ars-rss
To invent the wheel, did people first have to invent the spindle?
The physics of spinning objects may have seeded concepts key to the wheel.
Twelve-thousand years ago, people in a coastal village in the Levant used stone weights on their spindles to spin thread faster and more evenly—and, some archeologists are arguing, in the process they pioneered the basic mechanics that eventually made cart wheels possible.
Archaeologists found hundreds of perforated, roundish, flattish pebbles in the 12,000-year-old village of Nahal Ein-Gev II, all with neat holes drilled in their centers. Based on their uneven appearance and their varied sizes, it seemed that these weren’t beads, but spindle whorls: a flywheel-like piece that makes a drop spindle spin faster and more steadily. The find is the oldest known evidence of a newfangled textile production technology called the drop spindle. But it may also have been a distant precursor to the wheel. According to archaeologists Talia Yashuv and Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, drop spindles work on the same mechanical principle as the earliest wheels, which show up on carts around 6,000 years ago during the Bronze Age.
“Circular objects with a hollowed center connected to a bar make one of the most important inventions of all time,” write Yashuv and Grosman in their recent paper. “At the core of it all, the importance of the wheel and axle lies in a relatively simple rotational mechanism capable of transforming linear to rotary motion and vice versa.”
The amorous adventures of earwigs
Elaborate courtship, devoted parenthood, gregarious nature (and occasional cannibalism)—earwigs have a lot going for them.
Few people are fond of earwigs, with their menacing abdominal pincers—whether they’re skittering across your floor, getting comfy in the folds of your camping tent, or minding their own business.
Scientists, too, have given them short shrift compared with the seemingly endless attention they have lavished on social insects like ants and bees.
Yet, there are a handful of exceptions. Some researchers have made conscious career decisions to dig into the hidden, underground world where earwigs reside, and have found the creatures to be surprisingly interesting and social, if still not exactly endearing.
Apple’s headphone adapter for older iPhones sells out, possibly never to return
The end of Lightning is nigh. It’s a bummer for folks with older phones, though.
When Apple infamously ditched the headphone jack with the launch of the iPhone 7, it at least provided customers with a Lightning-to-3.5 mm adapter either right in the box or as a $9 standalone purchase in its online store. Now it looks like that adapter is being retired.
As MacRumors first noted, the adapter is showing as sold out in most regions, along with a few other Lightning accessories, like the even-more-archaic-seeming Lightning-to-VGA adapter. That includes the United States, where it is not possible to order the headphone adapter from Apple’s store.
Inventory has run out, and it seems unlikely Apple will make more to refill it.
Apple Intelligence notification summaries are honestly pretty bad
Summaries are often wrong, usually odd, sometimes funny, rarely helpful.
I have been using the Apple Intelligence notification summary feature for a few months now, since pretty early in Apple’s beta testing process for the iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 updates.
If you don’t know what that is—and the vast majority of iPhones won’t get Apple Intelligence, which only works on the iPhone 16 series and iPhone 15 Pro—these notification summaries attempt to read a stack of missed notifications from any given app and give you the gist of what they’re saying.
Summaries are denoted with a small icon, and when tapped, the summary notification expands into the stack of notifications you missed in the first place. They also work on iPadOS and macOS, where they’re available on anything with an M1 chip or newer.
Explicit deepfake scandal shuts down Pennsylvania school
Parents test if school leaders can be prosecuted over failure to report AI nudes.
An AI-generated nude photo scandal has shut down a Pennsylvania private school. On Monday, classes were canceled after parents forced leaders to either resign or face a lawsuit potentially seeking criminal penalties and accusing the school of skipping mandatory reporting of the harmful images.
The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaster Online reported.
Head of School Matt Micciche seemingly first learned of the problem in November 2023, when a student anonymously reported the explicit deepfakes through a school portal run by the state attorney’s general office called “Safe2Say Something.” But Micciche allegedly did nothing, allowing more students to be targeted for months until police were tipped off in mid-2024.
Trump’s FCC chair is Brendan Carr, who wants to regulate everyone except ISPs
Carr says he wants to punish broadcast media and dismantle “censorship cartel.”
President-elect Donald Trump announced last night that he will make Brendan Carr the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr, who wrote a chapter about the FCC for the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is a longtime opponent of net neutrality rules and other regulations imposed on Internet service providers.
Although Carr wants to deregulate telecom companies that the FCC has historically regulated, he wants the FCC to start regulating Big Tech and social media firms. He has also echoed Trump’s longtime complaints about the news media and proposed punishments for broadcast networks.
Trump’s statement on Carr said that “because of his great work, I will now be designating him as permanent Chairman.”
Big, beige ’80s PC case started out as a joke, but it’s becoming real in Japan
You can fit lots of modern hardware inside—and prop your monitor on top.
Putting out a joke product on April Fools’ Day can sometimes be a clever way to quietly gauge the reaction to a wild idea without having to really commit to it.
Nerdish purveyor ThinkGeek did this a few times with the 8-bit tie and the Tauntaun sleeping bag. Pokemon Go crystallized in some ways from a Google Maps joke. And just recently, PC case-maker SilverStone has decided that so many people were into its beige-tastic FLP01 case idea, tossed onto X (formerly Twitter) late on March 31 Tokyo time, that it will now release it in early 2025 in Japan for the USD equivalent of $130.
Credit:
SilverStone
Credit:
SilverStone
As shown off at SilverStone’s Expo 2024 show in Akihbara last weekend (and spotted on Tom’s Hardware), the FLP-01 is a combination of simulacrum and serious, with heavy NEC PC-9800 homage. It has fake 5.25-inch floppy blanks, but they cover real optical disc drive and button/port modules. At SilverStone’s Japan Expo, the firm packed a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, Intel Core Ultra 7 256K CPU, and full-size ATX motherboard and PSU. There are, of course, power and disk activity LEDs on the front. As displayed, SilverStone’s demo unit had three intake fans and plenty of room for whatever else you could pack in here.
Racing turns its back on heavy, expensive hybrids for sustainable fuel
Racing’s experiment with hybrid powertrains isn’t going great.
Over the past decade, spurred on by series like Formula 1 and the World Endurance Championship, the world of motorsport began to embrace hybrid powertrains. In addition to being a sport and entertainment, racing also serves as a testbed for new vehicle technologies, having pioneered innovations we now take for granted, like seat belts, windshield wipers, and rearview mirrors. But that dalliance with electrification may be nearing its end as two high-profile series announce they’re ditching batteries and electric motors starting next year in favor of sustainable fuels instead.
Formula 1 first officially allowed hybrid power in 2009, and by 2014, the series’ rules required every car to sport a pair of complex and costly energy-recovery systems. The more road-relevant discipline of sports prototypes also began dabbling with electrified powertrains around the same time, with the first win for a hybrid car at Le Mans coming in 2012.
The budgets involved for those programs were extravagant, though. Until it instituted a cost cap, F1 team budgets stretched to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In endurance racing, Audi and Porsche spent comparable amounts on their hybrid WEC campaigns, and while Toyota managed to make do with much less, even it was spending more than $80 million a year in the mid-2010s.
SpaceX president predicts rapid increase in Starship launch rate
“It’s going to be hard to catch us, but I certainly hope people try.”
As SpaceX made its final preparations for the sixth launch of its Starship rocket, the company’s chief operating officer and president spoke at a financial conference on Friday about various topics, including the future of the massive rocket and the Starlink satellite system.
The Starship launch system is about to reach a tipping point, Gwynne Shotwell said, as it moves from an experimental rocket toward operational missions.
“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. “We want to fly it a lot.”
Urban Arrow’s front-loader is a stylish, functional cargo/kid hauler
With either cargo or kids, the Family is impeccably designed and a smooth ride.
So far, all of the cargo bikes we’ve tested have been what are called “long tails,” which means the frame is extended out past the seat, moving the rear wheel back and creating a space for cargo or extra passengers. Based on my experience, they’re the most common form of cargo bike on US roads. But they’re not the only game in town. Bakfiets, or front-loaders, extend the other end, moving the front wheel forward to create space for a substantial cargo area.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been testing a front-loader called the Family from Urban Arrow, a Dutch manufacturer that’s a sister company to Gazelle. Everything Ars’ Kevin Purdy wrote about the Gazelle bike he tested applies here. The Urban Arrow is stylish and incredibly well thought out, and it uses some interesting tech extremely effectively. And it has the added bonus of being able to haul a surprising amount of cargo. If you can get used to the price (starting at $6,000) and the small front wheel being an appreciable distance from the handlebars you use to steer it, it’s a fantastic choice.
Taking a back seat
There are a number of nice things about a front-loader design compared to a long tail. For one, the distance between the cranks and the rear wheel is typical of other bikes, meaning you don’t need an extra-long chain. With no competition for space between the rear wheel and cargo, the rear wheel is also a normal size. This helps with the feel of the bike’s handling and could theoretically allow the front-loader to use more standard parts for easier service. That’s not entirely the case with the Family, however, as Urban Arrow went with a belt drive and internally geared hub (more on that below).