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Enlarge / On the outside, these heavily engineered bacteria look no different from their normal peers. (credit: Raphael Gaillarde / Getty Images)

Many of the fundamental features of life don't necessarily have to be the way they are. Chance plays a major role in evolution, and there are alternate paths that were never explored, simply because whatever evolved previously happened to be good enough. One instance is the genetic code, which converts the information carried by our DNA into the specific sequence of amino acids that form proteins. There are scores of potential amino acids, many of which can form spontaneously. But most life uses a genetic code that relies on just 20 of them.

Over the past couple of decades, researchers have shown that it doesn't have to be that way. If you supply bacteria with the right enzyme and an alternative amino acid, they can use it. But bacteria won't use the enzyme and amino acid very efficiently, as all the existing genetic code slots are already in use.

Now, researchers have managed to edit bacteria's genetic code to free up a few new slots. They then filled those slots with unnatural amino acids, allowing the bacteria to produce proteins that would never be found in nature. One side effect of the reprogramming? No viruses could replicate in the modified bacteria.

Enlarge / In April 2013, more than 120 people attended a rally in Boston to remember Aaron Swartz and call for reform of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (credit: Getty Images | Boston Globe)

The Supreme Court issued a ruling Thursday that imposes a limit on what counts as a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The case involves a former Georgia police sergeant who "used his own, valid credentials" to get information about a license plate number from a law enforcement database, the court decision said. The sergeant ran the search in exchange for money and for non-law enforcement purposes, violating a department policy. He was charged with a felony under the CFAA, which says it's a crime when someone "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access." He was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison in May 2018.

A federal appeals court upheld the conviction, but the Supreme Court reversed it today in a 6-3 decision that said Van Buren did not violate the CFAA. Justices found that the cybersecurity statute does not make it a crime to obtain information from a computer when the person has authorized access to that machine, even if the person has "improper motives."

A solitary man living in a dystopian near-future helps people recover lost memories and ends up uncovering a violent conspiracy in Reminiscence, a sci-fi thriller that feels like a cross between classic film noir and ambitiously heady fare like Memento and Inception. That's no surprise, as it's the feature film directorial debut of Lisa Joy, co-creator (with husband Jonathan Nolan) of HBO's critically acclaimed series Westworld.

Per the official premise:

Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a private investigator of the mind, navigates the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae's disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?

During a virtual event on Wednesday, Joy said she was inspired to make Reminiscence after finding an old photograph among her grandfather's belongings. The picture was of an unknown woman her grandfather had never mentioned to anyone in the family. "It made me start to think about memory and our lives in general," she said. "And the moments that maybe pass by, and maybe disappear—they don't stay with us, those connections necessarily—but that meant something, that changed us and touched us. And how nice it would be able to go back to these memories fully for a moment, to live that life and feel the way you felt when you experienced them."

Enlarge / The v1 SmartThings Hub from 2013. It's dying at the end of the month. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung has spent the last year or so upending its SmartThings ecosystem. SmartThings was born as an independent company in 2012 when it launched one of the largest Kickstarter campaigns ever: a $1.2 million funding program for the company's first smart home hub. Samsung bought SmartThings in 2014, and in June 2020, the Korean giant announced a plan that would basically shut down all of the stuff it acquired, forcing everyone over to in-house Samsung infrastructure. A big part of that plan is happening at the end of the month, when Samsung will kill the first-generation SmartThings Hub.

The SmartThings Hub is basically a Wi-Fi access point—but for your smart home stuff instead of your phones and laptops. Instead of Wi-Fi, SmartThings is the access point for a Zigbee and Z-Wave network, two ultra low-power mesh networks used by smart home devices. Wi-Fi is great for loading webpages and videos, but it's extreme overkill for something like turning on a light switch or working a door sensor; these things need to just send a few bits for "on or off" or "open or closed." Zigbee and Z-Wave are so low-power that you can run the devices on AA or coin cell batteries for months. The Hub connects your smart home network to the Internet, giving you access to a control app and connecting to other services like your favorite voice assistant.

You might think that killing the old Hub could be a ploy to sell more hardware, but Samsung—a hardware company—is actually no longer interested in making SmartThings hardware. The company passed manufacturing for the latest "SmartThings Hub (v3)" to German Internet-of-things company Aeotec. The new Hub is normally $125, but Samsung is offering existing users a dirt-cheat $35 upgrade price.

Enlarge / We've since touched up GT7's last significant advertisement, as per this week's platform update. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Aurich Lawson)

On Wednesday, Sony published a wide-ranging interview with the head of its PlayStation Studios division, arguably to set expectations ahead of the usual barrage of mid-June game announcements and reveals. In Sony's case, setting expectations now requires telling fans which console to expect future games to land on—especially in a world where chip shortages have made it tough to purchase the company's new and very popular PlayStation 5.

This week's PlayStation announcement marks a change for multiple games that had been previously advertised as PlayStation 5 titles. We have now learned that God of War: Ragnarok and Gran Turismo 7 are officially coming to both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The news follows last week's confirmation that Horizon: Forbidden West will also launch as a cross-gen game.

While the God of War sequel's backward-compatibility status was unclear, the Gran Turismo 7's announcement comes as a big surprise, since it was revealed to the world in June 2020 with a loud "get ready for next gen" tagline, followed by an outright declaration six months later that the game would be a "PlayStation 5 exclusive." Both video advertisements for the anticipated racing game revolved around intense reflection effects that take material properties and car surface warping into account. While Sony Interactive Entertainment has yet to detail exactly how the game's tech works, what we've seen so far will likely hinge on next-gen processing power, perhaps with ray-tracing or double-rendered geometry.

Enlarge (credit: Leah D. Rubin)

Sharks have been swimming and hunting in the world's oceans for 450 million years, and though their numbers have recently declined because of human activity, they're still with us. But the world once had many more, and many more varieties of, the large marine predators compared to today. In fact, new research published in Science suggests that 19 million years ago, the vast majority of sharks and shark species died off. We don't understand why or how this large extinction event occurred.

“Sharks have... weathered a large number of mass extinctions. And this extinction event is probably the biggest one they've ever seen. Something big must have happened,” Elizabeth Sibert, one of the authors of the paper, told Ars.

Sibert is a Hutchinson postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Institute for Biospheric Sciences, and she was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for the initial phases of this research back in 2017.