Month: June 2020

Enlarge / New research suggests we really can describe black holes as holograms: they have two dimensions, in which gravity disappears, but they reproduce an object in three dimensions. (credit: Gerd Altmann for PIxabay)

Nearly 30 years ago, theoretical physicists introduced the "holographic principle," a mind-bending theory that our three-dimensional universe is actually a hologram. Now physicists are applying that same principle to black holes, arguing in a new paper published in Physical Review X that a black hole's information is contained within a two-dimensional surface, which is able to reproduce an image of the black hole in three dimensions—just like the holograms we see in everyday life.

Black holes as described by general relativity are simple objects. All you need to describe them mathematically is their mass and their spin, plus their electric charge. So there would be no noticeable change if you threw something into a black hole—nothing that would provide a clue as to what that object might have been. That information is lost.

But problems arise when quantum gravity enters the picture, because the rules of quantum mechanics hold that information can never be destroyed. And in quantum mechanics, black holes are incredibly complex objects and thus should contain a great deal of information. As we reported previously, Jacob Bekenstein realized in 1974 that black holes also have a temperature. Stephen Hawking tried to prove him wrong but wound up proving him right instead, concluding that black holes therefore had to produce some kind of thermal radiation.

Enlarge / A bottle and pills of Hydroxychloroquine. US President Donald Trump announced May 18 he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for almost two weeks as a preventative measure against COVID-19. (credit: Getty | George Frey)

The Lancet medical journal on Thursday announced the retraction of a dubious study suggesting that the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine significantly increased the risk of death and heart-rhythm complications in hospitalized COVID-19 patients worldwide.

Three of the study’s four authors made the decision to retract the study after they were unable to independently verify the data used for their analysis. The data was provided by an obscure data analytics company, Surgisphere, which is run by the fourth author of the study, Sapan S Desai, who did not appear to agree to the retraction.

The three retracting authors—Mandeep R. Mehra of Harvard, Frank Ruschitzka of University Hospital Zurich, and Amit Patel of the University of Utah—said in their retraction notice that Surgisphere refused to hand over its full dataset and an audit report of its servers for an independent peer review. “Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources,” the wrote.

Draft league is probably nothing like the Pokémon you're familiar with. It's not training up a team of your favorite Pokémon to beat Team Rocket. It's not even like an official competitive tournament run by The Pokémon Company.

And it all started with a bumper sticker.

Steve "Magnitude" Wood is the YouTuber and sports fanatic who came up with the concept of combining his two passions. "I'm a huge Milwaukee Bucks basketball fan," he tells Ars Technica. "And I thought the Pokémon Sawsbuck looks a lot like the Milwaukee Bucks logo. One of my friends was a graphic designer, so she made me a sticker, and I got it printed and put it on my car."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | RichLegg)

The coronavirus pandemic caused big ISPs to put data caps on hold for a few months, but one small ISP is going a big step further and canceling the arbitrary monthly limits permanently. Antietam Broadband, which serves Washington County in Maryland, announced Friday that it "has permanently removed broadband data usage caps for all customers," retroactive to mid-March when the company first temporarily suspended data-cap overage fees.

The decision to permanently drop the cap was made partly because of "learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic as more people worked and learned remotely," Antietam explained. "During this period customers moved into broadband packages that more accurately reflected their broadband needs." Like most other ISPs, Antietam charges different prices based on speed tiers as measured in bits per second, with Antietam's advertised download speeds ranging up to 1Gbps.

"These are uncertain times. We felt a need to give customers as much certainty over their bill as possible," Antietam President Brian Lynch said in the press release. "Eliminating data usage caps means that customers will know the exact amount of their broadband bill every month."

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by Sony's "Days of Play" sale, a now-annual summer sale that includes deals on a wide range of PlayStation games, subscriptions, and accessories. Sony technically kicked off the event on Wednesday, but the company says the sale will last through June 17, with discounts available at its own digital stores and various third-party retailers.

We've rounded up the highlights of the sale below. In general, the offerings aren't quite as diverse as what we saw in last year's sale; there are no discounts on consoles or controllers this time around. But the event does bring a number of worthwhile PS4 games down to $10, including God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Bloodborne, and The Last of Us Remastered, among many others. The "Game of the Year" edition of Marvel's Spider-Man dropping to $20 is another highlight, while more recent worthy games like Dreams, Death Stranding, and MLB The Show 20 are anywhere from $10 to $20 off their usual street price.

Outside of games, one-year subscriptions to Sony's PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services are both down to $42. This isn't the largest discount we've seen for the former, but it's still a good drop from its standard $60, and the service remains a must for playing the vast majority of PS4 games online. PlayStation Now is less essential, but its library of games has grown to the point of being a decent value—albeit not on the level of Xbox Game Pass—and it lets you download hundreds of those games alongside the usual cloud streaming. That deal price is the lowest we've tracked to date.

Enlarge / Nelson Piquet Jr is one of the drivers featured in a new documentary about Formula E. (credit: Steven Tee/LAT/Formula E)

You might think a film about the world of Formula E racing would focus on the electric car technology being battle-tested by the sport. But And We Go Green—a new documentary now streaming on Hulu—is a much more emotional story about the sport. It takes about two and a half minutes for someone to drop the first F-bomb. We're in Hong Kong, and the electric racing cars of Formula E are lined up and waiting for the signal that starts the race. The only problem: those lights aren't working, and series boss Alejandro Agag wants to know "who the fuck is responsible" for messing up. That should make it clear that this is an unvarnished look at the sport.

The film follows this upstart race series as it goes about its fourth season, and more particularly some of the intense, sometimes long-standing rivalries within it. And I bring up the profanity—which starts with Agag but continues aplenty from everyone else—because so often that kind of thing is smoothed over by anodyne corporate messaging. But Formula E has always been a little more freewheeling than a series like Formula 1.

Unvarnished doesn't mean unpolished, though. And We Go Green is as much of a visual feast as any recent motorsports documentary, and if you think you detect the influence of legendary Director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin), good guess.

Enlarge / Squeeze the magical juice from some sugarcane, and this is what's left. (credit: Harsha K R)

While most plastics have generally been produced from petroleum, that’s not an inherent requirement. Chemistry is chemistry, and it’s possible to grow many of the hydrocarbons we need. But crops are the things we are best at growing, and plastics made from crops can have problems. They tend to cost more, and unless we're willing to accept impacts on our ability to grow food, pathways to bioplastics have to be pretty clever about their starting materials.

A new study led by Durham University’s Long Jiang, Abigail Gonzalez-Diaz, and Janie Ling-Chin lays out a pathway to making plastic bottles from waste organic material and CO₂ captured from power plants. A thorough analysis of the economics shows this process could even be cost competitive for making things like plastic bottles.

The process could start with something like the leftover plant material from sugarcane pressing. After a few reaction steps, which include the addition of some captured CO₂ and some ethylene glycol produced from corn plants, you’d end up with a plastic polymer called polyethylene furandicarboxylate—otherwise known as PEF. Functionally, it’s similar to the PET plastic used for water and soda bottles, denoted by the number 1 recycling symbol.

Enlarge / The 2017 Roku Ultra, which will still be supported by the latest Hulu app. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Several older Roku devices will lose access to the latest Hulu app on June 24, 2020, the subscription-based streaming service has announced with an update to its support pages. Users of the affected devices will see messages like "Hulu is no longer supported on this device," or simply "your user session has expired," according to Hulu documentation.

Affected devices include Roku Streaming Stick models 3420 or earlier, as well as Roku Streaming Player models 2400 to 3100. Roku device owners can navigate to the About panel under Settings within the Roku interface to determine which model they have.

The sticks and players were already limited to using the "classic" Hulu app instead of the modern one. The classic app has a number of limitations—most notably the lack of live TV support. However, with this change, it appears that users of these models will not be able to access Hulu in any form after the end-of-support date.