Month: July 2022

Enlarge / A translucent "helmet" on the bigclaw snapping shrimp’s head shelters its brain from the shock waves generated by its claw-snapping. (credit: Kingston et al., Current Biology)

The tiny-but-mighty pistol shrimp can snap its claws with sufficient force to produce a shock wave to stun its prey. So how come the shrimp appears immune to its sonic weapon? Scientists have concluded that the shrimp is protected by a tiny clear helmet that protects the creature from any significant neural damage by damping the shock waves, according to a recent paper published in the journal Current Biology.

The snapping shrimp, aka the pistol shrimp, is one of the loudest creatures in the ocean, along with the sperm whale and beluga whale. When enough of these shrimp snap at once, the noise can dominate the coastal ocean soundscape, sometimes confusing sonar instruments. The source of that snap: an impressive set of asymmetrically sized claws; the larger of the two produces the snap. As I wrote at Gizmodo in 2015:

Each snapping sound also produces a powerful shock wave with sufficient oomph to stun or even kill a small fish (the shrimp’s typical prey).... That shock wave in turn produces collapsing bubbles that emit a barely-visible flash of light. It’s a rare natural example of the phenomenon known as sonoluminescence: zap a liquid with sound, create some bubbles, and when those bubbles collapse (as bubbles inevitably do), you get sort bursts of light. I guess you could call it “shrimpoluminescence.”

Scientists believe that the snapping is used for communication, as well as for hunting. A shrimp on the prowl will hide in a burrow or similar obscured spot, extending antennae to detect any passing fish. When it does, the shrimp emerges from its hiding place, pulls back its claw, and lets loose with a powerful snap, producing the deadly shock wave. It can then pull the stunned prey back into the burrow to feed.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Patrick Pleul/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB)

Twitter filed its expected lawsuit against Elon Musk today, demanding that he complete the $44 billion purchase of the social network.

"Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests," the lawsuit said. "Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he—unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law—is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away."

The suit accused Musk of "a long list of material contractual breaches by Musk that have cast a pall over Twitter and its business" and asks the court to "compel consummation of the merger upon satisfaction of the few outstanding conditions." The lawsuit points out that in the purchase agreement, "Twitter negotiated for itself a robust right to demand specific performance of the agreement's terms that encompassed the right to compel defendants to close the deal, and ensured that Musk personally was bound by that provision (among others)."

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Earlier this month, Google sent a request to the Federal Election Commission seeking an advisory opinion on the potential launch of a pilot program that would allow political committees to bypass spam filters and instead deliver political emails to the primary inboxes of Gmail users. During a public commenting period that's still ongoing, most people commenting have expressed staunch opposition for various reasons that they're hoping the FEC will consider.

"Hard pass," wrote a commenter called Katie H. "Please do not allow Google to open up Pandora's Box on the people by allowing campaign/political emails to bypass spam filters."

Out of 48 comments submitted as of July 11, only two commenters voiced support so far for Google's pilot program, which seeks to deliver more unsolicited political emails to Gmail users instead of marking them as spam. The rest of the commenters opposed the program, raising a range of concerns, including the potential for the policy to degrade user experience, introduce security risks, and even possibly unfairly influence future elections.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Earlier this month, Google sent a request to the Federal Election Commission seeking an advisory opinion on the potential launch of a pilot program that would allow political committees to bypass spam filters and instead deliver political emails to the primary inboxes of Gmail users. During a public commenting period that's still ongoing, most people commenting have expressed staunch opposition for various reasons that they're hoping the FEC will consider.

"Hard pass," wrote a commenter called Katie H. "Please do not allow Google to open up Pandora's Box on the people by allowing campaign/political emails to bypass spam filters."

Out of 48 comments submitted as of July 11, only two commenters voiced support so far for Google's pilot program, which seeks to deliver more unsolicited political emails to Gmail users instead of marking them as spam. The rest of the commenters opposed the program, raising a range of concerns, including the potential for the policy to degrade user experience, introduce security risks, and even possibly unfairly influence future elections.

Enlarge / Is GameStop's "power to the players" NFT marketplace bringing any power to GameStop itself?

GameStop's new NFT marketplace—which finally launched in beta on Monday after months of teases and hype among some retail traders—has brought the game retailer about $45,000 in transaction fees in its first 24 hours, according to an Ars-exclusive analysis. While that revenue is a minimal drop in the bucket for a company of GameStop's size, it also means GameStop is now a surprisingly large player in the quickly shrinking market for NFTs.

Ars' analysis is based on publicly available data from the Gamestop NFT marketplace webpage. So far, that marketplace is sorted into nearly 54,000 distinct NFTs (many of which are available in multiple limited "editions") that are all part of one of about 250 collections. The combined, displayed "total volume" for those NFTs—which includes both initial sales by the creator and subsequent sales by secondhand purchasers—totaled about 1,835 ethereum (ETH) as of Tuesday afternoon (roughly $1.98 million at current ETH market prices).

GameStop takes a 2.25 percent marketplace fee on all those transactions (broadly in line with competing marketplaces), which translates to about $44,500 at current market rates. The rest of that sales volume goes to the people selling the NFTs, after crypto network fees and a variable creator royalty fee are taken into account.

Enlarge / Artist's interpretation of Sonic fans' impatience over a recent game's lack of updates and patches. (credit: Sega / Sam Machkovech)

Three weeks after its launch on modern consoles and PCs, the retro gaming collection Sonic Origins has continued coming under fire from various fans and critics, each uncovering issues that range from nitpicky to noticeable. Without any formal response from Sega on if or when the collection may receive a patch, one group of fans took it upon themselves to deliver their own mod on PC—only to then confirm that they were immediately halting and deleting their efforts.

The mod in question, dubbed BetterOrigins, was poised to correct apparently unfaithful elements found in the Sonic Origins versions of classic Sonic The Hedgehog games. In particular, the mod had already swapped art and sprites due to fact that some of them had been lifted from different games. (As an example, the "skidding" animation in Sonic Origins' version of Sonic 1 was actually lifted from Sonic CD, which the mod corrected.)

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  Screengrabs of the original mod update post, which have since been wiped.

But as the group of apparently three modders made progress on various art swaps and patches, the team ran at Sonic speeds into a brick wall: The game's "script" access was closed off. "After really digging into the files for this game, its [sic] become way clearer that this game is absolute shit," a modder by the name of XanmanP wrote in a post that has since been deleted. Until Sega opens up fan access to the game's scripts, he wrote, "there's not a whole lot we can 'fix' without just redoing sprites." (XanmanP did not immediately answer Ars Technica's questions about what this script access could look like.)

Enlarge / Artist's rendering of a T cell. (credit: Getty Images)

One of the adaptive immune system’s primary jobs is to recognize foreign substances in our bodies and unceremoniously reject them by eliciting inflammation. So the fact that it lets about 100 grams of assorted foreign animal and plant proteins pass through our digestive systems every single day with nary a peep is curious—food allergies are an exception.

The most common explanation given for this “oral tolerance” is that immune cells that react to proteins in food are generated but are then preferentially killed or somehow inactivated. But most of the experiments leading to this conclusion were done with transgenic mice that have a severely depleted T cell repertoire and thus lack a normal immune response. New work published in Nature uses mice with a normal, functioning immune system to recheck this result.

The mice were reared on a gluten-free diet and then challenged with a portion of one of the gluten proteins called gliadin—a protein that is known to elicit a T cell response.