Month: March 2018

Enlarge / The Samsung Galaxy S8+. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

While Samsung's newest flagship, the Galaxy S9, is just hitting the market, last year's flagship, the Galaxy S8, is getting some love, too. Samsung and its US carrier partners are finally upgrading the Galaxy S8 to Android 8.0 Oreo, a version of the OS that came out six months ago.

Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are all pushing out the update now, with no word yet on updates for the AT&T or unlocked US version.

Most of Google's engineering efforts on Android 8.0 came in the form of Project Treble, a massive overhaul of the underlying Android bits to modularize the OS away from the hardware, which should lead to easier updates. Due to the complexity of this change, this is mostly meant for new devices that were built with Oreo in mind and is not coming to most upgrading phones. The rest of the changes are nice-to-have things like a revamped notification hierarchy, and a lockdown on background processing.

Enlarge (credit: PNAS)

Studies of the bones of dog, large cat, turkey, and other animal bones found in the Maya city of Ceibal show that, as early as 400 BCE, the Mayan elite were importing dogs from distant corners of Guatemala and raising large cats like jaguars in captivity, probably all for use in elaborate rituals at the pyramids in the center of the city.

“Animal trade helped sustain many large civilizations, such as the Romans in Europe, the Inca Empire in South America, the Mesopotamians in the Middle East, and the ancient Chinese dynasties,” said archaeologist Ashley Sharpe of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who led the study. But at Ceibal, the imported animals seem to have served purely ceremonial or political purposes, which may have played an important role in the growth of the powerful Maya state.

Captive jaguar

The work is based on discoveries at a pyramid near the ceremonial center of Ceibal, an important Maya city in what is now Guatemala (the city is also known as Seibal and El Ceibal). Archaeologists found the jawbone of a large cat—probably a jaguar—mixed in with ancient construction fill. A jawbone doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to let archaeologists reconstruct what the animal ate and where it came from. The ratio of stable carbon isotopes stored in the bone, for example, can tell researchers whether the animal or its prey ate a lot of grain or foraged on more woody plants in the forests around Ceibal, while nitrogen isotope ratios reveal the amount of protein in the animal’s diet.

Enlarge / Kids can tell when something’s not right. (credit: dadblunders / Flickr)

Does language, by providing a way to symbolize and communicate our thoughts, enable us to reason? Or are inference, deduction, and other forms of logical reasoning independent of our ability to put words to them? It’s hard to figure out whether babies can think, given they can’t tell us. Which makes separating language from reasoning even harder.

Ernő Téglás, at the Babylab in Budapest, researches “how infants acquire the conceptual sophistication necessary for abstract combinatorial thought involved in everyday reasoning.” His team has just published work describing the precursors of logical reasoning in pre-verbal infants; one group of infants was aged 12 months and the other was 19 months old. Babies at these ages are just at the cusp of language learning and speech development, but they definitely precede the development of extensive language.

Wrong expectations

Like 20-something adults given the same tests, these babies expressed distress when their deductions did not hold true. Distress came in the form of staring at the inconsistent outcomes, which is how baby cognition is often measured.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Climate science has kind of had its day in court before. In 2007, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that CO₂ fits the definition of a pollutant under the Clean Air Act—a decision that forces the US EPA to draw up regulations to tackle climate change, regardless of political winds. But on Tuesday, climate science will literally have its day in court, as a federal judge receives a five-hour tutorial he requested on the subject.

The case pits San Francisco and Oakland against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell. The cities are alleging that major oil companies solid fossil fuels while knowing their use would change the climate—and, critically, publicly campaigning to convince the public they would not change the climate. As San Francisco and Oakland incur significant costs building infrastructure to protect their cities from sea-level rise, they want oil companies to chip in for the bill.

The case, which would obviously set a huge precedent if the cities won, already seems to have gone farther than past attempts. Other judges have booted suits on the grounds that emissions should be regulated by the EPA and therefore the issue can’t be decided in a courtroom. But the specifics of the California case—going after sellers of fossil fuels rather than local users of fossil fuels—convinced Judge William Alsup that it can go forward.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter Dazeley)

Federal judges have struck down an anti-robocall rule, saying that the Federal Communications Commission improperly treated every American who owns a smartphone as a potential robocaller.

The FCC won't be appealing the court decision, as Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the rule changes when they were implemented by the commission's then-Democratic majority in 2015. Pai issued a statement praising the judges for the decision Friday, calling the now-vacated rule "yet another example of the prior FCC’s disregard for the law and regulatory overreach."

The FCC's 2015 decision said that a device meets the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) definition of an "autodialer" if it can be modified to make robocalls, even if the smartphone user hasn't actually downloaded an autodialing app.