Month: March 2018

Enlarge (credit: Jose Iriarte)

A team lead by University of Exeter archaeologists Jonas Gregorio de Souza and José Iriarte used free satellite images on Google Earth and Zoom Earth to survey 54,000 square km of remote forest in the upper basin of the Tapajós River in Brazil. In cleared spaces where they could get a clear view of the ground, the satellites revealed a surprising number of ditches and earthen walls that once surrounded indigenous villages and urban centers prior to the arrival of Europeans: 104 earthwork structures at 81 sites.

The discovery of so many new sites in a previously un-surveyed area may mean that earth-building cultures were much more extensive and much more densely populated than archaeologists suspected.

Fortified towns left abandoned

Today we think of the Amazon as a pristine rainforest, sparsely populated by indigenous communities. But in records from the 1500s, Spanish colonizers describe a densely populated region, crisscrossed by canals and sunken roads and dotted with bustling, fortified towns. Unfortunately, fortification couldn’t protect the towns’ inhabitants against European diseases, which devastated South American indigenous populations and left the fortified villages abandoned.

Enlarge (credit: Wear OS by Google)

Android Wear showed a bit of life a few weeks ago when it was rebranded to "Wear OS by Google," and today it's getting a new Developer Preview based on Android P. Besides the upgrade to a newer version of Android, there are a few new features outlined in Google's blog post.

First, Google is switching to a default "Dark UI system theme." While Android Wear 1.0 sported Google's usual white background with black text, Android Wear 2.0 did a good job of making everything pretty dark. This change will probably clean up some odds and ends that still had a white background.

Background activity for apps is being limited almost completely. Google flatly states that "apps will no longer be allowed to run in the background unless the watch is on the charger," and it tells developers to "remove background services" from their apps. It's hard to come up with an example of a "background" functionality for an Android Wear app. Push notifications should be unaffected, and apps like fitness trackers or music players that generate an ongoing notification don't count as "background" apps. There's an exemption for watch faces and add-in complications, too.

Enlarge / The recently discovered galaxy is so diffuse that you can see other, more distant galaxies right through it. (credit: NASA, ESA, and P. van Dokkum)

Dark matter and galaxies normally go hand in hand. Dark matter seems to be needed to draw in sufficient material to form the galaxy and its stars, and halos of dark matter keep galaxies from spinning apart as they rotate. So scientists were more than a bit surprised to find a galaxy that has little to no dark matter at all. Confusing things further, the galaxy appears extremely similar to others that are nearly entirely composed of dark matter.

Slow motion

This was one of those cases where discovery began with the phrase "huh, that looks weird." The weirdness came courtesy of the Dragonfly Array, a collection of small telescopes designed to pick up faint objects. When observing a collection of galaxies called the NGC 1052 group, the array spotted an object that had shown up in other surveys of that region of the sky.

"It stood out to us because of the remarkable contrast between its appearance in Dragonfly images and Sloan Digital Sky Survey data," the authors of the paper describing the object write. Dragonfly saw it as a diffuse object with some structures in it; Sloan imaged it as a collection of distinct objects.

Enlarge (credit: AdDuplex)

Windows 10 version 1709, the Fall Creators Update, is now installed on more than 90 percent of Windows 10 machines, according to the latest numbers from AdDuplex.

This high uptake comes just in time for the next big update, the still as-yet-unnamed version 1803. The most recent insider builds have shipped with no known major issues and have also removed the version label from the desktop: these are indications that Microsoft regards development of the update to be essentially finished and is preparing for a wider release. There are reports that build 17133, released yesterday, is in fact going to be the RTM (release to manufacturing) release.

In the Windows-as-a-Service world, Microsoft says that, officially, there's no such thing as an RTM release; nonetheless, there's still a Windows 10 build that's deemed to be good enough for the stable release branch and made available to OEMs for preinstallation. While it may not be called RTM any more, it functions in much the same way.

At Ars Technica Live #20, Ars editors Samuel Axon and Annalee Newitz talked to award-winning game designer Tracy Fullerton. (video link)

Last week was the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, so we hosted a special episode of Ars Technica Live about the future of game design. Ars Reviews Editor Samuel Axon joined me to ask Tracy Fullerton about where games are headed in the future. An award-winning game developer, Tracy heads the Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. She gave us her perspective as a creator and as a teacher of the next generation of game creators.

We began by talking about two of Tracy's best-known games, Walden and The Night Journey, both of which push the definition of what counts as a game. In Walden, the player takes on the identity of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau during the mid-19th century when he built a tiny cabin in the woods and tried to live off the land. That experience became his famous book On Walden Pond, and Tracy recreated it in her game by allowing players to build a cabin, wander a set of paths around the pond based on actual maps from the period, and watch thousands of different trees transform with the seasons.

At Ars Technica Live #20, Ars editors Samuel Axon and Annalee Newitz talked to award-winning game designer Tracy Fullerton. (video link)

Last week was the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, so we hosted a special episode of Ars Technica Live about the future of game design. Ars Reviews Editor Samuel Axon joined me to ask Tracy Fullerton about where games are headed in the future. An award-winning game developer, Tracy heads the Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. She gave us her perspective as a creator and as a teacher of the next generation of game creators.

We began by talking about two of Tracy's best-known games, Walden and The Night Journey, both of which push the definition of what counts as a game. In Walden, the player takes on the identity of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau during the mid-19th century when he built a tiny cabin in the woods and tried to live off the land. That experience became his famous book On Walden Pond, and Tracy recreated it in her game by allowing players to build a cabin, wander a set of paths around the pond based on actual maps from the period, and watch thousands of different trees transform with the seasons.

Enlarge / Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during an event at Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago, Illinois, on Tuesday, March 27, 2018. (credit: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with MSNBC and Recode on Wednesday that Silicon Valley, and notably Facebook, should be far more careful with its customers' data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures.

"I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation," he said, according to Recode. "However, I think we’re beyond that here."

Cook reiterated points that he and former CEO Steve Jobs made previously, that Apple's business model—unlike Google, Facebook, and many other tech companies—is predicated on selling physical products rather than capturing data about customers.

Enlarge / Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks during an event at Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago, Illinois, on Tuesday, March 27, 2018. (credit: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with MSNBC and Recode on Wednesday that Silicon Valley, and notably Facebook, should be far more careful with its customers' data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures.

"I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation," he said, according to Recode. "However, I think we’re beyond that here."

Cook reiterated points that he and former CEO Steve Jobs made previously, that Apple's business model—unlike Google, Facebook, and many other tech companies—is predicated on selling physical products rather than capturing data about customers.