Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: Adapted from an image created by Dennis Sun, Mezarque Design)

To the best of our ability to tell, everything on Earth shares a few common features. It encodes information in DNA using a set of four bases, A, T, C, and G. Sets of three bases are used to code for a single amino acid, and most organisms use a set of 20 amino acids to build proteins. These features appear everywhere, from plants and animals to bacteria and viruses, suggesting that they appeared in the last common ancestor of life on Earth.

This raises a question that comes up a lot in evolutionary studies: are these features used because they're in some way efficient, or did we end up stuck with them as a result of some historic accident?

A team of California-based researchers has been building an argument that it's an accident. And it's doing so by expanding life beyond the limitations inherited from its common ancestor. After having expanded the genetic alphabet to six letters, the team has now engineered a bacterial strain that uses the extra letters to put an unnatural amino acid into proteins.

Enlarge / This will hurt... a lot. (credit: ZaldyImg)

To boost the stability of Chrome, Google has announced that it's going to start blocking third-party software from being injected into the browser.

Third-party software such as anti-virus scanners and video driver utilities often injects libraries into running processes to do things like inspect network traffic, or add custom menu options to menus. Malicious software can also do the same to spy on users, steal passwords, and similar. Google has found that people who have such injected code are 15 percent more likely to see their browser crash. As such, it's going to start blocking such injections.

The change will start in Chrome 66, due in April 2018. If that version crashes, it will warn users that there is something injected that could be causing problems. Chrome 68, due in July 2018, will start blocking the injection; if the browser doesn't run properly, it'll allow the injected software but show a warning. Chrome 72, due in January 2019, will block code injection entirely.

Our short series teaser. Click here for transcript. (video link)

For a few brief years between 1968 and 1972, humans left the Earth and visited the Moon. The flights took the combined efforts of nearly half a million people working across the world and cost about $160 billion in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars. The result of that work and money were the Apollo landings—six successful lunar touchdowns, each of which gave us a vast amount of scientific knowledge and a priceless trove of samples. Twelve people walked on our nearest heavenly neighbor, leaving 12 sets of footprints that will linger in the regolith for millions of years—possibly outlasting humankind itself.

Apollo occupies a unique place in human history—a flashbulb moment when economics and technology suddenly aligned with world politics in a way that likely will never happen again. The program was a monumental achievement—arguably the greatest engineering achievement in human history—but the story of Apollo is the combined story of each of the thousands of men and women who worked to make those flights happen.

In "Safe Mode," you only have to worry about the philosophical implications of this horrible Soma monsters, not the risk of death.

Developer Frictional Games has announced a new "Safe Mode" for 2015's Soma, intended to keep the title's horror atmosphere while removing the risk of in-game death.

Much like previous player-created mods like "Wuss Mode," Safe Mode will leave the game's monsters and puzzles intact. But while the Wuss Mode mod simply made players immune to damage, the official Safe Mode will also change the in-game monsters' behavior while protecting players from harm.

"Our goal has been for Safe Mode to not feel like a cheat, but for it to be a genuine way of experiencing the game," the developers wrote in an announcement. "So we’ve considered what each creature should be doing, given their appearance, sound, and voice."

Enlarge / Examples of some lockscreen ads, which totally replace the stock lockscreen. here, here, and here,

Google is cracking down on one of the most annoying ad types on Android. As first spotted by Android Police, the Google Play Developer monetization rules have been updated to ban lock screen ads. Here's the new section:

Lockscreen Monetization

Unless the exclusive purpose of the app is that of a lockscreen, apps may not introduce ads or features that monetize the locked display of a device.

It's not really possible to show an ad on the existing lock screen, unless you're counting a notification (which is pretty easy to block). So what some of the shadier developers on Google Play have been doing is replacing the existing lock screen, without asking, and showing a screen that can have a big ad slapped onto the lower half. This can be very confusing for users since nothing indicates why their lock screen is different, what app made the changes, or how it can be fixed. Do a search and you'll find tons of help threads of users asking why their lock screen is suddenly different, and others guessing at which app could be the culprit.

Now, developers that continue to do this will be tossed from the Play Store. Of course, this is only a Play Store rule and won't affect devices that are sold with lock screen ads built-in. Amazon, for instance, sells "Prime Exclusive Phones" with "special offers" built-in. These phones show ads full screen lock screen ads, notification ads, and pack the phone with some non-removable Amazon apps, in exchange for a discount of around $50 to $80.