Month: November 2020

Enlarge / Hurricane Eta on November 3 of this year. (credit: NASA EO)

Lots of attention is given to the effects of climate change on tropical cyclones, much of it focusing on effects that are dead obvious. Projections indicate increased intensity among the strongest storms, for example, and increases in rainfall and storm surge are unavoidable consequences of warmer air holding more moisture and sea level rise, respectively.

But a new study by Lin Li and Pinaki Chakraborty at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University focuses on a less-than-obvious question: what happens to hurricanes after landfall in a warming world? Once a storm moves over land, it loses the water vapor from warm ocean waters that fuel it, so it rapidly weakens. The total damage done depends in part on how quickly it weakens.

The researchers examined a data set of all North Atlantic landfalling hurricanes between 1967 and 2018. The primary metric they were interested in was the rate the hurricane lost strength over the first 24 hours after landfall. Strength “decays” on an exponential curve, so they boiled this down to a mathematical parameter for decay time.

Enlarge / Photo illustration of the Twitch logo on a smartphone. (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Trutschel)

Twitch today apologized to users for how it handled a copyright crackdown last month, but the site still told streamers that they will have to stop using copyrighted recordings to avoid further takedown notices. Twitch—the popular game-streaming site acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014—was forced to take more aggressive action on copyright by record labels. But Twitch's mishandling of the crackdown left users in a state of confusion about which videos violated copyrights and about how users can comply with the rules without simply deleting all their past videos.

In a blog post today, Twitch said users have been asking how they can stream "without having to worry about getting DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notifications from music use." The answer is that users need to stop using recorded music on their streams if they don't own the copyrights and delete old videos that have copyrighted music in them.

Twitch explained:

(video link)

The renewed war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagoro-Karabakh region has captured the attention of military strategists worldwide, including the United States, because of the degree to which drones have changed the battlefield. While the wide-open, rugged terrain of the region has played a role, Turkish- and Israeli-built remotely piloted vehicles are dominating the battlefield, causing strategists to think a lot about land-battle tactics—and about the value of tanks in the 21st century.

Azerbaijan has been using a number of weapons systems from both Turkey and Israel, including the Israeli Harop (seen in this Azerbaijani pop music video) and Orbiter-1k drones. Both are "loitering munitions"—i.e., drones that carry warheads and crash into their targets.

Enlarge / A copy of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one of the most important scientific works ever written, housed at the Science Museum Library and Archives in Swindon, England. (credit: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Image)

Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (known by its shortened Latin name, the Principia) is a massive, three-volume 17th-century treatise that is one of the most influential scientific books ever written. The famed 18th-century mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange described it as "the greatest production of a human mind." Science historians have long debated just how many copies were produced during the book's first print run.

Thanks to two intrepid researchers who spent more than a decade scouring records and archives across the globe, it now seems there could be more than twice as many surviving first editions as the long-accepted prior best estimates. They described the findings of their census in a new paper published in the journal Annals of Science.

As a young man, Newton attended Cambridge University, earning his undergraduate degree in science and math in 1665. His graduate studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the plague in Cambridge. Students and professors alike fled the city, and Newton returned home for the ensuing year, until the danger had passed. In that one year, he laid the groundwork for revolutionary ideas that would change the course of scientific history.

Enlarge / Medical staff members treat a patient suffering from coronavirus in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at the United Memorial Medical Center (UMMC) on November 10, 2020, in Houston, Texas. (credit: Getty | Go Nakamura)

More people in the United States are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 than ever before in the pandemic, and hospitals in numerous states are on the brink of being overwhelmed.

Around 62,000 people in the US are now in the hospital with the pandemic coronavirus, topping all previous peaks in hospitalizations, which were around 60,000, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The surge is intense and diffuse. Hospitalizations are up 40 percent over the last two weeks alone, and they’re rising in every region of the country.

Seventeen states are now at record-breaking numbers of hospitalizations, with states in the Midwest hit the hardest. In North Dakota, hospitals are at 100 percent capacity. On Monday, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum announced that the state has amended a health order to now allow nurses who are infected with the coronavirus to keep working in hospitals as long as they show no symptoms. The move is aimed at alleviating strain on hospital staff who are being overwhelmed by the influx of patients. The governor added that the state is also looking to hire emergency medical technicians and paramedics to run COVID-19 testing operations.

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  Loading manuals.playstation.com from the PS5 menu brings up this set of "How to navigate" instructions.

Officially, the PlayStation 5 doesn't include a Web browser, marking an apparent software downgrade from the PlayStation 4. But Ars has discovered the PS5 does actually include a limited, hidden Web browsing interface that you can use to load up generic websites on your TV in a pinch.

Getting in

The easiest way to get into the PS5 Web browser is to go to the system settings and load up the User's Guide. Unlike most other informational menus on the system, this one loads up inside a Web browser that points to the live URL at manuals.playstation.net.

If you visit that address from a standard PC or mobile Web browser, the site gives an error message. But if you access it from the PS5 menu, you see a picture explaining "how to navigate this user's guide" with the DualSense controller, as seen above.