In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine today, two doctors from the University of Michigan described how they saved an infant with a life-threatening respiratory disorder using a custom-designed 3D-printed device. Printed with bio-absorbable plastic, the device is holding the child's airway open and allowing him to breathe normally. The child, Kaiba Gionfriddo, suffered from tracheobrochomalacia—a collapse of the airway to one of his lungs. The condition prevented him from breathing out carbon dioxide and getting sufficient oxygen. At six weeks old, he was out with his family at a restaurant when he started to turn blue. By the time he was two months old, he had to have a breathing tube inserted into his trachea to keep him alive. Dr. Glenn Green, MD, the associate professor of pediatric otolarygololgy at the University of Michigan, was called in by Kaiba's doctors to consult on the case. He and Dr. Scott Hollister, Ph.D., a professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan, worked together to design a tracheal splint for Kaiba, using a CT scan of his respiratory tract to create a model of the device. They obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to surgically implant their creation and installed the splint on the bronchus of Kaiba's left lung on February 9, 2012. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Microsoft has finally won a long-running battle at the International Trade Commission, one of the most popular venues for the corporate patent wars that have broken out in the last few years. After Microsoft launched its patents against Motorola, the Illinois company—now under Google's control—launched a variety of counterattacks in both federal courts and the ITC. It filed a case accusing Microsoft's Xbox of violating several of its patents back in 2010. Initially, a judge did find that Microsoft infringed the patents, which were related to video transmission and compression as well as Wi-Fi. The case went back to the full six-member ITC for reconsideration, and the commission took its time to make a decision. Now its decision is out, and Microsoft is off the hook for patent infringement. The Redmond software company has been successful in using its patents to force Android-using headset companies to take licenses, and it hasn't really had to take many blows of its own in the process. And today's ITC ruling isn't the only patent counter-attack that's gone badly for Motorola lately. Earlier this year, a District Court in Washington denied Motorola the chance to charge Microsoft $4-$6 per Xbox in a separate case over standards-essential patents, reducing the license fees to a mere 3.5¢ per console. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Kyle Orland While Tuesday's Xbox One presentation answered some questions about Microsoft's upcoming system, it left just as many or more unsettled. Luckily, Ars got a chance to sit down with General Manager of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms Matt Booty to try to get more answers. While he wasn't able to answer some of the most pressing questions about the system, he was able to dive deep into some of the technical details. Our first question had to do with the 30,000-server cloud architecture that Microsoft says the Xbox One will use to help support "latency-insensitive computation" in its games. What does that mean exactly, and can laggy cloud data really help in a video game where most things have to be able to respond locally and immediately? "Things that I would call latency-sensitive would be reactions to animations in a shooter, reactions to hits and shots in a racing game, reactions to collisions," Booty told Ars. "Those things you need to have happen immediately and on frame and in sync with your controller. There are some things in a video game world, though, that don't necessarily need to be updated every frame or don't change that much in reaction to what's going on." Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Windows 8 haters, rejoice. Microsoft has heard your cries and has brought back the Start button. But you'll need to buy a new mouse to see it. Redmond today announced a pair of new mice, and those mice contain, yup, a Windows logoed Start button. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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If you've been in the market for a cheap, entry-level Chromebook, Acer's C7 Chromebook is the most affordable pick. And according to Engadget, Acer is introducing a 16GB solid-state drive option to the lineup. The C7 will continue to cost $199, and the new storage hardware presumably won't affect the 100GB of Google Drive storage users also receive. Best Buy says that the laptop is on its way, though there is no official launch date. The device will still feature a dual-core 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor, 2GB of RAM, and plenty of ports, including VGA, HDMI, a built-in card reader, and three USB 2.0 ports. You can still purchase the 320GB standard hard disk variant of the laptop from Best Buy and other participating retailers for now, though it's unclear if this 16GB version is replacing the original. We reviewed Acer's C7 Chromebook late last year and while we appreciated its relatively low price point, we felt it was too thick and heavy compared to other Chromebooks on the market—not to mention that it didn't offer the best battery life and it felt cheap to the touch to boot. Then again, it is $199, which is about $50 cheaper than the Samsung Chromebook. If you're considering buying one, it's really a matter of how much you value those Benjamins. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Aurich Lawson / Derek Riggs "Sir, look at me—did you have any shoes on?" asked the emergency medical tech. "Were you wearing shoes when you were struck?" "Huh?" I wondered, a little dazed. "What's with the shoe obsession?" Let me back up. My family and I moved from Chicago to Asheville, North Carolina last autumn, ostensibly to get closer to nature. Mostly, this has been great. We still have an urban center we can walk to, but the woodland behind my house hosts all manner of flora and fauna. We've traded rat-infested dumpsters for trash bins overturned by bears; instead of skyscrapers, we now have mountains. Unfortunately, mountains don't have lightning rods. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Take a lap, Facebook Home. But not into or around or near Europe. For now, Brits will be spared HTC and Facebook’s collaborative smartphone, the HTC First, according to a report from Engadget. The device is notably a prominent showcase for the Facebook Home experience, but given the amount of negative feedback Facebook’s Android overlay got after its US launch, the company plans to overhaul Home before trying to get other countries interested in it. Facebook launched Facebook Home back in April alongside the HTC First, which comes with stock Android and the Facebook Home interface (complete with its Cover Feed and “chat heads”) pre-installed. Reviews of Facebook Home have ranged from lukewarm to negative, in part because of the way it disrupts, rather than augments, the typical flow of using an Android phone. Facebook Home carries a 2/5 star rating in the Google Play Store, while the HTC First sold only 15,000 handsets at $99 with a two-year contract in its first month. The First was discounted to 99¢, and reports surfaced that it would be discontinued. Several HTC employees quit, but Facebook swore to users that it would issue improvements to the Home experience to alienate fewer users. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Artist's impression of the binary system SS Cygni, consisting of a white dwarf (right) stripping gas off a red dwarf star. The infalling gas forms an accretion disk, which according to theory flares periodically. Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF Many violent astrophysical phenomena, from quasars to some types of supernovae, are probably driven by accretion: gas falling onto a compact object. Frequently, the energy involved then blasts light and matter back into space, which is why we can see them. Cataclysmic variables, a type of recurring explosion involving a low-mass star and a white dwarf, probably fall into that category. However, an observation of the closest cataclysmic variable system—known as SS Cygni—casts doubt on that interpretation. The outbursts from SS Cygni were simply too bright to be accretion-driven by any known mechanism, leading some astronomers to doubt whether the process was responsible for this system and, by extension, other cataclysmic variables. Some even wondered whether it was involved in other phenomena, like bright galactic nuclei. A new set of data could possibly come to accretion's rescue. J.C.A. Miller-Jones and colleagues measured the distance to SS Cygni very precisely using two networks of radio telescopes and an assumption-free geometry-based method. They determined the binary system is about 372 light-years from the Solar System, placing it about 28 percent closer than the previous distance measurement. If that's a more reliable estimate, the bright outbursts from SS Cygni could be explained using accretion, saving that theoretical model from a premature death. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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A pleasant Thursday afternoon, Arsians, and welcome to SURPRISE THURSDAY DEALMASTER. Our partners at LogicBuy came across some timely deals they just couldn't sit on, so here they are! In the top slot this week is a PNY 120GB SSD, which features high-endurance MLC flash. With some discounts and some rebates, the final price on the drive should be down to $87.99, or $0.73 per raw gigabyte. If that SSD isn't floating your boat, we've also got a 250GB Samsung 840 for $188.99—about $0.78 per raw gigabyte. Aside from the difference in available space, the Samsung 840 also uses triple-level cell (TLC) flash, as opposed to the PNY's multi-level cell (MLC) flash. Want to know the difference? We've got you covered in our in-depth piece on how solid-state disks work. Top deal: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Yesterday we reported that Google officially updated the stable version of Chrome to Chrome 27, introducing several new features and bug fixes. Chrome for Android (stable version) also received similar treatment and has been promoted to Chrome 27. It comes with several options that were previously included in past versions of Chrome Beta for Android. Chrome 27 for Android has full-screen browsing abilities, simpler searching directly from the omnibox, and some stability improvements. The full-screen mode engages when the user begins scrolling down a webpage; the toolbar will scroll up with the rest of the content and doesn't stay fixated at the top for navigation. Tablet users can press the browser back button to view their tab history, and Chrome for Android now features client-side certification support. That allows users to access sites requiring visitors to use a certificate. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS' "unlimited" data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone. "I have never heard of this happening to anyone," the 27-year-old Californian—who uses the screen name houkouonchi and would prefer not to be identified by name—wrote in a post on DSLreports.com entitled "LOL VZ called me about my bandwidth usage Gotta go Biz." "But I probably use more bandwidth than any FIOS customer in California, so I am not super surprised about this." Curious about how one person could generate that kind of traffic, Ars reached out to houkouonchi and spoke with him via instant message. As it turns out, he's the ultimate outlier. His problem is more that he's violated Verizon's terms of service than his excessive bandwidth usage. An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, houkouonchi has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in a rack in his house. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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"What was once sweet is now bitter, but at least i can check out of the roach motels now." http://www.maine.gov/agriculture/pesticides/gotpests/bugs/cockroaches.htm Have you ever wished you could just turn off your sweet tooth to help you resist that third piece of pie? For people, the downside of the deliciousness of sugar is simply feeling really full or gaining weight, but for cockroaches, their sweet tooth can be deadly. The poisoned baits people set to kill roaches in their homes lure the unsuspecting insects in with sugar. But it turns out that the selective pressure of delicious, deadly traps throughout the environment has led to the rapid evolution of cockroaches that avoid sugar. They turned the sweet tooth off—or rather redirected it so it now tastes bitter. A team of researchers from North Carolina State University published research this week looking at how the German cockroach Blattella germanica was able to adapt so quickly when surrounded by tasty insecticide. Sweet baits became popular for roach control in the mid-1980s, but several years later scientists began noticing a new behavioral trait: aversion to glucose, the most common simple sugar. The trait is heritable, and cockroaches with it avoided the baits. In areas treated with these traps, the roaches without a sweet tooth had much better survival rates than the roaches that lacked this new adaptation. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Verizon Wireless customers can purchase the Samsung Galaxy S 4 handset today online or from a Verizon retail store. The carrier is offering the handset for $199.99 with a new two-year contract, or you can stick with the "month to month" service and get the device for the full $649.99. The handset features a 1080p Super AMOLED screen, Android 4.2.2, a Quad-core 1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 SoC, and 2GB of RAM. It will be sold at Verizon with 16GB of memory, though the phone does support up to a 64GB microSD card. Hat tip to Android Police for this one: AT&T today also teased its "aurora red" version, which can be purchased for the subsidized price of $199.99. It's $639.99 for those who want to go contract-free. The preorders for the red handset begin tomorrow, but it isn't slated to arrive until June 14th. It will feature 16GB of storage and it is apparently exclusive to AT&T. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Penguin will pay $75 million to settle claims that it engaged in a conspiracy with other publishers and Apple to raise e-book prices. "Penguin has reached a comprehensive agreement with the US state attorneys general and private class plaintiffs to pay $75 million in consumer damages plus costs and fees to resolve all antitrust claims relating to eBook pricing," the Pearson-owned company announced yesterday. The money will be distributed to consumers, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley announced. “Price collusion among competitors is unacceptable,” Coakley said. “This settlement will reimburse consumers harmed in this e-book scheme and bring an end to the unlawful practices that caused these overcharges.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Out of nowhere, Kim Dotcom last night claimed to have invented a widely used and very important security technology known as two-factor authentication. Just after Twitter launched a two-factor system, Dotcom tweeted that Twitter is "Using my invention" and also that "they won't even verify my Twitter account." He followed up by calling the use of two-step authentication by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Citibank, and others a "Massive IP infringement by U.S. companies. My innovation. My patent." Dotcom does have a US patent (using his original name of Kim Schmitz) on two-factor authentication, filed in 1998 and granted in 2000. He also used to have an equivalent patent in Europe. But Dotcom's European patent was revoked in 2011 largely because AT&T had a patent on the same technology with a priority date from 1995. (Thanks to Emily Weal of patent law firm Keltie for pointing out Dotcom's European patent travails in the IP Copy blog.) Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Despite the fact that HTC is shedding executives like cat hair onto a new black suit, things aren't all doom and gloom at the company. The Wall Street Journal recently spent some time with an unnamed HTC executive who noted that the company has sold about 5 million One handsets since the smartphone's launch. The HTC One. Florence Ion "Orders are pretty good so far and are still more than what we can supply," the executive told the WSJ. What isn't clear from the source's statement is whether the 5 million number actually refers to smartphones in the hands of consumers or if it's simply the number of handsets sold to retailers. If it's the latter, a lot of those HTC One smartphones could still be sitting in unopened boxes. Five million seems like a lot, but it's only half the number of Galaxy S 4s that Samsung has moved. However, Samsung's 10 million "sold" number explicitly refers to sales to carriers and retailers. There aren't yet 10 million S 4 handsets in the wild. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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In a move to get approval of its acquisition of Sprint Nextel Corp., executives of Japanese telecom company SoftBank have agreed to give the US government veto power over the choice for Sprint's director responsible for oversight of national security issues, the Wall Street Journal reports. Government representatives involved in the negotiations with SoftBank also reportedly want to be allowed to approve Sprint's network hardware purchases. Additionally, the government is pushing for Sprint to pull radio base stations manufactured by Huawei already installed on the network of wireless broadband company Clearwire. Sprint is a partner in Clearwire and is in the midst of acquiring it. Clearwire markets wireless broadband in the US under the CLEAR brand. Details of the negotiation over network systems from Huawei and ZTE were first reported in March. The US government has expressed concerns about potential security threats posed by hardware and software from the two companies; a report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found that the companies' close ties to China's People's Liberation Army posed a risk to national security and urged US telecom companies to "seek other vendors for their projects" because of the risk of cyber espionage and cyberattacks through hidden back doors in the hardware. Huawei had offered to allow a third party to certify the security of its systems; in April, the company's executives announced they were no longer interested in the US market. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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AMD today is announcing three new families of chips that it hopes will dominate the market of high-end tablets, low-end laptops, and converged hybrid devices. The chips—which will come to market variously as the A4 and A6 Elite Mobility series; the A4, A6, and E series; and the A6 and A10 Elite series—are close siblings to the processors found in both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. All the processors are built around the same building blocks: two or four Jaguar CPU cores, paired with AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU. They support AMD's heterogeneous uniform memory access technology, too, designed to make it easier to share data and computation between the CPU and GPU. The differences are their power usage, clock speeds, number of GPU cores, and level of integration. Formerly codenamed Temash, the A4 and A6 Elite Mobility series are full systems-on-chip, adding PCI express, SATA, USB, and other I/O controllers to the CPU and GPU. SKUs range from a 3.9W dual-core 1GHz part with a 225MHz GPU to an 8W quad-core 1.4GHz (maximum)/1GHz (base) part with a 400/300MHz (maximum/base) GPU, the A6-1450. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Michał Kasprzak / flickr One of the most damning accusations against copyright-trolling operation Prenda Law is that the attorneys who manage it engaged in identity theft. Corporate papers on Prenda shell companies were signed by Alan Cooper, the former housekeeper of John Steele. Cooper has said someone else signed his name; Prenda-linked lawyers have said Cooper is basically crazy. Crazy or not, Cooper lawyered up. He sued Prenda for fraudulent use of his name and the accusations were heard in court this week. At the same time, Prenda lawyers are continuing to fight off a devastating sanctions order with penalties growing at the rate of $1,000 per day. Observant citizen and Minneapolis resident Matthew Sparby published an article about his observations on the recent Cooper v. Prenda hearing at Techdirt. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Last year The New York Times unleashed its vision of digitally native storytelling with "Snow Fall." The piece broke away from standard newsprint-transplanted-to-Web design, offering interactive graphics, videos, and other multimedia integrated into an overall narrative. It wasn't necessarily Earth shattering, but it demonstrated a cool concept for others to aspire to. The push to move beyond common content templates is precisely what drives the tiny start-up Scroll Kit. According to a blog post by founder Cody Brown, the company works "to help publishers break from their templates and craft powerful digital stories" by streamlining this process. So Brown saw "Snow Fall" as an opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of Scroll Kit. He continued: "Instead of tweeting about how awesome 'Snow Fall' was, I wanted to do something that would show its admirers that they can do it too—I made a replica. It took about an hour to put together, and I recorded a video of the process." Nice homage, right? Not quite. According to the cease-and-desist letter Brown later received from NYT, the video is actually a nice example of copyright infringement. NYT requested that Brown remove the demo from YouTube, the Scroll Kit site, and other social media avenues within three days. Despite considering the video acceptable under fair use, Brown didn't want to fight the NYT legal team and he complied (setting the video to private). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock In a bid to make JavaScript run ever faster, Mozilla has developed asm.js. It's a limited, stripped down subset of JavaScript that the company claims will offer performance that's within a factor of two of native—good enough to use the browser for almost any application. Can JavaScript really start to rival native code performance? We've been taking a closer look. The quest for faster JavaScript JavaScript performance became a big deal in 2008. Prior to this, the JavaScript engines found in common Web browsers tended to be pretty slow. These were good enough for the basic scripting that the Web used at the time, but it was largely inadequate for those wanting to use the Web as a rich application platform. In 2008, however, Google released Chrome with its V8 JavaScript engine. Around the same time, Apple brought out Safari 4 with its Nitro (née Squirrelfish Extreme) engine. These engines brought something new to the world of JavaScript: high performance achieved through just-in-time (JIT) compilation. V8 and Nitro would convert JavaScript into pieces of executable code that the CPU could run directly, improving performance by a factor of three or more. Read 94 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Apple is yet again pursuing patent infringement claims against Samsung (and Samsung is counter-suing Apple too). The pair's newest patent battle is happening in the US District Court of Northern California and it's a similar lawsuit to the infringement case heard last year that resulted in a $1.05 billion verdict in favor of Apple. However, this time around Apple and Samsung are pursuing claims against the latest generation of products. Last week, Apple added a footnote to a filing, saying it hoped to include Samsung's Galaxy S4 in its infringement suit. Now, the company has filed a motion to include not only the S4 but also a wide array of Google services. According to Apple lawyers, the Google "Quick Search Box," and the later Google Now function, infringes two Apple patents. The Cupertino company went on to say that Samsung's latest iterations of Google's operating system infringe upon two patents—numbers 8,086,604 and 6,847,959—in ways that satisfied a Federal Circuit's narrowed definitions of Apple's claims. Both the '604 and '959 patents deal with selectively presenting information from a search to suit the user's most relevant needs. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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On the heels of the Syrian Electronic Army compromising a number of high-profile accounts—including those of the Associated Press, The Guardian, and The Onion—Twitter has introduced a two-factor authentication feature that should make such attacks more difficult. In a blog post today, Jim O'Leary of Twitter's security team announced the release of "login verification," an optional security measure that requires a verified phone number and e-mail address. Twitter is a bit late to the two-factor authentication party. Word first spread that Twitter was working on a two-factor authentication scheme in February when the company advertised job openings for security engineers to develop "user-facing security features, such as multi-factor authentication and fraudulent login detection." Google has offered two-factor authentication since February of 2011, and Facebook introduced two-step login approval in May of 2011. Like Google's two-factor authentication, Twitter's login verification sends a code via SMS to be entered to confirm login. But unlike Google's system, the code will be sent every time users sign into Twitter through its website. This is the case even if it's from a computer or device that they've logged in from before. The phone has to be enrolled through Twitter's existing SMS service first—you have to text a code to Twitter to verify the phone first, which may not work with some phone carriers. The relationship between phones and accounts is also strictly one-to-one: if you have a shared business account, you're going to need to share a phone number too. If you have multiple accounts and only one phone number, then you can only secure a single account. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Yesterday, voters in the Portland, Oregon area rejected a public health measure that's been widely adopted elsewhere in the US: water fluoridation. The treatment of drinking water with trace amounts of fluorine has a clear, positive effect in preventing tooth decay, and extensive studies (including some cases where water sources are naturally high in fluorine) have indicated that the levels used in water supplies have no adverse affects on health. But amidst talk that wouldn't seem entirely out of place in Dr. Strangelove, a measure that would have started water fluoridation failed by a 20-point margin. The evidence in favor of fluoridation's benefits is so strong that the CDC has named it one of the greatest public health accomplishments of the past century. As a somewhat snarky Slate piece on the Oregon ballot measure notes, a huge number of medical organizations are on record as supporting it. In fact, the benefits were so clear that the Portland city council approved a plan to start adding fluorine to the city's water. That, however, triggered enough outrage that the plan eventually ended up as a ballot measure. And the outrage lasted throughout the campaign over the ballot issue, by all accounts. Along with some civility, science itself went out the window. The campaign against fluoridation put up a website that said (contrary to evidence) that fluoridation doesn't actually work. It also plays a bit on chemophobia, calling the treatment an "industrial byproduct" and focusing on the tiny amounts of trace contaminants that come with fluorine. More generally, opponents focused on how pure the existing water supply was (without mentioning "purity of essence," though). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora operating system has a bit of a checkered history with the Raspberry Pi. It was originally the recommended operating system for the device before being stripped from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's downloads page, replaced by a version of Debian optimized for the Pi's ARMv6 chip. But Fedora is back on the Pi in the form of a new build developed by the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. It's called "Pidora." "It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set," the Pidora team said today. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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