Month: January 2021

Enlarge / The small particle accelerator in Switzerland where, surrounded by farms, the work took place. (credit: Paul Scherrer Institut)

Physicists, who dedicate their lives to studying the topic, don't actually seem to like physics very much, since they're always hoping it's broken. But we'll have to forgive them; finding out that a bit of theory can't possibly explain experimental results is a sign that we probably need a new theory, which is something that would excite any physicist.

In recent years, one of the things that's looked the most broken is a seemingly simple measurement: the charge radius of the proton, which is a measure of its physical size. Measurements made with hydrogen atoms, which have a single electron orbiting a proton, gave us one answer. Measurements where the electron was replaced by a heavier particle called a muon gave us a different answer‐and the two results were incompatible. Lots of effort has gone into eliminating this discrepancy, and it's gotten smaller—but it hasn't gone away.

That's gotten theorists salivating. The Standard Model has no space for these kind of differences between electrons and muons, so could this be a sign that the Standard Model is wrong? The team behind some of the earlier measurements is now back with a new one, this one tracking the behavior a muon orbiting a helium nucleus. The results are consistent with other measurements of helium's charge radius, suggesting there's nothing funny about the muon. So the Standard Model can breathe a sign of relief.

Enlarge / The term "warp drive" actually predates its first use in the long-running Star Trek franchise by 14 years. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

There's no denying the profound influence that the Star Trek franchise has had on our shared popular culture. But it turns out that some of the best-known terms associated with the series—transporter, warp speed, and the famous Prime Directive—actually predate Star Trek: The Original Series by a decade or more. According to Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer and editor of the newly launched online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction (HDSF), the first mention of those terms appeared in 1956, 1952, and 1940, respectively.

The origins of this new online resource date back to 2001, when Sheidlower was working for the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED). "OED has always been a crowdsourced entity," Sheidlower told Ars. "In fact, it was probably the first crowdsourced thing." Back in the late 19th century, OED editors typically placed notices in newspapers and magazines asking people to read various materials and contribute to their coverage of the English language.

While at OED, Sheidlower noted that science fiction was an area that was not very well served by scholarship, partly because science fiction hasn't had much serious literary cache historically. That meant that the most significant (and rare) pulp magazines weren't available in the usual archives, like the Library of Congress or the New York Public Library. So he set up a Science Fiction Citations Project (SFCP) and called on the science fiction community (fans and writers alike) to submit examples of the specialized terminology they found, all curated by moderators.

Enlarge / The Xbox Series X, which launched in November. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Microsoft delivered its earnings report for Q2 2021 yesterday, and the company has continued its sprint of very strong quarters, again driven primarily by Azure and the cloud. But that same old story isn't the only one here: the report also tells us a thing or two about the new Xbox's performance, as well as Windows and Office.

Overall, Microsoft beat analyst expectations. The company's top-level revenue grew 17 percent year over year, reaching $43.08 billion. Analysts had expected $40.18 billion. $14.6 billion of that was from the business segment Microsoft calls "Intelligent Cloud," which most notably includes Azure but also some other professional services like GitHub.

Cloud wasn't the only positive story, though. Personal Computing including Windows, Xbox, and Surface grew 15 percent compared to the previous year to just over $15 billion. That included an 86 percent increase in Xbox hardware sales, as well as a 40 percent increase in Xbox content and surfaces—the former of those includes the launch of the Xbox Series X/S consoles in November, and the latter includes Game Pass, which Microsoft has been pushing hard as a core value proposition for the Xbox game platform.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Z Flip (left) and Galaxy Z Fold 2 (right). Samsung will be selling both of these display styles to competitors now. (credit: Samsung)

A report from ETNews claims that Samsung Display is ready to expand its foldable-display business and start selling to companies other than Samsung Electronics' phone division. Flexible panels were previously exclusive to Samsung's phone division, but the report says Samsung Display plans to sell 1 million panels this year in the open market. ETNews quotes a source saying "multiple Chinese smartphones markets" are working with Samsung and plan to ship devices in the second half of 2021.

A million panels isn't a huge supply compared to the ~350 million smartphones sold annually, but that is about the size of the foldable market in these early days. Canalys' last numbers said 1.74 million foldables were sold from September 2019 to June 2020, which represents the first generation of foldables, before the launch of the Galaxy Z Fold 2. Samsung hopes to see that number grow a lot in 2021, with ETNews reporting Samsung Display will supply 10 million foldable displays to the phone division.

It doesn't sound like the third parties buying from Samsung will have a lot of wiggle room in terms of form factor. According to the report, Samsung is supplying two types of displays: one that folds across the horizontal axis like the Galaxy Z Flip, and one that folds across the vertical axis like the Galaxy Z Fold. The industry isn't quite sure what a flexible display smartphone should look like, and at trade shows, various companies have pitched all sorts of wild form factors. There are concepts for rollable display smartphones, outward-folding displays like the Huawei Mate X, and tri-folding smartphones that fold up like a wallet or a brochure. It doesn't sound like Samsung will be humoring any of those form factors just yet.

Enlarge / Pop goes the bubble... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Last week, an epic short squeeze had driven GameStop stock up to $40 a share, a roughly 1,500 percent increase from its low point nine months ago. Little did anyone know at the time that this would only be the beginning of the story.

As I write this, GameStop's stock price is hovering around $350, up another 775 percent or so since I wrote about this situation eight days ago. By the time you read this, that number may be horribly outdated, as the stock continues to bounce up and down with extreme volatility hour by hour (it dipped down as low as $61 and peaked as high as $159 on Friday).

The current stock price now gives the company a market cap of about $26 billion.

Enlarge / A man walks with an umbrella outside of AT&T corporate headquarters on March 13, 2020, in Dallas, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | Ronald Martinez)

AT&T lost 617,000 customers from DirecTV and its other TV businesses in the final quarter of 2020, capping a year in which it lost nearly 3 million customers in the category, AT&T reported today.

AT&T today also informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has taken "noncash impairment charges of $15.5 billion" related to its ongoing DirecTV debacle. AT&T said the $15.5 billion charges reflect "changes in our management strategy and our evaluation of the domestic video business... including our decision to operate our video business separately from our broadband and legacy telephony operations." This operational decision "required us to identify a separate Video reporting unit and to assess both the recoverability of its long-lived assets and any assigned goodwill for impairment," AT&T said.

AT&T said it also logged "charges of approximately $780 million from the impairment of production and other content inventory at WarnerMedia, with $520 million resulting from the continued shutdown of theaters during the pandemic and the hybrid distribution model for our 2021 film slate."