In Southwestern France, a group of fish have learned how to kill birds. As the River Tarn winds through the city of Albi, it contains a small gravel island where pigeons gather to clean and bathe. And patrolling the island are European catfish—1 to 1.5 metres long, and the largest freshwater fish on the continent. These particular catfish have taken to lunging out of the water, grabbing a pigeon, and then wriggling back into the water to swallow their prey. In the process, they temporarily stran
As we trudge through December toward the holidays, snowfall becomes increasingly likely. But while it may be a pain in the ass when it falls, up close it looks incredibly beautiful—as these photographs demonstrate. More »
A 20-year-old college student has rebuilt Portal, Valve’s 2007 space-bending game, from the ground up, on—wait for it—a graphing calculator. In a display that puts the old calculator versions of Mario and Tetris to shame, Alex Marcolina posted to a gaming forum and reddit on Sunday about his re-engineered version of Portal. It took three years to build and cannot, due to resource constraints on TI-83/84 calculators, execute more than 16 kilobytes of code.
When Marcolina set out to rebuild Portal on TI’s graphing calculator platform, he was 17. Now, he’s a 20-year-old game design major at UC-San Diego who programs games mainly for computers, but likes to dabble in graphing calculator games on occasion because it’s “a fun challenge to make a game for a platform that is not supposed to even support games.”
The native language for the TI-83 and 84 calculators is called TiBasic. But when it comes to making games, creators favor a language called Axe, developed by a member of the calculator and PC gaming forum Omnimaga. Marcolina points out the syntax for Axe is “very loose, but it allows for good optimization in the translation from code to assembly.â€
Calculating with Portals
To represent portal travel, Marcolina told Ars he had to create two separate sets of variables: x and y for regular space, and i and j for “Portal Space†(when the player is moving through a portal). i represents how far into the portal the player is, and j the side-to-side movement relative to the portal.
This beautiful shot was made for the first episode of Richard Hammond’s: Engineering Connections, which was dedicated to the Airbus A380. Apparently, wind tunnels can look like the lair of the wicked witch in an old Disney animation movie. More »
They had a month—and now it’s over. Any California mobile-app developers who don’t have a privacy policy obviously available to consumers need to get one and fast. If they don’t, they could be facing potentially massive fines: up to $2,500 per app download.
On October 30, California Attorney General Kamala Harris started notifying dozens of mobile-app developers that they weren’t in compliance with a state law that requires all “commercial online services” that gather personal information to have a clearly displayed privacy policy. State lawyers are going to send out a wave of “up to 100” letters warning the developers to get in shape or face those fines.
Since the law applies to any service provider who collects information from “any Californian,” it’s basically a regulation of the entire Internet. Earlier this year, Harris’ office made it clear that she intended to apply the law, called the California Online Privacy Protection Act, to the burgeoning world of mobile apps. In February, her office struck a deal with the big platforms, like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to help get the apps they sell to be compliant. And in July, Harris created a specialized group of six lawyers to concentrate on enforcing privacy laws.
Archeologists of the History Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences in North Korea claim they have found the “lair of the unicorn rode by King Tongmyong.” Yes, folks. A unicorn. The unicorn that their good old King used to ride back in the day.* More »
A First Look at Mercury’s Northern Polar Region Messenger’s Wide Angle Camera imaged this never-before-seen patch of terrain near Mercury’s North Pole during its first pass over the region after the camera was activated. At this point Mercury is just 280 miles above the surface. The spacecraft’s elliptical orbit brings it as close as 125 miles from the surface and as far away as 9,300 miles. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Daytime on Mercury’s equator can break the 800-degree mark, but nonetheless there’s long been speculation that the first planet’s poles might be icy. A new analysis of neutron-spectrometry data returned by the Messenger probe confirms the hypothesis: there’s ice in some polar craters!
When radar detected brightness near Mercury’s poles in 1992, the prevailing theory and hope was that it was H2O, but there are other reflective substances it might have been: lovely white sand deserts, perhaps.
Messenger, the NASA probe that’s been orbiting Mercury for a couple of years now, analyzed neutrons coming from the planet, and noticed that the quantity was lower above the polar bright spots — exactly commensurate with the way water ice absorbs neutrons.
