Month: August 2019

Paleontologists excavating a site in the Canadian Rockies known as the Burgess Shale have discovered the fossilized remains of a heretofore-unknown species of arthropod with a distinctive horseshoe-shaped upper shell. They whimsically named the species Cambroraster falcatus after the Millennium Falcon starship piloted by Han Solo in the Star Wars franchise. The discovery, reported in a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, sheds light on the diversity of the earliest relatives of insects, crabs, and spiders.

Discovered in 1909 by paleontologist Charles Walcott and dating back to the mid-Cambrian era some 508 million years ago, the Burgess Shale has since become one of the richest troves of preserved fossils from that period. The late Stephen Jay Gould immortalized its importance in his bestselling 1989 book, Wonderful Life, in which he argued (somewhat controversially) that the sheer diversity of the Burgess Shale fossils was evidence for several unique evolutionary lineages that became extinct, rather that continuing down to today's modern phyla. The Burgess Shale was declared a World Heritage Site in 1980.

In 2013, scientists discovered yet another piece of the Burgess Shale in Kootenay National Park and excavated the fossilized remains of some 50 new species in just 15 days. That's the area where a team of paleontologists affiliated with the Royal Ontario Museum discovered this latest arthropod.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Polar has had some catching up to do in the smartwatch space as Fitbit, Garmin, and Apple continuously improve upon and release new products. Polar has always had solid wearable options for serious athletes, but now the new Ignite smartwatch wants to reach a wider group of users.

At $229, the Polar Ignite is more affordable than the Vantage M or V smartwatches, but it has more capabilities as a GPS watch than something like Polar's A370 fitness band. It's also more attractive and versatile thanks to a round, lightweight case and interchangeable bands. It seemingly provides a good balance of style and fitness prowess like Garmin's Vivoactive 3 or Fitbit's Versa does, but spending a week wearing the Ignite has proven that Polar should have paid more attention to small yet crucial details that can make or break a $229 smartwatch.

Design

The Ignite is less intimidating than the Vantage M and V smartwatches because it strips away most of the side buttons and opts for a thinner and lighter case. The round smartwatch has a metal ring around its case and just one side button that navigates back on the touchscreen. Both parts of the watch band are removable, so you can switch them out for other styles at your leisure.

Enlarge / The "overcooked" game listing in this shot is a little on-the-nose, for a lot of Switch owners who tried using third-party cables, chargers, or docks with the portable console. (credit: Pixabay)

For over a year, Nintendo Switch owners have wondered about—and outright feared—plugging their "hybrid" portable console into unofficial docks. And for good reason: scary, anecdotal reports about third-party Switch docks "bricking" the machine popped up soon after the console received its version 5.0 update in early 2018. What gives?

Many people suspected that the Nintendo Switch is not properly USB-C PD (power delivery) compliant. Thanks to a recent deeper dive from an engineer's research, we have more insights as to the real cause—and reason to believe that users' initial suspicions weren't quite accurate. As Redditor "VECTORDRIVER" explained on Thursday, the Switch uses an M92T36 Power Delivery chip—and that's the part that most frequently burns out after use of third-party charging equipment.

There doesn't appear to be a datasheet available for the M92T36, but there is an available datasheet for a very similar chipset, Rohm Semiconductor's M92T30. The literal smoking gun here is the maximum voltage rating on the Configuration Channel pin (used for negotiating power delivery rates), listed at 6V.

Enlarge / A receiving line of guests next to the casket at a funeral in a funeral home. (credit: Getty Images)

The call came on January 2. It was early enough in the morning that Natalie Levy probably shouldn’t have been awake—she had recently left a high-stress job at a private-equity firm in San Francisco, and was determined to relax a bit—but her dog had woken her up.

It was her sister on the line. “When’s the last time you spoke to mom?” Levy remembers her asking. The worry in her voice was palpable. Levy’s sister was supposed to meet her mother that day in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where both lived, but the mother didn’t show.

Levy felt the panic rising. “Within probably an hour and a half, I was calling the Ann Arbor police, crying on the phone,” Levy recalled. “Something seemed so off.” Then, another call from her sister, who had searched her mom’s house with neighbors: They had found a receipt for a gun in the kitchen.

Enlarge / Does this dog look concerned because he realizes he can catch an infectious cancer? (credit: Martin Astley)

Cancer is a horrific disease, with its damage only limited by the fact that it only harms the individual in which it arises—except when it doesn't. In a few extremely rare cases, cancerous cells have evolved the ability to move from host to host, essentially becoming an immortalized parasite. The best known instance of this is in dogs, where a cancer has essentially become a sexually transmitted disease.

While the cancer's been known about for some time, there's been a bit of confusion about its origins. Now, a huge team of researchers has looked at parts of the genome gathered from hundreds of dogs from around the globe, and they've reconstructed the cancer's history and evolution. In the process, the team found that it's not actually doing much evolving anymore.

Dogs can catch cancer while having sex

It's hard to know what to call this thing. Cancer? Parasite? Disease? To an extent, its formal name covers things nicely: canine transmissible venereal tumor, or CTV. As the "venereal" implies, dogs transmit CTV during sex. It results in tumor growth, often on the external genitalia. But, unlike the cancer spreading among Tasmanian devils, the immune system quickly suppresses CTV, and the tumors quickly regress. But it does last long enough to spread throughout dog populations. With fewer working dogs and strays, CTV is rare in Europe and North America, but it remains prevalent elsewhere.

Enlarge (credit: Dame / Unbound)

If you use Facebook heavily, it might come as a surprise that the platform says it prohibits adult content in ads. With everything from a constant stream of "boosted" posts from fitness models to erectile dysfunction ads and "how to initiate sex" ads aimed at brainwashing your wife showing up in timelines, this seems like a weird flex. But Facebook—along with other companies and organizations, like the NYC MTA—does have such a policy. Unfortunately, enforcement of this kind of policy tends to be wink-wink nudge-nudge for ads and services targeting straight male customers, but it's often enforced sternly by-the-book for everyone else.

This is Facebook's stated policy on adult content in advertisements. (credit: Facebook)

Facebook's policy goes on to provide example images of prohibited content, which revolve in theory around nudity, "implied nudity," and excessive skin/cleavage or focus on a particular body part "even if not explicitly sexual." The problem is not so much with the policy as its uneven enforcement. Ads which clearly violate the stated policy—including but not limited to underwear companies or fitness models with tightly-cropped and suggestive poses, lots of skin, etc—routinely make it through, while ads for female-oriented sexual wellness products or educational posts, seemingly no matter how restrained, are stopped cold. So some companies in the sex tech area have now decided not to take such policy implementation lying down.

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  Facebook disapproved this innocuous ad for a Dame handheld vibrator. [credit: Dame ]

Approved, not approved

Two woman-owned sexual wellness companies, Unbound and Dame Products, have started a campaign to address this discriminatory policy enforcement. The campaign's website, approvednotapproved, encourages visitors to play a maddening guessing game in which they're shown advertisements and asked to guess whether those ads were allowed. For now, the campaign mostly targets Facebook, Instagram, and the New York MTA (aka, metro or subway ads).