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Last Updated: 2022-04-28 6:00:01 PM
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 21:28:22 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Barcroft)
Health officials in Wisconsin are investigating what could be the first child death in the US—and the second worldwide—linked to a growing international outbreak of unexplained liver inflammation, aka hepatitis, in children.
In a health alert Wednesday, Wisconsin health officials said they are investigating four cases of unexplained hepatitis in children that match the profile of the outbreak cases. Two of the cases were severe, with one leading to a liver transplant and the other being the fatality.
Wisconsin is at least the fifth US state to report cases of mysterious and severe hepatitis in children. Earlier this month, Alabama health officials initially reported nine cases, which occurred between October 2021 and February 2022. Five of the cases occurred last November in the same large children's hospital in the state, and three of those cases involved acute liver failure.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 20:51:59 +0000
Enlarge / In the case of the samoyed, selection for physical characteristics produced a dog that sure looks happy. (credit: Zhao Hui)
Many dog breeds are purely about appearance—think poodles and the Pekingese. But plenty of other breeds are devoted to specific tasks, like racing greyhounds. For many of these tasks, physical appearance isn't enough: behavior also matters. Things like herding by sheepdog breeds or fetching by various retrievers.
It's not surprising that many people ascribe these behaviors—and a wide variety of other, less useful ones—to their dog's breed and its underlying genetics. Now, a large team of US-based researchers has looked into whether this belief is accurate. And, with a few exceptions, they find that it's not. With a huge panel of volunteer dog owners, they show that the genetics of dog behavior is built from lots of small, weak influences, and every breed seems to have some members that just don't behave as we expect.
Dogs, meet Darwin
The work is based on a citizen science project called Darwin's Ark. Participants were asked to give details about their dog, including whether it belonged to an established breed (either certified or inferred). They were also asked to fill out short surveys that collectively asked about 117 different behaviors. Overall, they obtained data on some 18,000 dogs, about half of them from purebreds.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 20:08:54 +0000
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A cryptocurrency platform was recently on the receiving end of one of the biggest distributed denial-of-service attacks ever after threat actors bombarded it with 15.3 million requests, content delivery network Cloudflare said.
DDoS attacks can be measured in several ways, including by the volume of data, the number of packets, or the number of requests sent each second. The current records are 3.4 terabits per second for volumetric DDoSes—which attempt to consume all bandwidth available to the target—and 809 million packets per second, and 17.2 million requests per second. The latter two records measure the power of application-layer attacks, which attempt to exhaust the computing resources of a target’s infrastructure.
Cloudflare's recent DDoS mitigation peaked at 15.3 million requests per second. While still smaller than the record, its power was more considerable because the attack was delivered through HTTPS requests rather than HTTP requests used in the record. Because HTTPS requests are much more compute-intensive than HTTP requests, the latest attack had the potential to put much more strain on the target.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 19:39:48 +0000
Enlarge / Belkin's SoundForm Elite Hi-Fi smart speaker and wireless charger. (credit: Belkin)
The timeline for over-the-air charging in the home just got murkier. On Wednesday, a press release from Israel-based wireless charging company Wi-Charge detailed plans for a partnership with Belkin to launch a consumer product with Wi-Charge's technology this year. Belkin is now tempering those expectations.
On Wednesday, TechCrunch interviewed Wi-Charge co-founder and Chief Business Officer Ori Mor. The TechCrunch reporter wrote that Wi-Charge "told me it has just inked a mysterious deal with Belkin, and we can expect the first wireless power device to show up from the accessories manufacturer later this year." Mor told the publication that Belkin is being "super aggressive on the timeline."
Mor stoked hopes of domestic cable- and pad-free wireless charging by saying that the Belkin product in the works is "a center-stage consumer product" and that Belkin had chosen "a perfect application." Neither Mor nor Wi-Charge's announcement specified the Belkin product, but the Wi-Charge executive highlighted Belkin's businesses in aftermarket charging accessories, smart home products, and powerline offerings.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 19:05:05 +0000
Enlarge / Just a few of the Activision franchises that will become Microsoft properties if and when the acquisition is finalized. (credit: Microsoft / Activision)
On Thursday, Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard cleared the second-biggest hurdle remaining in their plan to complete a $68.7 billion acquisition deal: existing shareholder buy-in.
ATVI shareholders have voted overwhelmingly in favor of approving Microsoft's bid to acquire Activision-Blizzard, and a company announcement counted over 98 percent of shareholder votes in the "yes" column.
On a dollars-and-cents level, anyone currently holding on to Activision stock is likely interested in the potential cash windfall coming their way should the deal be completed. Ahead of the shareholder vote on Thursday morning, Activision stock prices were trading around $76 per share, while Microsoft's acquisition terms include a buyout amount of $95 per share.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 18:51:45 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Earth Day is April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.
The best gadgets are the ones that find a way to enhance your world of work, play, or even just the daily grind. But there's also another feature that can make a nice piece of tech even better: sustainability.
Continually buying the latest and greatest tech or gadget obviously creates a lot of waste. But thinking critically about the gadgets you buy can play a small part in reversing this trend.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 18:33:57 +0000
Enlarge / This is our first look at Formula E's Gen3 race car, which debuts next season. (credit: Formula E)
On Thursday, ahead of this weekend's Monaco E-Prix, Formula E finally unveiled its next electric race car. It's called the Gen3 car because it's the third generation to be used by the series, and will be introduced at the start of next season.
Much of the reaction online has been about the car's unconventional looks, at least in terms of what people expect race cars to look like. But then people reacted that way about the Gen2 vehicle as well. The new bodywork is more sustainable than before, with linen and some recycled carbon fiber (from retired Gen2 cars), which Formula E says will reduce the carbon footprint of the Gen3 car by 10 percent.
The new Formula E car is smaller than the previous version, with a narrower track and shorter wheelbase. It's also gone on a diet, cutting the car's mass from Gen2's 903 kg to 760 kg, which is just lighter than a current F1 car, for context. Gen3's weight reduction is coupled with a significant power increase: from 250 kW (335 hp) to 350 kW (469 hp), deployed to the rear wheels. With a top speed of 200 mph (320 km/h), we expect lap times to be significantly faster than before.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 18:12:35 +0000
Enlarge / A splash image for Nuvia from the company's blog. (credit: Nuvia)
Qualcomm bought a chipmaking startup called Nuvia back in March of 2021, and later that year, the company said it would be using Nuvia's talent and technology to create high-performance custom-designed ARM chips to compete with Apple's processor designs. But if you're waiting for a truly high-performance Windows PC with anything other than an Intel or AMD chip in it, you'll still be waiting for a bit. Qualcomm CEO Christian Amon mentioned during the company's most recent earnings call that its high-performance chips were on track to land in consumer devices "in late 2023."
Qualcomm still plans to sample chips to its partners later in 2022, a timeframe it has mentioned previously and has managed to stick to. A gap between sampling and mass production is typical, giving Qualcomm time to work out bugs and improve chip yields and PC manufacturers more time to design and build finished products that incorporate the chips.
Qualcomm acquired Nuvia based in part on its personnel—the company was founded by former members of Apple's chip design team—and in part on its work designing ARM-based server chips. Chip designs take years to bring to market, so even if Nuvia had already been working on chips destined for consumer laptops when it was acquired, it was always going to be at least a couple of years before we could actually buy them in anything.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 17:54:20 +0000
Enlarge / The Unihertz Titan Slim. It has big bezels and a weird keyboard layout. (credit: Unihertz)
Unihertz's latest boutique smartphone is the Unihertz Titan Slim. In contrast to the all-screen phones that dominate the market, this phone marks another attempt to bring Blackberry-style QWERTY bar phones into the smartphone era.
For whatever reason, Unihertz never officially unveiled the phone on its website (there is only this "coming soon" teaser image), but enough phone reviews have been published by now that the product is pretty much public. Be warned that almost every reviewer who tested the Titan Slim came away with negative impressions, but at least it's a unique device.
This PCMag report details most of the specs. The front of the phone sports a 4.2-inch LCD that is "roughly" 1280×768—and then all those QWERTY buttons start. With so much space needed for the hardware keyboard, shrinking the bezels should be a priority. Even $150 smartphones have teardrop front cameras and minimal bezels these days. Wasting so much space means the display comes with a weird 5:3 aspect ratio, which several reports say causes problems with Android app layouts.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 17:24:53 +0000
Enlarge / Elon Musk talks to members of the media while leaving federal court in New York on Thursday, April 4, 2019.
A federal judge has rejected Tesla CEO Elon Musk's attempt to get out of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that requires Tesla to impose limits on Musk's social media statements.
The judge also rejected Musk's request to quash portions of an SEC subpoena that seeks documents related to whether he got pre-approval before posting a recent tweet about Tesla stock sales. The ruling against Musk was issued Wednesday by Judge Lewis Liman in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
"Musk was not forced to enter into the consent decree" with the SEC, and he "cannot now seek to retract the agreement he knowingly and willingly entered by simply bemoaning that he felt like he had to agree to it at the time but now—once the specter of the litigation is a distant memory and his company has become, in his estimation, all but invincible—wishes that he had not," Liman wrote. The judge also called Musk's claim that the SEC is harassing him "meritless."
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 17:05:56 +0000
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are joined by Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill in Jurassic World Dominion.
Universal Pictures has released a second trailer for Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth installment in the hugely successful franchise, featuring cloned dinosaurs roaming freely on the mainland as human beings face possible extinction.
As we've reported previously, the Jurassic World trilogy was always intended to be a complete story told across three films, as opposed to the standalone nature of the original trilogy. Director Colin Trevorrow, who co-wrote Dominion's script, knew that he wanted the third film to center on dinosaurs going "open source," so to speak—portraying a world in which Wu is not the only scientist capable of cloning the beasts. But rather than scene after scene of dinosaurs terrorizing people and destroying cities, he wanted "a world where dinosaur interaction is unlikely but possible—the same way we watch out for bears or sharks."
Per the official premise:
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:26:34 +0000
Enlarge / Subscription cards like this seemingly won't work until PlayStation Plus transitions to its new tiered structure in June.
Sony has temporarily cut off users' ability to renew their PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now subscriptions, an apparent effort to prevent users from converting those cheaper subscriptions into more expensive PlayStation Plus Premium subscriptions when the services transition to a new unified, tiered structure in June.
Current PlayStation Plus subscribers who try to renew their subscription through the online PlayStation Store are greeted with a cryptic message reading, "Can't Purchase; Can't Add to Cart; You've already purchased this item." Users across the Internet are reporting similar issues using physical prepaid PlayStation Plus cards to renew their subscriptions. Accounts that aren't currently subscribed to PlayStation Plus can still sign up for up to a year, though.
Subscriptions to Sony's streaming-focused PlayStation Now subscription, meanwhile, are no longer available for purchase on the PlayStation Store at all. The area of the store's Subscriptions page where that subscription was previously listed now shows a message telling users that "PlayStation Now is changing soon and merging with PlayStation Plus." The message points players to an FAQ page.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:01:43 +0000
Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Transcript coming soon. (video link)
Our previous episode of Edge of Knowledge peeped back in time a few billion years to explore the origins of life on Earth, but now we aim our lens in a different direction. Rather than looking at the distant past to see how life began, this episode looks to the near future—specifically, at the ways in which Earth's climate might change over the next few decades.
Dealing with it
First, let's get this bit of inconvenient truth out of the way: anthropogenic climate change—that is, climate change caused by humans—is well-established science. The evidence is overwhelming, and attempted rebuttals are incomplete, flawed, or fabricated. The questions we need to be answering, as Paul points out in the video, aren't "Is this even happening?" or "Should we do something?" The questions we're now faced with are "How bad is it going to get?" and "What, exactly, do we need to be doing?"
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:01:56 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Elon Musk has claimed he is buying Twitter in order to protect free speech. But what does Musk mean by "free speech"? Musk provided a somewhat vague answer in a tweet on Tuesday, one day after striking a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. (The sale to Musk is pending and needs shareholder approval to be completed.)
Musk's statement, which he made the pinned tweet on his Twitter profile, said the following:
By "free speech," I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
Twitter has First Amendment right to moderate tweets
There are multiple ways to interpret Musk's statement as it relates to United States law, particularly the First Amendment. One interpretation is that Musk doesn't need to change Twitter at all to prevent "censorship that goes far beyond the law."
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:00:05 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Earth Day was April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.
For many people, buying an electric vehicle puts a stake in the ground—if I'm going to drive around town, I'm going to do it while reducing my carbon footprint.
“Gone are the days of burning toxic gasoline. A new age of electrons and instant torque is upon us,” you might say, standing next to your new vehicle and blue recycling bin.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 14:50:08 +0000
Enlarge / A 3D-printed scale model runs in the wind tunnel. Small tufts of wool stuck to the bodywork help visualize airflow over the body. (credit: Polestar)
Car companies can be quite secretive, and concepts can live and die without the public ever seeing more than a photograph, if that. Polestar is being much less cagey than that when it comes to the Precept, which we should see in production form in another couple of years as the brand's four-door electric flagship. The company has released a number of short films, each looking at a different aspect of the Precept's design. The most recent film covered the car's aerodynamics.
Aerodynamics matter like never before to the car industry. People won't buy electric cars that don't offer plenty of range, and a great way to kill range efficiency is to push a draggy shape through the air. The lack of a noisy internal combustion engine powertrain means that absolute noise levels in an EV are many decibels lower, which in turn makes wind or tire noise much more noticeable than in a conventionally powered vehicle.
The biggest problem that designers have are the wheels, each of which churns the air as it rotates. Fairings would be the simplest solution, but no one has been brave enough to go there since the original Honda Insight. Big open grilles matter, too, although these days, active shutters—and the optical effect of black plastic on black plastic—often minimize such penalties.
Publish Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 12:34:34 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)
In a move highly anticipated by parents the country over, Moderna announced Thursday that it has requested FDA authorization for its two-dose COVID-19 vaccines for children 6 months to 2 years, and 2 years to under 6 years.
If the Food and Drug Administration issues an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the vaccines, they will be the first such vaccines available to the age groups in the now nearly 2.5-year-long pandemic. Parents of young, vaccine-ineligible children have been anxiously awaiting the availability of such vaccines, particularly as much of the country tries to move on from the pandemic even as the number of cases of the extremely contagious omicron subvariants continues to tick upward.
"We are proud to share that we have initiated our EUA submission for authorization for our COVID-19 vaccine for young children," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement Thursday morning. "We believe mRNA-1273 [the COVID-19 vaccine] will be able to safely protect these children against SARS-CoV-2, which is so important in our continued fight against COVID-19 and will be especially welcomed by parents and caregivers."
Publish Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2022 22:30:52 +0000
Enlarge / Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk presents a vaccine production device during a meeting September 2, 2020, in Berlin, Germany. Musk met with vaccine-maker CureVac, with which Tesla has a cooperation to build devices for producing RNA vaccines. (credit: Getty | Filip Singer)
Elon Musk has a "huge responsibility" to combat dangerous, potentially life-threatening health misinformation on Twitter, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
The United Nations' health agency commented on Monday's news that the tech billionaire has struck a deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. WHO officials stressed how damaging misinformation and disinformation could be when it's widely spread in digital spaces like Twitter.
"In cases like this pandemic, good information is life-saving," Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Programme, said. "In some cases, [it's] more life-saving than having a vaccine in the sense that bad information sends you to some very, very bad places."
Publish Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2022 21:28:53 +0000
Enlarge / Hey, where'd everybody go? (credit: Chaos / Activision)
Players caught cheating in Call of Duty can now be punished with a penalty that makes them unable to see their opponents, a new anti-cheat mitigation feature that Activision calls "cloaking."
Cheaters who are subject to a cloaking penalty will find that "characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable," according to a post on the official Call of Duty development blog. Those cheaters will remain fully visible to non-cheaters, though; Activision quips that "they’ll be the players you see spinning in circles hollering, 'Who is shooting me?!'"
The latest anti-cheat update will roll out first for Call of Duty: Vanguard, then be applied to the free-to-play Warzone, Activision says, "to minimize any issues players may encounter." It also comes on top of another cheating mitigation measure, called Damage Shield, that was announced in February and "disables the cheater’s ability to inflict critical damage on other players."
Publish Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2022 21:07:28 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On March 1, Russian forces invading Ukraine took out a TV tower in Kyiv after the Kremlin declared its intention to destroy “disinformation” in the neighboring country. That public act of kinetic destruction accompanied a much more hidden but no less damaging action: targeting a prominent Ukrainian broadcaster with malware to render its computers inoperable.
The dual action is one of many examples of the “hybrid war” Russia has waged against Ukraine over the past year, according to a report published Wednesday by Microsoft. Since shortly before the invasion began, the company said, hackers in six groups aligned with the Kremlin have launched no fewer than 237 operations in concert with the physical attacks on the battlefield. Almost 40 of them targeting hundreds of systems used wiper malware, which deletes essential files stored on hard drives so the machines can’t boot.
“As today’s report details, Russia’s use of cyberattacks appears to be strongly correlated and sometimes directly timed with its kinetic military operations targeting services and institutions crucial for civilians,” Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president for customer security, wrote. He said the “relentless and destructive Russian cyberattacks” were particularly concerning because many of them targeted critical infrastructure that could have cascading negative effects on the country.