Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Emmett Anderson)

Today, the Nobel Prize committee has honored three US biologists for their role in unravelling one of biology's earliest mysteries: how organisms tell time. Microbes, plants, and animals all run on a 24-hour cycle, one that's flexible enough to gradually reset itself, although it can take a few days after transcontinental travel. The biological systems responsible for maintaining this circadian clock require a lot of proteins that undergo complex interactions, and the new laureates are being honored for their use of genetics to start unraveling this complexity.

A long-standing problem

The first description of an organism's internal clock dates all the way back to 1729, when a French astronomer (!?!?) decided to mess with a plant that opened and closed its leaves on a 24-hour cycle. He found that the cycle didn't depend on daylight but would continue even when the plant was kept in the dark nonstop.

It would take nearly 250 years to move from this observation to any sort of biological handle on the system. The change, as it has been so many times, was brought about using the fruit fly Drosophila. A genetic screen in the 1960s identified three different mutations that altered flies' circadian clock: one that lengthened its 24-hour period, one that shortened it, and one that left it erratic. Mapping these revealed that all of them affected the same gene. From there, however, the field had to wait 20 years for us to develop the technology to clone the gene responsible for these changes, named period.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today, we're bringing you more bargains for various Dell PCs, bundled deals for a fancy Samsung 4K TV and Amazon's Echo Dot speaker, and a smattering of other savings.

Also, at least as of this writing, Nintendo's Switch console is actually available on Amazon. (Yes, it's amazing that we still have to alert you of this seven months after the console first launched.)

You can find the rest of the deals below.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | ullstein bild)

The World Health Organization (WHO) is fuming over Philip Morris International's (PMI) efforts to go smokeless—and the second-hand moves it's using to do it.

As cigarette sales decline worldwide, the tobacco giant is scrambling to restructure and embrace potentially more profitable “smoke-free” products. The revamp involves setting up an $80 million foundation called the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. In the next 12 years, the foundation aims to rope in health and government organizations and “advance smoking cessation and harm-reduction science and technology.”

But the World Health Organization is working quickly to extinguish this new foundation's chances.

Enlarge / MIDLAND, TX - JANUARY 20: A pumpjack sits on the outskirts of town at dawn in the Permian Basin oil field on January 21, 2016 in the oil town of Midland, Texas. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

At $50 a barrel, the low price of crude oil has slowed some of the oil production in the US, especially in regions that are costly to develop, like the Arctic. But US oil producers aren't bearing the whole brunt of low prices, because federal and state governments provide tax breaks that stimulate oil production despite low prices.

The tax situation isn’t unique to the US—China, the EU, and India also offer a variety of flavors of tax breaks to fossil fuel producers, despite their recognition of the need to address climate change. Although the US has signaled its intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, tax breaks that fund more fossil fuel production don't help the rest of the globe to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

The latest research offers some hard numbers on just how much tax policy is supporting extra CO₂ emissions. “Federal tax subsidies to the oil and gas industry alone cost US taxpayers at least US$2 billion each year,” write researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Earth Track in a recent Nature Energy article. That $2 billion in uncollected taxes is helping some oil fields go from "unprofitable" to "profitable," increasing the amount of oil that's available for consumption. (The researchers broadly used the term "subsidies" to indicate different types of tax-based support that "confer a financial benefit from government to oil producer.")

Enlarge / Kim Dotcom, founder of Megaupload, seen here on Monday, Sept. 15, 2014. (credit: Brendon O'Hagan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Kim Dotcom’s civil forfeiture case will not be heard before the Supreme Court this term, America’s highest court ruled on Monday.

The civil forfeiture case was brought 18 months after 2012 American criminal charges related to alleged copyright infringement against Dotcom and his now-shuttered company, Megaupload. In the forfeiture case, prosecutors specifically outlined why the New Zealand seizure of Dotcom’s assets on behalf of the American government was valid. Seized items include millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, multiple cars, four jet skis, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000.

Since Dotcom was arrested in January 2012, he has successfully resisted extradition to the United States and remains in New Zealand free on bail.

Enlarge / Pedestrian at Oracle Corp. headquarters in Redwood City, California. (credit: Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Oracle has been sued (PDF) for gender discrimination by three female former engineers who allege they were paid less than men in similar roles.

The proposed class-action case was first reported on Friday by The Information, which said it was filed in August. Records from San Mateo County Superior Court, where the case was filed, indicate that it was actually first filed in June and then amended on August 28 to add a third plaintiff.

The lawsuit was filed by the same law firm, Altshuler Berzon, that sued Google last month on similar grounds, with three female ex-Googlers as named plaintiffs. Like the Google case, the Oracle lawsuit mirrors accusations first made by the government. In January, during the final days of the Obama Administration, the US Department of Labor brought a case against Oracle, saying that the company pays women "less than comparable males in comparable roles." The government case also alleges racial discrimination.

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DETROIT—General Motors is the latest car company to unveil plans for an emissions-free future. On Monday morning, the US' largest automaker announced that the next 18 months will see two new electric vehicles join the Bolt EV in showrooms, and 18 more are due by 2023. "GM believes in an all-electric future and a world free of automotive emissions," said Mark Reuss, GM's executive VP for Product Development, Purchasing, and Supply Chain. "When the Bolt EV was announced at CES it was described as a platform, and this is the next step."

The announcement took place at GM's Design Dome, site of many a new product reveal. As you'll see from the photo above, there were a number of cars hidden by dust sheets. We were given a sneak peek at three of these—a conventional-looking midsize crossover and two more futuristic vehicles including something that looked like a driverless pod—but sadly photography was not allowed, and no one took the wraps off what looked like either a Corvette or Camaro variant.

As has been the case with other electrification roadmaps, concrete details were thin on the ground at GM's Warren Technical Center this morning. We do know a few specifics, however. For example, unlike other automakers, GM isn't counting plug-in hybrids like the Volt or 48v "mild hybrids" among that number. But we don't know how those EVs will split across GM's various brands or whether some will only be for specific regions.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Nintendo's revenue sharing policy for Youtube livestreaming of its games.

Nintendo's always-rocky relationship with those that create online videos of its games got worse this weekend, as the company is now barring livestreamed gameplay on YouTube Live from channels that take part in revenue sharing through its Nintendo Creators Program.

"Live streaming on YouTube falls outside the scope of the Nintendo Creators Program," the company writes in a new note on its Nintendo Creators Program FAQ. "You cannot broadcast content on YouTube Live from the account you have registered to the Nintendo Creators Program."

Program participants that want to livestream their play of Nintendo games on YouTube can do so on a separate channel or cancel their participation in the revenue-sharing program, the company suggests. YouTube users that participate on a per-video basis seem to be unaffected.