Month: September 2019

Enlarge / Kellogg Co.'s Pringles brand potato chips. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

In the past, parents may have tried to coax their picky eaters to dinner with misguided reminders of starving children—or perhaps letting them imitate farm animals. But, the parents of today now have a scarier prompt.

A British teenager has permanent vision loss, hearing loss, and weak bones after years of eating only select types of junk food. The teen’s doctors eventually diagnosed him with a relatively newly-defined eating disorder called avoidant-restrictive food in-take disorder (ARFID). They report the teen’s case this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The case is a rare one in developed countries, which have a ready supply of nutritious foods. The teen’s doctors in Bristol were initially stumped by his progressive symptoms. But, they caution other physicians in their case report that such damage from poor nutrition is potentially reversible—if it’s caught early—and even people with normal weights may be struggling with eating disorders.

Enlarge / Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), as seen on April 18, 2018. (credit: New America / Flickr)

Mark Zuckerberg has "repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. "I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term."

Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has "hurt a lot of people."

Wyden was talking to the Willamette Week about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that gives online platforms like Facebook broad immunity for content posted by their users. Wyden was the co-author of the law and has been one of its most ardent defenders ever since.

Enlarge / A girl watches a video on YouTube. (credit: Getty | ALAIN JOCARD)

YouTube's had a rough year with kids. Not only has the Google subsidiary drawn concerns about content featuring children and content provided to children, but now the company has also settled allegations that it violated a key children's privacy law.

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that Google would pay fines totaling $170 million to settle allegations that YouTube violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. Most of the money, $136 million, will go to settle with the FTC, and the remaining $34 million will settle a similar complaint with the New York Attorney General's office.

COPPA imposes certain restrictions on the collection and use of personal data associated with children ages 12 and under. Under the law, websites, apps, and digital platforms that collect data from young users are required to post a privacy policy and have parents consent to it, to give parents the option to opt out of having their children's information shared with third parties, to let parents review their children's data, and to follow sound data storage and retention policies.

Enlarge (credit: US Dept. of Education)

One of the things that's amenable to scientific study is how we communicate information about science. Science education should, in theory at least, produce a scientifically literate public and prepare those most interested in the topic for advanced studies in their chosen field. That clearly hasn't worked out, so people have subjected science education itself to the scientific method.

What they've found is that an approach called active learning (also called active instruction) consistently produces the best results. This involves pushing students to work through problems and reason things out as an inherent part of the learning process.

Even though the science on that is clear, most college professors have remained committed to approaching class time as a lecture. In fact, a large number of instructors who try active learning end up going back to the standard lecture, and one of the reasons they cite is that the students prefer it that way. This sounds a bit like excuse making, so a group of instructors decided to test this belief using physics students. And it turns out professors weren't making an excuse. Even as understanding improved with active learning, the students felt they got more out of a traditional lecture.

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  The new Porsche Taycan is about the same length and width as a Tesla Model S, but it's a couple of inches shorter in height. It's a good deal more expensive than a Tesla though—but did you expect anything else from Porsche? [credit: Christoph Bauer for Porsche ]

In 2015, Porsche stole the Frankfurt Motor Show with the Mission E concept car. It was the first serious response to Tesla's Model S sedan from a major automaker, and few automakers are more serious than Porsche. On Wednesday, almost exactly four years to the day, it finally revealed the production version of that concept. It's called the Taycan, and it'll be built at the company's home in Zuffenhausen, Germany, with deliveries starting before the end of the year.

It's fair to say that the Taycan is one of the most hotly anticipated cars of the year, although Porsche's lengthy campaign of teasing out tiny nuggets of info here and there has surely been grating for some. But the embargo is over now, and we can share all we know about this impressive new battery-electric vehicle. And "impressive" is the right word—the car is capable of withstanding 26 2.6-second 0-60mph launches in short succession, and it can lap the Nürburgring in 7 minutes and 42 seconds without overtaxing its lithium-ion battery pack.

An 800V electrical architecture

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Taycan is basically an Audi e-tron under the skin. Audi and Porsche share a corporate parent, and both BEVs were greenlit around the same time in the wake of dieselgate. However, the two vehicles' powertrains share no parts, despite superficially similar specs. Porsche opted for an 800V high voltage architecture; until now almost every other BEV from Audi to Tesla and all stops in between have used 400V. Among the benefits of this higher voltage are faster charging—currently at up to 270kW, although Porsche thinks 400-500kW should be possible in time—as well as reduced weight and better packaging thanks to much thinner wires (because more volts mean fewer amps).