Month: October 2019

Enlarge / "We heard from people working at pizza parlors" being asked to sign noncompete agreements, a Massachusetts state legislator told Ars last year. (credit: Valentyn Semenov / EyeEm / Getty)

A bipartisan pair of senators has introduced legislation to drastically limit the use of noncompete agreements across the US economy.

"Noncompete agreements stifle wage growth, career advancement, innovation, and business creation," argued Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) in a Thursday press release. He said that the legislation, co-sponsored with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), would "empower our workers and entrepreneurs so they can freely apply their talents where their skills are in greatest demand."

Noncompete agreements ban workers from performing similar work at competing firms for a limited period—often one or two years. These agreements have become widely used in recent decades—and not just for employees with sensitive business intelligence or client relationships.

Enlarge / The Bullet Cluster is widely viewed as a clear demonstration of the existence of dark matter. (credit: APOD)

Dark matter is the mysterious substance that comprises about 23 percent of all the matter and energy in our universe, but thus far it has eluded physicists' many attempts to directly detect it. Maybe instead of looking for a dark matter particle, they should be looking for something more akin to a wave—a hypothetical dark matter candidate known as an axion.

In that case, perhaps we should be "listening" for the dark matter. Physicists at Stockholm University and the Max Planck Institute of Physics have proposed a novel design for an "axion radio" that employs cold plasmas (gases or liquids of charged particles) to do just that in a recent paper in Physical Review Letters.

"Finding the axion is a bit like tuning a radio: you have to tune your antenna until you pick up the right frequency," said co-author Alexander Millar, a postdoc at Stockholm University. "Rather than music, experimentalists would be rewarded with 'hearing' the dark matter that the Earth is traveling through."

Enlarge / Crème brulee getting torched. (credit: Getty | Anne Cusack)

Leading e-cigarette maker Juul on Thursday announced that it is immediately suspending the sale of some of its flavored products—Mango, Fruit, Creme (crème brulee), and Cucumber.

Notably, mint and menthol flavored products are not included in the pack of extinguished flavors.

The move is ostensibly to ease growing alarm over the spike of vaping among teens—who strongly prefer flavored products. About 25% of high school seniors reported recent e-cigarette use in a health survey this year, up from 11% in 2017. About 12% of students said this year that they used the products on a daily basis.

Enlarge / Dikembe Mutombo rejects your flawed publication. (credit: DAVID MAXWELL / Getty Images)

Science is an activity performed by humans, so it's inevitable that some of the scientific papers we cover will end up being wrong. As we noted yesterday, the cause can range from factors completely outside of a researcher's control—like OS implementation oddities—to mistakes and errors or even intentional fraud. In some cases, the problems are minor or peripheral to the main conclusions of a study and can be handled with a correction. In others, the issues are fatal to the paper's conclusion. In these cases, the only option is to retract the paper.

When Ars discovers that a paper we've covered has been retracted, we make an effort to go back and provide a notice of it in our article. But until recently, we didn't have a formal policy regarding what that notice should look like, and we typically didn't publish anything new to indicate a retraction had occurred.

Having given it some thought, that practice seems insufficient. A failure to prominently correct the record makes it easier for people to hang on to a mistaken impression about our state of understanding. Perhaps more importantly, not reporting a retraction leaves people unaware of a key aspect of science's self-correcting nature and how retractions can sometimes actually advance our scientific understanding. This is definitely apparent in the contrast between two retractions that we'll revisit today.

Enlarge / Sen. Ron Wyden questions witnesses during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on social media influence in the 2016 US elections in Washington, DC, on Nov. 1, 2017. (credit: Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images )

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) would like tech and data companies to mind their own business and get their noses out of yours. To that end, he has introduced a bill that would penalize them, potentially with jail time for executives, for not doing so.

The proposed bill (PDF), actually called the Mind Your Own Business Act of 2019, is in many ways an updated version of a discussion draft Wyden published last November.

The draft does not name any company specifically, instead focusing on the general concepts of personal data and company responsibility. That said, Wyden did name names in a statement, and Facebook is clearly front and center on his radar.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a pre-order deal for Google's Pixel 4 smartphones, which were formally unveiled earlier this week. Various retailers—including Best Buy, Amazon, and Google's online store—are currently bundling a $100 gift card with pre-orders of the new devices at their standard MSRPs. The 5.7-inch Pixel 4 starts at $799 for a 64GB model, while the 6.3-inch Pixel 4 XL starts at $899. All of these gift cards are specific to a given retailer, so if you plan to take advantage of the deal, be sure to pick the store you're most likely to use again.

The Dealmaster wants to be clear here: you should only take advantage of this offer if you're already dead set on upgrading to a Pixel 4 at launch. If you're still on the fence, you may be better off waiting to see if Google drops the price of its new phones for the holidays; last year, for instance, Google cut the price of an unlocked Pixel 3 by $150 for Black Friday, less than two months after the phone first hit shelves. There's no guarantee that will happen again—or that the Pixel 4 will not launch with niggling bugs the way the Pixel 3 did out of the gate—but we'd be remiss if we didn't mention it. It's also worth reiterating that this is a pre-order deal: while the Pixel 4's 90Hz display and camera upgrades look promising and its guaranteed software upgrades are great, there are still questions we won't be able to answer until we finish fully reviewing the phones.

That said, if you're sold on getting a new Google phone right away—the Pixel line does have a history of great cameras, after all—we think this deal is worth highlighting for those who would rather not tie themselves to a mobile carrier or "bill credits" discounts that won't fully pay off for several months. Just be aware of the context. And if you don't need a new phone, we also have a ton of video game deals, a rare Nintendo Switch discount, and more. Have a look below.

Enlarge / Members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters hold signs while protesting during the McKesson Corp. annual meeting at the Irving-Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce in Irving, Texas, US, on Wednesday, July 26, 2017. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Three of the nation’s largest drug distributors plus two big-name drug makers have reportedly offered a deal worth nearly $50 billion to settle more than two thousand opioid-crisis lawsuits, consolidated in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio. The first trial for the cases is scheduled to begin opening statements Monday.

The deal includes around $22 billion in cash, plus drugs and services valued at around $28 billion, according to sources familiar with the negotiations who spoke with Reuters.

Specifically, drug distributors McKesson Corp, AmerisourceBergen Corp, and Cardinal Health offered $18 billion in cash. Drug maker Johnson & Johnson offered another $4 billion. And finally, Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical Industries offered to give away addiction medications and related services in a 10-year program that it estimated has a total value of $28 billion.