Month: April 2020

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a deal on Bose's Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, which are currently down to $299 at various retailers. That's $100 off Bose's list price and about $75 off the average price we see them go for online. The catch is that this deal only applies to the white (or "Soapstone") model, but if you like that look, this is the lowest price we've seen from reputable retailers to date. (We previously highlighted a deal that brought the pair down to $280, but that only applied to officially refurbished models.)

The Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 are Bose's newest pair of wireless active noise-cancelling (ANC) headphones, having launched last May. While we don't have a formal review for them on Ars, we have tested them for various gift guides over the past year. They sport a more premium-feeling design than the company's older QuietComfort 35 II, with a slick metallic finish on the headband and lusher earpads. Their active noise-cancellation is virtually identical, too, which is to say it's just about best-in-class and plenty strong enough to mute out noisy kids or the rumbling of the subway.

Their sound is more bass-forward than the more laidback profile of the QuietComfort; there's less treble detail as a result, and as is usually the case with wireless ANC headphones, you can get better pure sound out of a wired non-ANC pair at the same price. But if you prefer a more "fun" sound, they should be perfectly enjoyable. Beyond all that, their 20-hour battery life is solid, and their integrated mics provide great clarity over calls.

Enlarge / An image of some of the plant parts imaged under their own glow. (credit: Mitiouchkina et al.)

Wander into the wrong section of a home improvement store and you'll discover entire aisles dedicated to a product category called "landscape lighting." Apparently, many people find it aesthetically pleasing to have systems to illuminate trees and flowers after the Sun goes down. If a group of Russian scientists has its way, however, the trees may ultimately be able to illuminate themselves.

A not-necessarily healthy glow

Plenty of living things glow in the dark. Some of these, like jellyfish and corals, rely on fluorescent proteins, which absorb energy at one wavelength and then re-emit it later at a visible one. Others, like fireflies, have enzymes that convert chemical energy to photons and so aren't limited by the need for a source of photons to power their glow. Typically, these latter organisms have a specific chemical—generically called a "luciferin"—that provides the energy. An enzyme called a "luciferase" (again, a generic term) cleaves a chemical bond in the luciferin and releases its energy as a photon.

(The use of these generic terms can be confusing, as the terms are interchangeable but the molecules are not. If you try to feed the luciferin from bacteria to the firefly luciferase, nothing will happen. It also means that the list of molecules in the "luciferin" category is regularly expanding as biologist categorize more systems.)

Enlarge / A Comcast service van in October 2014. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

When Badr's grandparents moved from one house to another in April 2018, they had one simple request for Comcast—they wanted the cable company to transfer their Internet-only plan to the new address, with no changes to the service or price.

Badr, who helps manage his grandparents' account, thought everything had gone smoothly. "We asked to move the exact same service we had in place—just Internet. The customer service rep sent us a text message to confirm, and we confirmed," he told Ars via email.

Badr's grandparents' Internet service was transferred to the new house in Orland Park, Illinois, and the bill remained roughly the same at about $53 a month, at least for a while, he told Ars. It wasn't until much later that he realized what actually happened. The Comcast rep had "matched the old bill on the monthly cost" but added a streaming TV service that his grandparents didn't request and never used. The TV service was essentially free for the first year under the promotional deal that the Comcast rep applied to the account, but after the year was up the bill doubled, Badr said. The overcharges continued unnoticed and eventually added up to more than $600.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / 20th Century Fox)

In just a few short weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects across the country. Its contagious nature and the current lack of a vaccine or effective treatment has curtailed all but the most essential activities, particularly those that happen indoors or in enclosed spaces. Airline travel has dried to a trickle. Bars and restaurants are mostly take-out only. And we can now add the humble driving test to the list of things the coronavirus has cancelled, at least in the state of Georgia.

On April 23, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp issued an executive order packed with directives. Many of these are aimed at businesss that want to reopen, for Kemp has been ahead of the curve—even compared to President Trump—when it comes to relaxing rules meant to prevent the spread of the virus. But among the new instructions for businesses like cinemas and tattoo parlors that want to reopen, one of them announces that the state's Department of Driver Services is temporarily dropping driving tests for new drivers.

"[A]pplicants for a driver's license shall not be required to complete a comprehensive on-the-road driving test, provided all other requirements outlined in Code Section 40-5-27 are met," says the executive order.

Enlarge / Microplastics are transported in the deep sea by turbidity currents and bottom currents, which concentrate them in hotspots known as sediment drifts. (credit: I. Kane et al. (2020))

Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic enter the oceans. If they’re buoyant, they get swept by surface currents into massive “garbage patches” like the famous ones in the North Pacific Ocean. But the tiny fragments and fibers of microplastics are harder to trace. As researchers have built up more evidence of their distribution, it’s becoming clearer that they may have a tendency to accumulate in particularly unfortunate places, like the surface currents where prey is plentiful and juvenile fish do a lot of feeding.

A paper in Science today reports a new hotspot: regions of the seafloor where sediments, swept along by deep currents, accumulate. Those same currents transport oxygen and nutrients to deep-sea ecosystems, meaning that the microplastics are probably accumulating in some of the most biodiverse spots of the seafloor.

Buried plastic

Much like weather on land, ocean currents are a morass of complex, interconnected systems, affected by local physical features. This makes it difficult to understand where plastics might end up. But we do know there's a lot to track. Right now, only around one percent of the plastic in the oceans seems to accumulate on the surface; much of the rest probably settles in the depths.

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  SpaceX's Starship vehicle is seen landing on the Moon. [credit: NASA ]

NASA announced Thursday that it has awarded three contracts to begin initial development of lunar landing systems that will take astronauts down to the surface of the Moon in less than five years.

With these Human Landing System awards, space agency officials reiterated in an interview that they remain committed to landing a pair of astronauts on the Moon by 2024 and building a sustainable presence by 2028. Asked if 2024 was still "on the table" despite the COVID-19 pandemic and myriad other challenges with such an aggressive timeline, NASA's chief of human spaceflight, Doug Loverro, replied, "It's not only on the table, it is the table."

The awards are notable both for their diversity and NASA's apparent willingness to take a chance on SpaceX and its out-of-the-box concept with its ambitious Starship system.