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PORTLAND, Ore.—In the cool, hushed atmosphere of Portland’s Newspace Center for Photography, a Geiger counter clicks steadily as I orient myself to the room. White walls, wood floors, and the faint, clean smell of an elementary school auditorium. I was here to see the "Reactive Matters" exhibit, a small collection of photography by three artists whose works document nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, and the disasters that have peppered our history of experimenting with radioactive material.

Photographing Superfund sites with buried nuclear waste and old reactor locations doesn’t always make for compelling visual media. Instead, these artists used radioactivity itself to build more interesting and abstract art.

Jeremy Bolen

Vieques #3, Archival pigment print made from buried film, window screen, artist’s frame, fragments of buried film. 36 in x 40 in.

3 more images in gallery

Digging deep

Chicago-based artist Jeremy Bolen told Ars over the phone that he became interested in nuclear energy after he visited "Site A" in the Red Gate Woods on the former grounds of the Argonne National Laboratory. (Argonne still exists in Illinois, but the lab was moved in 1947.) Site A became the first nuclear waste dumping ground in the US after scientists built an early nuclear reactor there in 1943.

Back into action. (credit: Oracle PR)

The long silence is apparently over. After an extended quiet period following last October’s Java One conference, Oracle has finally provided a hint about the company’s actual plans for Java EE, the enterprise framework for server-side Java applications. As Ars reported on July 1, development on Java EE projects by Oracle engineers has practically ceased since last fall, as the company pushed development resources to other projects—leaving members of the Java Community Process (JCP) executive committee and Java EE partners in the dark.

In response to Ars’ report, Mike Moeller, spokesperson for Oracle, issued the following statement via e-mail:

Oracle is committed to Java and has a very well defined proposal for the next version of the Java EE specification—Java EE 8—that will support developers are as they seek to build new applications that are designed using micro-services on large-scale distributed computing and container-based environments on the Cloud. Oracle is working closely with key partners in the Java community to finalize the proposal and will share the full details with the broader Java community at JavaOne in September.

When asked if “key partners” meant the JCP, the Java EE Expert Group, or specific industry partners in a parallel effort, an Oracle spokesperson replied that there was no parallel effort. The spokesperson suggested the changes Oracle was proposing would clearly need to be discussed within the Java community—both with the Java EE Expert group as well as more widely within the JCP—and that Oracle looks forward to feedback on the ideas.

(credit: Amazon)

Amazon's annual 24-hours of deals, dubbed Prime Day, is coming soon on July 12 and the company is incentivizing voice-shopping with its virtual assistant Alexa. On Prime Day, those with an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Amazon Tap can use Alexa to shop exclusive deals only available while voice shopping. Customers will also receive $10 off their first purchase of $20 or more when they use Alexa from now through July 12.

On July 12, customers can ask, "Alexa, what are your Prime Day deals?" to get the full list of exclusive savings. Amazon has been tight-lipped about the exact deals of Prime Day so far, but in a press release, the company did detail that some of the exclusive deals will be on smart home products, toys, Amazon devices, and more. For the past few days, Amazon has been releasing new deals every 24 hours leading up to Prime Day; some of today's deals include 35 percent off a Polaroid Cube 1080p action camera and 66 percent off an Anker 20000 mAh PowerCore portable charger.

Amazon has been pushing voice shopping using Alexa for a while now, so it's fitting that the company would hide some deals away to entice Alexa users who may have never shopped using the virtual assistant before. Keep in mind that Amazon's Prime Day deals are only available for Prime members, as are the Alexa-exclusive deals as well. Would-be buyers still have time to sign up for a free trial of Amazon Prime before July 12 to get in on the sale.

Enlarge / The cyborg, showing off its gold skeleton. (credit: Karaghen Hudson and Michael Rosnach)

Biology has given robot makers lots of good ideas about how to solve certain problems, like how to squeeze into tight spaces, how to conserve energy for flying, and how to move around without a skeleton. But now it's giving us the raw materials for building a robot—or perhaps more properly a cyborg. Researchers have not only based the design of their robot on animals like skates and rays, but have used muscle cells to power its movements and light-sensitive proteins to replace its circuitry.

Skates and rays (technically batoid fish) are distinct from other cartilaginous fish in that they have a largely flat body plan and generate propulsion by undulating their bodies rather than by flapping fins. This undulation is a very simple way to generate locomotion, but it's highly energy-efficient and lends itself to soft-bodied robotics. It's also relatively easy to steer, simply by alternating the frequency of undulations on the right and left sides of the body. So the builders (a huge US-Korean team) of the new robot used this as inspiration for their new design.

To mimic this type of fish, the authors built the body out of a flexible polymer called PDMS. Internally, they added a flexible metallic skeleton made of gold so that once an undulation was done, the body would flex back into its original shape.