For animals, the bigger the group, the more distinct its members
Living in big groups has its disadvantages: diseases spread quickly, large crowds may be more obvious to predators, and members have to compete for food, mates, and territories. In species where recognizing specific individuals is important, it’s also much harder for members to identify each other when living among lots of group members. Fortunately, there's a solution to this last problem: according to a new study in Current Biology, members of species that live in large groups tend to be more "unique" than members of species that live in small groups. To examine this phenomenon, the authors studied ground-dwelling sciurid rodents, a family that includes squirrels, chipmunks, and prairie dogs. These rodents, like many other gregarious animals, benefit greatly from being able to identify each other. Knowing your companion from an intruder, or recognizing individuals of different social ranks, is a huge advantage in these societies.
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Apple's Lala purchase appears to have been "insurance"
Apple isn't planning to replace its traditional music download model with a streaming model anytime soon—or at least that's what the company has reportedly been telling the music labels. Several unnamed music industry executives told the Financial Times that Apple has "clarified" its plans to use the cloud for music purposes, emphasizing that the company doesn't want to undermine its current dominant position in the music download market.According to the execs speaking to FT, Apple likened its long-rumored plans to bring iTunes to the cloud as "insurance." Instead of cannibalizing its own wildly successful download service by introducing a streaming equivalent, Apple said it plans to make it possible for existing iTunes users to store their music remotely. This would enable them to access their libraries from various devices without having to sync via USB.
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450 Limited Helghast Killzone 3 bundles exist—come win one!
Anyone can go out and plunk down $130 and get the Helghast Edition of Killzone 3... if you can find one. The edition comes with the game, an action figure, a helmet, an art book, and a bunch of other goodies. What we're offering here is something a little more special: the limited edition of the limited edition. The difference? The eyes of the helmet light up.
Okay, that kind of falls to the floor in text, but once you see how it looks in person you'll be impressed. There is also the fact that there were only 450 of these sets made, and they can't be bought in stores. We have ten of them to give away, and we'd like you to win one.
How do you do so? It's simple: e-mail giveaways@arstechnica.com with the subject line "I'm from Helghan and I say 'Kill 'em All!" That's it. We'll take entries from now until noon CST this coming Monday, and then run a random number generator to pick the ten winners. Once we e-mail you to let you know you've won, please respond promptly with your address. If you would like to include your address in the entry it would be helpful, but we don't want it to look like we're farming information, so feel free to leave it off as well.
Giving away a great game in a rare package on a Friday? Nothing better.
In brief, you must 18 years old or older and a resident of the United States or Canada (sans Quأ©bec) to be eligible. The giveaway begins at 12:00pm CST (GMT-0600) on February 25, 2011 and entries must be received before 12:00pm CST on February 28, 2011. We'll choose the winner on or around March 1, 2011. Please take a moment to read the full rules.
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Peers or not? Comcast and Level 3 slug it out at FCC's doorstep
The big headlines about the dispute between Level 3 Communications and Comcast over the latter's access charges may have subsided, but don't let that fool you. Like so many telecom wars, this one has migrated to the antechambers of the Federal Communications Commission. There, both sides are battling over whether the feud comes under the FCC's authority via its still-unofficial net neutrality rules.Read the comments on this post
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MacBook Pro teardown reveals battery tweaks, Thunderbolt details
The crack team at iFixit has given the newest 15" MacBook Pro a "respectable" repairability score of 7 out of 10 after putting the machine through its obligatory post-launch teardown. The gadget repair team said that Apple made a number of good design choices with this round of updates, though it also questioned Apple's quality control after making a few discoveries.
According to iFixit, the latest MacBook Pro revision allows you to disconnect the battery without having to take it out of the notebook altogether—a helpful move for tinkerers, since all power is supposed to be disconnected before digging into the machine's innards. "The unibody design also allows for easy access to most of the other components, so it won't be terribly hard to replace things on the machine," said iFixit. "The only tricky repair is LCD replacement, which could easily result in shattering the front glass panel."
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Genomic analysis shows humans evolved with few sweeping changes
Humans and chimpanzees split around five million years ago. Ever since then, we (and they) have changed a bit to adapt to the different environments we invaded and created, and the "classic selective sweep" model was widely thought to account for these changes at the molecular level. In this scenario, a new, strongly beneficial mutation increases in frequency so rapidly that it "sweeps" away all other variants at that gene and nearby sites.Yet it is difficult to detect the evidence of such sweeps in genomic data. After analyzing 179 human genomes, an international team of researchers have concluded that these sweeps were much rarer than previously thought, and were therefore probably not a huge influence on human adaptation over the past 250,000 years. Their work is reported in Science.
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Marvel vs. Capcom 3 arcade sticks: get 'em if you can
Mad Catz hit a home run with the arcade sticks for Street Fighter IV, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a set and proceeded to mod the hell out of them. Those sticks were given to readers as part of a past Child's Play fundraiser, and we knew we had to check out the new Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Tournament Sticks when we learned of their existence.These sticks are based on the past Tournament Edition sticks Mad Catz has released, so we didn't expect much in the way of differences. What we didn't know, however, was whether or not the quality would be the same as the previous sticks. With only 5,000 of these sticks made, they would sell out no matter what. So how do they compare to the Street Fighter IV sticks?
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Baby exoplanets photographed during formation
Infant planets have been spotted forming in the disk of gas and dust around their stars for the first time.Four groups of astronomers caught three different stars transforming from lone bachelors with thick disks of material around their middles to proud parents of a growing family of gas giant planets.
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Feature: Anonymous vs. HBGary: the aftermath
The RSA security conference took place February 14-18 in San Francisco, and malware response company HBGary planned on a big announcement. The firm was about to unveil a new appliance called "Razor," a specialized computer plugged into corporate networks that could scan company computers for viruses, rootkits, and custom malware—even malicious code that had never been seen before.Razor "captures all executable code within the Windows operating system and running programs that can be found in physical memory," said HBGary, and it then "'detonates' these captured files within a virtual machine and performs extremely low level tracing of all instructions." Certain behaviors—rather than confirmed signatures—would suggest the presence of malware inside the company.
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What we know about Mac OS X Lion
Apple has updated its website with a short preview of features coming in the next major update to Mac OS X. But with a Lion Developer Preview in the wild, a few other details are beginning to leak out as well. We wanted to run down what we know so far about the OS update from both official and unofficial sources.
Apple discussed a few of these features, which combine "the power of Mac OS X with the magic of iPad," when it first showed an early preview of Lion last October. Those features include the Mac App Store (available to Snow Leopard users with the 10.6.6 update); Launchpad, a Springboard-like app launcher for Mac OS X; and the ability of apps to run in full-screen mode. There was also Mission Control, a blend of Spaces, Exposأ©, Dashboard all mashed up.
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Feature: All this has happened before: NVIDIA 3.0, ARM, and the fate of x86
At a dinner this week with members of the press, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang laid out his view of NVIDIA's past, present, and future in light of recent developments in the processor market. Jen-Hsun's remarks are worth looking at in some detail, as much for what they say about Intel as what they say about NVIDIA. We'll recap Jen-Hsun's take on the processor and GPU markets, followed by a look at the implications of the trends he references for the future of Intel, the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA), ARM, and the CPU market as a whole. Ultimately, we could even see Intel get back into the ARM market, a market where it had considerable success with its XScale line before betting the farm on x86. Read the comments on this post
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Mosquito-attacking fungus engineered to block malaria
Although public health efforts have eradicated some diseases and helped limit the impact of many others, malaria continues to present a massive public health issue. A large fraction of the world's population lives in areas where the parasite poses a risk, and it kills a million people annually, most of them in the developing world. The malarial parasite, Plasmodium, has proven tough to tackle for a variety of reasons. Once in a human, it manages to change the proteins that cover its surface often enough that our immune systems have trouble mounting a successful response. Unlike a bacteria or virus, the parasite is a eukaryote, just like humans, which means that it's harder to find unique biochemical properties that would let us target it with drugs. Plasmodium has also been able to evolve resistance to the few drugs that we've been using to treat it. That evolution of resistance extends to its vectors, a few species of mosquitos, which have also evolved resistance to many of the pesticides we have used to keep them in check.
All of that might seem to be enough to make tackling malaria seem like an intractable problem. But some researchers are reporting some success with a new approach to limiting its spread: engineering a mosquito parasite to attack it before it can reach humans.
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Share your Wiimote, share your wife: We Dare... WTF?
The video for Ubisoft's upcoming Wii game called We Dare looks like a joke. It has been spreading all over the Internet, and the most common response has been disbelief. This is a game that is supposed to be played with your very attractive friends in order to have an excuse to do sexy things with one another. Do you know anyone who has a Wii and looks like these people? When watching the trailer, think of how uncomfortable this would be in real life. Let's watch... together.
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Unusual form of sulfur may move minerals around the Earth's crust
Sulfur, an essential element of life, exists in many forms. Your nose would recognize it easily in the form of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), with its distinctive rotten egg smell. Other forms of sulfur are important geochemically, as well. For example, sulfur dioxide (SO2) is one of the most common gasses to be released from volcanoes and causes significant global cooling after eruptions. Sulfur also dissolves in geological fluids and complexes with metals to transport them within the Earth's interior. It makes stable complexes with gold and helps move it to ore deposits at shallow depths. Many of sulfur’s geochemical activities occur within the Earth’s mantle and crust. In order to understand them, geoscientists must figure out what forms of sulfur exist underneath the Earth’s surface. Currently, scientists have found evidence that sulfate (SO42-) and sulfide (S2-) are the dominant forms of sulfur in the crust and mantle. However, Gleb Pokrovski and Leonid Dubrovinsky argue in a recent of issue of Science that previous studies were hampered by limitations in sample collection and examination procedures.
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Thunderbolt smokes USB, FireWire with 10Gbps throughput
Intel has finally launched its new peripheral interconnect technology—formerly codenamed "Light Peak"—now branded "Thunderbolt." Developed in cooperation with Apple, which introduced Thunderbolt on its newest MacBook Pro laptops on Thursday morning, the new interconnect is designed to bring workstation-class I/O throughput to mobile workflows as well as serve as a next-generation connector for peripherals, including displays, storage, and video and audio devices.
Intel first announced Light Peak at the Intel Developers Forum in 2009. The proposed standard was intended to replace interconnects like FireWire, USB, and others with fiber optic connections capable of up to 100Gbps bi-directional throughput. Moving to fiber instead of copper allowed increased speeds as well as dramatically longer cable runs. The original demos used a 30m fiber optic cable to transmit dual 1080p video streams, LAN traffic, and files to an SSD RAID setup.
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