Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Patients wait in their cars for drive-through COVID-19 testing at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, IL on Thursday. The hospital suspended drive-through testing on Friday due to a shortage of test kits. (credit: Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica)

America is finally starting to test for the coronavirus in significant volumes. On Thursday, the total number of coronavirus tests conducted in America topped 100,000, according to the COVID tracking project. That's a 10-fold increase from a week earlier. In the coming days, we can expect the pace of testing to continue increasing as more and more organizations—both academic labs and for-profit companies—ramp up testing efforts.

This is important because America has a lot of catching up to do. A series of early missteps at the federal level hampered America's testing efforts in the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis. It wasn't until the end of February that the Food and Drug Administration opened the door for a wide range of organizations to offer coronavirus tests.

In the last week, we've started to see the results of that change. Private companies are starting to ship hundreds of thousands of test kits. Drive-through testing stations are sprouting up all over America.

Enlarge / Members of an uncontacted tribe in Acre, northwestern Brazil, 2009.

Ethnos360, an “aviation missionary” organization based in Arizona, has recently announced the use of a new helicopter to provide supplies and transport to its operations in remote western Brazil.

The organization, which aims to reach "the last tribe regardless of where that tribe might be," has previously operated in western Brazil with a bush plane. This has restricted its activities because of the permit requirements and expense of building and maintaining an airstrip. The helicopter, the organization writes, will “open the door to reach ten additional people groups living in extreme isolation.” While questionable at any time, the current pandemic creates a context in which the decision to contact these groups is especially insensitive.

Leave us alone

This region of western Brazil is home to the highest number of uncontacted tribes in the world, according to nonprofit Survival International, which campaigns for the land rights of indigenous people as well as the right for uncontacted groups to remain so. Survival International points to uncontacted people's hostile behaviors, like pointing arrows at aircraft and leaving crossed spears in the forest, as evidence that these groups do not want to interact with outsiders.

Enlarge / This global map of asteroid Bennu’s surface is a mosaic of images collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. (credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)

What is black and gray and far away?

The asteroid Bennu is—and on Friday, NASA released an ultra-high resolution image of this planetary body for the first time. Go here to download full-size versions of the mosaic.

Scientists produced the mosaic by stitching together 2,155 images taken by the primary camera on board NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft about one year ago. With a resolution of 5cm per pixel, NASA says this is the highest resolution mapping ever of a planetary body.

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

Charter has partially backed away from its strict rules against working from home during the coronavirus pandemic and will let up to 40 percent of call-center employees do remote work.

Charter Executive VP Cliff Hagan sent a memo to employees today, explaining that employees will have to meet certain conditions before being allowed to work at home:

A balance of "In Center" and "Remote Work" will be maintained. We'll begin offering remote work opportunities to those who are at higher-risk from a health standpoint, and then open the option to additional employees who are tenured, taking into account performance, the home infrastructure to support remote work, and agreement to the terms and conditions of a remote work assignment. During this time, we anticipate up to 40 percent of call center employees could be working remotely. These actions will further our ability to create greater physical separation and reduce the overall on-site staffing levels in our call centers.

The memo was shared with Ars by Charter employees. A Charter spokesperson told Ars that the memo was sent "to our Customer Operations organization, which includes our customer service call centers and related activity, but not the whole company." The Charter spokesperson did not tell us how many call-center workers it has or how many non-call-center workers will be allowed to work remotely.

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  The Nokia 8.3 5G. [credit: HMD ]

Nokia is taking the wraps off its first 5G phone, the Nokia 8.3 5G. It's not quite a flagship (that would be the Nokia 9 Series), but it's pretty close, and it sports some interesting design decisions in Qualcomm's mandatory-5G world.

Instead of the Snapdragon 865 that most other 5G phones are shipping with, the Nokia 8.3 is one step down in Qualcomm's lineup and packing a Snapdragon 765G. This is a pretty new chip, and while several phones destined for China or India have already shipped with the 765G, this will be most countries' first taste of the chip.

Qualcomm's SoC lineup this year isn't as clearly segmented as it has been in years past. Despite being a cheaper chip, the 765G actually has some design advantages over the flagship 865. The 765G is Qualcomm's first chip with an integrated 5G modem, while the 865 offloads 5G (and 4G) to a separate chip. The integration of as many components as possible into a single SoC is the technical foundation of the modern smartphone, and usually, this approach uses less space and less power, generates less heat, and is cheaper. Next year, all of Qualcomm's 5G chips will probably be designed like the 765G, but this year, that chip is leading the way.

Enlarge / A vampire bat in flight with spread wings. The creatures build strong social bonds through grooming, sharing blood. (credit: Samuel Betkowski/Getty Images)

Vampire bats can starve to death if they don't feed for a mere three days, so strong social ties can be key to survival. For instance, a bat will sometimes share food with a hungry member of the same roost, regurgitating any blood it has consumed into the mouth of the hungry bat—a bit like a bloody French kiss. That's a true "friend." Evolutionary biologists have dubbed this behavior "reciprocal altruism." But vampire bats can also form bonds with strange bats from outside the roost, building up trust with mutual grooming first before moving on to food sharing, according to a new paper in Current Biology.

What's being tested here is a game theory model first proposed in 1998 colloquially known as "raise the stakes." It's similar to the famous prisoner's dilemma, in which two criminal suspects are arrested and separately offered a deal. If one of them confesses and the other doesn't, the defector will go free and the other suspect will get 20 years in jail. If both suspects confess, they will each get ten years in jail. The correct strategy, therefore, is to always confess, since one should assume the other party will act solely in his or her self-interest. Both players will reap the most benefit by cooperating with each other.

But cooperative behavior isn't always quite so simple as a binary choice between cooperating or defecting; it's more like a continuously variably investment. The "raise the stakes" model of relationships holds that two strangers can make low-risk, incremental investments to see if there is potential for further cooperation. If the other party reciprocates in kind, it builds trust and a relationship can form. If not, no relationship will develop, and nobody has spent too much time and energy on a worthless (from a survival standpoint) connection.

Enlarge / We here at the Ars Orbiting HQ are used to working from home, but even so our feline and canine coworkers are perhaps the only ones not feeling socially distanced these days. (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

Hi there. How are you feeling today?

It's a loaded question right now. Many of us are having extraordinary feelings in response to extraordinary times. Hundreds of millions of people here in the United States and around the world are doing their best to help contain the spread of novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 by following World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control guidelines and, bluntly, staying the heck away from other people.

Even for a born introvert like yours truly, the era of prolonged, enforced social distancing is hard. Folks are either stuck at home alone, stuck at home with their families, or still having to go out into the world every day to work—either because their work is vital or their employers are being stubborn—and all the while, we're being buffeted by government warnings and endless waves of frightening news.