Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Audio buffs are rediscovering the sound quality of reel-to-reel tapes. Chemists at the Library of Congress are studying why the tapes tend to degrade over time and why baking them can often reverse the damage. (credit: Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)

Reel-to-reel tapes are experiencing a resurgence of interest among audio buffs, but they are prone to degradation, which has been a topic of active research for many years. It's well known that applying heat can often reverse the damage sufficiently to enable playback, usually by baking the tapes in an oven. Now scientists at the US Library of Congress have determined precisely why this method seems to work, presenting their findings earlier this month on the American Chemical Society's SciMeetings online platform.

Project leader Andrew Davis is a polymer chemist who works in the LOC's preservation research and testing division. The LOC's mission is to ensure its collections continue to be accessible to the public, either in their original or reformatted mediums. The R&D division is responsible for providing the scientific groundwork for that mission, similar to how the Smithsonian Institute employs research scientists to maintain its collections.

"We span everything from simple analytical tests, like determining the kind of ink used on paper, to testing all building and construction materials, and ensuring the stickers on the barcodes don't damage books," Davis told Ars.

Enlarge / They're back! (credit: Apple TV+ / The Jim Henson Company)

You may have noticed news of delays, cancellations, and general scrambling from most major TV and film production companies over the past few months. Today, Apple TV+ showed up with a surprise bit of good pandemic-timed news: a classic Muppet series' return, built from the ground up to function within the constraints of stay-in-place orders across the world.

Fraggle Rock, a Jim Henson TV series that ran on HBO in the United States through the 1980s, has returned as a Muppets-in-Zoom concept. The new series, titled Fraggle Rock: Rock On!, will premiere a new five-minute "mini-sode" every Tuesday for the foreseeable future, and it sees familiar characters like Red, Gobo, and Mokey teleconference with each other. In the Fraggle universe, this is enabled by the series' Doozer characters creating a series of "Doozertubes" to connect citizens in their natural, underground habitat.

How the first episode of Fraggle Rock: Rock On! looks in action. (credit: Apple TV+ / The Jim Henson Company)

In real life, meanwhile, Apple is advertising the fact that every Muppeteer and contributor is filming their sequences with iPhone 11 handsets while abiding by stay-in-place orders across the globe, though Apple hasn't clarified anything else about the series' production pipeline (not even a mention of Final Cut Pro). The first attempt is a sweet-and-chipper statement of purpose, complete with the distant-but-connected Fraggles joining together to sing a song (something that's not necessarily easy to coordinate via shared Internet video feeds).

Enlarge / Bottles of Clorox bleach sit on a shelf at a grocery store. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan)

From adults creating chlorine gas in their kitchens to toddlers guzzling hand sanitizer, Americans seem to be inadvertently poisoning themselves as they try to defend against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

Since the beginning of March—as the COVID-19 pandemic began raging in the US—calls to poison control centers nationwide “increased sharply,” according a new study led by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Although researchers cannot directly link pandemic preparedness to the poison control calls, “the timing of these reported exposures corresponded to increased media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports of consumer shortages of cleaning and disinfection products, and the beginning of some local and state stay-at-home orders,” the researchers write

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

More than 230 Charter employees have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least two have died, The New York Times reported today.

New York Attorney General Letitia James' office has opened an inquiry into Charter's labor practices and management of employees during the pandemic, a spokesperson for James confirmed to Ars today.

Charter has faced numerous complaints from employees about the company's refusal to let them work from home during the pandemic. The cable company partially backed away from its strict rules on March 20, saying it would let up to 40 percent of call-center employees do remote work. But Charter's slow reaction to the pandemic—while the similarly situated Comcast moved aggressively to get employees into work-at-home situations—may have contributed to the spread of coronavirus in the company.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a deal on VAVA's VA-UC006 USB-C hub, which is down to $30 on Amazon when you use the code "ALVMMR83" at checkout. As of this writing, shipping times are longer than usual due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but this is a bigger-than-usual drop from the hub's typical $50-60 going price online.

This USB-C adapter is a recommended pick in our guide to the best USB-C docks and hubs, particularly for those who want a compact option on a budget. If you have a laptop like the latest MacBook Air or MacBook Pro that eschews traditional ports in favor of USB-C, a hub like this can bring many of those legacy connectors back. When connected to a USB-C port, the VA-UC006 here adds three USB-A ports (two of which are USB 3.0), an HDMI port capable of playing 4K video at least 30Hz, USB-C power passthrough at about 49W (which isn't strong enough to refill all laptops at max speed but still provides a decently fast charge), SD and microSD card slots, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

To be clear, this hub can get a little hot to the touch while in use, its data-transfer speeds aren't nearly as fast as those of a beefier Thunderbolt 3 dock, and its trio of USB-A ports might be too close together to fit three devices simultaneously. It won't work with iPad Pros, either. But in testing, we found it performed safely and reliably for a device that, at just 2×0.5×4 inches, can save this much space on a desk or on the road. Especially at this discounted price, it's a strong value for the amount of functionality it enables. VAVA says it comes with an 18-month warranty.

• 

  Press this button to measure your blood pressure. It's apparently going to be just that easy (after setup). [credit: Samsung ]

Samsung says it has figured out a blood pressure monitoring application for a smartwatch, and the solution will start shipping on the Galaxy Watch Active2, a Tizen watch that launched last year. Samsung says the app "has been cleared by the South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS), as a Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), making it a government-cleared, over-the-counter and cuffless blood pressure monitoring application."

The only sensors on the back of a Galaxy Watch Active2 are a photoplethysmography (PPG) heart rate sensor and an electrode for electrocardiograms, but the company says that's enough to obtain a blood pressure rating. The trick is that you'll first need to calibrate the sensors with a real blood pressure cuff. The setup process has you wear the watch while taking a blood pressure reading with a cuff, then you enter the cuff reading into Samsung's software. From there, the software can supposedly take further readings with just the watch hardware.

Traditional automated blood pressure cuffs inflate to restrict blood flow in your arm, and, as the cuff releases the pressure, arterial pulsations are measured with a pressure sensor. There already is a smartwatch with an inflating band that is basically a tiny blood pressure cuff—the Omron HeartGuide—but Samsung's watch doesn't work like that. Instead, the company says, "the device measures blood pressure through pulse wave analysis, which is tracked with the Heart Rate Monitoring sensors. The program then analyzes the relationship between the calibration value and the blood pressure change to determine the blood pressure." It's a PPG-driven blood pressure reading.