Month: July 2019

Enlarge (credit: Harvey Schwartz | Getty Images)

Four major automakers have reached an agreement with California to produce more fuel-efficient cars for the US market, despite efforts by the Trump administration to roll back emissions regulations.

Honda, Ford, Volkswagen, and BMW of North America all agreed to a voluntary framework that will reduce emissions through 2026, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) said Thursday.

The deal requires the automakers to improve their overall fleet's average fuel efficiency by 3.7 percent per year, starting with the 2022 model year. It also promotes a transition to electric vehicles by giving companies that produce and sell more electric cars credits toward meeting that emissions standard, and by providing incentives for installing more emissions-reducing technologies.

Enlarge / A pack of African wild dogs. (credit: Megan Claase)

Conservation efforts need data. To understand how a species is faring, it's essential to have information on roughly how many members of that species are living and where they're living.

But this kind of information is fiendishly tricky and expensive to get. Wilderness areas cover huge tracts of land, large segments of which can be difficult or impossible to access. Methods to estimate population densities rely on expensive equipment and staff time, and conservation is desperately underfunded.

A paper in Current Biology this week proposes a cheap alternative that could work in certain contexts: tourist photos. Researchers found that data gathered from tourist images in Botswana provided comparable results to more traditional survey methods—and at a much lower cost.

Enlarge / Florence Parly is the French defense minister. (credit: SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP/Getty Images)

After French President Emmanuel Macron called for a space high command to protect his nation's satellites earlier this month, military officials on Thursday released their plans in more detail.

As reported in the French financial newspaper Les Echos, the French Defense Minister, Florence Parly, outlined a new space weapons program that would allow the country to move from space surveillance to the active protection of its satellites.

"France is not embarking on a space arms race," Parly said, according to the publication. However, the projects outlined Thursday by French officials include swarms of nano-satellites that would patrol a few kilometers around French satellites, a ground-based laser system to blind snooping satellites, and perhaps even machine guns on board some satellites.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich)

AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019, a loss that the company attributed to price increases, competition, and other factors.

AT&T reported a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in the "Premium TV" category, which includes its DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services. AT&T attributed this loss to "an increase in customers rolling off promotional discounts, competition, and lower gross adds due to a focus on the long-term value customer base."

AT&T also lost 168,000 subscribers of DirecTV Now, an online service with linear channels that's similar to traditional satellite and cable TV. AT&T said the DirecTV Now customer loss was "due to higher prices and less promotional activity," meaning that customers have balked at price increases and a refusal to extend discounts.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with more deals to share. Prime Day 2019 may be behind us, but Amazon is still serving up deals on some of its services. Previously, Amazon offered a one-year subscription to Audible for $119.50, and you could add an Echo Dot to your order for just $0.99 extra. But not everyone wants or needs an Echo Dot—so instead, Amazon's now offering one year of Audible (12 credits upfront) plus a $20 Amazon credit for just $119.50 to Prime members who are not currently subscribed to Audible.

One year of Audible typically costs $149.50, so you're already saving $30 on an annual subscription. Prime members can use the $20 credit to buy anything on Amazon, making it a more versatile perk than a $0.99 Echo Dot. The only caveat is that the $20 credit will expire 30 days after you claim the offer. Also, as with most Audible offers we've seen as of late, only Prime members who don't currently pay for Audible can snag this offer.

If you don't want to spend that much or commit to a new service for a year, Prime members who are new Audible subscribers can get three months at the reduced monthly rate of $4.95—saving $10 off of Audible's regular $14.95-per-month cost.

Enlarge (credit: dvdbramhall)

Some people who reject climate science seem to think climate scientists have never heard that the climate has changed in the past—as if scientists weren’t the ones who discovered those events in the first place. In reality, researchers are intensely interested in past climates because there is a lot to learn from them. You can see how sensitive Earth’s climate is to changes, for example, or how variable things can be even when the long-term average temperature is steady.

(“Climate has changed without humans before, so humans can’t be changing it now” is not a logically valid argument, FYI. It's the equivalent to arguing that we can't cause forest fires, since they occurred before we were around.)

Searching the past

Some historical records show evidence of a cooler period between the 1400s and early 1800s, which has come to be called the “Little Ice Age.” We know that glaciers from the Rockies to the Alps expanded during this time period, leaving piles of rocks behind when they eventually retreated. But was this really a global event? Or were there just regional downturns in temperatures that we erroneously connect out of a desire to make a simple story?

Enlarge / The company is not having its best-ever week. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Facebook's legion of lawyers is certainly earning its keep this year: the company disclosed to investors Tuesday that it is under antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.

This is a completely different investigation than the $5 billion settlement, also made public yesterday, that Facebook and the FTC reached over Facebook's privacy practices. Nor is it the same antitrust probe of big tech the Justice Department launched earlier this week.

Why antitrust?

Antitrust investigations focus on behavior regulators deem anticompetitive. The best-known kind of example is when two companies that compete directly against each other want to merge, drastically reducing or eliminating competition in their market. If there are only two companies in the entire US that make a certain kind of nail, for example, the FTC or DOJ would likely sue to block an acquisition between them from happening, because it would pose harm to competition and likely raise prices for nail-buyers everywhere, also affecting suppliers that need nails to build things like houses.