Month: April 2022

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Health officials in Wisconsin are investigating what could be the first child death in the US—and the second worldwide—linked to a growing international outbreak of unexplained liver inflammation, aka hepatitis, in children.

In a health alert Wednesday, Wisconsin health officials said they are investigating four cases of unexplained hepatitis in children that match the profile of the outbreak cases. Two of the cases were severe, with one leading to a liver transplant and the other being the fatality.

Wisconsin is at least the fifth US state to report cases of mysterious and severe hepatitis in children. Earlier this month, Alabama health officials initially reported nine cases, which occurred between October 2021 and February 2022. Five of the cases occurred last November in the same large children's hospital in the state, and three of those cases involved acute liver failure.

Enlarge / In the case of the samoyed, selection for physical characteristics produced a dog that sure looks happy. (credit: Zhao Hui)

Many dog breeds are purely about appearance—think poodles and the Pekingese. But plenty of other breeds are devoted to specific tasks, like racing greyhounds. For many of these tasks, physical appearance isn't enough: behavior also matters. Things like herding by sheepdog breeds or fetching by various retrievers.

It's not surprising that many people ascribe these behaviors—and a wide variety of other, less useful ones—to their dog's breed and its underlying genetics. Now, a large team of US-based researchers has looked into whether this belief is accurate. And, with a few exceptions, they find that it's not. With a huge panel of volunteer dog owners, they show that the genetics of dog behavior is built from lots of small, weak influences, and every breed seems to have some members that just don't behave as we expect.

Dogs, meet Darwin

The work is based on a citizen science project called Darwin's Ark. Participants were asked to give details about their dog, including whether it belonged to an established breed (either certified or inferred). They were also asked to fill out short surveys that collectively asked about 117 different behaviors. Overall, they obtained data on some 18,000 dogs, about half of them from purebreds.

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A cryptocurrency platform was recently on the receiving end of one of the biggest distributed denial-of-service attacks ever after threat actors bombarded it with 15.3 million requests, content delivery network Cloudflare said.

DDoS attacks can be measured in several ways, including by the volume of data, the number of packets, or the number of requests sent each second. The current records are 3.4 terabits per second for volumetric DDoSes—which attempt to consume all bandwidth available to the target—and 809 million packets per second, and 17.2 million requests per second. The latter two records measure the power of application-layer attacks, which attempt to exhaust the computing resources of a target’s infrastructure.

Cloudflare's recent DDoS mitigation peaked at 15.3 million requests per second. While still smaller than the record, its power was more considerable because the attack was delivered through HTTPS requests rather than HTTP requests used in the record. Because HTTPS requests are much more compute-intensive than HTTP requests, the latest attack had the potential to put much more strain on the target.

Enlarge / Belkin's SoundForm Elite Hi-Fi smart speaker and wireless charger. (credit: Belkin)

The timeline for over-the-air charging in the home just got murkier. On Wednesday, a press release from Israel-based wireless charging company Wi-Charge detailed plans for a partnership with Belkin to launch a consumer product with Wi-Charge's technology this year. Belkin is now tempering those expectations.

On Wednesday, TechCrunch interviewed Wi-Charge co-founder and Chief Business Officer Ori Mor. The TechCrunch reporter wrote that Wi-Charge "told me it has just inked a mysterious deal with Belkin, and we can expect the first wireless power device to show up from the accessories manufacturer later this year." Mor told the publication that Belkin is being "super aggressive on the timeline."

Mor stoked hopes of domestic cable- and pad-free wireless charging by saying that the Belkin product in the works is "a center-stage consumer product" and that Belkin had chosen "a perfect application." Neither Mor nor Wi-Charge's announcement specified the Belkin product, but the Wi-Charge executive highlighted Belkin's businesses in aftermarket charging accessories, smart home products, and powerline offerings.

Enlarge / Just a few of the Activision franchises that will become Microsoft properties if and when the acquisition is finalized. (credit: Microsoft / Activision)

On Thursday, Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard cleared the second-biggest hurdle remaining in their plan to complete a $68.7 billion acquisition deal: existing shareholder buy-in.

ATVI shareholders have voted overwhelmingly in favor of approving Microsoft's bid to acquire Activision-Blizzard, and a company announcement counted over 98 percent of shareholder votes in the "yes" column.

On a dollars-and-cents level, anyone currently holding on to Activision stock is likely interested in the potential cash windfall coming their way should the deal be completed. Ahead of the shareholder vote on Thursday morning, Activision stock prices were trading around $76 per share, while Microsoft's acquisition terms include a buyout amount of $95 per share.

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Earth Day is April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.

The best gadgets are the ones that find a way to enhance your world of work, play, or even just the daily grind. But there's also another feature that can make a nice piece of tech even better: sustainability.

Continually buying the latest and greatest tech or gadget obviously creates a lot of waste. But thinking critically about the gadgets you buy can play a small part in reversing this trend.

Enlarge / This is our first look at Formula E's Gen3 race car, which debuts next season. (credit: Formula E)

On Thursday, ahead of this weekend's Monaco E-Prix, Formula E finally unveiled its next electric race car. It's called the Gen3 car because it's the third generation to be used by the series, and will be introduced at the start of next season.

Much of the reaction online has been about the car's unconventional looks, at least in terms of what people expect race cars to look like. But then people reacted that way about the Gen2 vehicle as well. The new bodywork is more sustainable than before, with linen and some recycled carbon fiber (from retired Gen2 cars), which Formula E says will reduce the carbon footprint of the Gen3 car by 10 percent.

The new Formula E car is smaller than the previous version, with a narrower track and shorter wheelbase. It's also gone on a diet, cutting the car's mass from Gen2's 903 kg to 760 kg, which is just lighter than a current F1 car, for context. Gen3's weight reduction is coupled with a significant power increase: from 250 kW (335 hp) to 350 kW (469 hp), deployed to the rear wheels. With a top speed of 200 mph (320 km/h), we expect lap times to be significantly faster than before.

Enlarge / A splash image for Nuvia from the company's blog. (credit: Nuvia)

Qualcomm bought a chipmaking startup called Nuvia back in March of 2021, and later that year, the company said it would be using Nuvia's talent and technology to create high-performance custom-designed ARM chips to compete with Apple's processor designs. But if you're waiting for a truly high-performance Windows PC with anything other than an Intel or AMD chip in it, you'll still be waiting for a bit. Qualcomm CEO Christian Amon mentioned during the company's most recent earnings call that its high-performance chips were on track to land in consumer devices "in late 2023."

Qualcomm still plans to sample chips to its partners later in 2022, a timeframe it has mentioned previously and has managed to stick to. A gap between sampling and mass production is typical, giving Qualcomm time to work out bugs and improve chip yields and PC manufacturers more time to design and build finished products that incorporate the chips.

Qualcomm acquired Nuvia based in part on its personnel—the company was founded by former members of Apple's chip design team—and in part on its work designing ARM-based server chips. Chip designs take years to bring to market, so even if Nuvia had already been working on chips destined for consumer laptops when it was acquired, it was always going to be at least a couple of years before we could actually buy them in anything.