Month: November 2020

Enlarge / A DirecTV satellite dish seen outside a bar in Portland, Oregon, in October 2019. (credit: Getty Images | hapabapa)

AT&T has announced another round of price hikes for DirecTV satellite and U-verse TV services, with monthly prices set to rise up to $9 starting January 17, 2021.

"Due to increased programming costs, we're adjusting the price of our video packages," AT&T said in a notice on its website. "Periodically, TV network owners increase the fees they charge DirecTV for the right to broadcast their movies, shows, and sporting events." Of course, AT&T itself determines some of these programming prices because it owns Time Warner.

A $5 monthly increase is coming to DirecTV's 160-channel "Entertainment" package, which currently has a standard rate of $97 a month. A $7 monthly increase is coming to the 185-channel Choice package, currently at $115 a month. A $9 increase is coming to both the 250-channel Ultimate package (currently $142) and the 330-channel Premier package (currently $197).

Enlarge / An aerial view of the Arecibo facility, showing the increasingly fragile cables supporting the instrument platform, as well as the gash caused when one of those cables failed. (credit: University of Central Florida)

Today, the National Science Foundation announced that its famed Arecibo radio observatory would be shut down. Built into a hilltop in Puerto Rico, the main dish of the observatory is over 300 meters across, and its massive size has made it a feature in popular culture ranging from James Bond movies to video games. But despite a long history of scientific contributions, the observatory has been struggling for funding for over a decade, and two cables that support it have failed this year, leaving it in a precarious state.

After engineering studies determined there was no way to repair the hardware without putting workers at risk, the NSF made the decision to shut the observatory down.

More than a big dish

While the sheer scale of the main dish at Arecibo grabbed the most attention, the dish was purely a reflector. The actual business end of the telescope, where radio waves were sensed, was an instrument platform suspended high above it by cables strung from three towers. The instrument platform held a receiver that could be moved to different locations above the disk, giving it the ability to resolve signals from more directions than its fixed dish might suggest.

Enlarge / Women in traditional Mosuo clothing. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In most societies, there are very easy to quantify differences between men and women. Women tend to live longer but earn less, for example. Historically, there has been a strong tendency to ascribe those differences to biology. But most societies treat women very differently, making disentangling biological and societal factors a challenge. This week, a couple of papers apply some interesting approaches to teasing the two apart.

In one, researchers looked at a matrilineal society in China to explore gender norms' impact on health. In the second, a detailed survey explored how internalized expectations can influence engineering career success in the US.

A healthier society

The work on China focused on women's health. Since women outlive men, you might expect that they're generally healthy. You'd be wrong; women tend to have a higher disease burden than men do. To get a hint as to why that might be the case, the researchers looked at an ethnic group called the Mosuo, who occupy an area near Tibet, on the border between Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. Some members of the Mosuo society have adopted patriarchal practices, with males as the head of the household. But others have women as the head of household, while their husbands continue to live with the families they grew up in. Children are raised by their mothers and remain part of her household.

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  Embossed text, 'cause it's fancy. [credit: Kyle Orland ]

After over a year of being barred from iOS, Google's Stadia game-streaming service will soon be available on the mobile platform as a progressive Web application running through a browser, Google announced today. Testing for the mobile Web version of the service will begin this week, with a wider rollout planned for "several weeks from now."

The move to a Web app for iOS support gets around the onerous restrictions Apple recently placed on game-streaming apps distributed through the iOS App Store. Such apps would need to submit each individual game for review by Apple for listing in a distinct App Store product page.

Xbox Chief Phil Spencer said last month that Microsoft would be using the same Web-based workaround to get its Project xCloud streaming service on iOS sometime in 2021. Amazon's Luna streaming service has support for iOS via a Web interface.