Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Spencer Platt | Getty Images)

Americans bought more electric vehicles in September than any other month this year. According to Inside EV's monthly sales report, 21,325 battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs found homes last month. That's 20 percent more than this time last year and the second highest number ever. 2017 looks like it will be a record year; a total of 159,614 EVs were sold, a figure that should easily be eclipsed by the end of October.

Tesla leads the pack, thanks to healthy increases in both Model S and Model X sales this month. Tesla may suffer some good-natured teasing about frequently missed deadlines, but you could set your watch by the regularity of its quarter-ending jump in deliveries. Barring some unforeseen circumstance, the Model S will remain the best-selling EV for the third year running. Like the overall trend, sales for the startup EV maker are up compared to last year, and even if the Model 3 continues to frustrate, we expect it to break the 50,000 car barrier by year-end.

General Motors is the only other company within reach of Tesla, whether we're talking about range or sales volume. The company just announced it's adding two new BEVs in the next 18 months, and the more we think about the concepts we saw (very briefly), the more we can see them appearing as a Buick crossover and something a bit sleeker wearing a Cadillac badge.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Aurora's eVTOL, a prototype of a plane Uber hopes to use to offer flying car service in Dallas and Dubai starting in 2020. (credit: Aurora Flight Sciences)

On Thursday, the aviation giant Boeing announced that it is acquiring Aurora Flight Sciences. The lesser-known company specializes in cutting-edge aviation technologies, including electric airplanes, vertical-take-off-and-landing (VTOL) airplanes, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Buying the company will help Boeing to beef up its capabilities in these areas, which are expected to be big growth areas for the aviation industry in the coming years.

While Aurora is much smaller than Boeing, it's not exactly a startup. Founded in 1989, the company has headquarters in Virginia and manufacturing facilities in West Virginia and Mississippi. It makes a few of its own airplanes, manufactures components like wings and doors, and also does cutting-edge design work.

The company does work for NASA, the US military, and private customers. One of its highest-profile private customers is Uber, which has tapped Aurora to build aircraft for Uber Elevate, the intra-city "flying car" Uber hopes to launch in Dallas and Dubai in 2020 (though we're skeptical they'll achieve that self-imposed deadline).

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is packed with solid bargains, highlighted a few nice discounts on high-end Dell monitors. Lenovo, meanwhile, is running a number of sales to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the ThinkPad brand. We've also got savings on HTC's Vive system and Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite, along with a few offers on Google's new Pixel 2 and Home Mini.

There are plenty others, too, so have a look at the full list of deals below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / High Sierra's default desktop wallpaper. (credit: Apple)

Mac users who have upgraded their SSD-equipped Macs to High Sierra are reporting compatibility problems with some widely used professional apps and some games.

While APFS is not currently supported on Fusion Drives, built-in flash drives in current Mac hardware are automatically converted to APFS from the old HFS+ file system when High Sierra is installed. Macs have been using HFS+ for more than 20 years, so the move to APFS is a monumental change. APFS has been in beta testing on Macs for months, and Apple gave it a public debut in iOS 10.3 in July, so it has already had some time out in the wild. The transition has been generally painless for a lot of users. But professionals should be careful about upgrading to a new OS while we wait for app developers to update their software and for a first major update to High Sierra from Apple.

In one example of compatibility problems, users have run into issues with Adobe Illustrator CC 2017 running on High Sierra Macs with APFS drives. Adobe has acknowledged the problems to its users, saying, "there is no workaround" but that a solution will come in a future update. New installations of Illustrator may fail, and running a previously installed copy on an APFS drive can lead to all sorts of problems when launching the application or opening files. There is also a more minor problem with color settings, but there is a workaround for that one.

Enlarge / To the left, a protein is shown with the sort of resolution possible in the early days of electron microscope work. As you transition to the right, the resolution changes to what's possible with present-day techniques. (credit: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)

The highest possible resolution we can get in a typical image is limited by the wavelength of the light we're using. Although there are some clever ways around this limit, one alternative has been to use something with a smaller wavelength. That "something" turns out to be electrons, and the electron microscope has provided a glimpse of the details inside cells, showing us how their parts are ordered and structured.

But this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a group of individuals who pushed the electron microscope to its very limit, figuring out how to use it to determine the position of every single atom in large, complex molecules. The award goes partly to a researcher who successfully used electron microscopes to image proteins. But it also goes to two people who developed some of the techniques to make the whole thing work: figuring out how to freeze water quickly enough that it formed a glass and developing an algorithm that could take a large collection of random data and convert it into a coherent picture.

Imaging molecules

For years, understanding the structure of a complex molecule like a protein or RNA involved a technique called X-ray crystallography. As its name implies, this works by shooting X-rays through crystals of the molecule in question. But there's a pretty major limitation to this technique: your molecule has to form a crystal. Not all proteins do. In fact, some rather important classes of proteins completely refuse to do so, like the ones that are embedded in a cell's membrane.

(credit: Spencer Katz)

Serine? So last century. Valine? Over it. Glycine? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Those chemicals are part of the 20 amino acids that are typically incorporated into proteins. That means they have a dedicated place in what's called the genetic code, which translates between the bases of DNA to the amino acids of proteins.

Granted, the genetic code has enabled the entire diversity and complexity of life on Earth, from E. coli to T. rex. But still, researchers are starting to find this kind of limiting. Life has evolved ways of using more than 140 amino acids in proteins; and once we start tinkering with the things, we can make scads more. Just because evolution has done so doesn't mean we need to rely on only these 20 old boring ones. What follows is a look at how and why we want to engineer artificial amino acids into cells and living organisms.

A still from a Facebook video made by Kanongataa of his son's birth. The video is still publicly available online. (credit: Kanongataa via Facebook)

A father who livestreamed his son's birth on Facebook and then sued various media outlets that used his clips has been ordered to pay $120,000 in attorneys fees after losing his case.

US District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in February that TV stations broadcasting clips of the 45-minute livestream, published online by Kali Kanongataa, qualified as fair use. NBC used 30 seconds of the video on one of its morning shows, while ABC and Yahoo used 22 seconds of the video for a segment that was broadcast on Good Morning America and a Yahoo site that hosts ABC content. The father also sued COED Media Group

In June, Kaplan said that "no reasonable lawyer" would have sued news organizations for using short clips of the publicly shown, viral video and that he intended to award fees. Kaplan agreed with ABC's arguments that the video was used in the context of news reporting and social commentary. Essentially, ABC was reporting on how Kanongataa himself chose to use social media and what that says about society today. That makes him the subject of the news, not a ripped-off creator.