Month: December 2017

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. The discounts have officially calmed down a bit since the Black Friday and Cyber Monday bonanza, but there are still a few items worth noting. Today's list includes a 15-inch Dell Inspiron laptop with a Core i7-7500U chip, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB HDD for $470. Just note that the display is stuck at a 1366x768 resolution.

If that doesn't interest you, the rest of the list includes deals on Amazon's Echo Show and Echo Dot speakers, select Lenovo laptops, and more. You can take a look at the full rundown below.

(credit: TechBargains)

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

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Nicholas Rigg)

Hidden fees that show up on broadband bills after customers sign up for service have long been a source of frustration for Internet users.

Because advertised prices often don't reflect the full cost of service, the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 forced ISPs to be more transparent with customers about hidden fees and the consequences of exceeding data caps. The new requirements were part of the net neutrality rules—and are therefore going to be eliminated when the FCC votes to repeal the rules next week.

While FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to keep some of the commission's existing disclosure rules and to impose some new disclosure requirements, ISPs won't have to tell consumers exactly what everything will cost when they sign up for service.

Enlarge / To genetically engineer RuBisCo, we'll no longer need all the time and space involved with these plants. (credit: Roy Kaltschmidt)

The single most abundant protein on the planet isn't actually very good at its job. And, unfortunately, its job is important: to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and incorporate it into sugars and other molecules that most of Earth's life depends on. Improving its function could help us in a variety of ways, from boosting crop productivity to cleaning up after our carbon emissions.

Unfortunately, the enzyme is also extremely fussy about how it operates, in part as a result of the evolutionary events that put it in plants in the first place. But now, a team of German scientists has figured out how to get the enzyme to work in the standard lab bacteria, E. coli, opening the door slightly to genetically engineering our way to more efficient plants. But the work also makes it clear that things aren't quite as simple as we'd like.

A key enzyme

The enzyme has the catchy name "ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase," but everyone knows it as "RuBisCo." Its function in the cell is to take the carbon of carbon dioxide, obtained from the air, and link it to a five-carbon sugar. This makes a six carbon sugar, an essential part of the process of photosynthesis. But it also allows the carbon to be used in a variety of other chemical reactions inside a cell that would never work with carbon dioxide. These include creating the building blocks of DNA and proteins. Through these two functions, the enzyme is essential to most life on Earth.

Jonathan Gitlin

YOUNTVILLE, Calif.—Nissan arguably doesn't get nearly enough credit for mainstreaming the electric vehicle. Sure, Tesla made EVs cool among Silicon Valley's venture-capital set who aspire to a clean, fast, and prosperous future. And the Chevrolet Bolt is GM's second bite at the cherry that actually worked, proving all those EV-1s didn't die in vain. But since 2010, it's Nissan that has actually been selling the most cars, with more than 290,000 Leafs worldwide, 114,000 of them here in the US.

Now there's an all-new Leaf, one with better range, more power, better technology, and for less money than before. After spending the day driving one, I came away impressed.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Every geek needs two things to start the morning off right: a quality coffee mug and a fresh T-shirt. Fortunately, Ars Technica now sells both, so you can leap from your bed to confront the forces of file corruption, homeopathy, and state-sponsored malware in style with some sharp Ars Technica merch!

Long ago, when the Ars staff collectively had more hair, fewer graduate degrees, and no children, we first offered merch in the form of shirts, hoodies, and the infamous Ars sumo. Running the merch store then was a thankless job because it meant filling one's garage with boxes of tiny foam wrestlers and XXL hoodies, along with making endless runs to the post office. As we expanded into the interstellar media empire that you know and love today, the leftover boxes of merch were quietly shot into the sun.

But we've always had a soft spot in our hearts for Ars logo shirts—and everyone needs a mug. So when Creative Director Aurich Lawson began batting around a few design ideas, the staff got excited. We hope you will, too.

Enlarge / House Speaker Paul Ryan speaks during a town hall with Boeing Company CEO Dennis Muilenburg and Boeing employees in Everett, Washington this year. (credit: Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)

It was about a year ago that Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg first began saying his company would beat SpaceX to Mars. "I'm convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket," he said during a Boeing-sponsored tech summit in Chicago in October 2016.

On Thursday, Muilenburg repeated that claim on CNBC. Moreover, he added this tidbit about the Space Launch System rocket—for which Boeing is the prime contractor of the core stage—"We’re going to take a first test flight in 2019 and we’re going to do a slingshot mission around the Moon."

Unlike last year, Muilenburg drew a response from SpaceX this time. The company's founder, Elon Musk, offered a pithy response on Twitter: "Do it."