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Corning's Gorilla Glass is the display cover of choice for many smartphones, tablets, and convertibles. Gorilla Glass 4 has been with us for nearly two years now, but it's time for it to move aside for the latest version: Gorilla Glass 5.

Gorilla Glass is great at resisting scratches, but it's prone to shattering when dropped. With Gorilla Glass 5, Corning claims the glass is now able to survive more drops than ever. The official claim is that the new stuff survives "1.6-meter, shoulder-height drops onto hard, rough surfaces up to 80% of the time."

Corning claims this is "up to 4X better in drop failure height than competitive glasses" but we're struggling to name a single competitive glass. (Samsung might have made one once on the Galaxy Nexus? Maybe Apple?) As usual Apple suppliers aren't allowed to mention their involvement, but other than iOS devices, Gorilla Glass has a near monopoly in smartphones.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area tonight, July 27, join Ars editor Annalee Newitz and writer Tiffany Kelly for the filming of our fourth episode of Ars Technica Live, a monthly interview series with fascinating people who work at the intersection of tech, science, and culture. Our guest next week is science fiction author Hannu Rajaniemi, who will discuss how we imagine the future of technology. Doors open at 7pm, and the discussion starts at 7:30.

Filmed before a live audience at Oakland's legendary Longitude tiki bar, each episode of Ars Live is a speculative, informal conversation between Ars Technica hosts and an invited guest. The audience, drawn from Ars Technica’s readers, is also invited to join the conversation and ask questions. These aren’t soundbyte setups; they are deep cuts from the frontiers of research and creativity.

Doors open at 7pm, and the live filming is from 7:30 to 8:00pm (be sure to get there early if you want a seat). Then you can stick around for informal discussion at the bar, along with delicious tiki drinks and snacks. Can't make it out to Oakland? Never fear! Episodes will be posted to Ars Technica the week after the live events.

(credit: Credit: JJ Harrison, via Wikimedia)

Malaria is a leading cause of disease and death in tropical and subtropical regions. Use of insecticidal nets, which are draped over beds while people sleep, has significantly reduced the incidences of malaria, along with the population of mosquitoes that transmit this disease. Unfortunately, long-term use of insecticides has led to the evolution of a mosquito population that is immune to insecticides.

A recent paper published in PNAS indicates that this might not be as grim as it seems. Mosquitoes that are resistant to the insecticide still suffer ill effects, including shortened lifespans and reduced ability to transmit malaria. So insecticide-laden sleeping nets should have a strong effect on transmission of malaria, even among insecticide resistant mosquito populations.

While most mosquitoes die within hours of exposure to the insecticides on bed nets, these experiments were designed to examine the populations of mosquitoes that survive for 24 hours or longer after exposure. As the mosquito populations are thinned by use of insecticides, more and more of the surviving generations of mosquitoes will fall within this group with prolonged post-exposure survival, so understanding these insects is important to future malaria prevention efforts.

(credit: KickassTorrents)

Federal authorities announced Wednesday the arrest of the alleged mastermind of KickassTorrents (KAT), the world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site. As of this writing, the site is still up.

Prosecutors have formally charged Artem Vaulin, 30, of Ukraine, with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Like The Pirate Bay, KAT does not host individual infringing files, but rather provides links to .torrent and .magnet files so that users can download unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies and more from various BitTorrent users.

The Verizon FiOS Quantum Gateway (no maintenance fee required). (credit: Verizon)

Verizon FiOS customers using one of the company's older routers are being told they must pay a new monthly "maintenance charge" of $2.80 to cover the cost of supporting the apparently outdated equipment. Customers also have the option of buying one of the company's newer routers, though some report being able to convince Verizon to give them a new one for free.

"Our records indicate that you have an older model router that is being discontinued," says an e-mail to customers published today by DSLReports. "If you do plan to keep using your current router, we will begin billing, on 9.29.16, a monthly Router Maintenance Charge of $2.80 (plus taxes), to ensure we deliver the best support."

Verizon confirmed the change to DSLReports, saying that the notice was sent to customers using the BHR1 and BHR2 routers. "Many of these routers have been in use for nearly ten years and have required more frequent repairs, so we’re trying to reduce that maintenance load and expense," Verizon said.

Enlarge / A passage of one of Feynman's lectures, written in individual atoms. (credit: TU Delft)

Last week saw researchers figure out how to make circuitry that's only a single atom thick, and this week we're pushing the physical limits on what we can do with data storage. While the ultimate limit is probably going to be a single atom, a procedure presented in a new paper is slightly less efficient in that it requires the space occupied by two atoms. Even so, and even after accounting for the equivalent of bad blocks in the storage media, the data density is enough to fit the contents of the Library of Congress within a 100 micrometer cube.

The approach, developed by a team of Dutch and Spanish researchers, has so many ingenious features that it's difficult to know where to start describing it all. But since we have to start somewhere, we'll begin with the medium itself.

The researchers first evaporated some chlorine and allowed it to settle on a copper surface. Given enough time, a single-atom layer of chlorine will fully coat the copper surface. But if you cut the process short, you end up with a mix of chlorine atoms and vacant spaces on the surface. With a scanning-tunneling microscope, which registers the electronic state of the surface, you can easily detect the difference between a chlorine atom and the hole where one could be.