Month: December 2018

Enlarge / Geico's sophisticated gecko opts for a speedboat, but if he wanted, he could totally run across the water. (credit: Youtube/Geico)

Geckos are known for being expert climbers, able to stick to any surface thanks to the billions of tiny hair-like structures on the bottoms of their feet. Now it turns out the little lizards can also zip along the surface of water at high speeds to elude predators. They can't do it for very long; the energy expenditure required is too great. But it's amazing they can do it at all. Scientists think they've pinpointed the mechanisms behind the feat, described in a new paper in Cell Biology.

The project started when co-author Ardian Jusufi, then a postdoc in the lab of University of California, Berkeley biophysicist Robert Full, was on vacation in Singapore during monsoon season. One day, after a big rain storm, he caught a gecko skimming across the water to escape a predator on video. The footage astounded everyone in the lab when he showed it to them. "It was super weird and unexpected, so naturally we had to test this," says co-author Jasmine Nirody, another former Full student who now splits her time between Rockefeller University and the University of Oxford.

There are several creatures in nature capable of walking on water, but they employ different mechanisms depending on their size. Small, lightweight water striders, for instance, rely entirely on surface tension to stay afloat, while the larger, heavier basilisk lizards employ a slapping motion with their feet that creates pockets of air bubbles to keep from sinking. The standard theoretical calculations set very strict boundaries for how small an animal has to be to use surface tension and how large it needs to be before the surface slapping mechanism is viable.

Enlarge (credit: Jian Zhu)

I cannot skip a paper that talks about making wormholes. Even if they are fake wormholes. And even if, after reading the paper, I’m not sure that the researchers have made fake wormholes. I simply can’t not tell you about it.

The paper in question makes use of something called transformation optics to create a wormhole for sound waves. So let’s break that down.

Please transform my optics

Transformation optics is one of my favorite things (right after raindrops on roses and definitely replacing all mention of kittens). Designing optics is hard. You often know what you want an optical system to do, but figuring out how to achieve that is a matter of experience combined with trial and error.

Enlarge

The monthlong cryptocurrency slide continued overnight with ether, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, falling below $100 for the first time since May 2017. Ether's value is down 93 percent from its January high above $1,400.

Bitcoin reached a 2018 low of around $3,500 last week. It's now trading at around $3,700, down 80 percent from its high of almost $20,000 last December.

There doesn't seem to be any specific cause for recent declines. Rather, the steadily declining prices seems to reflect a general decline of enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency.

Enlarge / Allo and Hangouts are going away, but Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet are opening up to consumers.

In a post on its official blog, Google laid out a simplified messaging strategy for the future. In order to offer customers "a simpler and more unified communications experience," Google promised to support only five messaging apps going forward, down from its current suite of seven. To cut down to five apps, Google will eventually shut down Hangouts and Google Allo, while Messages, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Duo, and Google Voice would continue to be supported.

Google's announcement of its quintuple-app strategy comes on the heels of a report from 9to5Google, which claimed that Google Hangouts would shut down sometime in 2020. Google's Scott Johnston—a product lead for three of Google's seven messaging apps—responded to the report on Twitter, calling it "shoddy reporting" and saying it "is only half the story." While Google does plan to shut down Hangouts eventually, Johnston said that Google is also opening up two of its enterprise-only messaging apps—Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet—to its consumer user base, and users of Hangouts would be transitioned to these two apps.

The blog post reiterated that "Classic" Hangouts would eventually shut down while Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet would be opening up, but Google won't shut down Hangouts until it can ensure a smooth transition between apps. The post also announced that Allo, which had its development "paused" earlier this year in favor of Messages, will be shut down in March 2019.

The skeleton had lain buried for about 500 years in the muddy silt of Chamber’s Wharf, a site located at a bend in the river just downstream from the Tower of London. Debris in the river tends to accumulate in bends like this one, so there’s no way to be sure exactly where the man fell in. But he ended up face-down in the mud at Chamber’s Wharf, with one arm stretched over his head and the other twisted to the side. The tide-washed sediment would have covered him quickly, the team says, holding his body in place and helping preserve the thigh-high leather boots he was wearing when he died.

The boots are a tangible, deeply personal link to how the unknown man lived, and they offer some hints at how he probably died. They’re comparable to the tall wading boots currently worn by fishermen, sewage workers, water utility crews, and many other industrial workers wear today: thigh-high boots with sturdy reinforced double soles, stuffed with a material that might be moss to keep the wearer’s feet warm or make the boots fit more snugly.

Based on their design, the boots date to the late 1400s or early 1500s, and they’re not the sort of item the man would have taken to his grave on purpose. Leather was a valuable commodity at the time, and almost no one in the working class would have buried such an expensive pair of boots—not when they, or their material, could be reused. Like his awkward final resting position, the man’s boots suggest an untimely, unexpected death.

Enlarge / Robot, heal thyself. (credit: Gmas3r, via Getty Images)

Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Each day this week from Wednesday through Friday, we're bringing you a pair of stories about facing the future. Today's focus is on AI in manufacturing and space—stand by to blast off!

Manufacturing is in the early states of a state of disruption brought on by technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D printing. "Additive manufacturing" has already worked itself into companies such as Porsche and Bugatti, and aircraft builder Airbus is experimenting with UAV THOR, a drone made entirely of 3D-printed parts. At the same time, AI is coming into play in a number of ways, in everything from analytics to manufacturing robotics. So the "factory of the future," as envisioned by projects such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Adaptive Vehicle Make program, is one in which software drives the manufacturing process and the factory can be rapidly reconfigured to change what it makes.

AI has increasingly played a role in designing products in the form of generative design software. AI-driven generative design software makes it possible for humans and AI to work together to rapidly consider every conceivable design option and to test them all before choosing one for production.