Month: October 2023

Enlarge / Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work using attosecond pulses to study the dynamics of electrons inside atoms. (credit: Niklas Elmehed/Nobel Prize Outreach)

Electrons move and change energies at such a blistering speed that physicists long believed it would never be possible to capture their dynamics, even with the fastest lasers. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists who used ultrafast pulses of light to do just that with a technique known as attosecond spectroscopy. Per the citation, Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huillier "have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms."

It's well known that to capture detailed images of, say, a hummingbird mid-flight, one needs to use exposure times that are shorter than a single beat of the hummingbird's wings. But atoms in a molecule move in billionths of a second, aka femtoseconds; electrons move and change energies faster, between one and a few hundred attoseconds. (An attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second.) If you sent a flash of light from one end of a room to the other, it would take 10 billion attoseconds. Physicists had long believed that a femtosecond was the fundamental limit for producing short bursts of light—at least with existing technology—and thus capturing the behavior of electrons in atoms was beyond reach.

That changed over the last 20 years. “The ability to generate attoseconds of light has opened the door on an extremely tiny timescale, and it also opened the door to the world of electrons,” said Eva Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee for physics, at the press conference announcing the prize. “Back in 1925, Werner Heisenberg argued that this world cannot be seen. Thanks to attosecond physics, this is now starting to change.” The work is expected to have a significant impact on electronics, where understanding and controlling how electrons behave in materials is critical to achieving faster electronics, as well as in medical diagnostics, which requires being able to identify different molecules.

Enlarge / In addition to craters, Mercury's terrain features faults generated by the planet's cooling. (credit: NASA)

The planet Mercury may be hot, but it appears to be cooling down. That's the conclusion of a new study that looked for the kinds of features on Mercury that can form as the surfaces of planets contract due to cooling. These vertical faults, called "graben," are not only common across the planet's surface but appear to have formed within the last few hundred million years—and possibly much more recently.

All of which suggests that the stresses caused by a cooling planet are still playing out on the Solar System's smallest non-dwarf planet.

Crunch time

The process of building a planet necessarily generates a lot of heat as impactors of various sizes deliver both matter and energy to the growing planet. The radioactive elements they deliver can also heat the planet's interior. For the rocky planets of our Solar System, this heat means a differentiated interior, with layers of lighter rocks on top of a liquid core.

Enlarge / A cropped portion of the AI-generated version of Hanks that the actor shared on his Instagram feed. (credit: Tom Hanks)

News of AI deepfakes spread quickly when you're Tom Hanks. On Sunday, the actor posted a warning on Instagram about an unauthorized AI-generated version of himself being used to sell a dental plan. Hanks' warning spread in the media, including The New York Times. The next day, CBS anchor Gayle King warned of a similar scheme using her likeness to sell a weight-loss product. The now widely reported incidents have raised new concerns about the use of AI in digital media.

"BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it," wrote Hanks on his Instagram feed. Similarly, King shared an AI-augmented video with the words "Fake Video" stamped across it, stating, "I've never heard of this product or used it! Please don't be fooled by these AI videos."

Also on Monday, YouTube celebrity MrBeast posted on social media network X about a similar scam that features a modified video of him with manipulated speech and lip movements promoting a fraudulent iPhone 15 giveaway. "Lots of people are getting this deepfake scam ad of me," he wrote. "Are social media platforms ready to handle the rise of AI deepfakes? This is a serious problem."

Enlarge / Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella arrives at federal court on October 2, 2023 in Washington, DC. Nadella is testifying in the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.'s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business. (credit: Drew Angerer / Staff | Getty Images North America)

On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella showed up at the Google antitrust trial to back the Department of Justice's argument that "Google used unfair tactics"—most significantly, default search contracts—to block opportunities for search competitors like Bing, The Wall Street Journal reported.

A Microsoft spokesperson provided Ars with a transcript of Nadella's morning testimony. It excludes approximately an hour's worth of testimony from the afternoon session (that transcript is not yet available). But it includes about an hour of questioning from DOJ lawyer Adam Severt, during which Nadella said that due to Google's grip on mobile providers and browsers' default search placements, the idea that users have real choices when selecting a search engine is "bogus."

However, Nadella's efforts to back the DOJ seemingly required that the CEO walk back some of his earliest remarks hyping AI-powered Bing as potentially giving Microsoft a long-sought-after competitive advantage over Google.

Enlarge / Unsupported Mac models like this 2017 iMac can install macOS Sonoma using the OpenCore Legacy Patcher project. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That's the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions.

Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release.

But OCLP supports some Macs better than others, and generally, the older your Mac is, the more problems you will have.

Enlarge / Netflix's pirate series, One Piece, recently debuted on the platform. (credit: Netflix)

Netflix, one of the only profitable TV streaming services (along with Hulu), is reportedly planning on increasing the monthly price of its ad-free subscription, The Wall Street Journal reported today. However, the price bump reportedly won't come for "a few months," as Netflix is waiting for the actors' and writers' strike to formally end, the publication said.

WSJ said "people familiar with the matter" informed it that Netflix will probably launch its price hike in the US and Canada. WSJ couldn't confirm how much prices will increase or when the increases will start. A representative for Netflix could not immediately be reached by Ars Technica for comment. Netflix declined to comment to the Journal.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is voting on a tentative agreement with TV and movie studios this week, while the Screen Actors Guild is undergoing negotiations.

Enlarge / 18-karat rose gold Apple Watches on display, ready for you to invest more than five figures into their inevitably limited lifespan as a functional timekeeping device. (credit: Getty Images)

When purchasing a luxury watch, you might consider it more of an heirloom than a simple timekeeper. You can pass a well-maintained Submariner down to your progeny. You can generally sell a Nomos or an Omega long after you purchase it, often at a profit. Or you can simply keep it on your wrist as a reminder of the inexorable march of time, the importance of punctuality, and the genius of so many tiny mechanical pieces working together toward one simple but crucial function.

This will not happen with the first Apple Watch Edition models, despite Jony Ive's strong desire to enter that realm. As of September 30, Apple moved the original Apple Watch models to its "obsolete" list, at least internally. That includes the "Edition" models that ranged from $10,000 to $17,000 at their April 2015 launch. When a product is "obsolete," Apple no longer offers parts, repairs, or other replacement services for it.