Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Watch the birdie! (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Ars Technica will soon be celebrating its 20th birthday—an eternity online. In those two decades, we've experimented with different formats of reporting and blogging, with each experiment aimed at better serving our readers. It has been a fun and wild ride: those 20 years have spanned some of the most turbulent and fast-paced years in the entire history of tech. We've witnessed the death of dial-up Internet access, the transformation of Apple from a punchline to one of the most valuable companies on earth, the end of the megahertz wars, and the rise of the smartphone. We've watched the online media landscape evolve, too, and that's why we are eager to tell you about our plans for video.

Video is not really new to Ars (remember data bears, anybody?), but most of our past efforts have been ad hoc, infrequent, and noticeably below the grade established by our written content (and sometimes they've just been very, very silly). We are now laying the groundwork for a bolder, more central video unit within Ars, capable of turning out video that truly improves upon the Ars experience as a whole, from the professionalism of the cut to the importance of the topics covered. In the past couple of months, many have noticed that our on-site video skillz were getting sincere. Next week, you'll know it! There's more detail on next week's big debut below, but first we want to share some thoughts on video and the mission here at Ars.

Tools for the job

In 2018, you're going to see much more video on the Ars front page—at least one or two videos per week. Some videos will be secondary to the stories they're attached to, while some will be the story. In situations where the video is the primary focus of the story, you'll notice a big "play" button on that article's listing image on the Ars homepage. We want to make sure that the medium is serving the message and that when we put in the time and effort to produce a video, it's because that video needed to be made to deliver what we had to say (in our judgement, of course).

Enlarge (credit: NEJM)

It’s well known that patients struggle to clearly communicate their end-of-life wishes to those calling the shots at critical moments—generally doctors and family members. But, in case anyone was wondering, tattooing your wishes onto your body does not clear things up.

Emergency medicine doctors in Florida struggled to figure out how to respectfully care for an unconscious 70-year-old man with a chest tattoo that read “Do Not Resuscitate” followed by what appeared to be his signature.

In a case report published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the doctors recounted:

Enlarge / Deal with it. (credit: Korean Central News Service / Sean Gallagher)

North Korea's latest intercontinental ballistic missile test demonstrates a number of things that are not good news for anyone hoping to prevent the country from becoming a global nuclear power. The missile, called the Hwasong-15, flew high enough (more than 4,400 kilometers, or 2,700 miles—more than 10 times the altitude of the International Space Station) and long enough (54 minutes) to demonstrate that it was capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to anywhere in the United States.

The Hwasong-15 is essentially equivalent to the US' Titan II. It is an immense, liquid-fueled missile, much larger than North Korea's Hwasong-14 ICBM. The 15 appears to use two engines on its first stage as well as an enlarged second stage, according to Kim Dong-yub, an analyst at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul. While it only flew about 960 kilometers (600 miles) over the ground, David Wright, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimated the Hwasong-15 would have a range of 8,100 miles (13,000 kilometers) in normal flight.

"We do not know how heavy a payload this missile carried, but given the increase in range, it seems likely that it carried a very light mock warhead," Wright said in a UCS blog post. "If true, that means it would be incapable of carrying a nuclear warhead to this long distance, since such a warhead would be much heavier."

Enlarge / An artist’s rendering of an electric skate. (credit: The Boring Company)

On Wednesday, the city of Chicago opened a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for an express train that would take passengers from the city’s O’Hare airport to downtown. The system would have to be completely privately funded—Chicago says no taxpayer money would be used for it.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company—a tunneling company that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO started last year—will respond to the request. Musk hopes to get to the second round when bidding will take place. On Wednesday evening, he tweeted that his company “will compete to fund, build & operate a high-speed Loop connecting Chicago O’Hare Airport to downtown.”

Musk’s reference to a “Loop” is explained more clearly on The Boring Company’s FAQ page: “Loop is a high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported on autonomous electric skates traveling at 125-150 miles per hour. Electric skates will carry between 8 and 16 passengers (mass transit), or a single passenger vehicle.” Unlike Musk’s idea for a Hyperloop, a Loop won’t draw a vacuum. “For shorter routes, there is no technical need to eliminate air friction,” The Boring Company states.

Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph showing Salmonella Typhimurium (red) invading cultured human cells. (credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH)

As soon as scientists figured out how to harness the power of antibiotic drugs, bacteria hit back. Following clinical trials of penicillin around 1941, doctors documented the spread of penicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus among hospital patients in 1942. By the late 1960s, more than 80 percent of S. aureus bacteria isolated in and out of hospitals turned up resistant to the revolutionary drug.

It’s a common pattern that has led to the crisis of antibiotic resistance the world is now facing. In 1945, Alexander Fleming himself—the discoverer of penicillin—even warned of such “an era... of abuses,” in which strong public demand for antibiotics would drive bacterial resistance that render the “miraculous” drugs impotent.

But the problem is not just overuse in people. And sometimes, bacteria aren’t just one step behind—they may be one step ahead, according to a new study in the Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Enlarge / A Ghost, but IRL. (credit: Amazon)

From the Power Glove to Fallout 4's real-life Pip Boy, gamers have been pitched a lot of ridiculous hardware over the years. The Destiny 2 Ghost Alexa speaker and accompanying Alexa skill are no less ridiculous.

The skill, which also works on other Alexa-enabled speakers, allows Destiny 2 players to ask questions like, "Who are the Red Legion," or "What should I do next?" and get answers back in the same voice they hear in the game. Amazon and game publisher Activision claim there are more than 1,000 lines to hear. Listed functions include telling you more about the game's lore, identifying your next activity, changing your equipped gear, or inviting other players to group with you. As far as we're aware, it's the first Alexa skill to connect directly into an online game.

When Ars's Sam Machkovech tried the skill out, he wasn't impressed. For example, many query responses just cycle through several pre-canned messages, and the only gear management command that he discovered was, "Alexa, ask Ghost to equip my best weapon." It's entirely a gimmick, but would you have expected anything better? Also, sadly for those (very, very) few of us who preferred Peter Dinklage's performance as Ghost over Nolan North's, only North's voice is available. Most players will be quite happy to see Dinklage is not involved, though.

Everywhere Windows 10 can be. And on the server, too, though there it gets a different branding. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders that Windows 10 has now passed 600 million monthly active users, picking up 100 million since May of this year.

This number counts all Windows 10 devices used over a 28-day period. While most of these will be PCs, there are other things in the mix there: a few million Xbox Ones, a few million Windows 10 Mobile phones, and special hardware like the HoloLens and Surface Hub. The exact mix between these categories isn't known, because Microsoft doesn't say.

The company's original ambition (and sales pitch to developers) was to have one billion systems running Windows 10 within about three years of the operating system's launch. In July last year, the company acknowledged that it won't hit that target—the original plan called for 50 million or more phone sales a year, which the retreat from the phone market has made impossible. But at the current rate it should still be on track for somewhere in excess of 700 million users at the self-imposed deadline.