Enlarge / German chemists combined two complementary mass spectrometry techniques to analyze 467 different commercial beers from around the world. (credit: Natasha Breen/Getty Images)

People have been brewing beer for millennia, and the basic chemistry of fermentation is well understood. But thanks to advanced analytical techniques, scientists continue to learn more about the many different chemical compounds that contribute to the flavor and aroma of different kinds of beer. The latest such analysis comes courtesy of a team of German scientists who analyzed over 400 commercial beers from 40 countries. The scientists identified at least 7,700 different chemical formulas and tens of thousands of unique molecules, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Chemistry. And they did it with a new approach that can analyze a sample in just 10 minutes.

“Beer is an example of enormous chemical complexity,” said co-author Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin of the Technical University of Munich and the Helmholtz Center in Munich. “And thanks to recent improvements in analytical chemistry, comparable in power to the ongoing revolution in the technology of video displays with ever-increasing resolution, we can reveal this complexity in unprecedented detail. Today it’s easy to trace tiny variations in chemistry throughout the food production process, to safeguard quality or to detect hidden adulterations.”

As I’ve written previously, all beer contains hops, a key flavoring agent that also imparts useful antimicrobial properties. To make beer, brewers mash and steep grain in hot water, which converts all that starch into sugars. This is traditionally the stage when hops are added to the liquid extract (wort) and boiled. That turns some of the resins (alpha acids) in the hops into iso-alpha acids, producing beer’s hint of bitterness. Yeast is then added to trigger fermentation, turning the sugars into alcohol. Some craft brewers prefer dry-hopping—hops are added during or after the fermentation stage, after the wort has cooled. They do this as a way to enhance the hoppy flavors without getting excessive bitterness, since there is no isomerization of the alpha acids.

Enlarge / FlickType iPhone keyboard. (credit: FlickType)

FlickType includes an Apple Watch keyboard and the iPhone keyboard intended for blind and low-vision users of VoiceOver, an Apple technology that can speak the key a user selects. FlickType’s Apple Watch keyboard will continue, at least for a while, but the iPhone keyboard will be disabled.

“It’s with a heavy heart today that we’re announcing the discontinuation of our award-winning iPhone keyboard for blind users,” the FlickType account on Twitter wrote yesterday. FlickType is developed by Kosta Eleftheriou, who recently filed a lawsuit alleging that Apple used its control over iPhone app distribution to induce him to sell FlickType to Apple at a discount. He says he refused to sell the app.

Project Starship’s frog cops out in force. (credit: Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

The ScummVM community has just made the early CD-ROM gaming era more accessible. For five years, multiple people have worked on making Macromedia Director games playable on modern hardware, and today, that work is done.

Director was a critical component of early CD games that failed to scale up as Windows advanced (and as software like QuickTime fell by the wayside). But playing Spaceship Warlock or the bizarre Japanese art piece Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou is now possible on current hardware—without the use of specific emulators.

Time travel and killer robots at their most ’90s. (credit: The Obscuritory)

Librarian, historian, and game archivist Phil Salvador, who runs The Obscuritory, tweeted about the project on Tuesday. “In many cases, the classic games you can purchase on platforms like GOG.com are being run through an emulator like DOSBox or ScummVM,” Salvador told Ars. “But because Director games use features of their operating systems like Windows 3.1 or external plugins like QuickTime, there’s been no clean, easy way to re-release those [games] on the commercial marketplace. As the ScummVM team continues to improve support for Director, there’s a good chance we could see some of these games on the market again.”

Enlarge / The destabilization of ice sheets in West Antarctica would be a major climate tipping point. (credit: Alessandro Dahan / Getty Images)

Rising temperatures are producing some very predictable effects: gradually worsening droughts, a steady rise in sea levels, and so on. But we also risk crossing thresholds in which aspects of the climate suddenly shift to new behaviors. That process seems to have happened in part of the Arctic Ocean, and there are indications that the main circulating current in the Atlantic Ocean may be approaching a shutdown.

A lot of effort has gone into modeling the economic cost of climate change in general, but we haven’t figured out what crossing a tipping point might do to the world economy. This week, three researchers attempted to explore the subject, integrating estimates of the cost of tipping points with combined economics/climate models. The results suggest that we may be under-valuing the current cost of our carbon emissions and accepting a much higher level of financial risk than we might think.

What percent do you tip?

Climate tipping points are easy to understand on a conceptual level. At some poorly defined point in the future’s warming, some natural systems will shift to a different type of behavior. That behavior will make it unlikely that the system will return to its initial state.

Google has officially unveiled its next mid-range phone, the Pixel 5a. The big news today (and always the main selling point of the Pixel A-series) is the price, which is $449, or $100 more than the Pixel 4a. Google’s blog post has a phone comparison sheet showing its lineup as the Pixel 5, Pixel 5a, and Pixel 4a, so hopefully, the $349 Pixel 4a is sticking around?

Part of the reason for the price increase is that the Pixel 5a is a bigger phone, with a 6.34-inch display and 73.7 mm width compared to the Pixel 4a’s 5.8-inch display and 69.4 mm width. Another big change is the addition of IP67 dust and water resistance, which means the phone should survive submersion in 3 feet of water (1 meter) for 30 minutes. Like the Pixel 5, the body is metal coated in plastic instead of the pure plastic body of the Pixel 4a. We did not really see the appeal of this in the Pixel 5, but presumably, the phone is stronger now.

As usual, we’re getting a no-frills design that just takes care of the basics. On the front, there’s a slim-bezel OLED display and a hole-punch camera in the top right, while on the back there are two cameras (main and wide-angle) and a capacitive fingerprint reader. Specs include a Snapdragon 765G (that’s a 7nm chip with two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores), 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and the biggest battery of any Pixel: 4680 mAh. The main camera is 12.2 MP and looks like the same Sony IMX363 sensor that Google has used for the past four years. There’s a 16 MP wide-angle and an 8 MP front camera. Oh yeah, the headphone jack is sticking around for at least one more year.

Enlarge / A Gigabyte power supply explodes during Gamers Nexus’ testing. (credit: Gamers Nexus)

If you’ve been trying to buy a GPU this year, you may be familiar with the Newegg Shuffle, a lottery system that Newegg instituted in January to try to beat bots and scalpers. You may also know that the GPUs and consoles in the Newegg Shuffle are often bundled with components like RAM, motherboards, and power supplies as a package deal—if you want dessert (in this case, a GPU), you have to eat your vegetables (or, a product you might be able to use but weren’t looking to buy).

Earlier this month, the PC gaming YouTubers at Gamers Nexus posted a video showing that two Gigabyte power supplies commonly bundled with GPUs in the Newegg Shuffle were prone to “catastrophic” failure. Some of the GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM models that were tested sparked as they died, creating a fire risk, and one also ruined an attached RTX 3080 GPU. Gigabyte has now released a statement that (inaccurately) takes issue with Gamers Nexus’ findings before outlining how the company is addressing the problem and offering exchanges for anyone who has bought a power supply within the affected range of serial numbers (the company has stopped short of a formal recall, however).

Affected GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM models can be exchanged, whether they’ve actually failed or not. (credit: Gigabyte)

Gigabyte claims that the Gamers Nexus team ran the power supplies over capacity for “extended lengths of time” and that these conditions “would not be typical of any real world usage.” In a response video posted today, Gamers Nexus pointed out that this mischaracterizes their tests, which were carefully designed to find where the power supplies’ Over-Power Protection (OPP) feature would trigger and shut the power supply off (as OPP is designed to do, when functioning properly). The power supplies were then left to sit for a few minutes and brought back online at 60 percent of their capacity to ensure that they were still working properly after the shutdown—the full testing methodology section of the first video is here. Gamers Nexus also pointed to numerous product reviews claiming that the power supplies had shown up dead on arrival, before they were ever installed or used.

The robot developer and YouTube sensation is giving us another peek at its robot-building efforts, this time by having its humanoid robotics research platform, Atlas, do some more parkour. Besides releasing a highly polished video, the company also posted a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to get a robot to jump through an obstacle course. It’s the best look at Atlas we’ve gotten yet and shows incredible footage of manufacturing, software, and repairs—plus some gnarly wipeouts when the stunts don’t go according to plan.

This is the third video we’ve seen of Atlas doing parkour, and you might wonder why Boston Dynamics is so obsessed with making its robots jump on boxes and do backflips. Atlas does parkour for the same reason car companies do motorsports. Using sports to push the performance boundaries of a machine leads to the development of better parts and techniques, and the tests have a trickle-down effect for consumer products. Just as motorsport has led to the creation of all-wheel drive, disc brakes, and tons of safety features for production cars, teaching Atlas to do backflips will hopefully result in better robots from Boston Dynamics.

“We really wanted to give these creators a wide creative berth to explore all the imaginative potential of the Star Wars galaxy through the unique lens of anime,” said executive producer James Waugh during a panel at Anime Expo Lite in early July. “We realized we wanted these to be as authentic as possible to the studios and creators who are making them, made through their unique process, in a medium they’re such experts at. So… this is their vision riffing off all the elements of the Star Wars galaxy that inspired them—hopefully to make a really incredible anthology series, unlike anything we’ve seen before in the Star Wars galaxy.”

Enlarge / A pigeon rests on a T-Mobile logo outside a mobile phone store, operated by Deutsche Telekom AG, in Munich, Germany, on Monday, Feb. 6, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The statement came a day after Motherboard reported that a forum post was advertising a massive trove of data for sale. The post didn’t mention T-Mobile, but the seller told the publication that data related to more than 100 million people and that it came from T-Mobile servers.

Enlarge / COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Madrid on Feb. 26, 2021. (credit: Getty | NurPhoto)

Pfizer and BioNTech submitted new COVID-19 vaccine-booster data to the Food and Drug Administration Monday as US officials continue to consider whether to recommend third doses for more Americans.

For now, officials have only recommended that some people with weakened immune systems get a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. While officials continue to say that there is not enough evidence to support third-dose boosters for other vaccinated groups at this point, many officials say boosters will likely be in our futures. The lingering questions are when exactly shots will be needed and who will be next in line.

On Sunday, Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins told the Associated Press that, with the delta variant raging and immune responses possibly waning, officials could be making decisions on boosters for this fall or winter within the coming weeks.

Enlarge / Researchers have determined why droplets are propelled across a heated oily surface 100 times faster than on bare metal. The images above reveal the mechanisms that cause the rapid motion. (credit: Kripa Varanasi/MIT News)

There’s a classic 2009 Mythbusters episode in which the hosts demonstrate how someone could wet their hand and dip it ever so briefly into molten lead without injury. The protective mechanism is known as the “Leidenfrost effect,” and it could one day prove useful for microfluidic devices, particularly in microgravity environments, among other applications. We’re one step closer to achieving those applications, thanks to new insights into the phenomenon uncovered by MIT scientists. They described their findings in a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

As we’ve reported previously, the Leidenfrost effect dates back to 1756. That’s when German scientist Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost observed that, while water splashed onto a very hot pan sizzles and evaporates very quickly, something changes when the pan’s temperature is well above water’s boiling point. When that happens, Leidenfrost discovered, “gleaming drops resembling quicksilver” will form and will skitter across the surface.

In the ensuing 250 years, physicists came up with a viable explanation for why this occurs. If the surface is at least 400 degrees Fahrenheit (well above the boiling point of water), cushions of water vapor, or steam, form underneath the droplets, keeping them levitated. The droplet can skitter across the surface with very little friction. The Leidenfrost effect also works with other liquids, including oils and alcohol, but the temperature at which it manifests (the “Leidenfrost point”) will be different.