Month: April 2018

Enlarge / Mark Karpeles, former chief executive officer of Mt. Gox, departs following a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Tuesday, July 11, 2017. (credit: Akio Kon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

This week, Bitcoin’s most despised man subjected himself to the Internet equivalent of a den of vipers: Reddit.

In a surprising post, entitled "I'm Mark Karpelès, ex-CEO of bankrupt MtGox. Ask me anything," the French entrepreneur spontaneously made himself available to all comers. (Even outside of this spontaneous AMA, Karpelès, under the nickname MagicalTux, remains active on Reddit.)

As Ars wrote a recent review of a documentary about Karpelès and the rise and fall of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, the bitcoin exchange quickly became the world's most popular place to trade. Launched in 2010, by February 2014, the site pulled the plug and filed for bankruptcy. Mt. Gox blamed its huge losses on hackers who had pilfered 850,000 bitcoins (now worth more than $8 billion) by taking advantage of a major security flaw. At the time, Karpelès became the most hated person in the bitcoin world for letting it happen right under his nose.

Jonathan Gitlin

Last year, Alfa Romeo made me a convert with its Giulia Quadrifoglio. The Italian company's answer to an M3 has found a lot of fans. But considering the recipe it would be hard not to be one: an engine borrowed from Ferrari (minus two cylinders), lashings of carbon fiber bodywork, and an asking price $10,000 less than any of its German rivals. But there is more to Giulia than the four-leaf clover. The bread and butter of the range comes with a 2.0L four-cylinder engine, and I'm here to tell you that even though it's significantly cheaper, it's almost as good as the fire-breathing version. In fact, I can't remember falling in love with a car quite like this one.

Alfa Romeo's return to the US began with the 4C, a lightweight two-seater. But this carbon-fiber chassis sports car sells in tiny numbers; to truly make an impact the company needed something a little more mainstream. That involves a pair of vehicles built on a shared platform (called Giorgio); the Stelvio crossover, which we reviewed earlier in the year, and this, the Giulia sedan. The range starts at $38,195 before discounts, but the one we're reviewing—and the pick of the bunch, in our opinion—is the $42,695 Giulia Ti Sport, in rear-wheel drive. All-wheel drive is an extra $2,000, which would be better spent on snow tires if winter performance is a concern.

Enlarge / Migration of glacier grounding lines between 2010 and 2016, with ocean temperatures. (credit: Hannes Konrad et al., University of Leeds)

If Antarctica and Greenland were just big ol’ ice cubes, projecting future sea-level rise would be a snap. The physics of ice melting are simple when you know the temperature. But these frozen continents are not nearly as boring as a cube of ice, so the task of working out how fast they will melt over the next century (and beyond) is herculean in scope.

Antarctic ice flows like slow putty, sliding away from the high interior of the continent and toward the sea. Some “outlet glaciers” at the edge fall apart before they hit the shoreline, but most push out into the water to produce floating ice shelves. The point where the ice lifts off the ground and begins to float is called the “grounding line,” and it’s incredibly important to a glacier’s stability.

A new study led by Hannes Konrad of the Alfred Wegener Institute greatly expands the map of Antarctica’s grounding lines, tracking areas of change and areas of stability.

Enlarge (credit: UtaUtaNapishtim via Wikimedia Commons)

Every human culture has a special way of laying its dead to rest. Some cremate the remains, some lay them beneath the open sky, and others place them in the ground. Regardless of its form, that final ritual implies an understanding of our own mortality, one of the things that seems to clearly set humans apart from other animals. Along with art and jewelry, deliberate burial is one of the few ways that we can trace the evolution of human thought using the archaeological record.

But it's hard to objectively determine what's a deliberate burial and what's an accidental collection of bones. Now, scientists have attempted to hand off the task to an impartial judge: a machine-learning algorithm. Its analysis indicates that possible signs of burial in other hominins are more likely to be the result of chance.

Grave or not?

Archaeologists are very interested in figuring out when humans started burying our dead. At the moment, the best candidates for the oldest-known burials of modern humans come from Skhul and Qafzeh Caves in Israel, where people appear to have been interred with ochre and other items around 100,000 years ago.