Month: October 2018

Enlarge / The Morton skull collection at the University of Pennsylvania. (credit: Steve Minicola/University of Pennsylvania)

Newly discovered handwritten documentation sheds new light on an ongoing scientific controversy regarding a famous collection of nearly 1,000 skulls amassed by a 19th-century Philadelphia physician. Dubbed the "American Golgotha," the collection is the work of Samuel Morton, who used them to compare the brain size of different racial groups in the 1830s and 1840s.

Paul Wolff Mitchell, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where the collection is stored, believes his analysis could help settle the often acrimonious debate over whether the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was correct in his assessment of the role of unconscious bias in science, particularly with regard to race. Mitchell concludes that Gould incorrectly accused Dr. Morton of inaccurately measuring the cranial capacity of his skulls but was nonetheless correct with regard to Morton's implicit racial bias. Mitchell's findings have just been published in PLOS Biology.

An American Golgotha

Morton is widely considered the father of scientific racism, and his controversial ideas about the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian people provided a handy defense of the continued enslavement of African-Americans in the US just prior to the Civil War. He bolstered those views with a broad analysis of 1,000 skulls he collected from all over, sometimes even scavenged from battlefields and the occasional catacomb. At the time, it was widely believed that skull size, or cranial capacity, was a marker of superior intelligence and advanced cognition.

Volkswagen

Is there a more quintessentially American Volkswagen than the Jetta? Having grown up in Europe, my default image for VW is the humble Golf. But hatchbacks never really caught on stateside. Until the age of the crossover, you needed a trunk if you wanted to sell, and the Jetta—a Golf with a trunk—proved that in spades. VW has sold way more than three million of them here since 1980, keeping the Jetta nameplate alive in the US market even while it called them Ventos or Boras or Sagitars elsewhere.

Now there's a brand-new Jetta on the block, the seventh generation to bear the name. Calling it a Golf with a trunk is underselling it. These days, car companies like VW use architectures, not platforms, and the MQB architecture lets it build Golfs and Jettas but also Atlases, Tiguans, A3s, and TTs, plus some Seats and Skodas we won't see for another 25 years. The architecture fixes some dimensional relationships, including the distance between the front axle and the pedals, for example. But it leaves others free, so a Jetta can be as wide as a Golf but much longer and with a larger wheelbase. (Or plain bigger all around, like that Atlas.)

Enlarge / Cruise second-generation test vehicles, assembled at GM’s Lake Orion plant in Michigan. (credit: Cruise)

Honda announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to invest $750 million in Cruise, GM's self-driving car company. On top of that, Honda plans to spend $2 billion over the next 12 years developing a fully self-driving car based on Cruise technology. It's a big vote of confidence for Cruise and a blow to Cruise's biggest rival, Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.

Waymo is widely recognized as the self-driving technology leader. The company says it will launch a fully driverless taxi service in the Phoenix metro area this year; no one else is close to launching a comparable service.

But while Waymo is almost certain to get to market first, its biggest challenge will come later: rapidly expanding to other cities in the wake of a successful Phoenix launch. Waymo is going to need carmakers' help to build enough cars, quickly enough, to grow its driverless car business into a global juggernaut. And carmakers are not enthusiastic about ceding control of their industry to a Silicon Valley upstart.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a bundle that pairs a Google Home Mini smart speaker with Nvidia's Shield media streamer at no extra cost.

The deal applies to the standard Shield variant, which costs $179, as well as the $199 version that comes with the streamer's dedicated gaming controller, if you have any interest in using Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming service. We've seen all manner of discounts on the Home Mini in recent months, but it normally goes for $49.

The Shield itself isn't for everyone in a world where Roku and Amazon are selling 4K HDR streamers for $50. But if you're not an Apple user, it's still arguably the best streamer on the market for power users. The Shield has no Dolby Vision, but there is 4K, HDR10, and Dolby Atmos support, and its performance is still admirable in 2018. It particularly shines with local file playback, and it can serve as its own Plex server, if you're into that. The game streaming is a nice bonus, and while Android TV still has its cluttered spots, it's simple enough to get around, and Nvidia has continuously supported the device with software updates. The Home Mini, meanwhile, is still capable if you're on the Google Assistant train and can now turn on the Shield with voice commands.

Ron Amadeo

HMD's latest Nokia smartphone—one that's actually coming to the US—is the Nokia 7.1. For $349 you get a mid-range phone with a few flagship-style touches that you may or may not be a fan of, like a notched display and a glass back.

First up, the specs. For $349 you're getting a Snapdragon 636 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 3060mAh battery. The display is a 5.8-inch, 2280×1080 LCD with a 19:9 aspect ratio, and, like many smartphones this year, there's a big notch cut out of the top of the screen to make room for the 8MP front camera and earpiece. Unlike many smartphones this year, it comes with a headphone jack, and there's also a USB-C port, a rear fingerprint reader, and a MicroSD slot. The rear camera setup has two 12MP sensors, with the second camera used for bokeh effects.