Month: November 2018

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The Johnson Indoor Track at MIT probably won't go down in history in the same way as Kitty Hawk has, but it was the scene of a first in powered flight. A team of researchers has managed to build the first aircraft powered by an ionic wind, a propulsion system that requires no moving parts. While the flight took place using a small drone, the researchers' calculations suggest that the efficiency of the design would double simply by building a larger craft.

Ionic wind

In conventional aircraft, air is pushed around by moving parts, either propellers or the turbines within jet engines. But we've known for a while that it's also possible to use electrical fields to push air around.

The challenge is that air is largely made of uncharged molecules that don't respond to electric fields. But at sufficiently high voltages, it's possible to ionize the nitrogen and oxygen that make up our atmosphere, just as lightning does all the time. The electrons that are liberated speed away, collide with other molecules, and ionize some of them as well. If this takes place in an electric field, all those ions will start moving to the appropriate electrode. In the process, they'll collide with neutral molecules and push them along. The resulting bulk movement of atmospheric molecules is called an ionic wind.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Towfiqu Photography)

Update on December 12: The FCC today approved the robotext proposal described in this article. Original story from November 21, 2018 is as follows:

The Federal Communications Commission says it is giving cellular carriers added authority to block text messages, saying the action is needed to protect consumers from spam or robotexts. But critics of the plan note that carriers are already allowed to block robotexts and worry that the change will make it easy for carriers to censor political texts or block certain kinds of messages in order to extract more revenue from senders.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's announcement acknowledges that carriers are already allowed to block illegal robotexts. Pai did not promise new consumer-friendly blocking services; instead, he said his plan "allow[s] carriers to continue using robotext-blocking and anti-spoofing measures to protect consumers from unwanted text messages" (emphasis ours).

Despite that, Pai is proposing to classify text messaging as an information service, rather than a telecommunications service. That's the same legal classification that Pai gave to home and mobile broadband services as part of a December 2017 vote to deregulate the industry and eliminate net neutrality rules. The FCC has not previously ruled on whether text messaging is an information service or a telecommunications service.

While you'll want to stay tuned to our regular Dealmaster guides for this week's range of Thanksgiving-timed sales, we wanted to quickly point out a rarity in the digital-gaming world: a legitimately good (and huge) range of discounts on Nintendo Switch downloads.

Wednesday saw the big N unveil a whopping 47-game sale, chock full of recent, popular, and well-reviewed fare, for its Nintendo Switch eShop. The sale is valid between now and November 28. The Switch eShop has never received this many simultaneous discounts on well-reviewed games, and, while some of the discounts are a little paltry, most are surprisingly good.

Here's a slightly sorted list of the "best" discounted games, with quality and discount considered as ranking factors. In particular, the ports listed here are all solid Switch fare that we've tested. (We're picky about good Switch ports, as I've discussed at length.)

Enlarge (credit: Larry Washburn | Getty Images)

My thesis advisor would describe some new results—disparagingly—as “not hypothesis driven.” Instead, the researchers who are reporting these results thought to themselves: hmmm, tumor cells really like glucose. (Yes, all cells really like glucose, but tumor cells really really like it.) Wonder if they like all sugars? They soon grew some osteosarcoma cells in the presence of different sugars and found that one sugar significantly impeded cell growth.

Despite the lack of a hypothesis, at least this is a Nature paper, so it is incredibly comprehensive. The authors followed up on many ramifications of their initial findings and did an inordinate number of experiments to bolster each of their assertions.

Mano a mannose

The authors compared the tumor cells' growth on a variety of sugars: glucose, fructose, frucose, galactose, and mannose. Out of everything they tested, mannose was the only one that seemed to slow the cells down.

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If you've ever lost your Android phone, it's usually a help to use Google's "Find My Device" service to see the phone's last known position on a map. As Google Maps get better and better, it makes sense to keep Find My Device up to date with the latest in mapping technology. With the latest update, Google is adding indoor mapping support to its lost device service.

While Google Maps has most of the great outdoors pretty well mapped, indoor mapping is the next great frontier. For indoor mapping, someone has to upload a floor plan to Google Maps and then set up some kind of indoor positioning system. Outdoor Google Maps can be powered by satellite imaging and photos from Street View cars, but there's no such shortcut for indoor maps, which require each individual building owner to enter data. Today you'll find indoor maps mostly for places like Airports, malls, stadiums, and other large businesses (here is an example). If you lose your device in one of these places and the indoor positioning system actually works, you'll now be able to get a pinpoint location in Find My Device.

This might actually work in your house someday, too. Google added 802.11mc support—AKA Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT)—to Android 9 Pie, which allows Android devices to natively support precise indoor positioning and even indoor navigation. You'll need a constellation of Wi-Fi RTT-compatible routers for indoor positioning to actually work, and no consumer routers actually support it yet. Google has promised Wi-Fi RTT support will come to the Google Wi-Fi mesh router before the end of the year, though.

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Amazon customers woke up on Wednesday to an email saying a technical error caused the site to disclose their names and email addresses. While Amazon officials have said the emails are authentic, they aren’t providing additional details beyond what’s in the extremely terse communication.

Wednesday’s email doesn’t say how long customers’ personal details were disclosed or precisely where on the site the disclosure took place. It’s also not clear how many customers received the email and whether a geographic location, specific purchase, or other common thread caused certain customers to be affected.

Below is the text of an email sent to one Amazon customer:

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: TechCrunch)

In a Tuesday interview with CNN, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook's handling of recent scandals and his own leadership of the company. He flatly rejected calls to give up his position as the chairman of Facebook's board and said he had no plans to fire his top deputy, Sheryl Sandberg.

He argued that despite Facebook's recent problems, the site "is a positive force because it gives more people a voice."

It's not surprising that Zuckerberg would defend his own company. But Zuckerberg is wrong: there's no reason to think Facebook is a "positive force" and a lot of reasons to think the opposite.

Enlarge / The Asus NovaGo is one of the first generation of Windows 10 on ARM systems, using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. (credit: Asus)

A couple of Microsoft engineers are contributing code to Google's Chrome browser to help make it a native Windows on ARM application, as spotted by 9to5google.

Windows 10 on ARM, Microsoft's second attempt at creating a line of PCs that run on ARM processors, does something important that Windows RT, Microsoft's first attempt, did not. It can run x86 programs in an emulator, greatly expanding the range of software that it can use. But this has a performance penalty, so where possible, it's better to have native ARM applications.

One of the biggest sticking points here is Chrome; Google's browser is the most widely used third-party application on Windows. While Chrome does of course run on ARM systems (both Android phones and Chrome OS laptops), it doesn't currently compile properly as a Windows-on-ARM application. The contributions made by the Microsoft developers are addressing these various issues—adding ARM64 build targets, specifying the right compilers and Windows SDK versions, providing alternatives to x86-specific code, and so on.