Month: September 2020

Enlarge / Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, in 2019. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

GM CEO Mary Barra on Monday signaled that the company is standing by its deal to produce Nikola's Badger pickup truck.

"The company has worked with a lot of different partners and we’re a very capable team that has done the appropriate diligence," Barra said during a conference with RBC Capital Markets on Monday.

GM is standing by Nikola despite recent revelations that the startup misled the public about the capabilities of its first truck, the Nikola One. At its 2016 unveiling, founder Trevor Milton claimed that the Nikola One "fully functions." But on Monday, Nikola admitted that the company never had a working prototype of the truck. The company acknowledged that a 2018 promotional video showed the truck rolling down a shallow hill—not driving under its own power.

As expected, Apple has unveiled the next model of Apple Watch, dubbed Apple Watch Series 6. As with other recent Apple Watch updates, it's focused primarily on adding new health monitoring features, like blood oxygen monitoring, as well as personal customization options.

The Blood Oxygen app lets user measure their blood oxygen saturation and help keep track of respiratory health, as with asthma symptoms. Apple's also partnered to help develop three new research studies, including early onset warning for COVID-19 infection.

There's also a scattering of new customizable and interactive watch faces and a couple new bands.

Enlarge / Dikembe Mutombo rejects your flawed publication. (credit: DAVID MAXWELL / Getty Images)

Well, that took a while. Five years after Ars' Chris Lee pointed out that the authors of a homeopathy paper were doing little more than offering up "magic" as an explanation for their results, the editors of the journal it was published in have retracted it. The retraction comes over the extensive objections of the paper's authors, who continued to believe their work was solid. But really, the back-and-forth between the editors and authors has gotten bogged down in details that miss the real problem with the original paper.

The work described in the now-retracted paper involved a small clinical trial for depression treatment with three groups of participants. One group received a standard treatment, another a placebo. The third group received a homeopathic remedy—meaning they received water. According to the analysis in the paper, the water was more effective than either the placebo or the standard treatment. But as Chris noted in his original criticism, the authors leap to the conclusion that treating people with water must therefore be effective.

The problem with this is that it ignores some equally viable explanations, such as a statistical fluke in a very small study (only about 45 people per group) or that it was the time spent with the homeopathic practitioner that made the difference, not the water. These are problems with the interpretation of the results rather than with the data. (This probably explains why the paper ended up published by PLOS ONE, where reviewers are asked to simply look at the quality of the data rather than the significance of the results.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

Google Fiber will soon offer 2Gbps service for $100 a month, a package that includes a Wi-Fi 6 router and mesh extender, the Alphabet-owned ISP announced yesterday.

Google fiber-to-the-home service never rolled out as far as many people hoped, but the ISP is still making improvements in cities where it does provide broadband. The new offering is double the download speed of Google Fiber's standard 1Gbps service and costs $30 more. While the new offer is 2Gbps on the download side, it will be 1Gbps for uploads.

In addition to fiber-to-the-home, Google Fiber offers wireless home Internet access in some cities through its Webpass service. Even the Webpass wireless service will get the 2Gbps plan, the announcement said. Webpass' standard speeds today range from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

Enlarge / The Atlantic tropics at 11am ET on Tuesday, September 15.

It is September 15, with more than two months remaining in the Atlantic hurricane season, and there is just one name left in the cupboard for tropical cyclones—Wilfred. And this storm will probably form off the coast of Africa in a day or two.

In some ways, this has been a truly bonkers year for Atlantic hurricane activity, and in other ways it has been fairly pedestrian. But before assessing the climatology, it's worth focusing on the one storm certain to have a direct impact on the United States, Hurricane Sally.

Sally’s flooding

Hurricane Sally has fortunately not intensified during the last 12 hours. Instead, it has weakened some, thanks to wind shear affecting the ability of its low-level and mid-level cores to align perfectly. This wind shear from its west, along with the upwelling of cooler water deeper in the Gulf, should prevent further strengthening today. The National Hurricane Center predicts the storm will have maximum sustained winds of 85mph when it comes ashore Wednesday morning along the Alabama coastline.