and $3 million for a soft landing on the Moon. The overall prize value remains $30 million.

Enlarge (credit: Scott Gilbertson)

The Linux world has long maintained a very specific rite of passage: wiping the default operating system from your laptop and plugging in a USB stick with your favorite distro's live CD. Some of us get a little, dare I say, giddy every time we wipe that other OS away and see that first flash of GRUB.

Of course, rites of passage are supposed to be one-time events. Once you've wiped Windows or OS X a time or two, that giddiness vanishes—replaced by a feeling of annoyance, a kind of tax on being a Linux user.

In recent years, the PC industry has finally spawned a few manufacturers offering up machines with Linux pre-installed to eliminate this issue. By this point, I've tested most of them around Ars: Dell's XPS and Precision lines both have Linux-friendly offerings, and dedicated Linux manufacturers like System76 have long offered decent hardware with Linux pre-installed. In all this testing, I've yet to encounter a driver problem, which is the real benefit of a machine with Linux pre-installed. (Though to be fair, I could say the same for the Lenovo x240 that serves as my daily driver.)

Enlarge / Homeopathic remedies in a pharmacy. (credit: Getty | Peter Macdiarmid )

Unproven alternative treatments are clearly risky. Some carry the risk of direct harms, such as improperly diluted homeopathic tablets, blinding stem cell injections, contaminated supplements, or tainted placenta pills. And others, such as magic healing crystals and useless detoxes, may risk indirect harm by taking the place of evidence-based treatments.

However obvious the risks, measuring them has been tricky. For one thing, patients aren’t always eager to provide data, let alone admit to their doctors that they’ve ditched conventional therapies. But, by digging into the National Cancer database, researchers at Yale have finally quantified one type of risk for cancer patients—the risk of death. And the results are grim.

Those who skipped or delayed conventional treatment to use alternative ones had as much as a 5.7-fold increased risk of dying within five years than those who stuck with conventional medicine, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Though the study was small and had several gaps—including not knowing the types of alternative treatments patients had tried—the researchers hope that it spurs discussion and “greater scrutiny of the use of [alternative medicine] for the initial treatment of cancer.”