Month: June 2018

Enlarge / Two human mandibles from Niah Caves in Borneo; the top jaw is 30,000 years old, and the bottom jaw 11,000 years old. (credit: Darren Curnoe)

Life wasn't easy for the first humans to settle in the islands of Southeast Asia. The rain forest was a completely new environment for people in the Late Pleistocene, so the learning curve was probably steep. A 28,000-year-old jawbone from Niah Cave in northeast Borneo reveals that Pleistocene people who first arrived there ate a tough diet.

The mandible belonged to a person who lived and died in Borneo nearly 10,000 years before the end of the last Ice Age, about 28,000-to-30,000 years ago, according to uranium-series dating (there wasn't enough collagen left in the bone for radiocarbon dating). It's small, but it's also unusually thick. Even without any other bones, the jaw tells us two important things about the Southeast Asians of the Pleistocene.

First, they were small. The jawbone is part of an adult mandible, but its height points to a person of short stature and small body size. That's something the ancient Niah Cave person has in common with modern indigenous people of the highlands of Borneo and the Philippines. It's also a very practical adaptation to life in the rain forest, according to University of New South Wales archaeologist Darren Curnoe—another way human diversity has been shaped by our long relationship with our environments.

(credit: Valve Software)

Steam, the long-running PC games marketplace operated by Valve Software, has consistently run into issues with approved and restricted content, and arguments about those guidelines have heated up in recent weeks. After Valve removed various "ero" games and then approved the sexualized, violence-against-women simulator Agony, users began asking what was up with Steam's content guidelines.

A lengthy blog post by Valve's Erik Johnson, titled "Who gets to be on the Steam store?," saw the company frankly admit that its own staff has struggled with the same question until reaching a new conclusion.

"We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal or straight-up trolling," Johnson wrote. "Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see."

Enlarge (credit: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles)

A Waymo executive announced on Tuesday that the company's self-driving car fleet would reach 7 million miles of testing this week.

"We've amassed close to 7 million miles—we'll hit 7 million miles this week," said Shaun Stewart, Waymo's director of operations, at the Innovfest Unbound conference in Singapore.

What makes this truly remarkable is that Waymo announced its last milestone—6 million miles—less than a month ago. Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov made that announcement at the Google I/O conference on May 8.

Sonos

Sonos on Wednesday announced the Beam, a soundbar for living rooms with smart-speaker functionality similar to that of the company’s Sonos One speaker.

The popular audio manufacturer announced the Beam at an event in San Francisco, California. The new device will ship on July 17 for $399, with pre-orders available on the Sonos website starting Wednesday.

Enlarge / A starburst galaxy, which produces stars at a high rate. (credit: NASA)

The size of a star determines its ultimate fate. The smallest stars will burn lighter elements for tens of billions of years; stars like the Sun will make some heavier elements before shrinking into white dwarfs; and massive stars will create the heavier elements and scatter them into the Universe as they explode. So knowing how many we have of each type of star form tells us a lot about what the Universe should look like.

Estimating the frequency at which different mass stars form is relatively easy—we can simply survey the Milky Way, counting how many of each type of star we see. That, however, assumes the Milky Way is typical of other galaxies out there. Earlier this year, we got a hint that it wasn't. Observations of one of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way suggested a star-forming region within it had an excess of massive stars.

But a dwarf galaxy is even more likely to have an atypical star-formation process than the Milky Way. So we really needed more general measures of the sizes of stars being formed in the larger Universe. We now have one, and big stars are still showing up at much higher rates than previous estimates would suggest.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

AMD's Threadripper platform gave a hefty boost to the high-end desktop (HEDT) market: 16 cores and 32 threads using AMD's Zen architecture. Today, AMD announced the second generation of Threadripper: it's twice as big again, with up to 32 cores and 64 threads, and it uses the revised Zen+ core of the second-generation Ryzen chips.

The basic building blocks of Threadripper 2 are the same as the first-generation parts. Threadripper processors are multi-chip modules (MCMs) containing multiple dies and Infinity Fabric interconnects. AMD calls the basic building block of each chip a Core Complex (CCX), which has four cores, eight threads, and 8MB of level 3 cache. Each chip contains two CCXes. The first round of Threadrippers had four chips, with two of them active and two inactive, for a total of 16 threads and 32 cores. The new second-generation parts announced today make all four chips active, bringing the counts up to 32 cores and 64 threads.

This is the same basic layout as the company's Epyc server processors, but there are some differences. Each chip has two memory controllers. In Epyc, all four pairs of memory controllers are enabled, for a total of eight memory channels. In Threadripper 2, only two of the chips have their controllers enabled, for four memory channels total.

Enlarge / Cyrus Farivar will talk about the history of tech law, and Annalee Newitz will speculate about where these laws lead us in the future.

Tech history is an endless tug-of-war between new innovations and old laws. But behind this legal machine are often bizarre court cases full of petty criminals, old-fashioned gumshoe detectives, and... robots who want civil rights.

In a very unusual Ars Technica Live event on June 13 in Oakland, your co-hosts Cyrus Farivar and Annalee Newitz will discuss their recent books about the people whose lives (and deaths) become test cases for new tech laws that govern millions of others.

Farivar, one of Ars' tech-policy reporters, is the author of Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech, a book that explores 10 historic court decisions that defined our privacy rights and matched them against the capabilities of modern technology. There's the 1960s prosecution of a gambler that established the "reasonable expectation of privacy" in nonpublic places beyond your home. Then there's the 1970s case where police monitored an obscene phone caller, which led to the legal decision that formed the linchpin of the NSA's controversial metadata tracking program revealed by Edward Snowden. And what about that time when a 2010 low-level robbery revealed that police had tracked a defendant's past 12,898 locations before arrest? That's just the tip of the digital iceberg.