Month: July 2020

Enlarge / Bombs away! When approaching a brooding penguin in its nest, it's best to beware of flying feces. Penguin poo can travel as far as 1.34 meters (about 4.4 feet), a new study finds. (credit: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Nature is a brutal place, so during brooding, chinstrap and Adélie penguins are reluctant to leave their eggs unguarded in the nest—even to relieve themselves. But one also does not wish to sully the nest with feces. So instead, a brooding penguin will hunker down, point its rear end away from the nest, lift its tail, and let fly a projectile of poo—thereby ensuring both the safety of the eggs and the cleanliness of the nest.

Back in 2003, two intrepid physicists became fascinated by this behavior and were inspired to calculate the answer to a burning question: just how much pressure can those penguins generate to propel their feces away from the edge of their nests? Answer: about three times more pressure than a human could produce. That paper earned them a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize and lasting glory among those obsessed with pooping penguins. Now, a pair of a Japanese scientists has weighed in on the matter, calculating the projectile trajectory of expelled feces and recalculating the rectal pressure. These scientists reported on their findings in a draft paper they posted to the physics arXiv.

According to Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of the Research Institute of Luminous Organisms in Japan, a co-author of the original 2003 paper, these fecal findings all started with an expedition he led to Antarctica. Although he was collecting samples of local marine worms and tiny terrestrial insects called springworms for further study, he also took copious photographs of the many penguins in the region, which he used in his lectures. During a seminar at Kitasato University in Japan, a young woman asked about a slide showing a penguin brooding on its nest, wondering about the white and pink lines radiating outward. She interpreted them as "decoration" and asked how the penguins made them.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Photographer is my life)

The world came together to build 5G. Now the next-generation wireless technology is pulling the world apart.

The latest version of the 5G technical specifications, expected Friday, adds features for connecting autonomous cars, intelligent factories, and Internet-of-things devices to crazy-fast 5G networks. The blueprints reflect a global effort to develop the technology, with contributions from more than a dozen companies from Europe, the US, and Asia.

And yet, 5G is also pulling nations apart—with the United States and China anchoring the tug-of-war. Tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade, human rights, the handling of COVID-19, and Chinese misinformation are escalating global divisions around the deployment of 5G. A growing number of countries are aligning with either a Western or a Chinese version of the tech.

Enlarge / Charlie Kimball, driver of the #4 TRESIBA / AJ FOYT RACING Chevrolet, races during practice for the NTT IndyCar Series GMR Grand Prix at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on July 03, 2020 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (credit: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Like most of us, 2020 hasn't exactly going to plan for IndyCar driver Charlie Kimball. Here in July, we should already be midway through the season. But the sport only waved the green flag in early June, starting a condensed 14-race season that wraps up—hopefully—in Florida in October. It promises to be hard work for the drivers; with no power steering and high cornering loads, an IndyCar requires more muscles to drive than most race cars.

"The challenge in driving an IndyCar is that, at 200 miles an hour, it produces 5,000 pounds of downforce. I've got 750 horsepower under my right foot, and I have no power steering, no power brake. Plus the adrenaline and the physiological response to competition means that during a race my average heart rate is between 150 and 170 beats per minute," he told Ars when we spoke recently. And don't forget—an IndyCar race can can last well over three hours if we're talking about something like the Indy 500.

The best way to be race-fit is to do a lot of racing, but the extended off-season obviously made that impossible. But Kimball thinks he's better prepared today than he was back in March when the original season-opener was cancelled.

Enlarge / Activating Siri on an Apple HomePod speaker. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Greetings, Arsians! It’s Independence Day in the United States, so the Dealmaster is back with a special Fourth of July edition of their usual tech deals roundup. While today’s holiday isn’t well-known for providing big discounts on tech—the biggest price drops will still come on Black Friday and Cyber Monday—we've found a handful of genuine deals worth considering on video games, tablets, speakers, and more. Below are the best Fourth of July tech deals we could find this year.

Sega Genesis Mini for $40 at Amazon (normally $60)

The Sega Genesis Mini. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

This is tied for the largest discount we’ve seen on Sega’s bite-sized retro console, which we reviewed positively when it launched late last year. Much like the NES Classic and Super NES Classic before it, the Genesis Mini packs a few dozen hits in an adorably tiny replica of the console on which it’s based.

Here, you get 42 pre-loaded and well-emulated games—including favorites like Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage 2, Gunstar Heroes, and Ecco the Dolphin—along with two controllers. Those gamepads aren’t the six-button models Sega launched later in the original console’s life, unfortunately, and there’s no way to “rewind” your progress if you screw up in-game. But at half off the original MSRP, this is a good value for nostalgists or anyone who missed out on the Genesis experience back in the day.

Enlarge / Laying some cable in rural UK. (credit: B4RN, Author provided / The Conversation)

Nestled between Lancashire’s stand-out beauty, the Forest of Bowland, and the breathtaking vistas of the Yorkshire Dales, the serene, postcard-perfect village of Clapham seems far removed from the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the British government announced a nationwide lockdown in mid-March, Clapham went on high alert.

Local residents formed what they dubbed “Clapham COBRA," a volunteer emergency response initiative that aimed to mitigate the negative effects of isolation by sharing information, delivering supplies, and checking in on one another. Like many rural villages, Clapham is fairly geographically isolated and home to an ageing population, with most of its roughly 600 residents over the age of 45. But when it came to confronting extreme isolation, it also has a unique advantage: unlike much of rural England, Clapham boasts one of the best Internet connections in the country—and the locals built it themselves.

Ann Sheridan remembers well the moment she got Broadband for the Rural North, known as “B4RN” (pronounced “barn”), to her farm in Clapham in March 2016. She recounted to me over the phone:

Last month, Bandai Namco announced a special bonus for Switch players who invested in the new Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1. In addition to 10 emulated Namco classics, the game's official Nintendo store page notes it includes "a newly created 8-bit demastered version of Pac-Man Championship Edition" (emphasis added).

That bonus game combines the gameplay of the 2007 Xbox 360 Championship Edition release with the graphics and sound effects of an NES title for a doubly nostalgic dose of retro appreciation. And this was no faux-retro demake either; shortly after release, hackers managed to extract the Pac-Man CE ROM from the Namco Museum collection and found it actually works on real NES hardware.

As it turns out, though, the "newly created" part of the game's promotion isn't quite accurate. Bandai Namco has confirmed to Ars Technica that its much-lauded Championship Edition demake is actually based directly on an obscure NES/Famicom ROMhack created over a decade ago by a Japanese fan going by the handle Coke774.