Month: March 2019

Enlarge / HOPKINS, Minn. - APRIL, 27: Abdullahi Mohamud, 5, awaits returning to school after two of his siblings contracted the measles during an current outbreak. (credit: Getty | Courtney Perry)

Plagued by a tenacious outbreak of measles that began last October, New York's Rockland County declared a state of emergency Tuesday and issued a directive barring unvaccinated children from all public spaces.

Effective at midnight Wednesday, March 27, anyone aged 18 or younger who has not been vaccinated against the measles is prohibited from public spaces in Rockland for 30 days or until they get vaccinated. Public spaces are defined broadly in the directive as any places:

[W]here more than 10 persons are intended to congregate for purposes such as civic, governmental, social, or religious functions, or for recreation or shopping, or for food or drink consumption, or awaiting transportation, or for daycare or educational purposes, or for medical treatment. A place of public assembly shall also include public transportation vehicles, including but not limited to, publicly or privately owned buses or trains...

The directive follows an order from the county last December that barred unvaccinated children from schools that did not reach a minimum of 95 percent vaccination rate. That order—and the directive issued today—are intended to thwart the long-standing outbreak, which has sickened 153 people, mostly children.

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  Here's the camera assembly for the Huawei P30 Pro and... wait, what? Is that a square camera lens? [credit: Huawei ]

Huawei officially announced the Huawei P30 Pro smartphone today. While it has a new Huawei-made SoC, an in-screen optical fingerprint reader, and lots of other high-end features, the highlight is definitely the camera's optical zoom, which is up to a whopping 5x. Not digital zoom. Real, optical zoom.

On most high-end smartphones today, like the iPhone XS and Galaxy S10, you'll only ever get a 2X optical zoom. Usually, these exist in an entire second sensor and lens on the back of the phone, giving you a choice between the standard 1x lens or extra 2x lens. The reason you usually don't get large zoom multipliers in smartphones is because zoom lenses take space. Inside a zoom lens is a series of smaller lenses, some of which move inside the lens body to change the focal length. A larger distance between the lenses will get you a higher zoom multiplier, and on real cameras this can reach several feet long.

Space, of course, is at a premium in smartphones. Imagine a smartphone sitting face down, and you would have to fit a vertical stack of the display, the CMOS sensor, and the lens all in about an 8mm height. There is just not a lot of room.

Enlarge / Wind turbines spin as steam rises from the cooling towers of the Jäenschwalde coal-fired power plant. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report on Monday saying that in 2018, "global energy-related CO₂ emissions rose by 1.7 percent to 33 Gigatonnes." That's the most growth in emissions that the world has seen since 2013.

Coal use contributed to a third of the total increase, mostly from new coal-fired power plants in China and India. This is worrisome because new coal plants have a lifespan of roughly 50 years. But the consequences of climate change are already upon us, and coal's hefty emissions profile compared to other energy sources means that, globally, carbon mitigation is going to be a lot more difficult to tackle than it may look from here in the US.

Even in the US, carbon emissions grew by 3.1 percent in 2018, according to the IEA. (This closely tracks estimates by the Rhodium Group, which released a preliminary report in January saying that US carbon emissions increased by 3.4 percent in 2018.)

Enlarge / Lightning bolts have currents from 5,000 up to perhaps as many as 200,000 amps. (credit: John Fowler / Flickr)

Google is bringing AMP, its cut-down version of HTML, to email. Starting today, Gmail on the Web will be able to support embedded AMP content, with support rolling out to mobile clients later. Gmail will also be joined by Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail, and Mail.Ru, with their respective developers promising to add support soon.

AMP for email isn't just a warmed-over version of email with HTML formatting. The embedded AMP content will be able to offer features such as interactivity without having to click away from your inbox. For example, an online store could send you an email about a product or promotion you're likely to be interested in, and the AMP embed could allow both scrolling through pictures of the products and even initiate the purchasing process. Or Pinterest could email you a selection of the day's popular items and you could pin them directly from your inbox.

Accelerated Mobile Pages were introduced by Google in 2015 as a narrow set of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS capabilities that produced pages that are fast to download and render, could easily be packaged together, and were amenable to being embedded in, for example, Google search results pages. JavaScript features were limited to those offered by a Google-supplied library. This greatly curtails the range of things that pages can do in favor of being extremely cache-friendly and having consistently good performance.

Enlarge / Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. (credit: NASA)

On Tuesday, at a museum within a stone's throw of Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a significant space policy speech that called for American men and women to return to the Moon by 2024. If the Trump administration follows through on the policies Pence outlined—admittedly a huge if—this was arguably the most consequential space speech since President Kennedy's Moon speech in 1962.

However, Pence's comments, and some of the plan later outlined by NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, raised significant questions about the viability of these ideas.

During a 30-minute speech that Ars previewed last week, Pence said NASA has moved too slow for too long. Half a century ago, the agency only took eight years to go to the Moon, Pence said, when NASA didn't know how to do the job. Therefore, he was not satisfied with NASA's stated aim of landing humans on the Moon by 2028, which would come 11 years after President Trump first established the goal of returning humans to the lunar surface.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Huawei MateBook systems that are running the company's PCManager software included a driver that would let unprivileged users create processes with superuser privileges. The insecure driver was discovered by Microsoft using some of the new monitoring features added to Windows version 1809 that are monitored by the company's Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service.

First things first: Huawei fixed the driver and published the safe version in early January, so if you're using a Huawei system and have either updated everything or removed the built-in applications entirely, you should be good to go.

The interesting part of the story is how Microsoft found the bad driver in the first place.

Enlarge / Eugene Wigner first came up with the thought experiment this real experiment is based on. (credit: Denver Post Inc (Photo By David Cupp/The Denver Post via Getty Images))

“More than one reality exists” screams the headline. Cue sighs of tired dread from physicists everywhere as they wonder what otherwise bland result has been spun out of control.

In this case, though, it turns out that the paper and the underlying theory are much more interesting than that takeaway. Essentially, modern physics tells us that two observers of the same event may never agree on the result, even if they have all possible knowledge. This is already accepted as part of special relativity, but now we have experimental proof that it applies to quantum mechanics as well. 

What Galileo and Einstein tell us

Let’s start with the simplest possible example of how we typically resolve conflicting measurements. I am standing on a platform and measure the speed of an approaching train to be 180km/hr. You are on the train and measure the speed of the train to be 0km/hr. We can resolve the difference by making an additional measurement on our relative speeds. Afterward, we both know that we’ve measured the speed correctly relative to our own motion.