Month: July 2021

Enlarge / Ole Worm's 17th-century drawing of the Hjarnø Viking ship settings at Kalvestene (1650). (credit: Ole Worm / Public domain)

In 1650, a Danish physician and antiquarian named Ole Worm conducted the first survey of a Viking cremation burial site known as the Kalvestene. Worm created a map of the locations of all the "ship settings"—stones arranged in the shape of vessels—marking the graves. Now, a team of archaeologists has compared its own detailed surveys with Worm's original illustrations and may have discovered two new ship settings that are consistent with that centuries-old survey, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology.

Vikings typically buried their dead within a wooden ship, along with the deceased's material possessions, then covered the grave with dirt to create a raised earthen mound. The Kalvestene, on a small island called Hjarnø, is one of about 25 such sites in Denmark. Even though it's a relatively small grave field, the Kalvestene (literally translated as "the calf stones") was nonetheless well-known in the region. It is first mentioned in the 12th-century treatise Gesta Danorum ("The History of the Danes" or "Deeds of the Danes") by Danish theologian Saxo Grammaticus, and there are many other references throughout medieval and early modern texts.

"It's such an interesting site, and the fact that it is referred to in medieval sources—when other, larger monuments aren't—demonstrates it was a significant site, too," co-author Erin Sebo of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told Ars.

Enlarge / A deserted walk-in COVID-19 mass vaccination site at the Convention Center in downtown Washington, DC, on June 1, 2021. (credit: Getty | ANITA BEATTIE )

The United States is expected to miss the Biden administration's target of having 70 percent of adults vaccinated with at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by July 4. Instead, the country will fall shy of the goal by just a few percentage points.

Currently, about 66.5 percent of adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. In order to reach the target of 70 percent, around 9 million unvaccinated adults—those ages 18 and over—would need to get a vaccine dose over the next three days. Though the number of daily vaccinations has risen slightly in the past week, there were only around 1.37 million vaccine doses administered on June 30, bringing the seven-day average of daily doses administered up to around 945,000. And that number includes second doses and doses given to those between the ages of 12 and 17, who are not included in President Joe Biden's target.

Though we'll only just miss the vaccine goal, new polling data highlights just how hard it is becoming to get even those small slivers of the population vaccinated going forward.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

On June 13, the Hubble Space Telescope took itself offline due to a fault in its payload computer, which manages the telescope's scientific instruments. Since then, NASA has been doing the sort of troubleshooting that is familiar to many of us—with the added pressure that the hardware is irreplaceable, in space, and about the same vintage as a Commodore 64.

So far, controllers have managed to figure out several things that are not at fault, based on attempted fixes that haven't worked. The workers narrowed the problem down, but they haven't pinpointed it. And at this point, the next steps will depend on the precise nature of the problem, so getting a diagnosis is the top priority.

If at first you don’t succeed...

The hardware at issue is part of the payload computer system, which contains a control processor, a communications bus, a memory module, and a processor that formats data and commands so that the controller can "speak" to all the individual science instruments (the system also converts the data that the instruments produce into a standard format for transmission to Earth). There's also a power supply that is supposed to keep everything operating at the proper voltage.

Enlarge / The kind of "everything to charity" slider option shown on the right here will soon be impossible for Humble Bundle customers. (credit: Humble Bundle)

Since the first Humble Indie Bundle launched to much acclaim in 2010, users have been able to allocate up to 100 percent of a bundle's pay-what-you-want purchase price to Humble's partner charities. That option will be going away in mid-July as the company institutes a new 15 to 30 percent minimum cut that will go to the storefront itself.

If that new policy sounds familiar, it's probably because of a test Humble Bundle in April that hid the charity sliders from some customers as a form of early user testing. In light of negative feedback, Humble Bundle apologized for not being "more proactive in communicating the test." But at the time, the company also said it was planning to limit total charity donations to 15 percent of the user-set purchase price in the near future.

By May, though, Humble Bundle backtracked and said it was leaving the charity sliders intact and turning them back on for all customers "while we take more time to review feedback and consider sliders and the importance of customization for purchases on bundle pages in the long term."

Enlarge / The previous generation of the MacBook Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

New MacBook Pro models with Apple's custom-designed silicon and Mini LED displays are coming this fall, according to a new report from Taiwanese news publication DigiTimes.

Last summer, Apple announced that it would transition the entirety of the Mac product lineup from Intel's CPUs to Apple's own, custom-designed silicon within a two-year timeframe. The first Macs to make the move were the MacBook Air and the low-end configurations of the Mac mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Earlier this year, Apple introduced a 24-inch iMac as well. All of these Macs had the M1, the first Apple Silicon SoC for Macs. (The M1 was also used in the most recent refresh of the iPad Pro.)

But all those Macs have something in common: they're on the low end, with limitations like fewer ports than the more expensive systems the company makes. All the higher-end Macs still have Intel chips. Given that WWDC 2021 (which took place in early June) marked one year since Apple first announced the transition, a lot of people expected some of those high-end Macs to move to Apple Silicon at that event—us included. But it didn't happen. Some supply chain sources seemed to indicate that Mini LED display production was a key bottleneck.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | ericsphotography)

A federal judge has blocked Florida's new social media law because it violates the First Amendment rights of tech companies that moderate user content on their online platforms. The state law would make it illegal for large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban politicians and impose other restrictions on the tech companies, but the judge's order means it cannot be enforced while an industry lawsuit against Florida is pending. The law would have taken effect today if not for the injunction.

The preliminary-injunction order issued by US District Judge Robert Hinkle yesterday called Florida's law "an instance of burning the house to roast a pig."

"If a preliminary injunction is not issued, the plaintiffs' members will sometimes be compelled to speak and will sometimes be forbidden from speaking, all in violation of their editorial judgment and the First Amendment," Hinkle wrote. The tech companies would sometimes be forbidden from speaking because the Florida law's definition of censorship includes not only deleting content, but also "post[ing] an addendum to any content or material posted by a user."

Enlarge / Berners-Lee reflecting on the creation of the World Wide Web. (credit: Courtesy Sotheby's)

Two weeks ago, World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee sent an NFT of the web’s original source code to the auction block with a starting bid of just $1,000. Yesterday, Sotheby’s announced that the crypto asset sold for $5.4 million. The sum makes Berners-Lee’s work one of the priciest NFTs of all time.

The digital package included not just the source code but also a letter from Berners-Lee reflecting on the creation of the web, some original HTML documents, an SVG “poster” of thousands of lines of code, and a 30-minute visualization of the code being typed on a screen. 

But there’s a twist. An eagle-eyed researcher pointed out on Twitter that the animation initially posted on the Sotheby’s site had errors in the code, possibly introduced when the person making the video fed the Objective-C code through an app or web service to produce the typing effect in the animation. Instead of angle brackets that are present in the code (< and >), the HTML codes for the symbols (&lt; and &gt;) appeared instead. On the poster, which was made by a Python script created by Berners-Lee, the brackets appear correct. Presumably, they are also correct in the code itself.