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Elizabeth Parrish (credit: YouTube)

Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, claims that her body's cells are 20 years younger after testing her company’s age-reversing gene therapy on herself.

The 45-year old Seattle-area woman, who has no scientific or medical training, underwent the experimental treatment last September in an undisclosed clinic in Colombia. The unorthodox, overseas trial, which was designed to skirt US federal regulations, prompted the resignation of one of the company’s scientific advisors. George Martin of the University of Washington quit after telling MIT Technology Review, "This is a big problem. I am very upset by what is happening. I would urge lots of preclinical studies.”

Though details of the fast-tracked trial are unpublished, Parrish says it involved intravenous infusions of an engineered virus. That infectious germ carried the genetic blueprints for an enzyme called telomerase, which is found in humans. When spread to the body’s cells, the enzyme generally extends the length of DNA caps on the ends of chromosomes, which naturally wear down with cellular aging. In a 2012 mouse study, Spanish researchers found that similar treatment could extend the lifespan of the rodents by as much as 20 percent.

Landing a vehicle as large as a Dragon spacecraft on Mars would be unprecedented. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX announced an audacious plan on Wednesday to land an approximately 6,000kg spacecraft on the surface of Mars. This simple declaration from the uber-popular rocket company drew a ton of questions from all quarters, and Ars spoke to a range of people across the space industry to get some answers. How big a milestone would this be? Can SpaceX do it? Is the plan realistic? And why does Rice play Texas, anyway? (OK, we didn't actually try to figure out that last one.)

Is this really a big deal?

Oh, heavens, yes. No private company has ever launched a significant, independently financed expedition into deep space, let alone all the way to Mars. In fact, only two world powers have ever softly landed spacecraft on Mars. The United States has done so half a dozen times, and the Soviet Union did it once with Mars 3 in 1971—although the vehicle failed after sending back just 15 seconds of data. And all previous soft landings have been relatively small and light; SpaceX is talking about landing a Dragon weighing about 6,000kg on the surface of Mars. The previous landing heavyweight was Curiosity, at 900kg. Soft-landing a 6,000kg object on Mars would be a stunning achievement for NASA or any government-backed space agency. For a private company, it's unheard of.

Can they do it?

Why not? In just the last six months, SpaceX has successfully launched and then recovered the first stages of multiple Falcon 9 rockets, first landing them on the ground and then later landing on an autonomous drone ship. SpaceX is known for making bold promises, and—eventually—delivering on them. However, the company has missed deadlines before, and making the 2018 launch window to Mars will be a real challenge.

Ars Technica Live, episode 1: Meat. (video link)

Welcome to the first episode of Ars Technica Live, a monthly series of in-depth interviews with people working at the intersections of technology, science, and culture. In this episode, your Ars hosts Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar interviewed Stanford anthropologist Krish Seetah about his research on the deep history of butchery before a live audience at Longitude, a tiki bar in Oakland, California. Seetah gave us a fascinating look at how the technologies and morality of butchery have shaped humanity for millions of years—and our discussion inspired an intense debate with some of the attendees.

Butchery evolved before humans

Seetah's first job when he was growing up in the neighborhood of Brixton in London was as a butcher's assistant. He told us about how his many years as a butcher shaped his understanding of meat and ultimately became a major part of his interests as a scholar. He's worked on studies that look at early humans' relationships with animals, as well as the technologies we've developed from animal products like wool, and he is now working on a book-length project about the early history of butchery. He pointed out immediately that there is evidence that the ancestors of Homo sapiens were butchering animals with stone tools nearly 2.5 million years ago. That's long before our ancestors invented fire and, indeed, long before Homo sapiens evolved some 200,000 years ago.

HP

HP's all-metal Chromebook 13 is evocative of the Chromebook Pixel.

6 more images in gallery

People who like Chrome OS but don't like the cheap low-end hardware it normally comes on or the expensive, aging Chromebook Pixel take note: HP and Google have announced a new 13-inch Chromebook that includes many of the Pixel's best features, but does it for a starting price of $499. That's half the $999 starting price of the Pixel, though it's still about twice as expensive as the cheapest Chromebooks.

The Chromebook 13's specs definitely deliver, though you'll need to drop more money to get the really impressive specs. It's got an aluminum enclosure with a soft-touch material on the bottom, and its rounded hinge is more than a little evocative of the Pixel. Higher-end models have a 3200×1800 IPS display, even higher than the 2560×1700 of the Pixel, while lower-end models get a still-reasonable 1080p panel. It has two USB Type-C ports for charging, data, and display output, which also makes it compatible with HP's Elite USB-C Docking Station (PDF), and it includes one standard USB Type-A port for compatibility with existing accessories.

Base models use 4GB of RAM, though 8GB and 16GB configurations are also available, and all models include 32GB of internal eMMC storage and an SD card reader. It also uses a range of Skylake Core M processors, from the Pentium 4405Y at the low end to the m7-6Y75 at the high end. All of these chips ought to provide more performance than the cheaper Atom-derived Celeron and Pentium chips in cheaper Chromebooks but should still allow for a fanless design while maintaining decent performance. It's 0.51 inches (12.9mm) thick, comparable to other Core M laptops, and it weighs 2.89 pounds (1.29 kg). 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 round out the wireless capabilities, and HP promises 11.5 hours of battery life while browsing.

(credit: Flickr)

Sony shipped 17.7 million PlayStation 4 consoles over the fiscal year ended March 31, bringing the total number of consoles shipped to an impressive 40 million. The strength of the PS4 helped Sony to reach its first full-year profit in three years, bringing in ¥‎147.8 billion (£936 million, $1.36 billion). Last year the company reported a loss of ¥126 billion (£798 million, $1.16 billion).

Strong demand for the PS4 and games led to an 11.8 percent jump in sales for Sony's Game and Network Services division. Interestingly, Sony's PlayStation Network alone brought in ¥529 billion (£3.3 billion, $4.9 billion) in raw sales, which is more than the whole of Nintendo brought in (¥504 million, £3.1 billion, $4.6 billion) for its last fiscal year.

While Sony's new-found profitability marks a dramatic turnaround for a company that has struggled to deliver consistent profits over the past decade, not all of it is performing well. Breaking it down by quarter, Sony actually made a ¥88.3 billion (£559 million, $816 million) loss in its fourth quarter, booking a charge against its chip business, as well as assessing damage from an earthquake that shut down its main plant for camera sensors.

Enlarge (credit: Tobias Lortzing)

Nature is, it’s often said, red in tooth and claw. But sometimes a claw scratches someone’s back in return for a symbiotic scratch of one’s own. Ants provide many examples of such mutually beneficial arrangements. As weird as it sounds, drinking the “blood” of a wounded bittersweet nightshade plant appears to be one of them.

Ants and plants are often good friends (leafcutters aside) because ants prey on insects that munch on the plants. Some plants keep ants on retainer by secreting nectar from special structures (fittingly called “nectaries”) that can be found in various parts of the plant. The acacia tree even goes as far as growing hollow thorns that ants can nest inside when they aren’t dining on the gourmet ant food the tree provides. (Full disclosure: acacias also drug the ants so they can’t live off other food sources. It’s a complicated relationship...) The benefits the tree obtains from its ant security detail apparently outweigh the energetic costs of these lavish gifts.

Something a little more subtle is going on with the bittersweet nightshade plant. A group of researchers led by Tobias Lortzing of the Free University of Berlin noticed that this nightshade bleeds sugary droplets when damaged, rather than quickly closing up its wounds. Seeing ants hit up those droplets for a snack, they wondered whether the plant adapted to call in ant support when herbivores come a-munching.