Month: November 2017

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google will soon be extending the reach of Google Lens, its visual search interface. In a blog post, the company announced Lens would be integrated into the Google Assistant in the coming weeks. The feature is still exclusive to Pixel phones, but now it should be a lot easier to access.

Google Lens came out in beta on the Google Pixel 2, which launched last month. The service is basically a revamp of Google Goggles—you take a picture of something, run it through Google's computer vision algorithms, and Google will try to tell you what's in the picture. Google says Lens can identify text, landmarks, and media covers, but those were all things Goggles could do years ago. We tried Lens on the Pixel 2 at launch, and while it was definitely a beta with a lot of problems, it occasionally did something impressive, like recognizing not just that a picture contained a dog, but also nailing the dog breed.

Google says Assistant integration will allow you to get "quick help with what you see." This sounds like a big improvement over the current beta of Google Lens, which is only integrated into Google Photos. Doing any kind of recognition through the Photos app is really slow, since you have to open the camera app, aim it at something, take a picture, open the picture, and then run it through Lens. The new location of Lens will be a lot easier—you just open the Assistant and tap on the Lens icon in the bottom right corner.

Enlarge / Those dark streaks come and go with the seasons. We still don't know what causes them. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

Mars clearly had extensive water in the past, and there's still plenty of it locked up as ice in glaciers and the polar ice caps. But the atmosphere is too thin and cold to allow liquid water to exist on the surface, which makes prospects for life on the Red Planet far less likely.

Back in 2011, however, researchers suggested that, contrary to our expectations, there might still be some water seeping out onto Mars' surface. Darkened features were identified on a variety of slopes, and they seemed to appear during warmer seasons and vanish as temperatures plunged again. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter appeared to detect water at the site. But other researchers proposed a physical mechanism that didn't involve water that could account for the seasonal changes.

Now, a review of the evidence in Nature Geoscience argues that there are problems with almost all of the potential causes for these seasonal features. And, in the absence of a compelling case for water, it's best to assume that the harsh conditions mean what we typically thought they did: Mars is a dry planet.

Enlarge / 25-year-old Rudy Van Buren beat out 30,000 gamers to win a year's contract with the McLaren F1 team as its new simulator driver. (credit: McLaren)

After an exhausting week of fitness tests, engineering debriefs—plus plenty of racing games—the McLaren F1 team has crowned Rudy Van Buren from Leystad, Netherlands as the World's Fastest Gamer. More than just a fancy title and bragging rights, that has earned him a year's contract with the team as its new simulator driver. It's the culmination of a search that kicked off in May of this year, as the F1 team conferred the most legitimacy yet on this corner of the eSports world.

And it's a return to the sport for 25-year-old Van Buren. At age 11 he was Dutch karting champion—and karts are where young racing drivers usually start. But then as now, it's a sport where talent often doesn't shout as loud as funding, and by 16 his racing career—or the first chapter in it—was done. "You search for a replacement because you’ve still got that racing feeling inside you," Van Buren said. "You want to go on, but there’s no option or route available. That burn inside to win, doing a lap quicker and quicker, lap after lap, it’s a feeling that you can’t express. Every boy that starts karting dreams about F1, and at a certain point that dream just vanishes. Now by winning World’s Fastest Gamer, I can relive that dream."

Now Van Buren will switch his job as a sales manager in Leystad for one at McLaren's otherworldly HQ in Woking, England. And make no mistake, simulator driver is a proper job in the modern F1 team. For the last few years the sport has heavily restricted real in-season testing of the cars, so there has been greater and greater emphasis put on driver-in-the-loop virtual testing.

Enlarge / The Facebook sign and logo at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. (credit: Josh Edelson/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on ProPublica on November 21, 2017. It has been lightly edited.

In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment, or credit.

But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company’s monitoring of the rental market.

Video shot and edited by Justin Wolfson. Click <a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/aston_martin_db11_gitlin_transcript.txt">here</a> for transcript. (video link)

To the casual observer, Aston Martin cars might all look the same. A long hood. Voluptuous curves over the wheels. That iconic grille. It's a design language that you can trace back through the decades to the 1950s.

Sixty years later that formula is still being obeyed, but it would be a mistake to think that makes this car—the DB11—an anachronism. Underneath its gorgeous aluminum and composite body panels is the most technologically advanced machine yet to wear the winged badge. It's the first all-new Aston Martin in years, and race-bred aerodynamics, a clever twin-turbo V12 engine, and some 21st century electronics knowhow (courtesy of Mercedes-Benz) come together to create a gran turismo that's as much PhD as 007. Over the course of a week and several hundred miles, I came away with the impression that if this car represents the future of the marque, that future will be rosy indeed.