Month: October 2018

Enlarge / This is what a quark-gluon plasma looks like when you don't have several Suns' worth of mass crushing it back together. (credit: Brookhaven National Lab)

The building blocks of atoms, protons and neutrons, are composed of a collection of particles called quarks and gluons. Shortly after the Big Bang, however, the Universe was too energetic and dense for the quarks and gluons to form stable interactions. Instead, the Universe was filled with a form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, where the particles could interact with each other promiscuously.

Billions of years later, a bunch of primates figured out how to re-create a quark-gluon plasma by smashing heavy atoms together. It was the first time the material is known to have existed since the Universe's first moments. But a group of astrophysicists is now suggesting that the biggest stars in the Universe also form something like a quark-gluon plasma as they explode, and these researchers use this to explain why we see so many distinct-looking supernovae.

It goes boom

Physical models of stellar explosions have done remarkably well at explaining what we see out in the Universe. They have helped us understand the amount of mass needed before a star will explode (as opposed to forming a white dwarf) and can describe the differences among a number of classes of supernovae. But something rather embarrassing happens as we move on to larger stars. For blue supergiants, with dozens of times the Sun's mass, the models stop exploding.

(credit: Black Sea MAP 2018)

An archaeological survey expedition called the Black Sea Maritime Archaeological Project discovered a shipwreck about 80km (49.7 miles) from the Bulgarian city of Burgas. A pair of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) made a 3D map of the site and took a sample of wood for radiocarbon dating, which suggest that the ship was built around 2,400 years ago.

It looks surprisingly good for its age; its hull is still intact, its cargo is still piled in the hold, and the rowing benches on its deck look like they’re ready for the crew to pick up an oar and get to work. Truly ancient wrecks like this one usually leave behind only a scattering of amphorae, ballast stones, or broken pottery on the seafloor to tell the tale. But the depths of the Black Sea have turned out to be like a time capsule for ancient shipwrecks.

In the Black

The Black Sea’s depth averages 1,253m (4,111ft), but the deepest places on the seafloor lie 2,212m (7,257ft) beneath the waves. There are plenty of much deeper places in the world’s oceans, but the Black Sea is unique because its deeper layers, which flow in from the bottom of the Mediterranean, don’t mix with the oxygenated waters of the surface, which pour in from rivers. Most of the deep sea floor in the Black Sea is completely anoxic, making it a bad environment for most of the microbial species that would normally break down the wood of a shipwreck. So not much has happened to the ancient Greek trading ship as it has rested on its side in the anoxic darkness 2,000m (1.2 miles) below the surface, even as two and a half millennia of history passed in the world above.

Enlarge / Ominous wall cloud portends possible violent weather in Nebraska early in 2018. (credit: NOAA)

The nation's weather and climate organization, NOAA, has appointed a new director of its Environmental Modeling Center. This position essentially oversees development of the US computer models used to forecast weather around the world. The new director is Brian Gross, who fortunately has extensive experience in the field, having worked at NASA and led NOAA's prestigious Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Gross becomes the full-time leader of NOAA's modeling center at a critical time. It is about to substantially change the dynamic core, or engine, of its primary weather model—the Global Forecast System. This GFS model provides the foundation of many, if not most, seven- and 10-day forecasts that consumers see on their weather apps or in the nightly news. It also provides critical forecasts for hurricane tracks and other significant weather around the world.

NOAA plans to implement this change, to what's known as the "FV3 dynamic core," as early as the end of January 2019. "This is the biggest change to the global model that’s being run in operations in about 40 years," Gross told Ars in an interview. "We think the FV3 is going to prepare us for a very bright future in terms of prediction capability."

Enlarge / The Apple TV 4K and the Apple TV with their remotes.

We may be only a few months away from an Apple TV subscription service launch. According to a report by The Information, Apple plans to launch its TV subscription service in the US in the first half of 2019. The service will reportedly be available in more than 100 countries, starting with the US and coming to other regions in the months thereafter.

According to "three people familiar with the company's plans," Apple's subscription service will include original content and will let users sign up for network subscriptions, such as HBO and Showtime, within the same app. It's unclear if the service will live in a new app or in Apple's existing TV iOS app.

Apple reportedly plans on making the original content on the service free for Apple device owners. This aspect of the service has been reported for a while now. But it has also been rumored that Apple will restrict the subscription service to Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Enlarge / The notch and front-facing camera on the new iPhone. (credit: Samuel Axon)

When we reviewed the iPhone XS and XS Max, we found a number of small things to quibble about in our generally positive review. Among them was the fact that Apple's self-styled "computational photography" approach involves the software doctoring the photos you take in ways that are not transparent to you and that may not produce the effect you want. That issue was at the heart of a minor scandal surrounding the phone's launch that some dubbed "Beautygate."

Users who took selfies with the front-facing camera found that the resulting images looked a little bit glossed over. Skin was unrealistically smooth, with blemishes and details missing—similar to what you'd see with a beauty filter. Some users took to forums to speculate that Apple did this deliberately because these kinds of filters are popular in one of its largest markets (China) and in social messaging apps like Snapchat.

However, Apple has told The Verge that the behavior is in fact a bug and that a fix is coming in iOS 12.1.