Month: October 2017

Enlarge / This picture taken on March 17, 2015 shows a Tesla Model S car on display at a showroom in Shanghai. (credit: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)

On Sunday morning the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla has reached an agreement to open a factory in Shanghai.

The electric vehicle (EV) company has had grand ambitions for increasing its market share in China, and in June of this year Tesla said it was in talks with the Shanghai government about opening a manufacturing facility. At the time, the company said it hoped to reach a deal by year’s end.

Ars reached out to Tesla, and spokesperson Kady Cooper said the company wouldn’t make new comments on the WSJ article, but referred Ars to a statement Tesla made in June, which noted:

Ars talks with Love & Saucers creators Matt Ralston and Brad Abrahams at Fantastic Fest 2017. (video link)

AUSTIN, Texas—Perhaps no film has ever set its tone so clearly within its first line as the new documentary Love & Saucers:

“When I was 17, I lost my virginity to a female extraterrestrial,” begins 72-year-old David Huggins. “That’s all I can say about it.”

Enlarge / The author's Nintendo Switch, inserted into the Nyko Portable Docking Kit. (Cables aren't inserted into its backside for this product shot.) (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Nyko had clearly been watching my Nintendo Switch coverage. The accessory maker invited me to an E3 demo this summer with promises of all kinds of new, third-party Switch accessories, but this wasn't about carrying cases or screen protectors. The invite frontloaded one accessory above them all: the Nyko Portable Docking Kit.

Ever since I first played with a Switch, I've been wanting a reasonably priced, hyper-portable dock to toss into my laptop bag, to better enable an impromptu "let's hook Mario Kart up to a TV" party. Nintendo's official dock, as I found, is designed for nothing of the sort. Nyko demonstrated something that plain-and-simply got the job done. But that was during its flashy E3 demo—how would that translate into a final product?

The answer finally arrived in my mailbox this week, following a quiet rollout to retailers in the States. The result is modest and gets the job done, though its specific issues may very well be dealbreakers for people who want it all in a truly portable Switch dock.

Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Jane Goodall is an astonishing figure in many ways. Starting with no formal training and using controversial methods, she made astonishing breakthroughs in understanding the social behavior of chimpanzees and thus understanding ourselves. She managed to become an extremely rare species: a scientist who was also a media darling. And, after dedicating many years of her life to her research (at significant personal sacrifice), she left it behind to become a global spokesperson for sustainable development and conservation.

How did that happen? That's the subject of a new National Geographic documentary Jane. The movie is primarily based on recently rediscovered footage filmed by noted wildlife filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, who was assigned by National Geographic to film Goodall's field work. van Lawick was there to capture a key transition in Goodall's research and drove one in her personal life: the two would end up marrying and having a son.

While it was a pivotal time and the original footage is stunning, it provides a limited window into Goodall's history. Other pivotal events pass by in a flash or are skipped entirely. Whether that bothers you is probably a key determinant of how much you'll enjoy Jane.

Enlarge / Colorized scanning electron micrograph of Escherichia coli (E. coli), grown in culture and adhered to a cover slip. (credit: NIAID / Flickr)

On February 24, 1988, Richard Lenski seeded 12 flasks with E. coli and set them up to shake overnight at 37ºC. But he seeded them with only enough nutrients to grow until early the next morning. Every single afternoon since then, he (or someone in his lab) has taken 100 microliters of each bacterial solution, put them into a new flask with fresh growth media, and put the new flask in the shaker overnight. Every 75 days—about 500 bacterial generations—some of the culture goes into the freezer.

The starvation conditions are a strong pressure for evolution. And the experiment includes its own time machine to track that evolution.

The pivotal piece of technology enabling this experiment is the -80ºC freezer. It acts essentially, Lenski says, as a time machine. The freezer holds the bacterial cultures in a state of suspended animation; when they are thawed, they are completely viable and their fitness can be compared to that of their more highly evolved descendants shaking in their flasks. As an analogy, imagine if we could challenge a hominin from 50,000 years ago to a hackathon. (Which she would probably win, because the paleo diet.)