Month: January 2022

The shell of a water/glycerol gas marble (bubble) remains liquid and spherical even after 101 days, and it reacts as a liquid film when punctured. These human-made bubbles could be used to create stable foams. (credit: A. Roux et al., 2022)

Blowing soap bubbles never fails to delight one's inner child, perhaps because they are intrinsically ephemeral, bursting after just a few minutes. Now, French physicists have succeeded in creating "everlasting bubbles" out of plastic particles, glycerol, and water, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids. The longest bubble they built survived for a whopping 465 days.

Bubbles have long fascinated physicists. For instance, French physicists in 2016 worked out a theoretical model for the exact mechanism for how soap bubbles form when jets of air hit a soapy film. The researchers found that bubbles only formed above a certain speed, which in turn depends on the width of the jet of air.

In 2018, we reported on how mathematicians at New York University's Applied Math Lab had fine-tuned the method for blowing the perfect bubble based on a series of experiments with thin, soapy films. The mathematicians concluded that it's best to use a circular wand with a 1.5-inch (3.8 cm) perimeter and gently blow at a consistent 2.7 inches per second (6.9 cm/s). Blow at higher speeds and the bubble will burst. If you use a smaller or larger wand, the same thing will happen.

Enlarge / The Fraggles are back, clap, clap. And they're a blast to watch again, clap, clap. (credit: Jim Henson Company / Apple TV+)

The video-streaming world has long suffered from content fragmentation, and modern-day Muppet access is no exception. If you want to revel in all things Jim Henson, you'll need subscriptions to no less than three streamers: Disney+ (which has the most Henson films and series), HBO Max (which has a lock on Sesame Street), and Apple TV+. In a fairer cosmos, a unified Henson+ service would let fans feast upon the entire Muppet-verse like giddy Cookie Monsters. Alas.

Those streaming services don't just divvy up classic Muppet content, either. They each feature brand-new series from the Jim Henson Company, either with newly invented characters or old favorites reliving their glory days. Keeping up with all that content has been tricky, but we at Ars have done our best, always with the hope that one of the new properties will deliver a good-enough mix of nostalgia, production values, and freshness.

This week, Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock nails that exact combination and breathes new life into the formerly HBO-exclusive universe.

Enlarge / Product photography of the Google Glass wearable. Project Iris won't look like this; it is said to more closely resemble ski goggles than casual glasses. (credit: Google)

Google engineers are developing a new augmented reality (AR) headset, according to a report by The Verge citing two people familiar with the project.

Google hopes to ship the product—codenamed "Project Iris"—sometime in 2024, but that date is likely not set in stone.

Like Apple's rumored mixed reality glasses, Project Iris would be wireless and use external cameras to send an augmented image of the real world to you. And like one of the devices Apple has reportedly worked on, the glasses would leave the heavy-duty graphics processing to an external computer. In Google's case, the device will rely on cloud computing instead of nearby hardware.

Enlarge / The dome of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Phil Roeder)

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 16-6 today to advance an antitrust bill that would prevent Big Tech firms from giving their own services preferential treatment.

The bill attempts to limit the ability of dominant firms to “unfairly preference” their own products or services in a way that would harm competition. For example, Apple and Google could not rank their own apps higher than competitors’ on app stores or in searches. With five Republican senators voting alongside Democrats, the bill has a reasonable chance of passing once it hits the Senate floor. A similar bill has been introduced in the House.

“We haven’t meaningfully updated our antitrust laws since the birth of the Internet,” said Senate co-sponsor Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in a committee hearing today. “We have to look at this differently than just startup companies in a garage. That’s not what they are anymore.”

Enlarge / Cloned piglets that are engineered to be useful for organ transplants to humans. (credit: Getty Images / Staff)

Last week, when we reported on the first pig-to-human heart transplant, we complained that the commercial company behind the transplant wasn't more forthcoming about the genetic engineering that had converted the pig into a viable donor.

However, we know now much more about porcine genetic engineering thanks to a new paper on a different, more cautious test procedure. The work described in the paper is a transplant of pig kidneys into a brain-dead recipient, meant to pave the way for trials in viable humans. The publication that describes the work contains extensive details on the genetic engineering used to ensure that the pig tissue would survive in a human host.

A test case

According to The New York Times, the recipient was rendered brain-dead by a motorcycle accident. He had signed up as an organ donor and was kept alive while his organs were screened; his next of kin gave informed consent to his body's use in the experimental procedure.

Enlarge / Google Pay continues to circle the drain. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Google Pay is bringing on a new executive who it hopes will turn the beleaguered division around. Bloomberg reports that Arnold Goldberg, PayPal's chief product architect, will now run Google Pay after the former payments chief, Caesar Sengupta, left in April.

Of the Google services that survived 2021, Google Pay had one of the most brutal years of any product. In March, Google Pay rolled out a completely new app in the US, replacing the old Google Pay app that had existed for years.

This new app was originally developed for India and is dramatically different from the old Google Pay app used in the US. For starters, the new app switched to using a phone number for your identity instead of a Google account, which meant that a ton of features US users were accustomed to were no longer supported. Indian consumers are used to phone number identity thanks to apps like WhatsApp, and the limitations are not a big deal for them thanks to smartphones being many consumers' only device.