Month: May 2018

Update (5/28/2018 1:45 PM ET): We've made one last sweep through our deals list and included new discounts on LG OLED TVs, Tile Bluetooth trackers, Dell monitors, and more. We've also removed a few expired deals. The original article is below.

Original post: Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. It's almost Memorial Day weekend, and though the Dealmaster plans to spend plenty of time this weekend grilling and lounging outside, he's also making time to ignore his family and keep you posted on good deals.

While most Memorial Day sales traditionally focus on appliances, mattresses, and other home goods—and while it's worth holding off on deals for things like MacBooks and Amazon devices with the likes of WWDC and Amazon Prime Day just around the corner—there's at least a handful of gadget deals worth noting for those who can't wait until Black Friday.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Comcast's planned purchase of 21st Century Fox properties would give the cable company ownership of the "vast majority" of regional sports networks [RSNs] in the US, a trade group that opposes the potential merger pointed out yesterday.

Comcast already uses its ownership of NBCUniversal and NBC-branded RSNs to raise prices on TV watchers who subscribe to other cable companies, the American Cable Association (ACA) said.

"If Fox agrees to sell to Comcast, these problems get only worse because the combined company would own the vast majority of regional sports networks across the country and increase its roster of popular national programming networks," the ACA said. The ACA represents nearly 800 small- and medium-sized cable operators.

Enlarge / The Samsung Gear S3. (credit: Samsung)

Today, Google's Android-based smartwatch platform—Wear OS—seems like a dead end. It's currently third in the smartwatch market, after the Apple Watch and Samsung's Tizen-based "Gear S" watches. On the software side of things, Google hasn't been iterating on Wear OS quickly enough. The last major update—Wear 2.0—was roughly 18 months ago, and Google I/O 2018 came and went without a peep about a new update. On the hardware side of things, Wear OS hardware is awful. The market's biggest SoC vendor, Qualcomm, has shown it isn't really interested in the smartwatch market and only offers a slow, hot, old smartwatch SoC based on manufacturing technology from 2013.

Wear OS might soon have a saviour though, at least when it comes to hardware. Venerable smartphone leaker Evan Blass claims Samsung employees are sporting Samsung smartwatches running "not Tizen, but Wear OS." Samsung might be coming to save Wear OS.

Samsung’s superior hardware

Qualcomm isn't investing in smart watches, and with a near monopoly on the SoC market, anyone beholden to Qualcomm's lineup is not going to be able to produce a competitive smartwatch. Most of the usual Android OEMs are aligned with Android Wear, but with no new smartwatch chips, they all mostly stopped making new smartwatches. It just so happens that the two smartwatch market leaders, Apple and Samsung, aren't beholden to Qualcomm—they have their own chip-design facilities, and they regularly update their smartwatches with new SoCs using state-of-the-art manufacturing technologies.

Enlarge (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Amazon confirmed an Echo owner's privacy-sensitive allegation on Thursday, after Seattle CBS affiliate KIRO-7 reported that an Echo device in Oregon sent private audio to someone on a user's contact list without permission.

"Unplug your Alexa devices right now," the user, Danielle (no last name given), was told by her husband's colleague in Seattle after he received full audio recordings between her and her husband, according to the KIRO-7 report. The disturbed owner, who is shown in the report juggling four unplugged Echo Dot devices, said that the colleague then sent the offending audio to Danielle and her husband to confirm the paranoid-sounding allegation. (Before sending the audio, the colleague confirmed that the couple had been talking about hardwood floors.)

After calling Amazon customer service, Danielle said she received the following explanation and response: "'Our engineers went through all of your logs. They saw exactly what you told us, exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes. 'This is something we need to fix.'"

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance president and CEO Tory Bruno leads a tour in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for Vice President Mike Pence, his wife, Karen Pence, and then-NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot on Feb. 20, 2018. (credit: NASA)

As the White House seeks to smooth the way for commercial spaceflight, President Trump will sign a new space policy directive on Thursday afternoon. The new policy directs US departments and agencies to implement several reforms to ease the regulatory system for launch licensing, remote sensing, and more.

"This builds on Space Policy Directive 1, to reorient the human spaceflight program back toward the Moon using commercial partners," Scott Pace said Thursday.

The new directive formalizes recommendations made in February at the second meeting of the National Space Council to reform the regulatory environment. In short, the White House wants to cut paperwork for commercial companies launching rockets and flying satellites in Earth orbit. As one official told Ars, the White House would like these companies to be able to hire more engineers and fewer lawyers.

European offshore wind farms have made big US projects possible.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island both awarded major offshore wind contracts on Wednesday, underscoring the increasing economic viability of a kind of renewable energy that has been long considered too expensive.

The Massachusetts installation will have a capacity of 800MW. Situated 14 miles off Martha's Vineyard, the wind farm will be called "Vineyard Wind," and it has an accelerated timetable: it's due to start sending electricity back to the grid as soon as 2021. According to Greentech Media, the contract was won by Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, both companies with headquarters in Europe. The two share 50/50 ownership of the project and beat Deepwater Wind and Bay State Wind in the bidding.

Massachusetts recently approved an ambitious goal to build 1.6GW of wind energy capacity off its coast by 2027. This new contract gets the state half of the way there. According to a press release from Vineyard Wind, the owners of the project will now begin negotiations for transmission services and power purchase agreements. The press release added that the project "will reduce Massachusetts’ carbon emissions by over 1.6 million tons per year, the equivalent of removing 325,000 cars from state roads."

Enlarge / An electron micrograph of multiple copies of the chikungunya virus. (credit: CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith)

The word “chikungunya” (chik-en-gun-ye) comes from Kimakonde, the language spoken by the Makonde people in southeast Tanzania and northern Mozambique. It means “to become contorted,” because that’s what happens to people who get infected. The contortion is a result of severe and debilitating joint pain. Chikungunya was first identified in Tanzania in 1952, but by now cases have been reported around the globe. There is no cure; the CDC recommends that “travelers can protect themselves by preventing mosquito bites.”

Chikungunya is only one of a family of viruses transmitted through mosquitoes for which we have no targeted treatment. This may partially be due to the fact that we didn’t know how they get into our cells. But for chikungunya, we've just found one of the proteins responsible.

Identification via deletion

Researchers used the CRISPR-Cas9 DNA editing system to delete more than twenty-thousand mouse genes—a different one in each cell in a dish. Then they added chikungunya to the dish, isolated the cells that didn’t get infected, and looked to see which gene they lacked. This gene would encode a protein required for viral infection, since infection didn’t happen in its absence.