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Check out my new infinity tattoo. It glows! (credit: The University of Tokyo, Someya Group Organic Transistor Lab)

We've gotten one step closer to a world where tattoos are made from LEDs and glowing watch faces embedded in your wrist can broadcast the time. It's the next phase in the development of e-skin, and circuits and sensors contained in flexible plastic sheets are thinner than human skin. Just stick the sheets on your body, stand in sunlight to power them up, and glow all night long.

A demonstration of the amazing electronic organic photonic skin. (video link)

E-skin, or flexible, stretchable circuits that can be stuck to skin, has been around for several years. But now a group of engineers have made a leap forward by integrating polymer LEDs into it. They explain their creation in Science Advances, showing how the new e-skin can display red, green, and blue light, which can be used for displaying biosigns like blood oxygen content and heart rate. Their e-skin also measures heart rate the same way many smart watches and fitness trackers do, by measuring the absorption of green and red light into the blood in a process called photoplethysmography.

A US congressman has learned first-hand just how vulnerable cellphones are to eavesdropping and geographic tracking after hackers were able to record his calls and monitor his movements using nothing more than the public ten-digit phone number associated with the handset he used.

The stalking of US Representative Ted Lieu's smartphone was carried out with his permission for a piece broadcast Sunday night by 60 Minutes. Karsten Nohl of Germany-based Security Research Labs was able to record any call made to or from the phone and to track its precise location in real-time as the California congressman traveled to various points in the southern part of the state. At one point, 60 minutes played for Lieu a crystal-clear recording Nohl made of one call that discussed data collection practices by the US National Security Agency. While SR Labs had permission to carry out the surveillance, there's nothing stopping malicious hackers from doing the same thing.

The representative said he had two reactions: "First it's really creepy," he said. "And second it makes me angry. They could hear any call. Pretty much anyone has a cell phone. It could be stock trades you want someone to execute. It could be a call with a bank."

The full array of PSVR hardware, arranged much more nicely than it will be in your home.

Sony will be making a major push to let gamers try its PlayStation VR headset starting months before the hardware's planned October launch. In a GameStop Investor's Day presentation last week, which Ars Technica listened in on, PlayStation VP of Marketing John Koller said that the company would start offering in-store demos at GameStop stores in June and plans to show the headset to at least 500,000 potential consumers through the end of the year.

"We have to do this prior to launch, that's critical," Koller said. "We need to be in stores."

This kind of heavy marketing push sets PlayStation VR apart from PC-based competitors like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Before their recent consumer launches, in-person demos for those headsets were largely limited to trade shows, fan conventions, and the odd touring demo truck (as well as very rough development kits, in Oculus' case).

For some reason, the scientists neglected to mention "fighting with a giant ape" as one possible cause of the dinosaur population decline. (credit: King Kong)

It's the most dramatic mass extinction in the history of Earth. About 66 million years ago, a giant meteorite smashed into the Gulf of Mexico, sending toxic gases into the atmosphere and causing extreme climate change that wiped out most dinosaurs. Except that's not the whole story. Mass extinction, like modern love, is complicated. A new study from a group of UK researchers reveals that most dinosaur clades were already in decline long before the Chicxulub impact that changed Earth's ecosystems forever.

After an exhaustive statistical analysis of dinosaur fossil frequency over time, the researchers published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What they found was that dinosaur populations were declining about 24 million years before the bolide from space smashed into our planet. The researchers show that dinosaurs from three major sub-clades—Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha, and Theropoda—reached a deadly tipping point about 90 million years ago. That's when dinosaur species began going extinct at a higher rate than they were speciating, or spawning new species. Put simply, new dinosaur species weren't evolving to replace the ones that went extinct.

Here you can see the slow decline of several subclades of dinosaurs, long before the Chicxulub impact. Note that two subclades were actually speciating at a higher rate, but they were the exceptions that proved the rule. (credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Extinction is a normal part of the lifecycle of any species, but in a healthy clade you expect to see new species evolving at the same or higher rate than they are going extinct. This wasn't so among most dinosaurs for millions of years before the Chicxulub event. That said, a few lucky dinosaur subclades, Hadrosauriformes and Ceratopsidae, actually saw speciation rates rising during the tens of millions of years before the meteorite impact. Indeed, there is evidence that Hadrosaurs lived for hundreds of thousands of years after the meteorite impact. And of course, early mammals were running around and happily speciating in the millions of years before and after the meteorite impact.