Month: December 2018

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook looks on as the new iPhone X goes on sale at an Apple Store on November 3, 2017 in Palo Alto, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Apple CEO Tim Cook further condemned white supremacists when he accepted an award from the Anti-Defamation League at an event in New York on Monday. The ADL honored Cook with its first ever Courage Against Hate Award, and the tech CEO took his time on the stage to address Apple's stance against hate speech and what he thinks are tech companies' responsibilities to customers.

"From the earliest days of iTunes, to Apple Music today, we have always prohibited music with a message of white supremacy," Cook said. "Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. And as we showed this year, we won’t give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the App Store."

He went on to say that tech companies shouldn't be afraid to take the moral high-ground and stand up against hate speech and discrimination of all sorts.

Enlarge / Steam is the guy standing his ground on the left. Epic is the guy jumping in with a Superman punch on the right.

Over the years, we've seen a lot of new PC game platforms try to make a dent in Steam's market-dominating position. Epic Games announced it's having a go at the leader this morning with an upcoming platform, the Epic Games Store, that promises more developer-friendly publishing terms.

Unlike Valve, which takes a baseline 30 percent of revenues from most games and content sold on Steam, Epic is promising to take only 12 percent of developer revenues on its new store. That matches the revenue cut Epic already takes on development assets sold through the existing Unreal Marketplace, a cut the company recently lowered from 30 percent.

"As a developer ourselves, we’ve always wanted access to a store with fair revenue-sharing that gives us direct access to our customers," Epic Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney told Ars in an email interview. "Now that we’ve built such a store, and Fortnite has brought in a huge audience of PC gamers, we’re working to open it up to all developers."

Enlarge / Fetus in the womb, computer artwork. (credit: Science Photo Library - SCIEPRO)

The placenta supports the fetus while it is in utero (and, according to some, can support a rosebush if it is buried after delivery).We know it’s essential for a successful pregnancy, but we don’t really know exactly how it works because we’ve had no experimental models we can use to study it. Until now.

Researchers in England examined all of the signaling molecules they could find rushing around between the mother and the placenta (which originates from fetal tissue), figuring they might induce the placenta to grow and develop. From this analysis they generated a blend of signaling molecules that they expected could induce placental formation in a culture dish.

They then obtained cells from first trimester placentas from women who had had normal pregnancies but decided to abort. These cells were grown in media that contained the factors identified by this team. Within a week, the cells were growing into organoids—small blobs of tissue similar to organs in mature organisms. The cells seem perfectly happy in this media; at the time this paper was written, they have been stable for a year.

SpaceX

A Falcon 9 rocket's first stage flew into space for the third time on Monday, and rare, clear skies at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California afforded a fine view of the booster.

This marked the first time an orbital rocket had ever taken off vertically, and landed vertically, for a third time. Moreover, with this 32nd landing of a first stage, SpaceX has now landed half of the Falcon 9 rockets it has ever launched. Quickly now, the company is delivering on its promise of reusable spaceflight with its new Block 5 variant of the Falcon 9 rocket.