Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Look at everything that comes in the box. It's mostly plastic and neoprene.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Locating the perfect tabletop MOBA is a bit like looking for a unicorn. It simply doesn’t exist and no amount of begging or fist clenching will make it appear. While the “multiplayer online battle arena” genre remains popular in the digital realm, it seems impossible to nail its feel in cardboard form. Perhaps that’s why Chip Theory Games elected to go in a different direction with Cloudspire, drawing not just from MOBA games but also real-time strategy and tower defense as well.

DOTACraft?

Little cardboard can be found in this enormous box. Units are thick poker chips, while the game’s surface is neoprene tiles that interlock to form randomized configurations. The sheer quantity of stuff in the box attempts to justify its high price tag while threatening to make you throw out your back if you don’t lift with your legs. By the end of Cloudspire’s three-hour playtime, plastic discs will be scattered about the table as if a slot machine exploded.

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Gene Berdichevsky believes in batteries. As employee number seven at Tesla, he helmed the team that designed the lithium-ion battery pack for the company’s first car, the Roadster, which convinced the world to take electric vehicles seriously. A decade later, EVs can hold their own against your average gas guzzler, but there’s still a large trade-off between the shelf life of their batteries and the amount of energy packed into them. If we want to totally electrify our roads, Berdichevsky realized, it would require a fundamentally different approach.

In 2011, Berdichevsky founded Sila Nanotechnologies to build a better battery. His secret ingredient is nanoengineered particles of silicon, which can supercharge lithium-ion cells when they’re used as the battery’s negative electrode, or anode. Today, Sila is one of a handful of companies racing to bring lithium-silicon batteries out of the lab and into the real world, where they promise to open new frontiers of form and function in electronic devices ranging from earbuds to cars.

Enlarge / A close-up view of the Starliner capsule with its service module immediately beneath it. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann )

On Friday, officials from NASA and Boeing held a teleconference with reporters to discuss issues related to the Starliner spacecraft's performance during an orbital test flight in December.

Although an independent review team remains in the midst of an investigation that will not conclude until the end of February, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he convened the call in the "interest of transparency."

The call followed an explosive revelation on Thursday, at a meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, that the Starliner spacecraft encountered a second major software issue that could have resulted in a total loss of the vehicle. At the outset of the media call, Bridenstine acknowledged that Starliner's flight had "a lot of anomalies." The agency published a summary here. At this point, it seems that NASA and Boeing do not yet know what they don't know about the problems, and it will take some time to sort all of this out.

Enlarge / WUHAN, Feb. 5, 2020 -- Patients infected with the novel coronavirus are seen at a makeshift hospital converted from an exhibition center in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 5, 2020. The first makeshift hospital converted from an exhibition center in China's epidemic-hit Wuhan city began accepting patients Wednesday. The hospital can provide about 1,600 beds to infected patients. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

Chinese authorities in Wuhan Thursday said that they will conduct door-to-door home searches for people potentially infected with the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) and corral the sick into massive, makeshift quarantine camps around the city, according to a report in the New York Times.

These latest, extreme outbreak control measures are on top of already draconian travel restrictions and shutdowns of public transit, which have effectively isolated Wuhan—a city of 11 million where the explosive outbreak began—as well as other highly-populated cities in the Hubei province. Overall, the lockdown has made it difficult to get food and supplies to Hubei’s 50 million residents, contributing to a humanitarian crisis that is now swelling from Wuhan in the wake of the virus.

The desperate situation in Wuhan is clear from the latest outbreak figures.  Of the 31,530 reported cases of 2019-nCoV in over two dozen countries, 22,112 are confirmed in the Hubei province alone. And of the 638 deaths logged so far in the outbreak, 618 have occurred in the province.

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)

A secretive startup that promotes a massive international universal facial recognition database seeded from more than three billion images is facing pushback from tech firms as it tries to woo more law enforcement agencies.

The company, called Clearview AI, went from near-complete obscurity to national headlines following a report published by the New York Times in January. The Times described Clearview as a "groundbreaking" facial recognition service. A user imports a photo of a person, and then the app shows "public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared," the NYT explains.

Clearview claims to have agreements with 600 law enforcement agencies for use of its services, and the company says it has a set of three billion public photos to match new images against. Those photos come from a wide array of sources, and the sources are ticked off.

Enlarge (credit: Alan Schein Photography / Getty)

A 19-year-old man named Tyler Wallace is in police custody after he entered a Walmart last Sunday in the Chicago suburb of Joliet. He walked through the store wearing a mask and sign that said "I have the coronavirus." He sprayed Lysol on produce, clothing, and other products. According to the Chicago Tribune, he faces charges of disorderly conduct, retail theft, and criminal trespass to property.

A 17-year-old friend who accompanied Wallace in the store is also facing charges of disorderly conduct and criminal trespass. His case will be handled by juvenile courts.

Police don't believe that either teen is actually infected with the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).