Month: October 2019

Enlarge / The amazing human nose. (credit: Getty | Picture Alliance)

Nose pickers are often said to be digging for gold. But a 48-year-old Australian man needed an entirely different kind of nugget mined from his schnoz.

Doctors excavated from the man's right nasal cavity a 19mm×11mm rock-hard mass—the calcified remains of a small amount of marijuana he tried to smuggle into prison a startling 18 years earlier.

The man's nose stone—reported this month in the journal BMJ Case Reports—is a rare example of illicit drugs causing a rhinolith, which are rare on their own. Rhinoliths are stone-like concretions formed by the gradual buildup of salts around things not normally found in the nose. The term rhinolith comes from the Greek rhino (meaning nose) and lithos (meaning stone). They're estimated to show up in 1 out of 10,000 outpatient visits to an ear, nose, and throat doctor.

Enlarge / A video surveillance camera hangs from the side of a building on May 14, 2019, in San Francisco, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

The use of facial recognition has spread from photo albums and social media to airports, doorbells, schools, and law enforcement. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union wants top US agencies to share records detailing what face data they're collecting and what they're doing with it.

The ACLU in January submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI seeking records relating to the agencies' "use of face recognition programs and other biometric identification and tracking technology." Almost 10 months later, the ACLU has received no response. And so the organization today filed suit against all three agencies, seeking the records.

The records are "important to assist the public in understanding the government's use of highly invasive biometric identification and tracking technologies," says the complaint, filed in federal court in Massachusetts. Through the records, the ACLU seeks to "understand and inform the public about, among other things, how face recognition and other biometric identification technologies are currently being used by the government and what, if any, safeguards are currently in place to prevent their abuse and protect core constitutional rights."

A modern human and Neanderthal skull face off. (credit: hairymuseummatt / DrMikeBaxter / via Wikimedia Commons)

John Capra, a research scientist at Vanderbilt University, wants to know how evolution has shaped our genomes and how differences in genetics can account for differences in species. In his latest work, he tries to get a better sense of what ancient humans—Neanderthals and Denisovans—may have been like. This has been difficult because there is only so much that scientists can glean about biological traits from fossils and DNA. And it's not much.

Capra's new study takes advantage of the fact that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans (yes, Jean Auel was a prescient genius). Collectively, we have about a third of the Neanderthal genome scattered across our cells' nuclei, or at least Eurasian populations do. Most of this Neanderthal DNA is in regions that don't encode proteins, a category that includes gene regulatory regions that dictate where, when, and how much a gene is expressed.

Ancient vs. modern

Much of the Neanderthal DNA that has been retained in the modern genome influences the immune system, hair and skin, and neurological development. But to figure out which genetic regions have divergent regulatory effects in ancient and modern humans, Capra's lab didn't look at the Neanderthal DNA sequences that modern humans got. It looked at the sequences we didn't get.

Enlarge (credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

On January 12, 2017, President-elect Donald Trump named Rudy Giuliani to be his cybersecurity advisor. A month later, on February 7, Giuliani walked into a San Francisco Apple Store with a problem: his iPhone had gotten locked down after 10 unsuccessful passcode attempts, NBC reports.

iPhones are designed to become permanently inaccessible after 10 failed login attempts. Rudy—who is now Trump's personal lawyer—had little choice but to wipe the phone and start over.

"Proceeded with DFU [device firmware update] restore and will set up the phone again from a current iCloud backup," an Apple store employee wrote in Apple's internal database.

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  The inside screen in all its glory. Check out the curved display sides! Look at that notch! [credit: Evan Blass ]

Update 6:30pm ET: Evan Blass has dropped even more images of the new Razr on his private Twitter account (which you can see above), and these are much more revealing than the initially-published images. We actually get clear views of the inner and outer screen now, which shows clearly that, yes, the inside of the phone houses one long, skinny, flexible display.

A notch at the top houses the earpiece and front facing camera, and theres a complicated-looking hinge mechanism in the middle. The display looks unlike anything else on the market, with an absolutely wild curve happening on the top and bottom edges of the display. The aspect ratio is tall and skinny—it seems like it's way taller than 21:9, but the angled images make it hard to tell exactly. If we take a rough measurement of the Motorola's patent drawings, which provide a front view, we get 23:9.

So far, this looks like a very faithful recreation of the original Razr phone, and this new incarnation does really come to market, is that a good design? Is a tall, skinny screen really appropriate for Android, which was primarily designed for 16:9 devices? Will that bottom chin get in the way of navigation gestures or buttons, which in a modern smartphone now live at the very bottom of the screen?

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of discounts and price drops. Today's list is headlined by a deal on the 128GB variant of Apple's 6th-gen iPad, which is down to $299 at Walmart as of this writing. That matches the price we saw during Amazon's Prime Day event, and this price tag comes in about $30 below the typical price we've seen whenever the tablet has been discounted in the past year.

The big caveat here is that Apple recently replaced this iPad with a new model, which starts at $329 for a 32GB model. That 7th-gen iPad bumps up the screen size from 9.7 inches to 10.2 inches and adds support for Apple's Smart Connector port, meaning it can use Apple's Smart Keyboard accessory instead of solely relying on Bluetooth keyboards. It also bumps up the RAM from 2GB to 3GB.

Other than that, though, this older model performs almost identically to the new one. It has the same A10 processor, the same camera and battery specs, the same Lightning port and 3.5mm headphone jack, and the same iPadOS software. It's also saddled with the same non-laminated display and relatively dated design. Springing more for an iPad Air (or a refurbished 10.5-inch iPad Pro) will bring you a noticeable hardware upgrade, the 10.2-inch iPad may grant you an extra year of iPadOS support down the road, and it's always possible Black Friday will bring prices down further. But if you just want an affordable iPad and value the extra storage, this is a good value.