Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | thomasd007)

Helen Marie Plourde, an 86-year-old Minnesota resident, just spent over a month without home Internet and phone service because CenturyLink failed to fix a problem that began in July.

CenturyLink didn't show up for scheduled appointments at her home in Saint Paul, Plourde told Ars in a phone interview on Thursday, August 24, one day after the latest missed service appointment. Another appointment was scheduled for August 28, but she was skeptical that it would actually happen.

"I'll believe it when I see them," Plourde said.

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  The new midrange Roomba has two bins, one wet and one dry. [credit: iRobot ]

Roomba is bringing the combo mop and vacuum feature to its cheaper robot vacuums with the new Roomba Combo j5+  and Combo i5+. Roomba's last combo bot was the Roomba Combo j7+, which would automatically switch between mopping and vacuuming with a swing-arm setup. These cheaper bots can both mop and vacuum, but you'll need to manually configure them for either task.

The idea here is kind of clever: the robot comes with two bins, one that sucks in dust and one that acts as a water tank with a mop pad on the bottom. You'll need to switch out the bin depending on which cleaning mode you want (the iRobot marketing team has come up with the phrase "swap and mop"). Other combo bots need to balance water tank size and dust bin size, but here, you get water and dust bins that are free to take up as much room as possible. Roombas have small bin areas to begin with, though, so that works out to a 210 mL water tank and 360 mL dust bin.

The vacuum part seems to be a bog-standard Roomba, complete with a charging base that can empty the dust bin. The mop part doesn't have a water sprayer or seemingly any connection to the rest of the robot at all. There's also no fancy water change system or scrubbing feature. It's just a self-contained water tank that keeps a rag wet and drags it along the floor. It almost feels like you could retrofit the water tank onto a normal Roomba, but on this unit, of course, all the vacuum functions turn off when you're mopping.

The flowering shrubs known as witch hazel are perhaps best known for their use in folk medicine and as a natural topical skin ointment. But the seeds are also of interest to biophysicists and engineers because witch hazel capsules can shoot them out at incredibly fast speeds, thanks to a built-in spring-loaded mechanism. Researchers at Duke University have figured out why—contrary to expectations—the seed launch speeds are roughly the same, even though seeds across species can have substantially different masses. They described their results in a new paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

“People ask me all the time, ‘Why are you looking at seed-shooting plants?’” said co-author Justin Jorge, a graduate student at Duke. “It’s the weirdness of their springs. When we think of springy things, we typically think of rubber bands, coils, or archery bows. But in biology, we have all these weird, complex shapes. Perhaps there are some benefits to these shapes that can be used to improve the design of synthetic springs, such as those used in small jumping robots, but first we need to understand how these biological springs work.”

According to Jorge and his co-author, advisor Sheila Patek, there are countless examples of biological springs in nature spanning a wide range of size scales and functions, including froghoppers, cannonball fungus, and carnivorous bladderwort plant traps—all of which use those mechanisms to launch projectiles. Trap-jaw ants use spring actuation to launch their mandibles to capture prey, while grasshoppers use their springy legs to kick away predators. Both species, as well as the froghopper, can also use the mechanism to launch their bodies. And flowering plants like the witch hazel use spring actuation to launch seeds out of their fruits.

A pile of Starfield discs sits on a car seat in a video posted by Harris. (credit: Dillan Harris / Streamable)

A Tennessee man has been arrested and charged with a felony after leaking early footage of Bethesda's upcoming Starfield and attempting to sell shrinkwrapped copies days before the game's highly anticipated launch.

According to a Shelby County, Tennessee, arrest record, Darin Harris was booked for felony and misdemeanor counts of theft of property, as well as possession of controlled substances, late on August 24. An incident report obtained by IGN reportedly lists the stolen property in question as "Video Game: Microsoft Starfield unreleased game."

The arrest came days after the YouTube account "DHavenShadow," which apparently belongs to Harris, posted roughly 40 minutes of Starfield gameplay (seemingly captured from a cell phone pointed at a TV) to YouTube and other social media channels on August 22 (a spoiler-free listing for one such video can be seen in this Internet Archive capture). While the video was quickly taken down from YouTube by a ZeniMax Media copyright claim, copies of the same content spread across the Internet quicker than they could be taken down. The footage reportedly got over 1 million views on Imgur alone before being taken down there as well.