Month: April 2018

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple knows the smartphone market is becoming more crowded and homogenous, and the company wants to make its iPhones stand out. According to a Bloomberg report, Apple is experimenting with two new features that could make it into future iPhone models: touchless gesture controls and curved screens. Those familiar with the plans claim that if Apple continues to develop these new technologies for the iPhone, they likely will not make their debut for another two or three years.

Gesture control would allow users to complete some tasks on the handset by moving their finger near the screen without actually touching it. Proximity of the finger to the screen would be the key, as the technology being developed is reportedly being built into the screen itself.

Samsung offered similar gesture controls, dubbed Air Gestures, on its Galaxy S4 smartphone years ago. Air Gestures allowed users to move their hand near the top of the handset to accept calls, scroll through webpages, and more. However, Samsung's feature used a motion sensor on the phone's bezel rather than technology built into the display panel.

Trevor Mahlmann/Special to Ars

SpaceX has long talked a good game about increasing its launch cadence, but the company now appears to be delivering in a big way. After two launches in four days, the California-based company has now flown seven rockets in 2018—six Falcon 9 missions and one Falcon Heavy. That breaks down to one launch every 13 days this year.

This is a significant number because it brings the company within its longstanding goal of launching a rocket every two weeks. Indeed, at this pace, SpaceX will launch a total of 27 rockets in 2018, which is consistent with expectations set by the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell.

Enlarge / This 2014 CDC image shows two Petri dish culture plates growing bacteria in the presence of discs containing various antibiotics. The bacterial isolate on the left plate appears to be susceptible to the antibiotics on the discs; and is therefore; unable to grow adjacent to the discs. The plate on the right was inoculated with a Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) bacterium that proved to be resistant to almost all of the antibiotics tested. (credit: CDC/James Gathany)

Several types of “nightmare” drug-resistant bacteria are lurking within healthcare settings across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest surveillance data. But the data also suggests that recently implemented control efforts are helping to squelch the deadly germs.

The data, published Tuesday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, focused on bacteria resistant to a group of antibiotics called carbapenems, which are often used as drugs of last resort. Carbapenem resistance often shows up in bacteria in the Enterobacteriaceae family, which includes common gut pathogens such as E. coli and Klebsiella. These carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) burst onto the clinical scene starting in the early 2000s and they’ve tended to carry resistance to many or nearly all other antibiotics, in addition to carbapenems. In fact, CRE cause dreadful infections with mortality rates as high as 50 percent—aka, nightmare cases, as the CDC likes to call them. For this reason, CRE are considered among the biggest microbial threats by the CDC and the World Health Organization.

In 2009, the CDC created a CRE-specific guidance to try to monitor and effectively control and eliminate CRE cases from healthcare settings, where they often cause blood, catheter, and central line infections. The guidance instructs healthcare workers to do things like use laboratory testing to surveil clinical isolates, screen healthcare workers that may be asymptomatically carrying the deadly germs, place infected patients in single rooms and under contact precautions, and up hand-washing.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

You're probably familiar with Samsung smartphones, Samsung TVs, and maybe even Samsung home appliances, like futuristic refrigerators. People know Samsung for a lot of reasons, but their PC business generally isn't one of them. While the South Korean tech giant sells a number of laptops, it knows that those devices aren't as prevalent in the general consumer consciousness as competing Dell, HP, and Lenovo PCs.

Samsung wants to change this with the Notebook 9 Pen. The new flagship convertible packs in many of the features you'd expect of a 2018 ultrabook—a design with premium materials, an 8th-gen Intel processor, integrated graphics, and biometric security—along with a few classic Samsung creations like the company's S Pen stylus. But it takes more than similar specs to compete with the top two-in-ones available today, and the compromises presented by the Notebook 9 Pen may be too great to convince some users.

Look and feel

Hold the Notebook 9 Pen while blindfolded and you may think it's a device that follows the same design language as modern ultrabooks. But open your eyes and you'll be disappointed: while the Notebook 9 weighs just 2.2 pounds, its design makes it look like it could be a much heftier machine.