Month: July 2018

Hello, universe? It's us, Earth. (credit: Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO)

This week we’re serializing yet another episode from the After On Podcast here on Ars. The broader series is built around deep-dive interviews with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists, and it tends to be very tech- and science-heavy. You can access the excerpts on Ars via an embedded audio player, or by reading accompanying transcripts (both of which are below).

This week, my guest is British astronomer Stephen Webb. Webb has probably spent more time than anyone on this planet—with the possible exception of Frank Drake—pondering a fascinating subject known as Fermi’s Paradox.

This is the question of why can’t we detect any signs of intelligent alien life when we look to the skies. No signs of astro-engineering projects. No signatures of relativistic space travel. No obviously artificial electromagnetic waves, and so forth. And when you think of it, this is rather surprising. Or at least it was surprising to the ingenious physicist Enrico Fermi, who first drew attention to the matter.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump shakes hands with Brett Kavanaugh, his nominee for the Supreme Court. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

President Trump's Supreme Court nominee argued last year that net neutrality rules violate the First Amendment rights of Internet service providers by preventing them from "exercising editorial control" over Internet content.

Trump's pick is Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The DC Circuit twice upheld the net neutrality rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission under former Chairman Tom Wheeler, despite Kavanaugh's dissent. (In another tech-related case, Kavanaugh ruled that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone metadata is legal.)

While current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai eliminated the net neutrality rules, Kavanaugh could help restrict the FCC's authority to regulate Internet providers as a member of the Supreme Court. Broadband industry lobby groups have continued to seek Supreme Court review of the legality of Wheeler's net neutrality rules even after Pai's repeal.

Enlarge / A Nintendo-proivded selection of indie games currently out (or coming soon) for Switch. Nintendo hopes lists like these will be much bigger in the future.

Popular first-party franchises and an innovative hybrid hardware design have been key parts of the Nintendo Switch's sales success thus far. But the system also owes a lot to a wide selection of independent games that has helped round out the library of available titles between marquee releases.

So perhaps it's not a surprise that Nintendo says it's interested in expanding the range and number of indie titles on the system going forward. In an investor's Q&A session this week, Senior Executive Officer Susumu Tanaka said, "In the future, we are looking to release around 20 to 30 indie games on Nintendo Switch per week, and we definitely expect to see some great games among them."

That range would represent a big increase from the Switch's current baseline of about 10 games released per week, on average, over the last year (a number that includes indie titles as well as games from major publishers). The Switch's current rate of new game releases—which is comparable to that on the Xbox One—represents a huge increase from the Wii U era, when that system saw just three releases in an average week during its first year on the market in 2013 (and that number that was padded a bit by dozens of Virtual Console re-releases, to boot).

Enlarge / Elon Musk unveiled the Model X back in 2015. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, currently traveling in Asia, signed an agreement Tuesday with officials in Shanghai to build a factory with the capacity to produce up to 500,000 vehicles per year. Shanghai officials describe it as the largest foreign-funded manufacturing project in Shanghai history.

The deal comes in the midst of an increasingly bitter trade war between the United States and China. A 25 percent Chinese tariff on US-made cars recently forced Tesla to raise the Chinese price of the Model S and Model X. Having a Chinese factory would help Tesla avoid these taxes, as it could manufacture cars in China and then sell the cars directly to Chinese consumers—or to customers in Asian countries with good trade relationships to China.

Tesla's China project was first reported by Bloomberg. A Tesla spokesperson confirmed the news to Ars Technica.

Enlarge / Send money to friends with the say app you pay for stuff with. (credit: Google)

Google is cleaning up its Google Pay mobile payments app this week. Google Pay (which was formerly Android Pay, which was formerly Google Wallet) is getting rolled up into a single app, and it's getting boarding pass support.

First, you'll finally be able to pay for things with NFC and send money to contacts through a single app. For a while now, Google's mobile payments solutions have inexplicably been split across two apps. With the latest branding, there was a "Google Pay" app for NFC payments and a second "Google Pay Send" app for P2P money transfers. With the new update, Google says you'll now be able to request and send money right from the main Google Pay app, and you'll even be able to split the bill from a recent NFC purchase. For now this is limited to the US.

The second upgrade coming to Google Pay is the launch of boarding pass support, which has been a feature of Apple Wallet forever. Google announced boarding pass support at Google I/O 2018, and the feature has been in public testing for a few months, but now it appears to be entering wider availability. Google's blog post says you'll be able to save passes from Ticketmaster and Southwest with "more places soon, including Eventbrite, Singapore Airlines, and Vueling." For now that appears to be the entire list.

Enlarge (credit: California Social Services)

We have a good idea of what makes individual cells old. Things like DNA damage, shortened chromosome ends, and a lack of proliferative ability can all cause cells to basically shut down—they don't die, but they stop dividing and become quiescent. But we don't have a strong sense of what makes an organism old. It could be the cumulative effect of lots of their cells getting old, or there may be additional means of registering an organism's age.

Now, a new study suggests at least part of the answer may be a mix of the two. The study, done using mice, indicates that having a small population of cells that have hit the wall due to aging can induce symptoms of age-related decline in otherwise young mice. And a drug combination that targets these cells can block these problems from taking root. The same drugs, when given to elderly mice, also reduce mortality and limit some of the symptoms of age.

Senescent

Cells pick up damage all the time, either through environmental exposures or simply as a byproduct of their normal metabolism. If the damage is sufficiently critical, the cell will respond by committing an orderly sort of suicide called apoptosis, which keeps it from causing any further problems. For lesser damage, there's a less drastic alternative called senescence, in which the cell remains active and contributes its normal functions to the organism's health, but it commits to no longer dividing. Over time, as animals age, more and more cells enter senescence, a process that's thought to contribute to aging.