Month: May 2019

Enlarge / MONTGOMERY, Ala. - MAY 19, 2019: A protestor dressed as a character from the Hulu TV show The Handmaid's Tale, based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood, walks back to her car after participating in a rally against one of the nation's most restrictive bans on abortions. (credit: Getty | Julie Bennett)

Google will roll out a policy next month to crack down on deceptive advertisements dealing with abortion—a topic rife with misleading and false health information.

The policy changes come amid backlash from a report in The Guardian saying that the tech giant granted $150,000 worth of free advertisements to The Obria Group, which runs a network of clinics across the United States that are funded by Catholic organizations. Obria's advertisements have suggested that the clinics (aka Crisis Pregnancy Centers) provide abortions and other medical services. But the clinics are in fact opposed to abortion and all forms of contraception, including condoms. According to The Guardian, the misleading advertisements are an attempt to bait "abortion-minded women" so that the clinics can then deter them from terminating their pregnancies.

To ostensibly address this problem, Google will now require all advertisers in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom who run abortion-related ads to submit to a pre-certification. The process is intended to identify the types of services that the advertisers provide. All of their subsequent advertising will then be automatically and clearly labeled with either "Provides abortions" or "Does not provide abortions."

Enlarge / Workers and packages inside an Amazon warehouse. (credit: Getty Images | Macduff Everton)

Amazon has created video games that its warehouse workers can "play" while they fill customer orders in an effort to speed up fulfillment and relieve the tedium of packing products into boxes.

The Washington Post described the warehouse games in a report yesterday:

Developed by Amazon, the games are displayed on small screens at employees' workstations. As robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation, lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to pluck to put into a bin. The games simultaneously register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors against one another to be fastest, simply by picking or stowing real Lego sets, cellphone cases or dish soap. Game-playing employees are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.

Think Tetris, but with real boxes.

Amazon has deployed the games in "five warehouses from suburban Seattle to near Manchester in Britain, after starting to offer them at a lone warehouse in late 2017," the Post wrote. The games ratchet up workplace competition, while "slyly pushing workers to raise the stakes among themselves to pack more boxes bound for customer homes," the Post wrote. (The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.)

Enlarge / Neon emoji and animoji images accompanied the invites to press.

Apple has sent out invites to the press for its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote—or as the invite calls it, a "special event." The event will take place on June 3 at 10am PDT. Ars will be in attendance to liveblog the proceedings and all the announcements.

Sometimes the invites Apple sends out contain hints as to what will be announced. It seems members of the press received various graphics depicting neon emoji and animoji images set against midnight blue backgrounds—perhaps to evoke iOS 13's rumored Dark Mode. Ars received the above emoji.

We're expecting extensive details about the company's major three OS releases that are expected later in the year: iOS 13 for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch; macOS 10.15 for the Mac; and watchOS 6 for the Apple Watch.

Enlarge / This is the only Mario Kart Tour closed beta image we're officially allowed to share. (credit: Nintendo)

Nintendo's first racing game for smartphones, Mario Kart Tour, is barreling like a red shell toward a free-to-play launch on iOS and Android later this year. But today's kickoff of a closed-beta test (only on Android, only for randomly invited users) makes me wonder whether Nintendo and its development partner, DeNA, should tap the brakes in a huge way.

From a sheer gameplay standpoint, Mario Kart Tour is actually a pretty solid facsimile of the classic series, albeit with a couple of puzzling design decisions. But the game's path to monetization is the most brazen yet applied to a Nintendo smartphone app.

Don’t look! Don’t you dare look at the leaked videos!

In good news, Mario Kart Tour plays much like the series' past 25 years of home and handheld versions. Race on go-karts through cartoony racetracks while picking up and using weapons (turtle shells, banana peels) and boost items ("nitro" mushrooms, mostly). In this version, your kart automatically accelerates, so use your fingers to steer left or right, tap weapon items to activate them (with a forward- or back-flick to direct them as needed), and pick from one of two drifting options to trigger "micro-boosts" in speed.

Enlarge / This is Recology's new BYD 8R, the first electric rear-loading class 8 garbage truck in the US. (credit: BYD)

If you live in Seattle, your scheduled garbage pickup might be about to get a lot quieter. Recology, a West Coast waste management company, has just taken the delivery of its first fully electric garbage trucks. The vehicle is a class 8 truck—meaning the heaviest—made by BYD, with New Way supplying the Viper rear-loading garbage truck body. It's also apparently the first electric class 8 rear-loader in the country and the first of two that Recology ordered last year.

The BYD's specs make for very different reading compared to the average electric vehicles we cover. The powertrain is a 320kW (430hp), 1101Nm (812ft-lbs) electric motor, supplied by a 295kWh battery pack. However, it does have to carry around a truck with a 21,605lb (9,800kg) curb weight, and it can be optioned to a gross vehicle weight of either 57,500lbs (26,082kg) or 66,000lbs (29,937kg). (Interestingly, the photo BYD sent us has the GVW at 50,000lbs on the door.)

All that mass means the truck is limited to a 65mph (104km/h) top speed and a range of 56 miles (90km) and 600 pickups. Recharging the truck doesn't take as long as you think, despite all those kWh—nine hours connected to a 33kW AC outlet. The 8R supports either 120kW or 240kW DC fast charging, which takes 2.5 hours or 1.5 hours to recharge, respectively.

Enlarge (credit: Manmohan Singh | Getty Images)

Superconductivity offers the promise of hyper-efficient electric motors, ultra powerful magnets, and the transmission of electricity without losses. The reality, however, has fallen considerably short of that promise, as superconducting materials are difficult and expensive to manufacture, requiring a constant bath of liquid nitrogen to keep them cold enough to operate. And progress at identifying new high-temperature superconductors went through an extended stall, with no new contenders for decades.

But behind that stall, researchers were getting a better understanding of the physics involved with superconductivity, and that understanding seems to be paying off. A few years back, researchers found that a high-pressure form of hydrogen sulfide would superconduct at 203K (-70°C), roughly 65K higher than any previous material. Now, following up on suggestions from computer modeling, researchers have discovered that a metal-hydrogen compound (LaH₁₀) can superconduct all the way up to 250K. That's roughly -25°C, a temperature that can be reached by a good freezer.

Unfortunately, its superconductivity is dependent upon pressure and required compressing the sample between two diamonds. But the results do tell us that our understanding is on the right track, and there are undoubtedly additional chemicals worth examining.