Month: February 2018

Enlarge / ZBook 15u G5 internals. As a corporate machine, it's easy to take apart and repair. (credit: Hewlett-Packard)

After spending some years improving the quality and design of its premium systems, HP is turning its attention to its mainstream, corporate laptops. The new range of 800-series EliteBooks, ZBook workstations, monitors, and docks, brings many features of the premium 1000-series to a wider audience.

The EliteBook 800 G5 range—available in 13-inch, 14-inch, and 15-inch variants—is HP's main corporate workhorse laptop. "Mainstream" here means that they're not quite as thin as the 1000-series, while "corporate" means that they sport a bunch of things not found on consumer systems: for example, there's a smartcard reader, gigabit Ethernet, and a docking station connector for HP's slim, non-Thunderbolt 3 docking station. Their keyboards included buttons for answering and hanging up calls on Skype for Business, they're available with Intel vPro management, and they use HP's latest generation "Sure Start" firmware to protect against certain kinds of malware. Integrated 4G WWAN is an option, along with NFC, 802.11a/b/g/n, and Bluetooth 4.2.

HP EliteBook 850 G5. (credit: HP)

Further enhancing their usefulness on conference calls and Skype, mainstream devices include dual microphone arrays. One that faces you, while another one faces the rest of the world for more effective noise cancellation.

Trevor Mahlmann for Ars Technica

Elon Musk reveled in the moment on Tuesday night after his Falcon Heavy rocket flew into space. The world's most powerful booster had done its job, and now everyone gawked at the spectacle of Starman in a red Tesla in space while twin boosters landed near the launch site in Florida.

Musk, too, expressed amazement. Of the synchronized booster landings, he said, “That was epic. It was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.” And of Starman, the spacesuited mannequin, he quipped, “You can tell it’s real because it looks so fake. We have way better CGI.”

Enlarge (credit: Kevin Gill / Flickr)

Could we meet the needs of everyone on the planet without stripping the Earth of all its resources? A paper in this week’s Nature Sustainability says: kind of.

It should be possible to meet the basic physical needs of everyone on the planet without using up physical resources too quickly. But it wouldn’t be possible to extend a first-world standard of living to everyone without needing “a level of resource use that is two-six times the sustainable level,” researcher Daniel O’Neill and his colleagues report. Only a drastic improvement in efficiency would allow the planet to manage this higher standard of living.

O’Neill and his colleagues looked at the resources that humans use a lot of and that are critical for the planet’s health: things like fresh water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Exceeding the “planetary boundaries” of these resources risks global environmental stability—and we’re not doing well on that front.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Uber’s top security official testified at Capitol Hill on Tuesday, saying that Uber had “no justification” for not coming clean sooner when it had been hit by a massive data breach in 2016.

In written testimony, John Flynn, Uber’s chief information security officer, told a Senate committee that “it was wrong not to disclose the breach earlier.”

Flynn and representatives from security firms appeared as part of a hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security.

Enlarge (credit: Ranja Andriantsoa)

It's possible to infer many species' origins from things like fossils and DNA sequences. But for one creature, we have a specific date: 1995. That's when the first marbled crayfish appeared in a pet shop in Germany, mixed in with similar-looking animals that had originally come from streams in the US South.

When it came to selling pets, the marbled crayfish had a big advantage over its relatives: it doesn't need males to reproduce. Instead, females are able to produce genetic copies of themselves, allowing any fish tank to become a factory for an army of crayfish clones. Now, researchers have confirmed that these clones have spread throughout Europe, gotten as far as Japan, and begun invading the streams of Madagascar.

Ostensibly, the publication that describes these results is about the completion of the genome for the marbled crayfish. And the genome is what has allowed researchers to confirm that crayfish from around the world are essentially clones. But the real story in Nature Ecology and Evolution is the evolution and global spread of an entirely new species in less than 25 years.