Month: October 2019

Enlarge / An AT&T sign outside a company office in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

AT&T has agreed to sell its wireless and wireline networks in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands for $1.95 billion to Liberty Latin America. The deal will help AT&T pay a small portion of the debt load created in part by its acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner Inc.

AT&T announced the deal today, saying that the transaction requires review by the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice. AT&T hopes to complete the sale within six to nine months. "This transaction is a result of our ongoing strategic review of our balance sheet and assets to identify opportunities for monetization," AT&T CFO John Stephens said.

AT&T has said it intends to cut its debt by up to $20 billion in 2019. The company already lowered its long-term debt from $166 billion as of December 31, 2018, to $158 billion on June 30, 2019. AT&T told investors today to expect share buybacks later this year as the company continues improving its debt-to-earnings ratio. AT&T said it it is on track to hit its goal of a net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA ratio in the 2.5X range by year-end, down from its current 2.7X. AT&T's adjusted EBITDA was $29.8 billion for the first six months of 2019, a pace of nearly $60 billion for the year.

Enlarge / A diagram showing lithium ions moving between two different materials they can intercalate into. (credit: US DOE)

Lithium-ion batteries have become central to everything from the mobile-electronic revolution to electric vehicles, and they're poised to play a huge role in fostering the expansion of renewable power. It's safe to say that their development has made a discernible impact on the modern world. But aside from the fact that they involve lithium ions, the chemistry that enables these batteries to power so many things while balancing size, durability, and weight isn't widely understood.

Today's Nobel Prize in Chemistry provides a fantastic opportunity to correct that, as it honors three researchers who made key contributions to the development of the lithium-ion battery: Stanley Whittingham for developing the first intercalation-driven version, John Goodenough for developing the cathodes we use today, and Akira Yoshino for developing the anodes.

Less chemistry?

The earliest batteries we developed were driven by chemical reactions. The lead-acid battery, for example, has two electrodes that undergo reactions with sulfuric acid in the electrolyte, liberating electrons to be used for other purposes. These reactions are the sorts of things you'd recognize from high school chemistry, with atoms swapping their partners and transferring electrons to end up in a different charge state. To an extent, the development of the lithium-ion battery was an attempt to get rid of all that.

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  Essential's Project Gem. It has the form factor of a TV remote. [credit: Essential ]

Believe it or not, Essential seems financially solvent enough to release one more (one last?) smartphone. Despite having no discernible income since the complete flop of the Essential Phone in 2017, canceling the Essential Phone sequel, canceling its smart home device, being put up for sale, laying off 30% of its staff, and having its founder and CEO Andy Rubin stained by a sexual misconduct scandal, Essential is somehow still around. And it hopes you'll forget about all that while it teases a shiny new smartphone on Twitter.

Meet "Project Gem," a tall, ultra-skinny smartphone with an aspect ratio approaching that of a TV remote. It looks like what would happen if you took a normal smartphone and cut it in half vertically. The front has an even bezel all the way around the phone, with a hole-punch camera in the top-left corner. The back has a sizable camera bump for the single-lens camera and a divot for your finger, which could be a button, or a fingerprint reader, or both. The color scheme definitely lives up to the "Gem" name, with four versions each showing a different shiny, color-shifting finish.

Every phone must be assumed to run Android unless proven otherwise, but boy, does this not look like normal Android. The hero image features what we assume is the home screen, showing a clock widget, a music widget, and apps icons that live in a 2x2 grid of tiles, making it look a bit like Windows Phone. The home-screen design seems to prefer showing apps as square widgets with some info and functionality, rather than app icons. The Spotify widget shows music controls, the Gallery shows a picture preview, calendar shows your next appointment, "Maps" shows a map with your current location, and we're going to assume the weather widget shows a weather preview. It's different, but it also looks pretty scroll heavy, since only four widgets are necessary to fill up the screen.

Breaking Bad brought the messy, smelly process of cooking methamphetamine into American households with its depiction of a high school chemistry teacher who begins making the stuff after a terminal cancer diagnosis. Walter White went from cooking meth in an RV, to a home basement, to a full-fledged underground lab run by a crime syndicate. It's highly likely that any place he cooked would still be contaminated years later, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research.

Researchers at Flinders University in Australia took samples from a house in rural Victoria, Australia, once used to cook meth and found the house still contained significant levels of the drug even five years after the drug operations had ended. And that contamination had transferred over to personal possessions of the home's new owners.

"Our results demonstrate that methamphetamine has continued to mobilize after manufacture when the property was under new ownership for a period exceeding five years," said co-author Kirstin Ross. "This suggests that the methamphetamine is not breaking down or being removed and is constantly transferred from contaminated to non-contaminated objects."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Vaginal-fluid transplants appeared to successfully treat devastating vaginal conditions that had failed all other treatments options, according to a small pilot study published this week in Nature Medicine.

The study comes amid a gush of enthusiasm for the transplants, often dubbed vaginal microbiota transplants (VMTs). Though researchers are only now getting down to investigating their potential, many are optimistic that the microbe-toting fluid swaps will prove broadly successful at treating swaths of conditions in more rigorous trials.

In a recent conceptual study on screening potential fluid donors, Johns Hopkins researchers suggested that the transplants could “revolutionize the way we view and treat conditions affecting the female reproductive tract.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

Comcast's data-usage meter gave thousands of customers inaccurate readings for two months because of a software bug, causing the broadband provider to incorrectly charge about 2,000 users for exceeding their monthly data caps. Comcast has admitted the error and told Ars it is giving refunds and additional credits of $50 each to customers who paid data overage fees that shouldn't have been assessed.

We contacted Comcast two weeks ago after we heard from a customer in Duluth, Georgia who found that Comcast was recording major data usage on his account even when he wasn't using the Internet. The customer, Michael, supposedly had exceeded his 1TB monthly data cap. But when he unplugged his modem overnight, Comcast recorded another 40GB of usage during a 15-hour stretch in which he couldn't have used any data.

Our inquiry to Comcast and complaints from other customers on social media caused the company to investigate. A Comcast spokesperson told us what the investigation discovered yesterday.