Month: January 2021

A rotational deceleration experiment with egg yolk, using an egg scrambler and measuring the soft matter deformation, to find possible answers about concussions. (video link)

A growing number of professional football players have been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), likely the result of suffering repeated concussions or similar repetitive brain trauma over the course of their careers. It's also common in other high-contact sports like boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing, and ice hockey. We might find clues about the underlying physics by studying the deformation of egg yolks, according to a new paper published in The Physics of Fluids. This in turn could one day lead to better prevention of such trauma.

Egg yolk submerged in liquid egg white encased in a hard shell is an example of what physicists call "soft matter in a liquid environment." Other examples include the red blood cells that flow through our circulatory systems and our brains, surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid (CBR) inside a hard skull.  How much a type of soft matter deforms in response to external impacts is a key feature, according to Villanova University physicist Qianhong Wu and his co-authors on this latest study. They point to red blood cells as an example. It's the ability of red blood cells to change shape under stress ("erythrocyte deformability") that lets them squeeze through tiny capillaries, for instance, and also triggers the spleen to remove red blood cells whose size, shape, and overall deformability have been too greatly altered.

Enlarge / Waymo CEO John Krafcik speaks in 2018. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Many Tesla fans view the electric carmaker as a world leader in self-driving technology. CEO Elon Musk himself has repeatedly claimed that the company is less than two years away from perfecting fully self-driving technology.

But in an interview with Germany's Manager magazine, Waymo CEO John Krafcik dismissed Tesla as a Waymo competitor and argued that Tesla's current strategy was unlikely to ever produce a fully self-driving system.

"For us, Tesla is not a competitor at all," Krafcik said. "We manufacture a completely autonomous driving system. Tesla is an automaker that is developing a really good driver assistance system."

Enlarge (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

The corporate-behemoth organism that is Blizzard Entertainment, which exists in a symbiotic state next to megaton game publisher Activision, became blurrier on Friday with a surprise announcement: It has absorbed a game studio within the Activision family, effective immediately.

Vicarious Visions, a longtime game studio that was acquired by Activision in 2005, has been shuffled out of the Activision ecosystem and pumped directly into Blizzard's veins. In a statement offered to GamesIndustry.biz, Blizzard confirmed that the 200+ staff at Vicarious Vision has been shifted to a "long-term support" team focused entirely on "existing Blizzard games and initiatives." The news also includes a mild shuffle of leadership, sending current Vicarious studio head Jen Oneal to the Blizzard leadership board as executive vice president of development.

The statement did not clarify exactly when this arrangement began, nor which of Blizzard's "existing" projects would receive Vicarious staff support in particular. (Blizzard representatives did not immediately respond to Ars Technica's questions about the deal.) As of press time, neither Blizzard nor Vicarious have published details or terms about the deal on their respective blogs or social media channels. In fact, Vicarious Visions' website is currently offline altogether.

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  The Transporter-1 mission lifts off on Sunday morning. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

Sunday 10:15am ET Update: At the opening of its launch window, a Falcon 9 rocket took off from Florida on Sunday morning and made a flawless ascent into space. After dropping off the second stage in a parking orbit, the first stage returned to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the 73rd time a Falcon 9 rocket first stage has been recovered.

Meanwhile, the second stage began to circularize its orbit before it was scheduled to begin a satellite deployment sequence at 59 minutes into flight. The final 10 satellites are expected to be deployed at 1 hour and 31 minutes following liftoff.

Sunday 8:30am ET Update: SpaceX has readied its Transporter-1 mission for a second launch attempt on Sunday morning, from Florida. Engineers are confident enough in weather at the opening of the launch window, at 10am ET (16:00UTC), that they have proceeded with loading the first and second stages with propellant.

Enlarge / If your phone knows where you are, the feds can, too. (credit: Luis Alvarez | Getty Images)

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides military intelligence to the Department of Defense, confirmed in a memo that it purchases "commercially available" smartphone location data to gather information that would otherwise require use of a search warrant.

The DIA "currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones," the agency wrote in a memo (PDF) to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), first obtained by the New York Times.

The Supreme Court held in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling that the government needs an actual search warrant to collect an individual's cell-site location data. "When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in his opinion. "The retrospective quality of the data here gives police access to a category of information otherwise unknowable."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

A home security technician has admitted he repeatedly broke into cameras he installed and viewed customers engaging in sex and other intimate acts.

Telesforo Aviles, a 35-year-old former employee of home and small office security company ADT, said that over a five-year period, he accessed the cameras of roughly 200 customer accounts on more than 9,600 occasions—all without the permission or knowledge of customers. He said he took note of homes with women he found attractive and then viewed their cameras for sexual gratification. He said he watched nude women and couples as they had sex.

Aviles made the admissions Thursday in US District Court for the District of Northern Texas, where he pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud and one count of invasive visual recording. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.