Month: May 2018

Enlarge (credit: Tejero et al. 2018)

In caves and rock shelters around the Levant, archaeologists keep finding gazelle scapulae (shoulder blades) marked with a series of regular notches. Scientists still aren't sure what kind of information the enigmatic marks once conveyed or how the bones themselves might have been used or displayed, but they may be able to tell us something about how early human cultures spread through Eurasia.

Put another notch in your... gazelle scapula?

Hayonim Cave in Western Galilee, Israel, overlooks the right bank of a large wadi a few miles from the Mediterranean shore. There, archaeologists found eight gazelle scapulae, mostly broken, along with hearths, tooth pendants, stone chips, and signs of ochre use within layers of sediment dating to the Upper Paleolithic. The bones are marked with rows of 0.5-2.5mm wide, 4-5mm long notches regularly spaced 0.5 to 7mm apart. They were put there by a stone blade; on the only unbroken scapula in the set, there are 32 notches, but some have as few as three.

The notches aren’t on the same parts of the bone where you'd expect to find cut marks from butchering an animal. Butchering cuts also tend to be shallower and shorter, and the surface of a hacking or cutting mark looks very different under a microscope than a notch made by sawing into a pre-scraped surface.

Enlarge / The Pocket recommendations on Firefox's New Tab page.

Mozilla plans to add sponsored content to its Firefox browser in a bid to increase and diversify its revenue stream.

Since the start of the year, the company has been showing some Firefox users links to recommended content on its New Tab page. Some proportion of the recommendations are sponsored, with content producers paying to be included in the list of recommendations. Those links are now also available in the nightly and beta releases. In Firefox 60, due to ship on May 9th, the feature will roll out to all Firefox users around the world.

The recommended links are personalized, with Mozilla saying that the links should be valuable content that's worth taking the time to read. Normally, such personalization raises privacy concerns because effective personalization requires the tracking of personal preferences and habits to ascertain what things a person is likely to be interested in. But Mozilla's personalization is different: it happens entirely on the client side. The browser will download a list of recommended links each day. Each link will also have a list of related websites, with similar kinds of content to that in the sponsored links. The browser will then compare these related sites to your browsing history; if there are lots of matches, Firefox will assume that you're interested in the recommended content and show it to you.

On Tuesday, Facebook users began seeing a new "hate speech" report feature roll out by default on the primary news feed. Curiously, however, the new feature didn't emerge under one of the site's myriad "hamburger" and ellipses drop-down menus, nor did it pop up as a one-time warning at the top of the site after a fresh login.

Instead, Facebook began asking by using a yellow "warning" exclamation box and off-set text if every post on users' news feeds contained hate speech.

Enlarge / The big improvement is the lower fingerprint reader, which now lives below the camera module. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

If you're looking for a US Galaxy S9 with more than 64GB of space, Samsung is starting preorders today for two higher-storage variants of its flagship smartphone. Samsung has announced that 128GB and 256GB versions of the Galaxy S9 can now be preordered in the US, with shipments starting May 18.

The Galaxy S9 originally launched in the US in March with only an entry-level 64GB storage tier. Samsung forfeited the spec sheet bragging rights to its biggest rival, Apple, which launched its latest iPhone with a 256GB storage tier. Extra built-in storage isn't as necessary on Samsung phones since they have a MicroSD slot, allowing digital pack rats to buy the 64GB phone and slap in a giant SD card later.

The move to only launch with 64GB in the US certainly seems carrier-driven, as all the carrier models are 64GB and Samsung's new higher storage models are exclusively available on Samsung.com. Thankfully, Samsung is only charging $50 for each 64GB jump in storage. Here's the price breakdown for the new models:

Eli

Listen to most mobility experts and they'll tell you the future of transportation involves connected, autonomous, shared electric vehicles. While it's true those should deliver some benefits—like fewer crashes and less CO2 in the atmosphere—there's not actually much evidence that autonomous cars will solve problems like congestion. Sure, you might be able to watch TV or work during your commute, but you'll still be stuck in a car for hours every day. Which is why a new neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV) called the Eli Zero caught my attention recently.

NEVs certainly aren't the answer for everyone; if you're the sort of person who has a 50-mile commute on a freeway every day, you might as well stop reading now because they won't solve any of your problems. But for people who live and work in denser urban areas whose commute or trip to the grocery store sticks to roads with city-appropriate speed limits, or who live in planned communities like Celebration, Florida, a NEV can start to make a lot of sense.

Enlarge / A screen capture from Nintendo.com shows no "Buy Digital" option for Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze on the Wii U. (credit: Nintendo.com)

This week sees the re-release of Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze on the Nintendo Switch, giving millions more people the opportunity to catch an enjoyable platformer they might have missed when it was first released in 2014 on the Wii U. Surprisingly, though, Wii U owners who want to purchase that original version of the game can no longer do so through Nintendo's online eShop.

While Reddit user bgold101 alerted the Internet at large to the Wii U version's online removal on Monday, the title appears to have come down well before that. Captures from the Internet Archive show the "Buy Digital" option for Tropical Freeze on Nintendo's website disappeared sometime between October 22, 2017 and February 25, 2018, suggesting Nintendo made this move well ahead of Friday's Switch re-release. (Incidentally, the Switch version of Tropical Freeze was publicly announced on January 11). And while there are scattered reports that the game has returned to the eShop today, Ars has confirmed it is not available either via the website or the Wii U's own online store as of press time. Nintendo has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars.

Timing aside, it's odd that Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze would be removed from the Wii U eShop at all. Games like Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon are still available for Wii U download, even though new versions of both games are also available on the Switch. Users who previously purchased Tropical Freeze on the Wii U report they are still able to re-download the game through the "Your Downloads" history page, so the digital files haven't disappeared entirely from Nintendo's servers (unlike sought-after PS4 horror demo P.T.'s removal from PSN, for instance). While legal issues like music rights sometimes force games off of digital storefronts, there's little reason to think such issues affect a wholly original first-party game from Nintendo.

Enlarge / It doesn't look like anything to me. (credit: Tom Bridgman/NASA)

Going back millions of years into Earth's history, our planet's magnetic field has frequently gone its own way. The magnetic north pole has not only wandered through the north, but it has changed places with the south magnetic pole, taking up residence in the Antarctic. Going back millions of years, there's a regular pattern of pole exchange, with flips sometimes occurring in relatively rapid succession.

In those terms, our current period of pole positioning is unusually long, with the last flip occurring nearly 800,000 years ago. But the magnetic field has grown noticeably weaker since we started measuring it more than a hundred years ago. The poles have wandered a bit, and there's an area of even more dramatic weakening over the South Atlantic. Could these be signs that we're due for another flip?

Probably not, according to new research published with the refreshingly clear title, "Earth’s magnetic field is probably not reversing." In it, an international team of researchers reconstructs the history of some past flips and argues that what's going on now doesn't much look like previous events.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Fitbit is serious about making it easier for doctors and medical professionals to access important health data. The company announced a new partnership with Google to make this happen faster using Google's new Cloud Healthcare API. Fitbit will use the API to further integrate with the healthcare system, and will also move to Google's Cloud Platform.

Google created the Cloud Healthcare API to provide a scalable infrastructure that makes it easier to manage different types of healthcare data from multiple sources. For Fitbit, the API could allow it to better connect user data to electronic medical records. This would make it easier for physicians to learn more about a patient and provide more personalized treatment by using the data collected by the patient's Fitbit device.

Fitbit's move to Google's Cloud Platform will help facilitate Fitbit's healthcare plans. Many Google Cloud products are already HIPAA-certified, and Google already knows how to meet the security and privacy needs of the healthcare industry. Instead of building its own platform in compliance with healthcare industry standards, Fitbit can use Google's platform, where the regulatory work has already been done.