Month: November 2020

Enlarge / The ID electric vehicles are the future for Volkswagen. (credit: Volkswagen)

On Wednesday, Volkswagen announced that its forthcoming electric vehicle now has an official range. The US Environmental Protection Agency has confirmed that the ID.4 crossover will travel 250 miles (402km) on a single charge.

At launch, the ID.4 will only be available in two configurations; the 1st Edition, and the ID.4 Pro. Both of these use a single motor-generator unit that drives the rear wheels and an 82kWh lithium-ion battery. However, we believe that only 77kWh is usable. The EPA also rated the ID.4 at a combined 104mpge in the city, 89mpge on the highway, and a combined 97mpge.

For comparison, the extended-range, rear wheel drive Ford Mustang Mach-E we wrote about on Monday, which has an EPA range of 300 miles (483km), comes packed with 98.9kWh. Tesla does not publish the kWh capacity of its battery packs—there's belief that for model year 2021 this will be 82kWh total capacity, like the ID.4—but the EPA has rated the long-range Model Y crossover at 326 miles (524km).

Enlarge / Students have their temperature measured at Daowu middle school in China's Hunan Province, part of the measures adopted to limit the spread of the coronavirus. (credit: Xinhua News Agency)

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, there were a lot of big questions about the basic properties of SARS-CoV-2: how quickly did it spread, could it spread from asymptomatic people, what was the typical mortality rate, and so on. We quickly started getting answers on some of these, but they were all imperfect in various ways. We could trace all the cases in controlled environments, like a cruise ship or aircraft carrier, but these probably wouldn't reflect the virus's spread in more typical communities. Or, we could trace things in real-world communities, but that approach would be far less certain to capture all the cases.

Over time, we've gotten lots of imperfect records, but we've started to build a consensus out of them. The latest example of this—a paper that describes contact tracing all cases that originated in Hunan, China—provides yet another set of measures of the virus's behavior and our attempts to control infection. Papers like this have helped build the consensus on some of the key features of things like asymptomatic spread and the impact of contact tracing, so we thought it was a good chance to step back and look at this latest release.

Trace all the cases

The new work, done by an international team of researchers, focuses on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Hunan Province during the first outbreak after its origins in nearby Hubei. During the period of study, health authorities started by identifying cases largely by symptoms, and they then switched to a massive contact tracing effort and aggressive isolation policies. These efforts shut the outbreak down by early March. And, thanks to them, we have very detailed information on viral cases: 1,178 infected individuals, another 15,648 people they came in contact with, and a total of nearly 20,000 potential exposure events.

• 

  How the RetroArch menu looks on the Xbox Series X.

Modern gaming consoles have exploded with indie games and apps, but one category has always proven an exception: emulators. This week, however, Ars has learned of an apparent loophole in Microsoft's Xbox Store system being used to distribute high-performing emulators on the platform.

Microsoft usually doesn't allow emulators to be published on the Xbox Store, though individual emulators have occasionally (and briefly) sneaked past Microsoft's approval net in the past. Yesterday, we also wrote about how Xbox owners can use the system's built-in Developer Mode as a workaround to install their own copy of the RetroArch emulator suite onto an Xbox Series X/S (or Xbox One).

But this new effort, led by a third-party app developer going by the handle tunip3, exploits an apparent hole in the Xbox app distribution system to let users download a "retail" version of RetroArch directly to the console's main interface, without using Developer Mode.

Enlarge / A sign on the entrance to a pharmacy reads "Covid-19 Vaccine Not Yet Available," November 23, 2020 in Burbank, California. (credit: Getty | Robyn Beck)

Individual states will ultimately decide who will get the first 6.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, which will be distributed based on each state’s population rather than the levels of disease spread or number of high-risk people.

The approach, announced in a press briefing Tuesday, is a departure from earlier plans and reflects the frenzied effort to vaccinate a country of nearly 330 million as quickly as possible.

Top officials for Operation Warp Speed—the federal government’s program to swiftly develop and deliver COVID-19 vaccines and therapies—said at the briefing that the current approach is intended to “keep this simple.” However, the potential for state-by-state variation in early access to vaccines could easily become complicated—and time is ticking for states to get their distribution plans clarified. There’s just a matter of weeks before the Food and Drug Administration may grant an emergency authorization for a vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech.

• 

  In case you haven't already purchased enough copies of these trilogies, Warner Bros. has you covered. [credit: Warner Bros. / Aurich Lawson ]

Ever since its early '00s conclusion, The Lord of the Rings film trilogy has remained the ultimate collision of nerd scrutiny and filmmaking excellence. It's the exact kind of series that fans have hoped to one day see on 4K UHD Blu-ray for pristine color reproduction and utmost image quality.

This year, after countless DVD and Blu-ray releases, box sets, and special editions, Peter Jackson's acclaimed trilogy has finally gotten a home version at four times the previous pixel resolution—and it's as beautiful as I'd hoped for. If previous Blu-ray releases had you anxious about Jackson and Weta Workshop's color-correction philosophy, rest assured that 4K Blu-ray's full HDR canvas has done wonders for all three Tolkien classics.

Oh, and the three Hobbit films have gotten the same treatment, if you're into that sort of thing. (Should image quality be your jam, you might even want to start with the newer trilogy in your 4K Blu-ray player of choice.)

Enlarge / Comcast Xfinity cable television installation truck parked on a street in front of a suburban home, San Ramon, California, May 17, 2018. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection | Gado)

Comcast is raising prices for cable TV and Internet service on January 1, 2021, with price hikes coming both to standard monthly rates and to hidden fees that aren't included in advertised prices.

TV customers are getting an especially raw deal, as Comcast is adding up to $4.50 a month to the "Broadcast TV" fee and $2 to the Regional Sports Network (RSN) fee. That's an increase of up to $78 a year solely from two fees that aren't included in advertised rates.

As in past years, even customers who still are on promotional pricing will not be spared from the Broadcast TV and RSN fee increases. "Customers on promotional pricing will not see that pricing change until the end of the promotion, but the RSN and Broadcast TV fees will increase because they're not part of the promotional pricing," a Comcast spokesperson told Ars.

Enlarge / The iconic spire collapses as smoke and flames engulf the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on April 15, 2019. (credit: Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP via Getty Images)

On April 15, 2019, the world watched in horror as the roof of the famed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire. The blaze spread rapidly, and for several nail-biting hours, it seemed this 850-year-old Gothic masterpiece might be destroyed entirely. Firefighters finally gained the upper hand in the wee hours of the following morning. Almost immediately after the fire had been extinguished, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to rebuild Notre Dame.

But first, the badly damaged structure had to be shored up and stabilized, and interdisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, architects, and master craftspeople assembled to determine the best way to proceed with the restoration. That year-long process—headed up by Chief Architects Philippe Villeneuve and Remi Fromont— is the focus of a new NOVA documentary premiering tonight on PBS. Saving Notre Dame follows various experts as they study the components of the cathedral's iconic structure to puzzle out how best to repair it.

Director Joby Lubman was among those transfixed in horror when the fire broke out, staying up much of the night as the cathedral burned, until it became clear that the structure would ultimately survive, albeit badly damaged. In the office the next morning, "Everyone was a bit shell-shocked talking about it," he told Ars. "And it might sound opportunistic, but I thought, 'The restoration of this icon is going to be quite something to document.'"