cartechboy writes "It looks like the old-school windshield wiper is about to be replaced by new technology — but not until 2015. British car-maker McLaren is apparently developing a new window cleaning system that is modeled from fighter jet tech. The company isn't revealing exactly how it will work, but the idea comes from the chief designer simply asking a military source why you don't see wipers on jets as they land. Experts expect McClaren to use constantly active, high-frequency sound waves outside the range of human hearing that will effectively create a force field across a car's windshield to repel water, ice insects and other debris. Similar sound waves are used by dentists to remove plaque from teeth."
First time accepted submitter LibbyMC writes "Google's approach to bringing older C software to the browser is demonstrated in bringing the '80s-era AmigaOS to Chrome. 'The Native Client technology runs software written to run on a particular processor at close to the speeds that native software runs. The approach gives software more direct access to a computer's hardware , but it also adds security restrictions to prevent people from downloading malware from the Web that would take advantage of that power.'" Chrome users can go straight to the demo.
PC gamers who are champing at the bit to build their very own "Steam Machines" won't have to wait long to start tinkering, as Valve has revealed that its recently announced SteamOS will be available this Friday.
The announcement comes alongside word from Valve that its prototype Steam Machines, along with the companion Steam Controller, will be shipped out to 300 randomly selected US beta testers on Friday. Valve plans to notify the lucky testers via e-mail at 2pm Pacific today, and beta participants will get a special badge on their Steam accounts so journalists and fellow players can start bugging them for their impressions incessantly.
If you're not part of that lucky group of 300, though, you're probably more interested in the fact that "SteamOS will be made available when the prototype hardware ships... downloadable by individual users and commercial OEMs." More information about that release is coming soon, the company says, but Valve is already warning that "unless you’re an intrepid Linux hacker already, we’re going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out."
This ancient Peruvian telephone was unearthed in the 1930s by by Baron Walram V. Von Schoeler, "a shadowy Indiana Jones-type adventurer."
The gourd-and-twine device, created 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, remains tantalizingly functional — and too fragile to test out. “This is unique,” NMAI curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and archaeologist who specializes in the study of the central Andes, tells me. “Only one was ever discovered. It comes from the consciousness of an indigenous society with no written language.”
We’ll never know the trial and error that went into its creation. The marvel of acoustic engineering — cunningly constructed of two resin -coated gourd receivers, each three-and-one-half inches long; stretched-hide membranes stitched around the bases of the receivers; and cotton-twine cord extending 75 feet when pulled taut—arose out of the Chimu empire at its height.
judgecorp writes "Google has opened data centers in Singapore and Taiwan to serve the boom in Asian Internet users. But it canceled a $300 million data center project in Hong Kong, to focus on the Taiwan site and the smaller one in Singapore. Officially the problem was lack of space in Hong Kong, but China's repressive attitude to the Internet (and the history of the Chinese hack on Gmail in 2010) must have contributed to the move."
Zothecula writes "Harvesting power from the wind and the sun is nothing new. We've seen flying wind turbines and solar power plants that aim to provide clean renewable energy. UK-based New Wave Energy has a bolder idea in the works. The company plans to build the first high altitude aerial power plant, using networks of unmanned drones that can harvest energy from multiple sources and transmit it wirelessly to receiving stations on the ground."
sciencehabit writes "This morning, an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a lawsuit in a New York Supreme Court in an attempt to get a judge to declare that chimpanzees are legal persons and should be freed from captivity. The suit is the first of three to be filed in three New York counties this week. They target two research chimps at Stony Brook University and two chimps on private property, and are the opening salvo in a coordinated effort to grant 'legal personhood' to a variety of animals across the United States. If NhRP is successful in New York, it would upend millennia of law defining animals as property and could set off a 'chain reaction' that could bleed over to other jurisdictions, says Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a prominent critic of animal rights. 'But if they lose it could be a giant step backward for the movement. They're playing with fire.'"
I love you very much Pea. You are doing great, generally. It's impossible to be calm when pets go missing.
Can someone tell me how I’m supposed to genuinely reduce stress while still being alive?
I mean, I get it, feeling like I am always about to either pass out or hyped up enough to skydive a genuine health issue. I completely concede that I need to slow the eff down, chill out, all of those things.
But seriously and truly — how am I supposed to just dial it down when life keeps on ticking away with its myriad messes? Taking deep breaths and making sure I go to bed on time is great and all, until your granny cries about how your kids are going to hell because they aren’t going to a church building with a Church of Christ sign on the door over the one-day Thanksgiving that you drove 6 hours round trip for, and the cat goes missing twice in 4 days? And plus run around delivering greenery for Boy Scouts and cooking supper and ghostwriting a book and just even remembering to feed myself. Honestly, some of that wouldn’t be that bad except it’s an example of even taking-it-easy life being stressful. The cat and granny — how do I just NOT CARE? Or, not Not Care, but take it in stride I guess? How do I drink anti-stress tea until I just suddenly have this happy zen que sera, sera attitude?
I just don’t have any freaking CLUE how to do it. I yoga and twinge something or start berating myself. I even try to not ruminate on stupid crap and the Spousal Unit picks up on the fact that I was thinking something stressful and then I get to hash it out, outloud. I have talked to him, and he’s trying to help, I’m just SAYING. I can’t freaking seem to get a damn grip on anything.
And watch the smug ass little cat traipse in here and my heart lift completely and it’ll be alright. Except it’s not.
I am reading books. I’m altering my chemistry. I am doing everything I know how to do and then some. I am napping. Sleeping in. Eating like a starved person. It’s got to get better sometime. I just can’t hardly deal or think or anything lately.
A few months ago, I said on Twitter that I want a T-shirt that’s based on Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, only the wave is made of dice, and the rest of the work is gaming stuff.
The China National Space Administration has launched Chang'e 3, a plutonium-powered lunar lander on-board at 185-foot-tall Long March 3B rocket. The lander is on a four-day trajectory for the lunar surface, and will brake and enter lunar orbit on December 6th. It is scheduled to land on December 14th, in the Bay of Rainbows (Sinus Iridum). The rover masses 140kg, with nuclear heaters to keep systems alive during the two-week-long lunar nights, and will use radar to probe the lunascape as it roves during its mission. It is also outfitted with high-resolution panoramic cameras and telescopes. The Chinese space program's stated goal is to establish a space-station and autonomous landers that can return to Earth with samples.
"On behalf of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center and the command headquarters, I would like to extend my gratitude to all those who have been part of the project," said Zhang Zhenzhong, director of the Xichang launch base. "And my thanks also go to all the friends who have been helping us throughout the whole process.
"The Chang'e probe is on the way to the moon. Of course, it's a symbol of China's national power and prowess," Zhang said in post-launch remarks translated into English on China's state-run television.
Over the next few days, Chang'e 3 will adjust its path toward the moon three times to set up for a critical rocket burn to enter lunar orbit Dec. 6.
Landing on the moon is scheduled for Dec. 14 in a region known as Bay of Rainbows, or Sinus Iridum, on the upper-left part of the moon as viewed from Earth.
Many of the mission's specifications and objectives remained secret until the week of launch, when China rolled out details in a press briefing and through official state-owned media outlets.
The lander carries a bipropellant rocket engine designed to adjust its power level and pivot to control the probe's descent from an altitude of 15 kilometers, or about 9 miles, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.
Researchers have discovered a Linux worm capable of infecting a wide range of home routers, set-top boxes, security cameras, and other consumer devices that are increasingly equipped with an Internet connection.
Linux.Darlloz, as the worm has been dubbed, is now classified as a low-level threat, partly because its current version targets only devices that run on CPUs made by Intel, Symantec researcher Kaoru Hayashi wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. But with a minor modification, the malware could begin using variants that incorporate already available executable and linkable format (ELF) files that infect a much wider range of "Internet-of-things" devices, including those that run chips made by ARM and those that use the PPC, MIPS, and MIPSEL architectures.
"Upon execution, the worm generates IP addresses randomly, accesses a specific path on the machine with well-known ID and passwords, and sends HTTP POST requests, which exploit the vulnerability," Hayashi explained. "If the target is unpatched, it downloads the worm from a malicious server and starts searching for its next target. Currently, the worm seems to infect only Intel x86 systems, because the downloaded URL in the exploit code is hard-coded to the ELF binary for Intel architectures."
If there is one thing we know about comets, it is that their behavior is really hard to predict. Comets will always surprise us—sometimes to our disappointment.
It looks like comet ISON, or most of it, did not survive its encounter with the Sun yesterday, when it made a close approach at just 1.2 million kms from that fiery surface. This distance may seem large, but it is close enough to have subjected the comet to temperatures of around 2,700°C. To survive such a close shave with the Sun may sound unlikely, but a few other sungrazing comets have managed the feat during even closer passes. So some people hoped ISON would perform a death-defying stunt and emerge intact.
ISON did not leave us without a final serving of mystery though. Soon after reaching its nearest point to the Sun (known as perihelion), there was no sign of it emerging afterwards. Twitter and news agencies were alight, lamenting its loss and assuming it disintegrated—RIP ISON.
schwit1 writes about the hazards of driving through Ohio in a car with a secret compartment in the trunk. From the article: "Norman Gurley, 30, is facing drug-related charges in Lorain County, Ohio, despite the fact that state troopers did not actually find any drugs in his possession. Ohio passed a law in 2012 making it a felony to alter a vehicle to add a secret compartment with the 'intent' of using it to conceal drugs for trafficking." This is the first person arrested under the strange law.
necro81 writes "Little known even in environmental circles is a renewable energy success story: five geothermal power plants on Leyte Island in the Philippines — each of which produces enough power for the entire island — that collectively produce more than 10% of the Philippines' total electrical demand. From boreholes deep underground comes pressurized water heated to 280 Celsius. At the surface it flashes into steam, turning one set of turbines, then cools and contracts to spin a second set of turbines. The low-grade steam is then condensed back into water and reinjected into the bedrock. But Typhoon Haiyan destroyed the cooling towers, snapped transmission towers, and scattered the employees."
squiggleslash writes "The concerns, legitimate or otherwise, about genetically modified foods such as Monsanto's Round-up Ready soy-beans, may be causing unintended consequences: Monsanto's rivals such as BASF are selling 'naturally' mutated seeds where extreme exposure to ultra-violet is used to increase the rate of mutations in seeds, a process called mutagenesis. These seeds end up with many of the same properties, such as herbicide resistance, as GM seeds, but inevitably end up with other, uncontrolled, mutations too. The National Academy of Sciences warns that there's a much higher risk of unintentionally creating seeds that have active health risks through mutagenesis than by other means, including relatively controlled genetic engineering, presumably because of the blind indiscriminate nature of mutations caused by the process. But because mutagenesis is effectively an acceleration of the natural system of evolution, it's very difficult to regulate."
Update: It's the day after Thanksgiving in the US, meaning most Ars staffers are on the lookout for deals rather than potential stories. With folks off for the holiday, we're resurfacing this consumer tech classic from the archives—a look at why we're not all trying to buy an IBM PS/10 today and updating to OS/12, perhaps. This story first ran in November 2013, and it appears unchanged below.
It was a cloudy Seattle day in late 1980, and Bill Gates, the young chairman of a tiny company called Microsoft, had an appointment with IBM that would shape the destiny of the industry for decades to come.
He went into a room full of IBM lawyers, all dressed in immaculately tailored suits. Bill’s suit was rumpled and ill-fitting, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t here to win a fashion competition.
New submitter Cid Highwind writes "If you want to download the latest version of Winamp, you'd better do it soon. According to a new banner on the download page, AOL will be pulling the plug on the iconic llama-whipping music player in a month. 'Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.' Ars Technica ran an article last year detailing how the music player lost its dominance."
minty3 writes "The team used graphene's mechanical 'stretchability' in order to create a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) – an electronic component that can generate an FM signal. The VCO was used to send and receive audio signals of 100 megahertz. The team used pure tones and more complex music signals to tune the VCO's output and found that both kinds of signals could be 'faithfully reproduced' by an ordinary radio receiver."
astroengine writes "As if the International Space Station couldn't get any cooler, the Japanese segment of the orbiting outpost has launched a barrage of small satellites — known as "cubesats" — from their very own Cubesat Cannon! Of course, the real name of the cubesat deployment system isn't quite as dramatic, but the JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (J-SSOD) adds a certain sci-fi flair to space station science."
SmartAboutThings writes "Chip maker AMD has announced that it's won 2 CES Innovation Awards for a gaming tablet the company plans to show off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The device is called "Project Discovery" and will come with AMD's Mullins chip that is a 64-bit, x86-based chip, perfectly suitable for Windows 8.1. The low-power Mullins APU (accelerated processing unit) is AMD's answer to Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm, aimed at fanless tablets, ultrathin notebooks, and 2-in-1 devices. The 28nm processor is expected to consume as little as 2 watts of energy while in use. The obtained images show that the upcoming AMD tablet is quite similar to Razer Edge."
The interior of the donut-shaped Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). Hydrogen plasma is confined in this chamber by strong magnetic fields, where it fuses into heavier nuclei.
The promise of fusion is immense. Its fuel is hydrogen plasma, made from the most abundant atom in the Universe, and the major byproduct is helium, an inert gas. In this era with the threat of climate change, clean alternative sources of energy are more necessary than ever. However, even after decades of research and enormous investments of money, scientists haven't succeeded in producing a working nuclear fusion plant. Nevertheless, many feel the potential payoff is worth continued investment.
For that reason, work is proceeding apace on the next generation of fusion reactors. Researchers at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei, China, achieved a significant improvement in its confinement time and the density of the plasma it held. This step is necessary to maintain the appropriate conditions for fusion as well as to reduce the damage the hot plasma causes to the reactor walls. As described by J. Li and colleagues, the latest run at EAST achieved a plasma pulse lasting over 30 seconds, a record achievement that simultaneously demonstrated improvements in heat dispersal.
Nuclear fusion requires overcoming the electric repulsion between positively charged nuclei until the strong nuclear force exerts itself. In practice, that requires very high temperatures, which ensure that the nuclei are moving fast enough to collide rather than repel each other. While fusion is relatively easy on a small scale, researchers have yet to produce a reliable chain reaction that safely yields more energy than is required to sustain it.
In 1983, fine art photographer Laura Levine shot a Super-8 film in Athens, Georgia with a group of creative friends. It includes a clip of Michael Stipe singing Lou Reed's "Pale Blue Eyes." The film, titled "Just Like A Movie," is unreleased, but after Reed's tragic death last week, Levine decided to post that scene on YouTube. Levine says, "The song itself was recorded earlier that day on a Walkman, with Matthew Sweet on guitar."
Velcroman1 writes "The tomb of brutal Mongolian emperor Genghis Khan — the one who created the world's most powerful empire by raiding and invading across Eurasia, not Kirk's nemesis — is a lost treasure archaeologists have sought for years. And one man thinks he knows where it is. Last fall Alan Nichols, the president of The Explorers Club, mapped out possible locations for the tomb of Khan (also known as Chinnggis Qa'an). His hypothesis: Khan's tomb is located in the Liupan Mountains in Northern China, where the emperor who was born in 1162 and is said to have perished from an arrow wound in August 1227. Next fall, Nichols plans the next phase of his research: pinpointing Khan's exact resting place. 'Ghengis Khan's tomb is my obsession,' Nichols, a noted authority on the emperor, said recently. 'I couldn't stop thinking about it. But I'm not happy just reading about it, or knowing about it. I need to have my feet on it.'"
Today, NASA is planning on sending the MAVEN mission to Mars, weather and launch vehicle permitting. The live stream is embedded above, with the launch set to go off just before 1:30pm US Eastern time. MAVEN will serve as a communication hub from orbit around Mars while studying the evolution of its atmosphere, which will help us understand the conditions prevalent on Mars today and possibly give some hints about how the red planet could have supported liquid water on its surface in the past.
We don't have a picture of Amazon's supercomputer, so here's a scene from WarGames.
MGM
Amazon has once again cracked the upper echelons of the Top 500 supercomputer list with a cluster that hit nearly half a petaflop per second to claim the title of the 64th fastest supercomputer in the world.
Using a just-released virtual machine optimized for high-performance computing on Amazon's infrastructure-as-a-service cloud, the company strung together 26,496 cores with 106TB of memory and a 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnect. The cluster could hit a theoretical peak of 593.9 teraflop/s, and in testing it hit an actual maximum of 484.2 teraflop/s. Amazon used Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 processors, which have 10 cores each and clock speeds of 2.5GHz.
Amazon's highest placement in the Top 500 list was No. 42 in November 2011 with 240.1 teraflop/s. That cluster is now ranked 165th.
The China National Space Administration has launched Chang'e 3, a plutonium-powered lunar lander on-board at 185-foot-tall Long March 3B rocket. The lander is on a four-day trajectory for the lunar surface, and will brake and enter lunar orbit on December 6th. It is scheduled to land on December 14th, in the Bay of Rainbows (Sinus Iridum). The rover masses 140kg, with nuclear heaters to keep systems alive during the two-week-long lunar nights, and will use radar to probe the lunascape as it roves during its mission. It is also outfitted with high-resolution panoramic cameras and telescopes. The Chinese space program's stated goal is to establish a space-station and autonomous landers that can return to Earth with samples. 
