Month: April 2021

Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Colombia’s rainforest looked very different 66 million years ago. At present, the humid and biodiverse ecosystem is jam-packed with plants and is covered in a thick, light-blocking canopy of leaves and branches. Notably, there are no dinosaurs. But prior to the dinosaurs going away with the Chicxulub impact, signaling the end of the Cretaceous Period, things looked very different. The area’s plant coverage was relatively sparse, and a bevvy of conifers called it home.

Using the fossilized remains of plants, a team of researchers studied the past of the rainforest and how the asteroid gave rise to the rainforests of today. The study, published in Science on April 1, was led by scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama and supported by scientists at the Negaunee Institute for Plant Conservation Science and Action at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

“Forests disappeared because of the ecological catastrophe... and then, the returning vegetation was mostly dominated by flowering plants,” said Mónica Carvalho, first author and joint postdoctoral fellow at STRI and at the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, in an interview with Ars.

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  This image is practically worthless. But an NFT representing the same 3D model just sold for $18,000.

The corporate entity managing the Atari brand name (which has only the slightest connection to the original company known as Atari at this point) is the latest company to get in on the speculative mania surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Atari SA's first NFT auction, which concluded Wednesday night on OpenSea, raised 47.582 ether (about $92,000 USD at current prices) through the sale of 10 cryptographically signed NFTs, each representing a 3D model of an Atari 2600 Centipede cartridge. The cheapest of the 10 NFTs sold for 3.25 ether (about $6,300) while the most expensive (numbered "1 of 30" in its digital stats, even though only 10 have sold so far) went for a whopping 9.4395 ether (about $18,300).

A separate set of 100 NFTs representing red Centipede cartridges also sold on the Harmony One marketplace for the equivalent of $180.78 each, raising an additional $18,000 in just one and a half hours, according to a spokesperson.

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  Doctor Johanna Xu with a newly manufactured structural battery cell in Chalmers’ composite lab, which she shows to professor Leif Asp. [credit: Marcus Folino ]

Over the next few years, the batteries that go into electric vehicles are going to get cheap enough that an EV should cost no more than an equivalent-sized vehicle with an internal combustion engine. But those EVs are still going to weigh more than their gas-powered counterparts—particularly if the market insists on longer and longer range estimates—with the battery pack contributing 20-25 percent of the total mass of the vehicle.

But there is a solution: turn some of the car's structural components into batteries themselves. Do that, and your battery weight effectively vanishes because regardless of powertrain, every vehicle still needs structural components to hold it together. It's an approach that groups around the world have been pursuing for some time now, and the idea was neatly explained by Volvo's chief technology officer, Henrik Green, when Ars spoke with him in early March:

What we have learned… just to take an example: "How do you integrate the most efficiently a battery cell into a car?" Well, if you do it in a traditional way, you put the cell into the box, call it the module; you put a number of modules into a box, you call that the pack. You put the pack into a vehicle and then you have a standardized solution and you can scale it for 10 years and 10 manufacturing slots.

But in essence, that's a quite inefficient solution in terms of weight and space, etc. So here you could really go deeper, and how would you directly integrate the cells into a body and get rid of these modules and packs and stuff in between? That is the challenge that we are working with in future generations, and that will change how you fundamentally build cars. You might have thought that time of changing that would have ended, but it has just been reborn.

Tesla is known to be working on designing new battery modules that also work as structural elements, but the California automaker is fashioning those structural modules out of traditional cylindrical cells. There's a more elegant approach to the idea, though, and a group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden led by professor Leif Asp has just made a bit of a breakthrough in that regard, making each component of the battery out of materials that work structurally as well as electrically.

Enlarge / Images of Real Water's "alkalized" products, which the FDA now says you should not drink or use. (credit: FDA)

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday admonished Nevada-based company Real Water for being uncooperative in a multi-state health investigation linked to its “alkalized” water products. The company is accused of poisoning its customers, causing acute liver failure and other serious health problems in adults, children, and pets.

On March 16, the FDA and the Southern Nevada Health District announced that they were investigating cases of acute non-viral hepatitis (resulting in acute liver failure) in five infants and children, all of whom consumed the company’s alkaline water. The water was the only common link between the five children and infants. Since then, customers have filed several lawsuits making similar claims, including three Californian women who filed a federal lawsuit in Nevada March 22 seeking class-action status.

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  Box of Real Water bottles. [credit: FDA ]

In an investigation update Wednesday, the FDA said its work has been hamstrung by Real Water’s failure to hand over critical records for two of its product facilities. Real Water has also failed to notify its distributors of the March 24 recall of all its water products, which are still being offered for sale by online retailers, the FDA noted. In addition, the FDA reported that the company is still promoting its products on social media, despite the recall and serious health claims.

Enlarge (credit: Siriporn Kaenseeya / EyeEm / Getty)

An Arizona bill to expand payment options in Apple's and Google's app stores has failed in the state Senate, the law's sponsor has told the Verge. The legislation narrowly passed the Arizona House last month.

Rep. Regina Cobb, a Republican, told the Verge that she thought she had the votes to pass the legislation in the Senate. But then, according to Cobb, Apple and Google "hired almost every lobbyist in town" to kill the legislation.

“We thought we had the votes before we went to the committee," Cobb told the Verge. "And then we heard that the votes weren’t there and they weren’t going to take the time to put it up."

Enlarge (credit: LineageOS)

The Android community's biggest aftermarket distribution, LineageOS, is now up and running with Android 11. The new release is called "LineageOS 18.1," and builds for over 60 smartphones are hitting official servers for brands like OnePlus, Google, Xiaomi, Sony, Motorola, LG, and even some old Samsung devices.

New Lineage OS 18.1 contains, of course, all the Android 11 features from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), like a new notification panel with a persistent media player, floating "bubble" notifications, one-time permissions, new emojis, a new autofill system for the keyboard, and more. All the Lineage apps now support dark mode, and a fork of the FOSS "Etar" calendar app replaces what Lineage calls the "stagnant and largely unmaintained" AOSP calendar. The FOSS app SeedVault has been included as a built-in backup solution, and Lineage's screen recorder and music apps have been revamped.

Google releases the Android source code as "AOSP," but Google's repo is a big pile of code that isn't device-ready. LineageOS takes AOSP code and whips it into shippable shape, patching up any missing components with its own code and adding some of its own apps in place of Google's proprietary apps (though you can flash Google's apps on top of Lineage, too), and baking several customization and mod-friendly features into the OS. Everything Lineage does is free and open source.