Month: January 2024

Enlarge (credit: Pocketpair)

I'm whacking at a rock as the sun sets. The game is telling me that I am cold and hungry. But I need to collect enough resources to make a Pal Sphere to catch some Pals so I can assign them to work at my base and gather even more resources.

I am in the very opening minutes of Palworld, a game made by an obscure Japanese indie studio named Pocketpair. Some combination of algorithmic providence and word of mouth helped the game score some impressive achievements in its first Early Access weekend: over 5 million copies sold and nearly 1.3 million concurrent Steam users playing the game, beating out the high-watermarks for big-name games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3. 

The game's success means it has already been through multiple cycles of minor Internet controversy, mainly related to circumstantial evidence that its monster designs may have been created by generative AI or from the actual 3D models used in the Pokémon games.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

An overwhelming majority of handheld devices these days have ambient light sensors built into them. A large percentage of TVs and monitors do, too, and that proportion is growing. The sensors allow devices to automatically adjust the screen brightness based on how light or dark the surroundings are. That, in turn, reduces eye strain and improves power consumption.

New research reveals that embedded ambient light sensors can, under certain conditions, allow website operators, app makers, and others to pry into user actions that until now have been presumed to be private. A proof-of-concept attack coming out of the research, for instance, is able to determine what touch gestures a user is performing on the screen. Gestures including one-finger slides, two-finger scrolls, three-finger pinches, four-finger swipes, and five-finger rotates can all be determined. As screen resolutions and sensors improve, the attack is likely to get better.

Always-on sensors, no permissions required

There are plenty of limitations that prevent the attack as it exists now from being practical or posing an immediate threat. The biggest restrictions: it works only on devices with a large screen, in environments without bright ambient light, and when the screen is displaying certain types of content that are known to the attacker. The technique also can’t reveal the identity of people in front of the screen. The researchers, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, readily acknowledge these constraints but say it’s important for device makers and end users to be aware of the potential threat going forward.

Enlarge / An 18th-century fire engine designed and built by Richard Newsham, purchased in 1728 for St Giles Church, Great Wishford, UK. (credit: Trish Steel/CC BY-SA 2.0)

When Don Lemon, a physicist at Bethel College in Kansas, encountered an 18th-century fire engine designed by English Inventor Richard Newsham on display at the Hall of Flame museum in Phoenix, he was intrigued by its pump mechanism. That curiosity inspired him to team up with fellow physicist Trevor Lipscombe of Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, to examine the underlying fluid mechanics and come up with a simple analytical model. Their analysis, described in a new paper published in the American Journal of Physics, yielded insight into Newsham's innovative design, which incorporated a device known as a "windkessel."

A quick Google search on the "windkessel effect" yields an entry on a physiological term to describe heart-aorta blood delivery, dating back to the man who coined it in 1899: German physiologist Otto Frank. "Windkessel" is German for "wind chamber," but the human circulatory system doesn't have a literal wind chamber, so Frank's use was clearly metaphorical. However, there are earlier English uses of the wind chamber terminology that refer to an airtight chamber attached to a piston-driven water pump to smooth the outflow of water in fire engines like those designed by Newsham, per Lemon and Newsham.

Rudimentary firefighting devices have been around since at least 2 BCE, when Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the first fire pump; it was re-invented in 16th-century Europe. Following the 1666 fire that destroyed much of London, there was a pressing need for more efficient firefighting strategies. This eventually led to the invention of so-called "sucking worm engines": leather hoses attached to manually operated pumps. John Lofting is usually credited with inventing, patenting, and marketing these devices, which pulled water from a reservoir while the hose ("worm") enabled users to pump that water in a supposedly continuous stream, the better to combat fires. But nothing is known of his sucking worms after 1696.

Enlarge / It actually feels intimidating standing next to a vehicle like this GMC Yukon Denali when the hood is level with your shoulder. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

It's hard to escape the fact that American trucks and SUVs have been on a steroid-infused diet for the last few years. The trend was all too apparent at the last auto show we went to—at Chicago in 2020, I felt physically threatened just standing next to some of the products on display by GMC and its competitors. Intuitively, the supersized hood heights on these pickups seem more dangerous to vulnerable road users, but now there's hard data to support that.

It hasn't been a great few years to be a pedestrian in the United States. These most vulnerable road users started being killed by drivers more frequently in 2020, and while some states were able to reverse that trend, others went the other way, making 2022—the last year for which there is full data—the most deadly year on record for US pedestrians.

The problem has multiple causes. For decades, urban planners have prioritized car traffic above everything else, and our built environment favors speeding vehicles at the cost of people trying to cross roads or cycle. But it's not all just the fault of those planners, as the vehicles we drive play a large role, too.