Month: February 2020

Enlarge / The iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 13. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple does not let filmmakers show villains using iPhones on camera, movie director Rian Johnson said in a new interview with Vanity Fair.

"Apple, they let you use iPhones in movies, but—and this is very pivotal if you're ever watching a mystery movie—bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera," Johnson said. Johnson said he was reluctant to reveal that tidbit "because it's going to screw me on the next mystery movie that I write," but he added, "forget it, I'll say it. It's very interesting."

"Every single filmmaker that has a bad guy in their movie that's supposed to be a secret wants to murder me right now," Johnson said. He made the comment while talking about a scene from his mystery film Knives Out. The remark is at the 2:50 mark of this video:

Enlarge / Mitochondria, previously found in all animals, is now in all animals but one. (credit: NIH)

Eukaryotes are the branch of the tree of life with complex cells, containing a separate compartment for DNA, lots of internal compartments, and mitochondria that use oxygen to provide lots of energy. These features were so successful that we can't find any trace of a eukaryotic ancestor that lacks any of them. It has been suggested that the mitochondria's ability to mobilize energy was an essential ingredient for animal life.

That said, there are a small number of single-celled parasites that seem to have lost this energy-producing function over the course of evolution. They typically still have mitochondria-like compartments, but they've lost their DNA and role in aerobic metabolism. Instead, these compartments are involved in specialized chemical functions like producing hydrogen. But these were typically parasites that lived in oxygen-free environments and were only distantly related to animal life.

But now researchers have identified an animal that is also a parasite that lives in oxygen-poor environments. And it, too, has gotten rid of its mitochondria, being the first-known instance of an animal that lacks them.

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On Monday, the National Transportation Safety Board met to discuss its investigation into the March 2018 crash that killed Tesla owner Walter Huang. The hearing followed a recent release of a trove of documents related to the investigation, which revealed that Huang had in the past repeatedly experienced the same glitch that caused his Tesla Model X to veer out of its lane and into a concrete highway gore, as well as the fact that he was playing a game called Three Kingdoms on his iPhone in the minutes leading up to his death.

During the hearing, the NTSB was highly critical of Tesla for what it sees as misleading marketing of its driver assistance system and a lax attitude toward the system's operational design domain. But there was plenty of blame to share—the board also excoriated the National Highway Transportation Agency for providing utterly ineffectual oversight when it comes to so-called "level 2" driver assists, as well as California's highway agency CalTrans, which failed to replace a damaged crash attenuator in front of the concrete gore, which would in most likelihood have saved Huang's life.

"This tragic crash clearly demonstrates the limitations of advanced driver assistance systems available to consumers today. There is not a vehicle currently available to US consumers that is self-driving. Period. Every vehicle sold to US consumers still requires the driver to be actively engaged in the driving task, even when advanced driver assistance systems are activated. If you are selling a car with an advanced driver assistance system, you’re not selling a self-driving car. If you are driving a car with an advanced driver assistance system, you don’t own a self-driving car," said NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt.

Enlarge / A humpback whale and calf. (credit: flickr user: texaus1)

Peeing on a stick is nobody's idea of fun, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what whales have had to deal with: pregnancy test by dart gun. And if a blubber-sampling dart wasn't bad enough, some dart gun pregnancy tests might not even be all that accurate.

A recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports found evidence that the standard humpback whale pregnancy test was failing to spot a whole lot of pregnant females. There’s a better way of testing, the researchers suggest—and their results could help conservationists and researchers protect whales.

Counting whales

You can’t protect a species very effectively if you have no idea how many individuals are alive and whether their numbers are on the increase or decrease. Estimating populations of wild animals is always tricky, but for whales, it’s fiendish—huge territories, long migrations, and of course the whole problem of living underwater mean that scientists have to get inventive to figure out even rough numbers.

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)

Clearview, a secretive facial-recognition startup that claims to scrape the Internet for images to use, has itself now had data unexpectedly scraped, in a manner of speaking. Someone apparently popped into the company's system and stole its entire client list, which Clearview to date has refused to share.

Clearview notified its customers about the leak today, according to The Daily Beast, which obtained a copy of the notification. The memo says an intruder accessed the list of customers, as well as the number of user accounts those customers set up and the number of searches those accounts have conducted.

"Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century," Tor Ekeland, an attorney for Clearview, told The Daily Beast. "Our servers were never accessed. We patched the flaw and continue to work to strengthen our security."

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For years now, downloadable PC gaming retailer GOG has offered a "money-back guarantee" only if a game you bought "doesn't work" on your hardware. Today, the company has removed that requirement, offering an expansive new refund policy for up to 30 days after purchase, "even if you downloaded, launched, and played [the game]."

While users won't have to provide a reason for their refund request when contacting customer support, GOG says in an FAQ that it reserves the right to "refuse refunds in... individual cases." More broadly, that means the company will be "monitoring the effects of the current update to make sure no one is using this policy to hurt the developers that put their time and heart into making great games."

That monitoring could end up being important, because all of GOG's games are offered without any DRM protection. That would seemingly make it trivial for a customer to purchase and download a game, create a fully functional backup, and then ask for a refund while keeping an essentially free copy.