Month: October 2017

Enlarge / Ow. (credit: Getty Images | Media for Medical)

The mind is a powerful medicine. Given an ineffective treatment, patients can experience real health improvements by simply believing that the treatment works—the placebo effect. But this blissful delusion has a dark side: when a harmless placebo becomes effective, it becomes harmful, too, causing side-effects seen in actual therapies.

In a new study exploring this mysterious “nocebo effect,” researchers pinpoint regions of the brain that seem to be behind phantom injuries. They also assess factors—framing and price—that can increase the potency of the effect. These may be critical to designing and assessing clinical practices and trial results, they argue.

Specifically, researchers gave patients a sham anti-itch cream for eczema (atopic dermatitis) and told them it increases sensitivity to pain as a side effect—which is a side effect of real medicines, but the phony cream shouldn’t have any side effects. Nevertheless, patients not only reported more pain, but the amount of pain they reported depended on the cream’s price and packaging. The cream caused more pain in patients when they were told it had a hefty price tag and came in a brand-name-looking box, compared with when they thought it was a cheap cream that came in a generic-looking box. The researchers, led by neuroscientist Alexandra Tinnermann of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, published the results recently in Science.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Regardless of whether you look at Columbus Day as a worthy tradition, a whitewashing of history, or just a day off from work, there's no denying that it's typically a good time to grab some discounts. Today's edition is no different, as we're serving up savings on Dell and Lenovo laptops, Sonos speakers, Amazon gadgets, and more.

You can see the full list of deals below.

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

Of course we'll continue to support the platform.. bug fixes, security updates, etc. But building new features/hw aren't the focus. https://t.co/0CH9TZdIFu

— Joe Belfiore (@joebelfiore) October 8, 2017

During the weekend, Microsoft's Joe Belfiore tweeted confirmation of something that has been suspected for many months: Microsoft is no longer developing new features or new hardware for Windows Mobile. Existing supported phones will receive bug fixes and security updates, but the platform is essentially now in maintenance mode.

Microsoft's difficulties in the mobile market are no secret, but for a time the company looked as if it was keeping Windows Mobile as a going concern regardless. Through 2016, Microsoft produced new builds for the Windows Insider program and added new features to Windows Mobile. At around the time of release of the Windows 10 Creators Update in April this year, that development largely ground to a halt. Windows Mobile, which already lacked certain features that were delivered to Windows on the PC, had its development forked. PC Windows development continued on the "Redstone 3" branch (which will culminate in the release of the Fall Creators Update later this month); Windows Mobile languished on a branch named "feature2."

But in spite of this, until Belfiore's tweets at the weekend, Microsoft never actually said what its plans for Windows Mobile were or how it would be developed going forward.

Enlarge (credit: OpenCritic)

In the week since I ranted about the increasingly poisonous practice of loot boxes appearing in retail-priced video games, more big-ticket titles have shown up to the loot box party. Apparently, we're not the only folks fed up with the trend, which combines slot-machine psychology with unclear real-money economies in games. On Monday, the review-aggregation site OpenCritic announced the first major game-review initiative to combat the practice.

"We're going to take a stand against loot boxes," the site announced on its Twitter feed. "We're looking into ways to add business model information to OpenCritic."

OpenCritic says it's currently testing a number of flags that can be applied to a given game's review page. The simplest ones would clarify whether a game has a "loot box" system that randomizes your progress in a game, as opposed to an experience-driven or store-driven system that lets players freely choose any changes or upgrades. OpenCritic would also judge a loot box system's "buying power" to clarify whether a game's randomly generated loot boxes contain anything beyond a "cosmetic" tweak.

Enlarge / One of the earliest families in Waymo's public trial in Phoenix poses with a Waymo minivan. (credit: Waymo)

Waymo, Google's self-driving car company, is laying the political groundwork to launch a truly driverless car service. On Monday, the company announced a new partnership with several non-profit organizations.

Called "Let's Talk Self-Driving," the partnership aims to persuade Americans—and especially people in the Greater Phoenix area—of the benefits of self-driving cars. "We're starting this campaign with a series of digital, outdoor, and radio advertising in Arizona," Waymo CEO John Krafcik says in a blog post announcing the campaign.

Companies run ads promoting their products all the time, so on its own this isn't very surprising. But two things stand out about the Waymo campaign.

Enlarge / US Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) at a hearing earlier this year. (credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Allergan's move to stop its patents from being reviewed by handing them off to a Native American tribe is winning support from few people outside the drug company. Now one lawmaker is seeking to ban it.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has introduced a bill (PDF) that would head off Allergan’s strategy without waiting to see whether the judges at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board will even approve it.

“This is one of the most brazen and absurd loopholes I’ve ever seen, and it should be illegal,” McCaskill said last week in a statement to a pharmaceutical lobby group.

New York Comic Con brought a deluge of geeky movie trailers this weekend. Among them is Pacific Rim Uprising, sequel to the kaiju-inspired monster disaster movie Pacific Rim. In the first film, pilots inhabited giant robots that fought off massive inter-dimensional monsters. Uprising looks like more of the same, and that's nothing to complain about.

Uprising takes place 10 years after the first film. After the successful but costly defeat of the monsters, that giant robot program is still going. The trailer seems to suggest that the focus is on a "new generation" of young pilots who are operating several new types of robots to defeat more invaders—including at least one with some cool-looking lightning swords. In general, the battles look more martial arts-inspired than those in the first film. Star Wars: The Force Awakens' John Boyega leads the cast, playing the son of Idris Elba's character from the first film.

Pacific Rim didn't recoup its budget on the US box office alone, but it reportedly did very well in China. It's fitting that Pacific Rim Uprising was largely shot in China, then. Pacific Rim was directed by Guillermo del Toro, but the sequel has a new director—Steven S. DeKnight, a writer, producer, and director known for his work on TV shows like Daredevil, Smallville, Spartacus, and various Joss Whedon projects like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Dollhouse. Uprising is his feature film directing debut, but his pedigree is enough to keep fans from being nervous.

Enlarge / BT Openreach van and a coil of yellow broadband fibre cable awaiting installation in February 2017 in London, England. (credit: Getty Images | Richard Baker)

The United Kingdom's telecom regulator, Ofcom, wants to strengthen an industry code that lets Internet customers exit contracts without penalty when broadband providers fall short of their advertised speeds.

Ofcom's proposed changes would also improve the accuracy of speed information provided to customers before they sign up for broadband. Ofcom intends to add the new guidelines to its existing codes of practice for residential and business broadband speeds, which already "commit Internet companies who have signed up to them to give customers an estimated range of speeds they are likely to receive, as well as the right to exit their contracts penalty-free if their speed falls below a minimum level."

The regulator described proposed additions to the code on Friday, saying that its plan is to: