Month: January 2018

Enlarge / A crow gets to work manufacturing a tool. (credit: Jolyon Troscianko)

Tool use among animals isn't common, but it is spread widely across our evolutionary tree. Critters from sea otters to cephalopods have been observed using tools in the wild. In most of these instances, however, the animal is simply using something that's found in its environment, rather than crafting a tool specifically for a task. Tool crafting has mostly been seen among primates.

Mostly, but not entirely. One major exception is the New Caledonian crow. To extract food from holes and crevices, these birds use twigs or stems that are found in their environment without modification. In other environments, however, they'll remove branches from plants and carefully strip parts of the plant to leave behind a hooked stick. The behavior takes over a minute, and the crows will typically carry the tool with them when they explore new sites, and they will sometimes store it for future use.

Understanding how this complex behavior came about in crows requires us to understand the evolutionary advantages that might be had from a good tool. A group of researchers, mostly from the University of St. Andrews, has now done just that: the researchers have quantified how tool manufacture influences food harvesting. The results show that the use of bird-crafted tools can increase food extraction by up to 12 times the rate the crows could achieve by using unmodified sticks.

Enlarge / The launch of Zuma was pretty, but the aftermath has been anything but. (credit: SpaceX)

A little more than two weeks have passed since the apparent loss of the highly classified Zuma mission. Since then, SpaceX has publicly and privately stated that its Falcon 9 rocket performed nominally throughout the flight—with both its first and second stages firing as anticipated.

Now, the US Air Force seems to be backing the rocket company up. "Based on the data available, our team did not identify any information that would change SpaceX's Falcon 9 certification status," Lieutenant General John Thompson, commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, told Bloomberg News. This qualified conclusion came after a preliminary review of data from the Zuma launch. That's according to Thompson, who said the Air Force will continue to review data from all launches.

However tentative, this statement buttresses the efforts by SpaceX to say that, from its perspective, the mission was a success. The statement also adds to the concerns of Northrop Grumman, which built the Zuma payload and the adapter that connected it to the Falcon 9 rocket. Northrup Grumman was also responsible for separating after the second stage of the Zuma rocket reached space. The aerospace veteran has yet to publicly comment on specifics of the Zuma mission since the launch.

Enlarge / Montana Governor Steve Bullock. (credit: Getty Images | William Campbell )

Montana will require Internet service providers to follow net neutrality principles in order to receive state government contracts.

Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat, today signed an executive order imposing that requirement beginning July 1, 2018.

"There has been a lot of talk around the country about how to respond to the recent decision by Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality rules, which keep the Internet free and open," Bullock said. "It's time to actually do something about it. This is a simple step states can take to preserve and protect net neutrality. We can't wait for folks in Washington, DC, to come to their senses and reinstate these rules."

Enlarge / An array of Windows Mixed Reality headsets. (credit: Microsoft)

With its Windows VR headsets, Microsoft wanted to make it simpler and cheaper to get into PC-based virtual reality.

But perhaps not quite this cheap: most of the Windows VR headsets on the market are now available on Amazon in the US for around 50 percent off: for as little as $200, you can get a headset complete with a pair of motion controllers that'll run Windows Mixed Reality software and which has beta quality support for SteamVR titles too.

When first announced, Microsoft promised its headsets would be around $300-500, compared with the $600 or more for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Since then, both the Rift and the Vive have some big price cuts of their own, and while the Windows VR devices do still retain the pricing edge, the difference is much less pronounced than it once was. For the moment, the Windows hardware retains one advantage—it doesn't need base stations to track movement because all the tracking is handled in the headset itself, which makes installation and setup substantially easier. But this benefit, too, is set to disappear in the near term, as this style of tracking is going to become the norm.

(credit: https://arstechnica.com/author/aurich-lawson/)

A commitment made by Comcast to follow net neutrality rules expired on Saturday, seven years after the cable company agreed to the requirements in order to purchase NBCUniversal.

When Comcast bought NBC in 2011, it pledged to follow the net neutrality rules the Federal Communications Commission had passed in 2010 even if those rules were later overturned in court. Comcast thus continued to face rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization even after a federal appeals court struck down that version of net neutrality rules in January 2014. Comcast (but not other ISPs) faced net neutrality requirements for more than a year until June 2015, which is when a new set of net neutrality rules took effect.

But Comcast's merger agreement with the FCC expired, as per schedule, on January 20. The expiration, combined with the FCC's decision last month to repeal the industry-wide net neutrality rules implemented in 2015, will free Comcast of FCC oversight when it comes to net neutrality. Comcast will still face some merger-related oversight from the Department of Justice until September, though.

Enlarge / You'll know your plane has 2Ku if you see a larger radome on it, like the one pictured above. (credit: Gogo Air)

For this demo, Gogo Air provided a round-trip ticket on Delta Air Lines from DCA>DTW>DCA. I sat in coach and never left Detroit airport before boarding the return leg.

If you're one of those people with the misfortune to follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed the occasional complaint about the poor state of in-flight Internet service. After all, it's incredibly frustrating when you're on a deadline and unable get any work done because you can't even load the Ars CMS. But there is light at the end of the tunnel, as I discovered late last year. Gogo Air, which provides in-flight connectivity on most of the major US airlines, noticed one of my frustrated outbursts (on AA680, PHX to DCA, November 13 for the curious) and invited me to try out its latest service, a satellite-based system called 2Ku. Compared to the ATG4 system that most flyers are currently saddled with—including this author right now, currently on AA2617 at 37,000 feet—the difference is night and day.

Gogo Air provides in-flight Internet connectivity to most US passenger airlines (and quite a few international ones) and has been doing so since 2008. Originally that was with a cellular service called ATG—for Air-To-Ground—which leveraged the old Airfone cellular network. More recently Gogo Air upgraded that system to ATG4, bumping per-plane bandwidth from 3.1Mbps to 9.8Mbps. (For a much more indepth look at the state of in-flight Wi-Fi back in the day, check out this comprehensive feature from 2011.)