Month: September 2018

Nintendo

After a delay in light of a Japanese earthquake, Nintendo's latest Direct video presentation finally went live on Thursday evening, and it included confirmations of long-rumored games and ports for the Nintendo Switch—along with a surprise NES controller pack launching next week.

Coming September 18, the same day as the new paid Nintendo Switch Online service, the NES Controllers two-pack will be sold exclusively at Nintendo.com for $59.99—and you'll need to be a paying Switch Online subscriber to place an order. These controllers connect wirelessly to Switch consoles, and they also include latches to hook to the sides of a Switch console, but Nintendo advertises this solely as a controller-charging feature. Meaning, you won't be able to use these NES controllers in traditional Switch games—particularly when you might prefer a traditional D-pad over the Joy-Cons' clicky buttons.

Enlarge / A "Moment of Science" from the 2017 Ig Nobel ceremony featured a demonstration of wave phenomena. (credit: Alexey Eliseev/Improbable Research)

Ever wondered why so many people don't read instruction manuals, or how how many calories are in the human body? Or whether stabbing a voodoo doll representing your horrible boss with pins could help reduce workplace tension? The winners of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes have got you covered. These and other unusual research topics were honored tonight in a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes, honoring "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The prizes have always been perceived as a celebration of scientific silliness, an impression strengthened by the unapologetically campy awards ceremony. The festivities feature mini-operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures, whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds, and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds, strictly enforced by an eight-year-old girl nicknamed "Miss Sweetie-Poo," who will interrupt those who exceed the time limit by repeating, "Please stop. I'm bored." Until they stop.

It's all in good dorky fun. But there's also a serious side to the Ig Nobels. The research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it is devoid of scientific merit. Take the 2006 Ig Nobel for physics, awarded to French researchers for investigating why dry spaghetti often breaks into more than two pieces when it is bent. That work led to a new bendy paintbrush in Adobe Illustrator 5. More importantly, studying how cracks form and spread in various kinds of materials is critical to detecting imminent failure in, say, bridge spans or human bones. Just last month MIT physicists published a follow-up paper. But more people are likely to read about breaking spaghetti than peruse an academic paper entitled "Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching."

Enlarge / Solar panels, Ferrisburgh, Vermont, June 15, 2016. (credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

On Thursday, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) published a quarterly report that offered surprising results. Despite a 30-percent tariff on solar cells and modules imported to the US, solar installations only fell by about nine percent, year over year.

At the same time, during the first half of 2018, utilities signed more than 8.5 gigawatts' worth of procurement deals for projects that will be completed before 2020. The effect is that US solar installment growth in 2018 and 2019 will likely remain flat year over year compared to 2017. That's better than most analysts expected.

There are a few reasons that President Trump's tariffs haven't had as much of an effect as they could have. According to Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA's president and CEO, "the solar industry is simply too strong to be kept down." That's perhaps an overly rosy way of looking at it. The report itself notes that a lot of this growth comes from the fact that the US offers a 30-percent investment tax credit on solar installations that are completed before 2020. Tariffs or no, companies wanting to build panels stand to save a significant amount of money if they start building before the end of 2019 and snag that tax credit.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Sciepro)

Half-siblings conceived with donated sperm and eggs are connecting online using DNA testing and online registries, forming extraordinarily large genetic families with dozens to hundreds of children linked to one parent, The Washington Post reports.

The modern family ties and genetic sleuthing are making it easier for donor-conceived children to learn about their backgrounds—and harder for anonymous donors to maintain anonymity. That has clearly been proven in tragic cases in which fertility doctors misled patients about their donor’s identity, even using their own sperm to sire dozens of children. But in legal, less-scandalous cases, the online connections are also highlighting the complex consequences of America’s lax regulations of the fertility industry, particularly on sperm and egg donations.

Many other countries have set legal limits on the number of children, families, or pregnancies to which one donor can contribute. Sperm donors in Taiwan can only sire one child, for instance. In Britain, they can donate to 10 families, and in China they can provide starter material for five pregnancies. But in the US, no such limits exist.

Enlarge (credit: rabiem22 / Flickr)

Cold boot attacks, used to extract sensitive data such as encryption keys and passwords from system memory, have been given new blood by researchers from F-Secure. First documented in 2008, cold boot attacks depend on the ability of RAM to remember values even across system reboots. In response, systems were modified to wipe their memory early during the boot process—but F-Secure found that, in many PCs, tampering with the firmware settings can force the memory wipe to be skipped, once again making the cold boot attacks possible.

The RAM in any commodity PC is more specifically called Dynamic RAM (DRAM). The "dynamic" here is in contrast to the other kind of RAM (used for caches in the processor), static RAM (SRAM). SRAM retains its stored values for as long as the chip is powered on; once the value is stored, it remains that way until a new value is stored or power is removed. It doesn't change, hence "static." Each bit of SRAM typically needs six or eight transistors; it's very fast, but the high transistor count makes it bulky, which is why it's only used for small caches.

DRAM, on the other hand, has a much smaller size per bit, using only a single transistor paired with a capacitor. These capacitors lose their stored charge over time; when they're depleted, the DRAM no longer retains the value it was supposed to remember. To handle this, the DRAM is refreshed multiple times per second to top up the capacitors and rewrite the values being stored. This rewriting is what makes DRAM "dynamic." It's not just the power that needs to be maintained for DRAM; the refreshes also need to occur.

Enlarge (credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

For over two years now, Pokémon Go's in-game Pokéstops and Gyms have been placed in real-world locations derived from Niantic's previous GPS-based game, Ingress. Now, the developer is slowly rolling out the ability for Pokémon Go players to nominate their own places of interest to be integrated into the game.

The suggestion system is currently only available to players in Brazil and South Korea who have played enough to reach level 40 (no easy feat), and it is limited to seven suggestions per person per week. For those users, suggesting a new in-game location is as simple as taking a picture, writing a brief description, and uploading your location to Niantic.

It seems inevitable that the suggestion system will eventually roll out to the rest of the game's playerbase, which has been seeing a significant uptick during the warmer summer months. In the meantime, Niantic has posted a couple of FAQs detailing what makes for a good Pokéstop suggestion.

Enlarge / The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, ruled that UK bulk data collection and mass surveillance regimes violated the European Charter of Human Rights. (credit: Violetta Kuhn/picture alliance via Getty Images)

In a set of rulings today, the European Court of Human Rights found that the mass surveillance scheme used by the GCHQ—the United Kingdom's signals intelligence agency—violated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), unlawfully intruding on the private and family life and freedom of expression of British and European citizens. And the case included consideration of intelligence collected by the US National Security Agency shared with GCHQ.

The Court found that sharing intelligence information gathered from bulk surveillance—as GCHQ does with the NSA and other members of the "Five Eyes" intelligence and security alliance—does not violate the human rights charter. But the judges did warn that using such intelligence sharing to bypass restrictions on surveillance of a member state's own citizens would be a violation of the charter.

In the ruling, the judges found that there was insufficient oversight through the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal (the UK equivalent of the US' Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) over the UK's bulk interception, filtering, and search of communications by the GCHQ. The judges also found that there were insufficient safeguards put in place to govern access to communications data. While the case has no direct impact on US intelligence gathering, the case could have a ripple effect because of the close connections between US and UK intelligence and law enforcement organizations.

Enlarge / Project Verify would let you confirm or deny logins for other apps and websites. (credit: Project Verify)

The four major US mobile carriers have unveiled a system that would let them manage your logins across any third-party website or app that hooks into it.

"Project Verify" from a consortium of AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile US, and Sprint, was unveiled in a demo yesterday. It works similarly to other multi-factor authentication systems by letting users approve or deny login requests from other websites and apps, reducing the number of times users must enter passwords. The carriers' consortium is putting the call out to developers of third-party apps and websites, who can contact the consortium for information on linking to the new authentication system.

"The Project Verify app can be preloaded or downloaded to the user's mobile device," a video describing the technology says. "And then when they face a login screen on their favorite sites and apps, they select the verify option. That's it—Project Verify does the rest."