Topps Blog

Thursday, 3 November 2022

New Study Shows Bees Enjoy Playing With Toys, a First for Insects

(Photo: Eduardo Goody/Unsplash) Dogs, cats, primates, and even some birds are known to play for enjoyment’s sake—but what about bumble bees? A new study has revealed that these adorably fuzzy bees seek out fun by playing with toys, even without any survival incentive to do so.

Researchers from the United Kingdom’s Queen Mary University and the University of Sheffield recently sought to uncover whether insects engage in play. A study from 2017 found that bumble bees could be trained to roll balls for a reward; taken a step further, the same concept could be applied to research on bees’ “recreational” behaviors. The researchers obtained multiple commercial bumble bee colonies housed in a container that mimicked their natural nesting environment. To avoid distressing the bees, the researchers handled the insects as little as possible and gave them as much pollen and sugar water as they wanted. They also adjusted the lab’s lighting to simulate night and day.

Attached to the bees’ nest was a tunnel leading to the experimental arena, which contained small wooden balls in one area and food in another. The path past the balls and to the food was left unobstructed. A total of 45 bumble bees were allowed through the tunnel and into the arena; from here, they had the freedom to interact with the balls, feed, or leave at any time. On the first day of the experiment, all 45 bees completed “intentional” (0.4 seconds or longer) ball rolls at least once, with some rolling the balls up to 44 times. The next day, 37 bees returned to interact with the wooden balls, even after they’d finished feeding on pollen and sugar water.

(Image: Dona et al, Animal Behaviour)

At no point were any of the bees incentivized (i.e. rewarded with food or rest) for rolling the balls. The researchers also eliminated the possibility that the bees were attempting to mate or clear debris. As a result, the researchers believe they were engaging in play, or recreational behavior lacking immediate survival benefits.

As with other creatures, it appears bumble bees’ interest in play is influenced by their age. A second version of the researchers’ experiment monitored two distinct groups: bees under and over 10 days of age. Younger bees interacted with the wooden balls more, particularly between the ages of three and seven days. Males also interacted with the balls longer than their female counterparts.

Though play is typically enjoyed in the moment thanks to its associations with relaxation and delight, scientists believe it might serve a larger function. Humans and other animals are encouraged to play in their youth to promote the healthy development of certain cognitive and motor abilities. Still, the researchers in the UK think there’s a chance bees play in an effort to achieve a “positive emotional state,” however rudimentary that might be.

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Sony PlayStation VR2 Launching at $549 in February 2023

Meta is getting most of the attention in the VR space as CEO Mark Zuckerberg bets his company’s future on his nebulous vision for the “metaverse.” Sony is still making VR for games, though. The company’s long-awaited PlayStation VR2 headset has been fully revealed, with pre-orders starting later this month. It won’t cost you Meta Quest Pro money, but it’s not cheap, either.

The PS VR2 has the same basic aesthetic as Sony’s last headset — it’s a wrap-around plastic visor with a halo-style strap. While the first-gen PS VR used the Move controllers (the ones that look like glowing microphones), PS VR2 has its own handle-shaped Sense controllers with sensor rings and adaptive triggers (like the PS5 controller). The base PS VR2 bundle will set you back $549.99, and it goes up to $599.99 if you pick up the version bundled with Horizon Call of the Mountain. Sony will also have a $50 charging dock for the Sense controllers.

Sony says the PS VR2 was designed with visual fidelity and immersion in mind. It has an OLED screen with a resolution of 2000 x 2040 pixels per eye. That’s a huge upgrade from the meager 960 x 1080 pixels per eye offered by the original. Even the $1,500 Quest Pro is a bit behind the PS VR2 with 1800 x 1920 pixels per eye. The PS VR2 also supports up to 120Hz refresh rate, adjustable IPD, and eye tracking via an IR camera. Plus, Sony says it’s added a vent to the design that will improve airflow and make the headset more comfortable to wear for long periods.

The main differentiator between the PS VR2 and Meta’s current VR products is that Sony’s headset is a PlayStation accessory. You must connect it to the PlayStation 5 via a USB-C cable, allowing it to act like a fancy monitor on your face. That makes it less portable and convenient than standalone VR, but you don’t have to worry about battery life and the visual quality will be better than what you get with a headset running a souped-up mobile processor.

Sony will begin taking pre-orders for the PS VR2 on Nov. 15 via its online store in the US, UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. It will be available in other countries at the same time, but the specifics will be up to local retailers. The headset, games, and accessories will begin shipping on Feb. 22, 2023. Sony expects there to be about 20 games for PS VR2 ready at launch next year.

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ASRock Shows Off External Display That Goes Inside Your Case

Glass side panels have long been a favored accessory for PC builders. After all, what good is all that RGB if you can’t show it off? Now component maker ASRock is one-upping that feature by letting you put a display behind your case windows. Yes, it will cover up your precious rainbow lights, but it’s certainly a novel location for a second monitor. The only drawback is it’s only available on certain ASRock motherboards. You also need a transparent side panel on your case, obviously.

The kit is simply dubbed 13.3″ Side Panel Kit by ASRock. It was revealed recently by Twitter informant momo_us, who is known for CPU and GPU speculation. It’s a fairly pedestrian IPS display by most standards. It runs at 1920 x 1080 resolution at 60Hz, with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Despite the fact that it might be located behind tempered glass, it has a modest peak brightness of just 300 nits. The reason why it only functions on certain ASRock motherboards is it uses embedded DisplayPort for both data and power. That’s not a connector you find on a GPU, or most motherboards. However, if you have a compatible ASRock motherboard, the panel connects with a single 40-pin connector. This feature is found on select Z790 and B650 motherboards, according to Techpowerup.

ASRock’s Side Panel Kit lets you “double your productivity.” (Image: ASRock)

Mounting the panel seems straightforward. You attach two rails to the top and bottom of your side panel, then slide it into place. It seems like it’s using double-sided tape to secure it to the glass. From there you connect the eDP cable and you’re off. You can now, according to ASRock, chat with people on your second screen while gaming. Or you can stream and chat, watch game guides, and so on. We’d probably just use it to monitor our system temps and CPU usage, but we’re nerdy like that.

We think this is pretty neat. It’d be even neater if it didn’t require an ASRock motherboard, but the company has bills to pay. It’s a bit reminiscent of iBuyPower’s Snowblind S chassis (above). It uses a clear LCD as the actual side panel. This lets you see your RGB and monitor your hardware at the same time. ASRock’s kit is even vaguely reminiscent of the 2004 Dream Machine from MaximumPC. Your humble author helped build it, and we put a 6.5-inch LCD in the front of our Silverstone chassis. That idea never took off, however. Now with the prevalence of RGB lights on CPU coolers, memory, and motherboards, it’s doubtful people will want to cover that up with a display. Still, it’s a cool feature, even if it doesn’t enjoy widespread adoption.

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NASA to Test a New Inflatable Heat Shield in November

Many of the places NASA wants to send future crewed and uncrewed missions have an atmosphere, which is problematic if you want your payload to reach the surface in one piece. Entering an atmosphere from space, even a thin one like you’d find on Mars, requires a heat shield. NASA is investigating a more dynamic and scalable version of this essential component by making it inflatable. The agency’s Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) could be the first step toward that, and it’s being launched this month.

As scientists have moved toward sending larger payloads to distant locales, the limitations of heat shields have become more challenging. If you want to land a mission on celestial bodies like Mars, Venus, and Titan, you have to be able to protect it during atmospheric entry when kinetic energy is converted to heat. The same goes for bringing a spacecraft back to Earth. Current rigid aeroshells are limited by the shroud size of the rocket, but an inflatable shield could be much larger, and thus offer better protection.

LOFTID will demonstrate a much wider aeroshell that you could fit in most current rockets — a full 6 meters in diameter (about 20 feet). NASA believes this design could scale to support both crewed and uncrewed missions, and the value for Mars exploration is particularly pragmatic. The red planet has an atmosphere that is thick enough to produce intense heat during landing, but it’s too thin to substantially slow a craft. That’s why Perseverance and Curiosity, which were bulkier than past Mars missions, needed the rocket sled to gently land on the surface. The larger surface area allowed by LOFTID could produce more drag to slow a spacecraft down.

NASA believes future versions of LOFTID technology could also help lower the cost of space operations around Earth. For example, an inflatable heat shield would not add as much to the initial launch mass, and they could be used to safely land components like ULA’s Vulcan rocket engines for reuse.

The LOFTID prototype vehicle is currently set to ride into space aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V (which is only 3.8 meters across) on Nov. 9. It’s not the primary payload of that mission, which is also deploying a weather satellite called the Joint Polar Surveyor System-2 (JPSS-2). However, LOFTID will deploy in orbit and be put on a reentry trajectory. NASA will monitor the conditions on the reentry vehicle every 20 seconds during its descent. The inflatable heat shield will have a parachute for a safe landing in the ocean, but it will also eject a data recorder to ensure engineers get everything they need from the test.

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Wednesday, 2 November 2022

Google Officially Puts Hangouts Out to Pasture

The long, agonizing death of Google Hangouts has finally come to an end. After announcing that its popular chat platform would shut down in 2018, Google has been urging users to switch to Google Chat. But now, you’ve got no choice — attempting to access Hangouts on the web will simply redirect you to the enterprise-centric Google Chat.

Google’s messaging products have been a mess for years, but there was a brief period when it seemed like Hangouts could be the single unifying platform we needed. Hangouts began its life in Google+, but later it replaced Google Talk in Gmail, which immediately gave it a big user base. The app later added support for SMS, making it a one-stop shop for all your messaging needs. That changed in 2016 when Google announced Allo, the phone number-based messaging client that crashed and burned in 2018.

It was clear during Allo’s brief reign that Hangouts was doomed. Google started removing features like SMS support, and in 2018 announced that it planned to wind down the service. However, it has delayed the final shutdown several times. The plan was put into action in 2021 when the company opened up access to its suite of Workspace apps, which includes Google Chat. It finalized the shutdown date in June of this year, making this one of the most glacial product wind-downs in history.

In its heyday, Hangouts was a very full-featured app.

Google Chat is already accessible in Gmail for most users, and there’s a mobile app (the Hangouts mobile app was pulled from app stores in March of this year). While Chat is supposed to be the replacement for Hangouts, it’s part of Workspace and is therefore treated like more of a business tool (think Slack). Average users are supposed to be using the other Chat, which is Google’s implementation of RCS in the Google Messages app. Confused? Don’t feel bad — Google isn’t making this easy.

Google has been migrating users to Chat with increasing frequency as the final shutdown approached, and starting today, you can’t even access Hangouts on the web anymore. For those who’ve been clinging to Hangouts, Google says most of your conversations will transfer to Chat. It will email those who have non-transferable data and suggests Google Takeout as a way to preserve it. However, you only have until January 2023 to grab it, as that’s when Google will delete all stored Hangouts data from its servers.

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Breathtaking New 544MP Image of a Supernova Remnant Revealed

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a new image of the cosmos, which is not exactly uncommon. However, the new image of the Vela supernova remnant is special. It was captured with one of the largest telescopes in the world and features an incredible level of detail. The ESO has made the stunning image available in various resolutions, including a 544-megapixel original file.

Until about 11,000 years ago, there was no Vela supernova remnant. This structure is the product of a type II supernova, which marked the end of a massive star. That star is now an ultra-dense neutron star — technically a pulsar as it’s rotating more than 11 times per second. It’s the brightest pulsar (in radio frequencies) in the sky, and has one of the fastest rotations known. The image from the ESO doesn’t focus on the pulsar itself but rather on the massive cloud of energized gas that makes up the supernova remnant.

The Vela supernova remnant is only 800 light years away, which allows the VLT to get a good look at the structure. When the progenitor star ran out of nuclear fuel, the resulting collapse launched the outer layers away with a massive explosion. The shock wave compresses gas into wispy filaments. The energy from the supernova heats the gas, making it glow brightly in the image.

The image comes to us by way of the ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope, which is a 2.6-meter telescope in the arid Atacama Desert in Chile. It relies on a single focal plane instrument known as the OmegaCAM, which has a resolution of 268 megapixels. It can capture images with a variety of color filters. In the case of the Vela supernova remnant, four were used: red, blue, green, and magenta.

This image shows the process of going from the raw data captured by a telescope to a stunning astronomical image like the one featured here, showing the Vela supernova remnant as seen with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST).

You might wonder how you get from a 268-megapixel sensor to a 544-megapixel processed image. The answer is that what you see above is a mosaic composed of multiple frames. The ESO provided a neat graphic that explains the process. The team has to merge frames, balance the background, assign colors to each filter, and finally produce the final full-color version.

The ESO has downloads of the image in various wallpaper resolutions, but if you’ve got a lot of pixels to cover or just want to explore the Vela supernova remnant in greater detail, there are publication-ready JPEGs, as well as uncompressed TIFF files. The original 544-megapixel version clocks in at 1.1GB.

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Lasers Can Blind Autonomous Vehicles, Endangering Pedestrians: Study

(Photo: Daryan Shamkhali/Unsplash) When we think of autonomous vehicle safety, we’re usually focused on ensuring a vehicle’s self-driving technology is sound. But what if high-quality self-driving tech can be sabotaged by bad actors from the outside? According to new research, it can—and the consequences could be deadly for pedestrians.

Most companies involved with autonomous vehicle technology use light detection and ranging (LIDAR) for navigation. LIDAR, which typically takes the form of a spinning sensor on the vehicle’s exterior, constantly captures information about the vehicle’s surroundings by emitting laser light. The resulting reflections allow the system to calculate the distance between itself and any obstacles present in the vehicle’s environment. When LIDAR is working properly, it helps the vehicle stop or change course to avoid obstacles in its path.

Unfortunately, it’s disconcertingly easy to interrupt this process from the outside. Researchers from the University of Florida, the University of Michigan, and Japan’s University of Electro-Communications have found that it only takes a well-aimed laser to confuse autonomous vehicles’ LIDAR, thus preventing the system from detecting things in its path. When timed correctly, a laser pointed at an oncoming LIDAR sensor creates a cone-shaped blind spot where pedestrians, equipment, and other obstacles can’t be seen. This causes the vehicle to think its current path is a safe one and even crash into whatever’s in its way.

(Image: Cao et al/arXiv)

Though at first it sounds like lasers “blind” LIDAR, this isn’t the case. In an experiment simulating malicious interference, the researchers tested the effect of a laser pointed at LIDAR-equipped vehicles and robots from approximately 15 feet away. While LIDAR still captured obstacles’ presence, it immediately discarded that data in favor of the laser, which essentially spoofed a second reflection and scrambled the sensor’s data. In simulations involving vehicles, this caused moving pedestrians to go unnoticed, allowing the vehicles to proceed toward a potentially deadly collision.

It’s difficult to imagine what incentive someone would have for wreaking havoc by inhibiting an autonomous vehicle’s LIDAR. Regardless, the researchers—who specialize in artificial intelligence, data science, programming, and electrical engineering—think such interference can be avoided. Manufacturers could update their vehicles’ LIDAR to include Fake Shadow Detection, or FSD. This would identify and circumvent “shadow regions” caused by spoofed reflections, including those maliciously generated using lasers.

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