Month: December 2024

GMX hat im November 2024 einen kostenlosen Tarif eingeführt. Nun streicht der Anbieter die Gebühr für den Wechsel des eSIM-Profils. (GMX, E-Mail)

Derzeit ist ungewiss, wie es mit der Filmreihe James Bond weitergeht. Die Produzenten und Amazon liegen im Streit. (James Bond, Amazon)

When you want to move an object from one place to another, you usually grab it with your hands or a robotic arm. But what if you want to move something you cannot touch without damaging or disrupting it, like a droplet of liquid? A solution proposed by a team of scientists at the North Carolina State University is a metamaterial that can change shape in response to magnetic fields.

This material had to be easily deformable to change shape, yet at the same time stiff enough to bear loads. “That seemed contradictory—how do you make something that is stiff and deformable at once?” says Jie Yin, a mechanical metamaterials researcher at NC State. His team did it with ferromagnetic elastomers, kirigami cuts, balloons, and magnets.

Refreshable Braille display

“There is not much research on using magnets to manipulate non-magnetic objects. It is very, very hard,” says Yinding Chi, another NC State researcher and lead author of the study. The idea Chi and his colleagues came up with could be compared to a refreshable Braille display. They imagined a surface dotted with domes that could rise, turn, or depress on demand, allowing it to dynamically form relief-like images or move in a pattern similar to waves in the ocean. Objects would then move on these surfaces like they were carried by waves. “This way, you can move various objects without using grippers,” Yin says.

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Das chinesische Unternehmen Deepseek hat mit Deepseek-V3 ein neues Large Language Model (LLM) veröffentlicht, das bisherige Open-Source-Modelle übertrifft. (KI, API)

Wegen des Verdachts auf Manipulationen des Halbleitermarkts durch China leitet die Handelsbeauftragte der USA eine Untersuchung ein. (Politik, Wirtschaft)

Im Vorfeld der CES 2025 verdichten sich die Hinweise auf das Notebook Lenovo Thinkbook Plus Gen 6, das mit einem rollbaren OLED-Display kommen soll. (Lenovo, OLED)

There is now a genetic excuse not to bother cutting carbs. Humans have genetically adapted to eating starchy foods, and our ancestors may have been carb-ivores even before modern Homo sapiens emerged.

The salivary amylase gene, known as AMY1, is already known to have helped us adapt to eating carbs. It encodes amylase, an enzyme that breaks starches found in pasta and bread down to glucose—and may have given us a taste preference for them. Humans have multiple copies of the gene, which may help us produce high levels of the enzyme.

Researchers from the University of Buffalo and the Jackson Laboratory have now found that, while most copies of this gene arose with the advent of farming, modern humans and our closest relatives had accumulated extra copies long before agriculture.

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Das Weltraumteleskop James Webb hat eine weitere astronomische Entdeckung von Hubble bestätigt. (James-Webb-Teleskop, Nasa)

More than 18,500 games will have been released onto the PC gaming platform Steam in the year 2024, according to SteamDB. Dividing that by the number of people covering games at Ars, or the gaming press at large, or even everybody who games and writes about it online, yields a brutal ratio.

Games often float down the river of time to us, filtered by friends, algorithms, or pure happenstance. They don't qualify for our best games of the year list, but they might be worth mentioning on their own. Many times, they're better games then they were at release, either by patching or just perspective. And they are almost always lower priced.

Inspired by the cruel logic of calendars and year-end lists, I asked my coworkers to tell me about their favorite games of 2024 that were not from 2024. What resulted were some quirky gems, some reconsiderations, and some titles that just happened to catch us at the right time.

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Seit 1996 bietet Elster eine Plattform für die papierlose Steuererklärung. Die Nutzerzahlen steigen - aber es gibt auch Kritik. (Digitalisierung, Wirtschaft)