Month: January 2019

Enlarge / Original manuscript of the Domesday Book on display at The National Archives in Kew, London. Satellite documents preserved by a Benedictine abbot named Nigel place its completion date much later than previously assumed. (credit: Jonathan Brady/PA Images/Getty Images)

At Christmas in 1085, William the Conqueror decided to commission a kingdom-wide survey of England, sending census takers into every shire to take stock both of the population and its resources: land, livestock, castles and abbeys, and so forth. The result was the Domesday Book, a tome that provided an unparalleled record of daily life in 11th-century England, long revered and studied by medieval historians. It got its moniker because the English complained that its decisions could not be appealed, just like on the Day of Judgement.

Traditionally, historians have pegged the date of completion for the Domesday Book as 1087. This puts it about one year after William decreed his survey but just before he sailed off to die (quite ignobly) in Normandy while defending his kingdom from the French. But a recent paper in the journal Speculum by Carol Symes, a historian at the University of Illinois, argues that the final book was actually completed years, maybe even decades, later than that.

Symes' expertise is investigating how medieval manuscripts were made, and the Domesday Book is the most complicated medieval text there is. "After the Magna Carta, the Domesday Book is the most fetishized document in English history, and with good reason," she said. "It's one of the few medieval documents you can do data analysis with, because there's actual data in there."

Enlarge / GILLETTE, Wyo.: A truck loaded with coal is viewed from the Eagle Butte Coal Mine Overlook which is operated by Alpha Coal. The area is a large producer of coal. Gillette uses the moniker of "The Energy Capital of the Nation". (credit: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Given all the celebrations, I think we all deserve some punishment. Why else would I be inflicting chemistry on you? Chemistry is like the suspension system on your car; it's unnoticed and unloved, but it allows all the cooler bits to strut their stuff, much like the chemistry behind the development of a better carbon dioxide sponge.

One of the jaw-dropping (for me anyway) developments in chemistry was metal-organic frameworks. These frameworks form both open spaces—they let small molecules in—and enclosed spaces—the trapped molecules behave like they are stuck in a crystal. This combination opens up a world of possibilities.

The current research has allowed me to discover that the possibilities are also expanded by the fact that you can make these frameworks without the metal.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | UniversalImagesGroup)

An unusual multidrug-resistant bacterium lurked in sinks at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center for more than a decade, striking at least a dozen patients, a new report by NIH scientists concludes.

Researchers tracked the superbugs to sinks in patient rooms amid a freaky outbreak in 2016. Searching through genetic sequences of clinical samples collected as far back as 2006—a year after a new inpatient hospital building opened—researchers identified eight other cases for a total of 12 instances where the sink-dwelling germs had splashed into patients.

The aquatic germ in these cases was Sphingomonas koreensis. Such sphingomonas species are ubiquitous in the environment but rarely cause infections. In the NIH patients, however, they were found to cause a variety of problems, including pneumonia, blood infections, a surgical site infection, and a potential urinary tract colonization. Some isolates were resistant to 10 antibiotics tested, spanning three classes of drugs.

Evan Blass

Happy 2019! If we're going to already start picking out smartphone trends for the new year, "add lots and lots of cameras" is looking like a pretty good front-runner. Samsung is already on this path with devices like the Galaxy A9 and upcoming Galaxy S10, both of which have four cameras on the back, but now it looks like HMD's Nokia brand is going to one-up everyone with five rear cameras. Over the last weekend of 2018, both Evan Blass and MySmartPrice shared imagery for the upcoming "Nokia 9 Pureview," which promises to be the highest-end HMD Nokia phone to date.

The Nokia 9 first leaked in September, when the trypophobia-inducing camera array immediately turned heads. The rear camera setup features seven holes housing five cameras, with the extra two holes used for an LED flash and what looks to be a sensor cluster. For the first time, a video from MySmartPrice gives us an idea of what all of these cameras are actually supposed to do: it promises the phone will take "5 simultaneous shots," which will result in "10x more light captured" compared to a regular camera sensor. This sounds a lot like the computational photography work Google does with a single-lens Pixel camera, where it takes multiple shots in rapid succession and merges them all for better low-light shots. The multi-image idea is proven to work, but we'll have to see if extra physical lenses improve on it.

Enlarge / This is a Mu'Kay, and they really, really like fish. They do not, however, like protracted litigation. (credit: Stardock)

The ongoing legal battle between original Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III and Star Control: Origins developer Stardock escalated significantly on the last day of 2018. Following a favorable court decision, Ford and Reiche filed DMCA takedown requests with Steam and GOG over allegations that Star Control: Origins infringes on Ford and Reiche's copyrights. Steam and GOG both removed Star Control: Origins from their respective stores, cutting off significant revenue sources for Stardock.

The move is the latest in a nearly year-long legal battle (which itself had been brewing for at least several more years before evolving into actual litigation) between Ford and Reiche and Stardock. At issue is the convoluted mess of copyrights and trademarks that make up the Star Control universe; the outcome of the case appears to hinge on a decades-old agreement between Ford and Reiche and defunct developer Accolade—and how that agreement's dissolution affected ownership of the Star Control IP.

The shortest recap I can give

Recapping the course of the lawsuit—lawsuits, properly, since there are multiple suits proceeding apace—would take a considerable amount of time, but the short version is that several years ago, Stardock purchased the "Star Control" name and trademark and a bunch of rights related to Star Control 3, with the intent of making a new Star Control game that would eventually come to be known as Star Control: Origins. Stardock reached out to series creators Ford and Reiche multiple times over the years asking for their involvement and blessing, but Ford and Reiche appeared to be apathetic about the game's development.