Month: March 2018

Logan Garbarini models the 2x2 mm sensor that monitors ingested fluids and transmits information wirelessly. (credit: Fio Omenetto, Tufts University)

With this latest wearable gadget, you could really sink your teeth into tracking your diet and health.

A tiny tooth-mounted sensor can wirelessly transmit radio frequency data about the foods you’re noshing, reporting on sugar, salt, and alcohol in real-time. The creators, led by biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto of Tufts University, hope that the dental device will someday help consumers and researchers make “conclusive links between dietary intake and health.” They report their prototype in a study that will be published next week in the journal Advanced Materials.

Omenetto’s team has long been working on such radio frequency sensors—ones for the skin, brain, and surgical implants. It made sense to move to the mouth, Omenetto tells Ars. “There are a plethora of markers in the mouth that… are very relevant to our health states,” he said. But the team was in talks with the nutrition researchers at Tufts that they thought “’gee, wouldn’t it be great if you could track your diet.’”

SAN FRANCISCO—With every year of the Game Developers Conference, there comes a rash of panels. This being a developer- and coder-centric event, they focus largely on niche game-design topics like rendering techniques, procedural generation, and art pipelines. That's all informative and thorough, well and good, but one animator's treasure can be another programmer's trash.

For nerdy panels that have something to offer everyone, we look to GDC's classic postmortems: the stories of long-ago games from the designers who led the projects and still remember a lot from those '70s, '80s, and (now) early '90s projects.

This year's two best GDC postmortems landed firmly in the early '90s, with one of the games in focus, NBA Jam, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Both postmortem'ed franchises exploded as rebellious, industry-shifting upstarts during their era, and as such, their GDC origin stories included plenty of attitude and jokes. Even better, the staffers for both of these series came with reams of data in hand—and in one case, there might be delectable, super-rare EPROMs to follow.

Enlarge / Nope, that's not an Xbox, Playstation, or even a Dreamcast... (credit: Macgeek.org's Museum)

Apple in mid-1993 was reeling. Amidst declining Mac sales, Microsoft had gained a stranglehold over the PC industry. Worse, the previous year Apple had spent $600 million on research and development, on products such as laser printers, powered speakers, color monitors, and the Newton MessagePad system—the first device to be branded a "personal digital assistant," or PDA. But little return had yet come from it—or indeed looked likely to come from it.

The Newton's unreliable handwriting recognition was quickly becoming the butt of jokes. Adding to the turmoil, engineering and marketing teams were readying for a radical transition from the Motorola 68k (also known as the 680x0) family of microprocessors that had powered the Mac since 1984 to the PowerPC, a new, more powerful computer architecture that was jointly developed by Apple, Motorola, and IBM. Macs with 68k processors wouldn't be able to run software built for PowerPC. Similarly, software built for 68k Macs would need to be updated to take advantage of the superior PowerPC.

It was in this environment that COO Michael Spindler—a German engineer and strategist who'd climbed through the ranks of Apple in Europe to the very top layer of executive management—was elevated to CEO. (The previous CEO, John Sculley, was asked to resign.) Spindler spearheaded a radical and cost-heavy reorganisation of the company, which harmed morale and increased the chaos, and he developed a reputation for having horrendous people skills. He'd hold meetings in which he'd ramble incoherently, scribble illegible notes on a whiteboard, then leave before anybody could ask a question, and his office was usually closed.

Enlarge / Nope, that's not an Xbox, Playstation, or even a Dreamcast... (credit: Macgeek.org's Museum)

Apple in mid-1993 was reeling. Amidst declining Mac sales, Microsoft had gained a stranglehold over the PC industry. Worse, the previous year Apple had spent $600 million on research and development, on products such as laser printers, powered speakers, color monitors, and the Newton MessagePad system—the first device to be branded a "personal digital assistant," or PDA. But little return had yet come from it—or indeed looked likely to come from it.

The Newton's unreliable handwriting recognition was quickly becoming the butt of jokes. Adding to the turmoil, engineering and marketing teams were readying for a radical transition from the Motorola 68k (also known as the 680x0) family of microprocessors that had powered the Mac since 1984 to the PowerPC, a new, more powerful computer architecture that was jointly developed by Apple, Motorola, and IBM. Macs with 68k processors wouldn't be able to run software built for PowerPC. Similarly, software built for 68k Macs would need to be updated to take advantage of the superior PowerPC.

It was in this environment that COO Michael Spindler—a German engineer and strategist who'd climbed through the ranks of Apple in Europe to the very top layer of executive management—was elevated to CEO. (The previous CEO, John Sculley, was asked to resign.) Spindler spearheaded a radical and cost-heavy reorganisation of the company, which harmed morale and increased the chaos, and he developed a reputation for having horrendous people skills. He'd hold meetings in which he'd ramble incoherently, scribble illegible notes on a whiteboard, then leave before anybody could ask a question, and his office was usually closed.

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

Insiders have long viewed Uber as a laggard in the driverless car race, but internal documents obtained by the New York Times suggest that the company's self-driving car program is even further behind its rivals than had been publicly known.

The key statistic: prior to last Sunday's fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, Uber's self-driving cars in Arizona were "struggling" to go 13 miles between interventions by a safety driver—known as a disengagement.

In comparison, Waymo's self-driving cars in California traveled 5,600 miles per disengagement in 2017, while Cruise, GM's self-driving car subsidiary, had a disengagement once every 1,250 miles in the state. We don't know either company's statistics in Arizona because Arizona law doesn't require them to be disclosed.