Month: October 2020

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After covering Waymo for several years, I've learned to take the company's announcements with a grain of salt.

In 2018, for example, Waymo said it would launch a fully driverless commercial service by the end of the year. Waymo did release a service called Waymo One in December 2018, but it came with a couple of huge asterisks: every vehicle had a safety driver, and the service was only open to a small group of people.

But today Waymo finally seems to be launching the taxi service it promised two years ago: one that's fully driverless and open to the public. Waymo told Ars that the service will initially operate in a 50-square-mile area in the Phoenix suburbs of Chandler, Tempe, and Mesa.

Enlarge / If you can't socially distance, a face mask helps. (credit: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images)

Many countries that controlled their COVID-19 cases in the spring are now seeing rises in infections, raising the prospect that they'll face a second wave of cases, as many epidemiological models had predicted. But in the United States, the number of cases has never dropped to low levels. Instead, it varied between high levels of infection and very high peaks in cases. Why is everything so different in the states?

While there are plenty of possible reasons, a series of new studies essentially blame all the obvious ones: the United States ended social distancing rules too soon, never built up sufficient testing and contact-tracing capabilities, and hasn't adopted habits like mask use that might help substitute for its failures elsewhere. The fact that some of these studies used very different methods to arrive at similar conclusions suggests that those conclusions are likely to hold up as more studies come in.

Too soon

One of the studies, performed by a US-South African team, looked at the relaxation of social distancing rules in the US. Its authors created a list of restrictions for each state and the District of Columbia and tracked the number of COVID-19 deaths in each state for eight weeks prior to the rules being terminated. The number of deaths was used as a proxy for the total number of cases, as the erratic availability of tests made the true infection rate difficult to determine.

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Comcast's cable Internet still has a heavy emphasis on download speeds, as even its gigabit-download service only comes with 35Mbps uploads. But that may not be the case forever, as today Comcast announced a "technical milestone" that can deliver gigabit-plus download and upload speeds over existing cable wires.

Specifically, Comcast said it conducted "a trial delivering 1.25Gbps upload and download speeds over a live production network using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) combined with the latest DOCSIS Technology." Comcast installed the service at a home in Jacksonville, Florida, where "the technology team consistently measured speeds of 1.25 Gbps upload and 1.25Gbps download over the connection."

The speeds were delivered over a hybrid fiber-cable network, with the coaxial cable providing the final connection into the home. That's nothing new—Comcast has been using both fiber and cable for years, but Comcast said the trial benefitted from the company's "ongoing effort to extend fiber further into neighborhoods." Normally, symmetrical gigabit speeds require a fiber-to-the-home connection. But many more homes have cable than fiber, so a symmetrical gigabit technology could be deployed faster if it doesn't require bringing fiber all the way to each building.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of a black hole merger. New simulations suggest that colliding black holes should emit not one, but multiple telltale "chirps," when the collision is observed from the "equator" of the final black hole. (credit: N. Fischer, H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno, SXS Collaboration)

Physicists hunt for merging black holes and other similar cosmic events through the detection of gravitational waves, from which they can glean valuable information, such as the mass of both the precursor black holes and the final, larger black hole that results from the merger. Now a team of scientists has found evidence from supercomputer simulations that those waves may also encode the shape of merging black holes as they settle into their final form, according to a new paper published in the Nature journal Communications Physics.

General relativity predicts that two merging black holes should give off powerful gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime so faint that they're very difficult to detect. The waveforms of those signals serve as an audio fingerprint of the two black holes spiraling inward toward each other and merging in a massive collision event, sending powerful shock waves across spacetime. Physicists look for a telltale "chirp" pattern in the data as the two black holes collide. The new remnant black hole vibrates from the force of that impact, and those vibrations—called a "ringdown" since it is much like the sound of a bell being struck—also produce gravitational waves. Furthermore, the gravitational-wave signals have multiple frequencies, dubbed "overtones," that fade away at different rates (decay), with each tone corresponding to a vibrational frequency of the new black hole.

LIGO detects these gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. (LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana, while a third detector in Italy, Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016.) On September 14, 2015, at 5:51am EDT, both detectors picked up signals within milliseconds of each other for the very first time. 

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Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a handful of early Prime Day deals on various Amazon subscriptions and services. Like most Prime Day offers, you have to be a Prime member to take advantage, but if that's the case you can currently grab six months of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited e-book service for $30 or grab the first year of its Audible Premium Plus audiobook service for $100. Those are $30 and $50 discounts, respectively.

For the unfamiliar, Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat subscription that gives access to a large library of e-books for one monthly fee. It can be used on Kindle e-book readers or just through Amazon's Kindle app. Audible Premium Plus, meanwhile, provides a similar setup for audiobooks, podcasts, and original shows. Amazon recently introduced a similar subscription plan called Audible Plus that costs $8 a month, though that covers a smaller selection of content. This deal also includes 12 book credits upfront, which can be used to purchase a title permanently.

In any event, note that both subscriptions will be set to renew automatically if you take the plunge, so keep an eye out to avoid any unwanted charges. Elsewhere, the Dealmaster also has deals on various first-party Switch games, the PlayStation exclusive Ghost of Tsushima, various iPads, Dell monitors, and more. Have a look at our full rundown below.

Enlarge / Kate Mulgrew speaking on a panel during the 17th annual official Star Trek convention on August 4, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Gabe Ginsberg | Getty Images)

Actress Kate Mulgrew, who played Captain Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager, is returning to the franchise to reprise her role in the upcoming Star Trek: Prodigy animated series, ViacomCBS announced today.

Mulgrew popped in to make made the surprise announcement during the end of a Star Trek panel at this year's all-virtual New York Comic Con. "I have invested every scintilla of my being in Captain Janeway, and I can’t wait to endow her with nuance that I never did before," Mulgrew said. "How thrilling to be able to introduce to these young minds an idea that has elevated the world for decades. To be at the helm again is going to be deeply gratifying in a new way for me."

Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman leveled a sideways blow at the sexism that dogged the first female Star Trek captain when she was cast in the 1990s, saying, "Captain Janeway was held to a different standard than her predecessors. She was asked to embody an inhuman level of perfection in order to be accepted as 'good enough' by the doubters but showed them all what it means to be truly outstanding. We can think of no better captain to inspire the next generation of dreamers on Nickelodeon, than she."