Month: August 2018

LOS ANGELES—A new kind of entertainment is opening next month: a large, carnival-like arcade filled with VR headsets, brand new arcade cabinets, holograms, escape rooms, a robot bartender named Guillermo del Pouro, hidden passages, and more.

It's called Two Bit Circus, and it's run by a company of the same name. Founded by Eric Gradman (a computer programmer who has also worked as a circus performer) and Brent Bushnell (an engineer who is also the son of Atari and Chuck E Cheese's co-founder Nolan Bushnell), Two Bit Circus is something of a staple in the LA scene now. Their previous individual installations have appeared at nightclubs, corporate events, and more.

Rozetked

There has been yet another Pixel 3 XL leak, this time courtesy of the Russian site Rozetked. We get to see even more pictures, confirmation of the wireless charging, and a serious conundrum about what the back is made of.

The pictures look a lot like what we saw in the previous leak, with a working Pixel 3 XL and a front notch so large it can probably be seen from space. The two front-facing cameras are still there.

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Robin Sloan writes about artificial intelligence in his latest novel, Sourdough, but he has also been writing with help from AI, too. In the latest episode of Ars Technica Live, filmed before actual humans at Oakland bar Eli's Mile High Club, I talked to Sloan about his work.

We started out by discussing how Sloan does his research, because Sourdough has some of the most accurate representations of robots you'll find in a work of fiction. But it also has impeccably researched descriptions of how to make sourdough bread, which is a pretty interesting scientific process in itself. Sloan said he talked to several roboticist friends about his main character, who works as a software developer for robot arms. But he also incorporated his personal knowledge of San Francisco startup culture, as well as sourdough cultures. He has made sourdough bread himself, though he admitted it wasn't particularly successful. Cooking has become a form of science, Sloan said, and developments in biotech have taken food into the laboratory.

Enlarge / Attorney General Jeff Sessions talks about the opioid epidemic at The Columbus Police Academy on August 2, 2017 in Columbus, Ohio. (credit: Maddie McGarvey/Getty Images)

Federal authorities announced Wednesday that in recent months, they have arrested, charged, and received guilty pleas from suspects in numerous new drug cases stemming from dark Web sites. Prosecutors collectively dubbed this project "Operation Darkness Falls."

The most prominent of these cases involves Matthew Roberts and Holly Roberts, a possibly married couple from San Antonio, Texas that jointly operated under the name "MH4Life."

According to federal prosecutors, the two suspects were "the most prolific dark net fentanyl vendor in the United States and the fourth most prolific in the world" at the time of their April 2018 arrest.

Enlarge (credit: Fernando Tomás / Wikimedia Commons)

Soils, especially those in tropical forests, play an important role in absorbing carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere; the world’s soil currently holds about twice as much carbon as the air. Tropical forests account for about a third of the carbon sequestered in soils worldwide, and a significant portion of that carbon resides in subsoils, buried 20cm to 30cm deep, where it usually spends thousands of years before returning to the atmosphere.

Deforestation leads to soil erosion, and it can change the chemistry that keeps carbon molecules bound to other minerals in the soil. A new study suggests that people have been damaging carbon reservoirs in tropical forests for much longer than we thought.

The Maya began farming in the lowlands of northern Central America around 4,000 years ago. By about 2,500 years ago, the civilization was at its peak, clearing away jungle to make room for farms and cities. Maya civilization began to decline shortly before Spanish conquest brought about a final, massive population crash 500 years ago. Today, the jungle has reclaimed most of the land once farmed by the Maya, and many of their cities now lie hidden beneath dense foliage. But the soil turns out to have a much longer memory.