Month: April 2023

Enlarge / The Jefferson Lab particle accelerator, where the work took place. Electrons in the oval at top center are sent to different underground target rooms (circles at lower right). (credit: Jefferson Lab)

If you ask how much an object like a bicycle weighs, there's a simple answer. But if you ask where the mass of a bicycle is, things get more complex. The bike has a lot of parts—some of which move—that all have different volumes, shapes, and densities, so its mass is distributed irregularly around its form.

To an extent, this is similar to the question of where the mass of a proton is. The proton is a collection of quarks and gluons moving at relativistic speeds around a central point. Figuring out where its mass lives would be difficult even without the fact that the analogy with bicycles completely falls apart due to one awkward fact: A proton weighs much more than its component quarks, and the gluons that hold the quarks together are massless. In fact, the mass of the particles involved is somewhat irrelevant. "If you do calculations where you set the quark mass to zero, the proton is pretty much the same thing," physicist Sylvester Johannes Joosten told Ars.

Instead, much of the proton's mass comes from the incredibly high energy density created by the gluons' strong force interactions. So, to understand the mass of a proton, we have to understand what its gluons are up to. Which, given that they're massless and have no charge, is extremely difficult to do. But some experimental work has created a value for the proton's mass radius, which describes the distribution of mass within the particle. And it turns out the value is significantly different from the proton's charge radius.

Enlarge / Amazon's entry-level Kindle doesn't have all the features of the pricier Kindle Paperwhite, but it's a good choice for those who want a quality e-reader for as little money as possible. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Today's best deals feature Amazon's two best entry-level tablets, the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite, as well as Apple's MacBook Air and Mac Mini, all matching their record-low prices. The second-generation Apple Watch SE is also on sale, matching its lowest tracked price and adding even more value to the best fitness tracker for most people. As always, we use tracking sites like CamelCamelCamel and Keepa to compare current sale prices to the typical street price to ensure the sales we find are good deals, too.

Apple Mac mini with M2 Pro for $1,249 ($1,300)

This Mac mini is among the highest-end minis from Apple, and therefore it seldom sees discounts. Equipped with 512GB of storage, 16GB RAM, and Apple's M2 Pro system-on-a-chip, this model is well-equipped to satisfy creatives. As we noted in our review, it fills the gap well between the lowest-end Mac Studio and the previous-generation M1-equipped Mac mini. The $50 discount matches the lowest price we've tracked on the M2 Pro-equipped Mac mini.

Open up the MacBook Air, and it looks quite a bit like the 14-inch MacBook Pro from this angle. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple MacBook Air for $1,049 ($1,200)

The MacBook Air is the best Mac laptop for most types of users. Especially with this M2 chip with eight CPU cores, it has closed the performance gap for most users, and it's more powerful than some desktop computers.

Enlarge / Google's Nearby Share can quickly send a photo to your computer. (credit: Google)

Google is bringing Android's "Nearby Share" feature to the desktop with a new Windows app. Google says the new program will make sharing between Windows and Android easier, letting you send files over in just a few clicks and taps.

Google's Nearby Share has been built into Android for a few years now and allows you to locally transfer files over Wi-Fi, with the initial device-pairing happening over Bluetooth. Nearby share has been kind of tough to use in real life, since most people share files over the Internet. And for personal use, most people only have one Android device, their phone, so there is nothing to share files with. A ton of Android users have Windows PCs, though, so for many this will be the first time Nearby Share has an actual use.

Using the app is easy. Just download it from the Android website and click a few "next" buttons in the installer. You need a 64-bit Windows PC (not ARM, ironically) with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. From there you can easily share by dragging and dropping on Windows or by using the Android "share" button and hitting "Nearby Share." You have the option of signing in to the Windows app or not. If you don't you'll need to manually approve every transaction on both the phone and PC. If you sign in, you can set up auto-accept from yourself, anyone in your contacts, or the probably not advisable "everyone" option.

Enlarge (credit: Western Digital)

Users of the Western Digital My Cloud service are fuming after a network breach has locked them out of their data for more than 24 hours and has put company-handled information into the hands of currently unknown hackers.

The inability to access data stored in My Cloud was reported on social media by multiple users, including this one, who indicated the outage started sometime on Saturday. Since then, the number of users (and their anxiety levels) have only ratcheted up.

Sounds like ransomware

By early morning California time on Monday, Western Digital issued a release saying that a week ago Sunday the company learned that an “unauthorized third party gained access to a number of the Company’s systems.” The release added: “​​Based on the investigation to date, the Company believes the unauthorized party obtained certain data from its systems and is working to understand the nature and scope of that data.”

Is there anything better than a good superhero origin story? There's something about watching an ordinary person, struggling with self-doubt, discover their unique hidden strengths and own their power that never fails to capture our imaginations. It's the bread-and-butter of the superhero genre, and we're getting yet another origin story this August, when Warner Bros. releases Blue Beetle, focused on the latest incarnation of the classic comic book character. The first trailer just dropped, and it looks like a fun, family-centric summer film.

The Blue Beetle character first appeared in DC Comics in 1939. Back then, he was a police officer who gained his superpowers by ingesting something called Vitamin 2X, giving him a distinct advantage when fighting crime. The character was rebooted in 1964 by Charlton Comics, in which an archaeologist named Dan Garrett acquired mystical abilities from an ancient Egyptian scarab. The mantle passed to Garrett's student, Ted Kord (and to DC Comics), in 1966. The scarab element also featured in the 2006 retconned Blue Beetle, revealed to be an alien artifact. The scarab bonded with a teenager named Jamie Reyes, and the protective extraterrestrial armor Reyes acquired as a result led to him joining forces with the Teen Titans and Justice League, among others.

Reyes is the Blue Beetle in this new film from the DC Extended Universe, played by Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai). It was originally intended for release on HBO Max, but Warner Bros. and DC Films decided to add the film to their slate of upcoming theatrical releases instead. New DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn has said Blue Beetle won't be connected to prior films in the DCEU, so if it's a box office success, it could be incorporated into the new franchise. Director Angel Manuel Soto decided not to follow one of the classic storylines, opting instead to cherrypick his favorite moments from the character's entire run.

Enlarge / Tim Hortons is a coffee and donut chain popular with Canadians, Canadian-adjacent regions of the US, and statistics professors. (credit: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

All you had to do, if you really wanted some free coffee and doughnuts, was wake up around 3 am each day and click on some virtual Tim Hortons coffee cups.

It was 3:16 am, actually, that gave a University of Waterloo professor a roughly 80 percent win rate on Tim Hortons' Roll Up To Win game. That wasn't as good as the 98 percent Michael Wallace clocked in early 2020, when he discovered a quirk in the coffee chain's prize distribution scheme, but it still made for great lessons for his students.

"I really like the fact that you can take data from the real world, run it through some math, and find patterns that describe what you see," Wallace told his university's news service. "It's a kind of magic."

Enlarge / Tim Hortons is a coffee and donut chain popular with Canadians, Canadian-adjacent regions of the US, and statistics professors. (credit: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

All you had to do, if you really wanted some free coffee and doughnuts, was wake up around 3 am each day and click on some virtual Tim Hortons coffee cups.

It was 3:16 am, actually, that gave a University of Waterloo professor a roughly 80 percent win rate on Tim Hortons' Roll Up To Win game. That wasn't as good as the 98 percent Michael Wallace clocked in early 2020, when he discovered a quirk in the coffee chain's prize distribution scheme, but it still made for great lessons for his students.

"I really like the fact that you can take data from the real world, run it through some math, and find patterns that describe what you see," Wallace told his university's news service. "It's a kind of magic."

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk at an opening event for Tesla's Gigafactory on March 22, 2022, in Gruenheide, southeast of Berlin. (credit: Getty Images | Patrick Pleul)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk violated US labor law by threatening to take stock options away from employees who join a union, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The appeals court said the US National Labor Relations Board can enforce its order that requires Musk to delete the tweet.

Musk's tweet in May 2018 is still online and said in part, "Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?" Musk issued the tweet amid a union campaign at a Tesla vehicle manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. Tesla factories are still not unionized.

A federal administrative law judge ruled against Tesla and Musk in 2019, finding among other things that Musk violated labor law with the tweet. The NLRB affirmed that and most other portions of the judge's ruling in 2021. Tesla challenged in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which sided with the NLRB in its ruling on Friday: