Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Robots are everywhere these days. (credit: NBC Universal)

Imagine assembling a crack team of musicologists to compose the perfect Eurovision hit, only to end up with a song that crescendos as a robotic voice urges listeners to “kill the government, kill the system."

That was the experience of a team of Dutch academics who, after an experiment in songwriting using artificial intelligence algorithms, inadvertently created a new musical genre: Eurovision Technofear.

The team—Can AI Kick It—used AI techniques to generate a hit predictor based on the melodies and rhythms of more than 200 classics from the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual celebration of pop music and kitsch. These included Abba’s “Waterloo” (Sweden’s 1974 winner) and Loreen’s “Euphoria” (2012, also Sweden).

Enlarge / Would you pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for cable if your restaurant looked like this right now? (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images )

Everyone is stuck at home, which you would think would mean a lot more TV watching, not less. And up to a point, that's true: millions of us are putting millions of hours into streaming content from Netflix, Disney+, and others. What we aren't doing, though, is watching cable—especially sports, which aren't happening in the bars and restaurants we aren't going to.

Residential customers have been cutting the cord for years, but now commercial subscribers to pay-TV companies have started jumping into the cancellation heap, The Wall Street Journal reports. Restaurants, bars, hotels, and airlines aren't continuing to pay for pricey channel bundles when nobody is coming in, and even if they could, those viewers would have nothing to watch.

Cable operators continue to charge fees for sports programming that currently doesn't exist thanks to a fairly tangled web of rights and contracts. And while some customers could receive rebates down the line, managing cash flow today may be easier if you just cancel the package altogether. That's even truer for small businesses, which are trying to shore up enough resources to survive long-term.

Enlarge / Social distancing in a Czech movie theater. (credit: Gabriel Kuchta / Getty Images)

During the pandemic, Ars has done its best to keep you on top of the most important news. But there are definitely gaps in our coverage: small updates to stories we've covered, or news that we've decided wasn't worth the time to report deeply. Focusing on breaking news also limits our opportunity to provide bigger-picture perspective. To make up for this, we're going to try doing a series of Monday updates to help keep you informed.

Current counts: 4.1 million confirmed cases globally; 1.33 million of those in the United States. 285,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19; 80,000 deaths in the US.

Multiple symptoms

While the focus of attention has been on the respiratory impact of COVID-19, there have been clear indications that the virus attacks other tissues, with intestinal distress being a commonly reported symptom. Over the weekend, the Washington Post looked at all the organs that seem to have problems in people with SARS-CoV-2 infections. The virus triggers a systemic immune response, and it can be difficult to tell which symptoms are a product of this response and which are caused by the virus directly infecting these tissues.

The diminutive gecko is capable of some extraordinary feats of locomotion, zipping along vertical walls with ease and even running short distances across water. Precisely how they accomplish these feats has long interested scientists. A new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reports that geckos' ability to reorient their flexible toes is a major factor, enabling them to realign and adjust to shifts in gravity (load). The work may one day help to improve the design of bio-inspired robots.

This work builds on a 2018 study from the laboratory of University of California, Berkeley biophysicist Robert Full. Geckos are known for being expert climbers, able to stick to any surface thanks to the tiny hair-like structures on the bottoms of their feet. The little lizards can also zip along the surface of water at high speeds to elude predators. They can't do it for very long; the energy expenditure required is too great. But it's amazing that they can do it at all.

As we reported in 2018, those creatures in nature capable of walking on water employ different mechanisms depending on their size. Small, lightweight water striders, for instance, rely entirely on surface tension to stay afloat, while the larger, heavier basilisk lizards employ a slapping motion with their feet that creates pockets of air bubbles to keep from sinking. The standard theoretical calculations set very strict boundaries for how small an animal has to be to use surface tension and how large it needs to be before the surface slapping mechanism is viable.

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Qualcomm's second-best chip for 2020, the Snapdragon 765G, is just barely hitting the market, but that isn't stopping the company from releasing a new and improved version. Today, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 768G, an overclocked version of the 765G.

Qualcomm is promising a 15-percent faster CPU and GPU compared to the Snapdragon 765G. Considering yearly upgrades from Qualcomm are only in the 25-percent range, that's a pretty significant upgrade. The speed boosts are all from faster clocks. The main "Prime" CPU jumps up to 2.8GHz from the 2.4GHz of the 765G. Qualcomm doesn't have official numbers for the Adreno 620 GPU, but we know it used to be 625MHz, so now it should be up around 725MHz.

The Snapdragon 768G isn't just a speed boost. Qualcomm also lists "Support for Adreno Updateable GPU Drivers" and "Bluetooth 5.2" in the spec sheet.

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  The Kia Niro EV is another battery electric vehicle that proves the Korean car industry is on top of its game right now. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

The Kia Niro EV is a battery electric vehicle I've been eager to drive for a while now. Two years ago, I tried the $26,000 Niro, a 40mpg (5.9L/100km) hybrid that charmed my socks off. Last year, it was the Niro PHEV, a plug-in hybrid that beefed up the battery in exchange for not too much more money. Both of those still carried around an internal combustion engine; the $39,090 Niro EV does not. Aside from some subtle design clues, you might not know one from the other, but a blanked off nose grille and bits of blue highlight trim give the game away that this version ditches the ICE.

Instead, a 64kWh lithium-ion battery lives low-down between its axles. Under the hood lies a 201hp (150kW), 291lb-ft (395Nm) permanent magnet synchronous motor that drives the front wheels. If those specs sound familiar, they should be: the Niro EV shares its electric powertrain with another budget BEV from Korea, the Hyundai Kona EV.

As we discussed with the hybrid Niro review, Kia calls it a crossover. Whether you do depends on how sensitive you are to its visual height—as a shape, it screams, "I'm a mini SUV" much more softly than the Kia Seltos we looked at last week. You don't sit that high up—enough for a bit of extra situational awareness, perhaps, but still a couple inches lower than another Kia is-it-a-hatchback-or-a-crossover, the Soul. Pigeon-hole it where you like, that part is probably not as important as whether it fits with one's lifestyle.