ArsTechnica
Bye-bye Windows gaming? SteamOS officially expands past the Steam Deck.
Almost exactly a year ago, we were publicly yearning for the day when more portable gaming PC makers could ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS (without having to resort to touchy unofficial workarounds). Now, that day has finally come, with Lenovo announcing the upcoming Legion Go S as the first non-Valve handheld to come with an officially licensed copy of SteamOS preinstalled. And Valve promises that it will soon ship a beta version of SteamOS for users to "download and test themselves."
As Lenovo's slightly downsized followup to 2023's massive Legion Go, the Legion Go S won't feature the detachable controllers of its predecessor. But the new PC gaming handheld will come in two distinct versions, one with the now-standard Windows 11 installation and another edition that's the first to sport the (recently leaked) "Powered by SteamOS" branding.
The lack of a Windows license seems to contribute to a lower starting cost for the "Powered by SteamOS" edition of the Legion Go S, which will start at $500 when it's made available in May. Lenovo says the Windows edition of the device—available starting this month—will start at $730, with "additional configurations" available in May starting as low as $600.
Dirty deeds in Denver: Ex-prosecutor faked texts, destroyed devices to frame colleague
When suspicion began to mount that the young prosecutor, Yujin Choi, might have faked her sexual misconduct allegations against a Denver District Attorney's Office colleague, investigators asked to examine Choi's laptop and cell phone. But just before Choi was to have turned them in, her devices suffered a series of unlikely accidents.
First, she said, she managed to drop her phone into a filled bathtub. When she pulled the phone out of the water and found it was not working, Choi went to her laptop in order to make a video call. When the call ended, Choi then knocked over a bottle of water—whoops!—directly onto the computer, which was also taken out of commission. So, when the day came to hand in her devices, neither was working.
"I’m devastated that I may have tanked the investigation on my own, but that I also lost all of my personal data that were very important to me," Choi wrote to investigators. She had even, she added, gone to the local Apple Store in an attempt to retrieve the data on the devices. No luck.
New GeForce 50-series GPUs: There’s the $1,999 5090, and there’s everything else
Nvidia has good news and bad news for people building or buying gaming PCs.
The good news is that three of its four new RTX 50-series GPUs are the same price or slightly cheaper than the RTX 40-series GPUs they're replacing. The RTX 5080 is $999, the same price as the RTX 4080 Super; the 5070 Ti and 5070 are launching for $749 and $549, each $50 less than the 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Super.
The bad news for people looking for the absolute fastest card they can get is that the company is charging $1,999 for its flagship RTX 5090 GPU, significantly more than the $1,599 MSRP of the RTX 4090. If you want Nvidia's biggest and best, it will cost at least as much as four high-end game consoles or a pair of decently specced midrange gaming PCs.
Science paper piracy site Sci-Hub shares lots of retracted papers
Most scientific literature is published in for-profit journals that rely on subscriptions and paywalls to turn a profit. But that trend has been shifting as various governments and funding agencies are requiring that the science they fund be published in open-access journals. The transition is happening gradually, though, and a lot of the historical literature remains locked behind paywalls.
These paywalls can pose a problem for researchers who aren't at well-funded universities, including many in the Global South, which may not be able to access the research they need to understand in order to pursue their own studies. One solution has been Sci-Hub, a site where people can upload PDFs of published papers so they can be shared with anyone who can access the site. Despite losses in publishing industry lawsuits and attempts to block access, Sci-Hub continues to serve up research papers that would otherwise be protected by paywalls.
But what it's serving up may not always be the latest and greatest. Generally, when a paper is retracted for being invalid, publishers issue an updated version of its PDF with clear indications that the research it contains should no longer be considered valid. Unfortunately, it appears that once Sci-Hub has a copy of a paper, it doesn't necessarily have the ability to ensure it's kept up to date. Based on a scan of its content done by researchers from India, about 85 percent of the invalid papers they checked had no indication that the paper had been retracted.
Inside the hands-on lab of an experimental archaeologist
Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. Metin Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University, fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon.
Sadly for the legend, the blades failed every test, but the study was colorful enough to snag Eren an Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And it's just one of the many fascinating projects routinely undertaken in his Experimental Archaeology Laboratory, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies, whether they involve stone tools, ceramics, metal, butchery, textiles, and so forth.
Eren's lab is quite prolific, publishing 15 to 20 papers a year. “The only thing we’re limited by is time,” he said. Many have colorful or quirky elements and hence tend to garner media attention, but Eren emphasizes that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. “I think sometimes people look at experimental archaeology and think it’s no different from LARPing,” Eren told Ars. “I have nothing against LARPers, but it’s very different. It’s not playtime. It’s hardcore science. Me making a stone tool is no different than a chemist pouring chemicals into a beaker. But that act alone is not the experiment. It might be the flashiest bit, but that's not the experimental process.”