Month: January 2018

Enlarge (credit: Brandon Camargo)

A couple of months after Tesla announced its all-electric semi-truck, someone has spotted a prototype driving around the streets of Santa Clara, California, captured it on video, and uploaded the video to YouTube.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made some ambitious promises when he unveiled the Semi back in November. It's supposed to have a range of up to 500 miles and the ability to haul a full 40-ton trailer. It should reach 65 miles per hour with a full trailer in 20 seconds.

Most impressive of all, Tesla has said that the 500-mile version of the truck will cost $180,000. That's more than the average conventional diesel truck, but it's a lot less than the $300,000 to $400,000 some experts estimated it would cost before the price was announced.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple is reportedly tweaking its e-book offering to better take on Amazon, the current leader of the digital book market. According to a Bloomberg report, Apple will release a revamped version of the iBooks app for iOS, which will be dubbed "Books," that will have an interface more like the iOS 11 App Store, a Reading Now tab, and a separate section for audiobooks. There's no official date for the debut of the new app, but it's reportedly slated to be released in the coming months.

Limited details are known about the app, which is in testing right now. Bloomberg's report describes it having a "simpler interface" that emphasizes books the user is currently reading. There's also a new digital book store within the app that's said to be similarly designed to Apple's current App Store, which received a drastic redesign in iOS 11. That could mean that Apple plans to make discovering new books through the Books app easier, possibly with categorical tabs and book cover art throughout the digital store. Apple recently moved its audiobook offerings from the Music app to the iBooks app, but having a dedicated tab for audiobooks will make them more easily accessible for customers.

Apple has also reportedly hired a lead executive from Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook platform, to help reinvigorate its e-book efforts. The iBooks app remains one of the few Apple programs that hasn't received a significant update in years. That is likely due in part to a 2013 ruling by the U.S. Department of Justice covering fixed pricing for e-books in Apple's iBooks store. Apple was fined $450 million.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Dragon resupply ship with its dual outstreched solar arrays is pictured attached to the Harmony module as the International Space Station orbited above Brazil this month. (credit: NASA)

The Trump administration will delay the release of its budget proposal for fiscal year 2019 by a week, from Feb. 5 to Feb. 12, due to the recent three-day government shutdown. However details of the White House budget plan for NASA are starting to leak out.

According to a copy of the document seen by Ars, the White House budget builds upon statements by Vice President Mike Pence, and President Trump to refocus NASA's human exploration efforts on sending astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA's objectives will include, "Pursuing a cislunar campaign that will establish U.S. preeminence to, around, and on the Moon." As part of this goal, the agency will be directed to use public-private partnerships to provide transportation and landing services to the Moon.

The big question is how to pay for all of this, and the Trump administration's answer here is ending "direct" NASA support for the International Space Station in 2025, according to the document. At that time, NASA should transition to "commercial provision of low-Earth orbit capabilities." Presently NASA spends about $4 billion annually to staff and support the international laboratory.

Sketching out rough ideas—traditionally on the back of a napkin in the US, backs of envelopes being preferred in the UK—is a common and important part of the design process, with the familiar pen or pencil and paper being favored for rough mockups and outlines. Ink to Code, a new Microsoft Garage project, hopes to turn those rough sketches into usable, working code.

Ink to Code is currently itself a rough prototype of an app. The basic premise is simple: designers can sketch out the bare bones of application interfaces with a stylus, and Ink to Code will turn those sketches into real code, specifically the XML markup used for Universal Windows Platform apps and Xamarin apps for Android. It uses the Windows 10 Ink APIs to recognize the objects that have been drawn, converting handwriting into text and boxes into screens, buttons, text boxes, and image placeholders.

Currently, the app is only an early prototype—a basic proof of concept rather than a fully fledged development tool. It recognizes only a few interface elements, along with rules and guidelines for aligning things, and it produces only basic code with no functional parts. The company has various ideas of how to develop it further but wants to hear from real designers and developers where to focus its development efforts. Some obvious directions are supporting a greater range of interface elements and producing more functional code; one can easily imagine how it could, for example, identify login screens and automatically plumb in authentication workflows.

Enlarge / It's so cute! Let's chop off its leg in the name of science. It'll grow back. (credit: IMP Vienna)

Some human tissues, like the liver and muscles, retain the ability to regrow after damage. But most of our bodies do not—if you lose a limb, the limb's gone. But elsewhere in the animal kingdom, regeneration is much more widespread. Many reptiles can regrow tails, and some salamanders can replace entire limbs. More distantly related worms called planaria can be cut into multiple pieces and see each piece regrow an entirely new body.

There are a couple of organisms that have been extensively studied due to their ability to regenerate: the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea and a type of salamander called an axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum). But those studies have been limited by the fact that we don't have a complete catalog of genes for these organisms. Attempts to correct that were bogged down by the fact that the genomes appeared to be littered with duplicate copies of virus-like DNA—in the case of the axolotl, enough to balloon its genome up to 10 times the size of our own.

Now, researchers have figured out a way to overcome that hurdle, and they have gotten high-quality copies of both the planarian's and the axolotl's genomes. Unfortunately, the copies don't shed much light on the animals' regeneration abilities. And all that extra DNA carried by the axolotl doesn't seem to be doing anything useful in particular.