Month: December 2021

Enlarge / Ars staffers picked their favorite must-watch TV shows of 2021. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list includes a few specific references to You, Midnight Mass, Resident Alien, Post Mortem, Snowpiercer, Lupin, His Dark Materials, and Wellington Paranormal, among others.

Months of lockdown in 2020 meant fewer films but more quality TV content than ever before—much of it from streaming platforms rather than traditional broadcast television. Many of those shows were already in the pipeline, however. We feared the inevitable production shutdowns would result in fewer offerings for 2021, as the industry reckoned with rising production costs and the continued fallout from a pandemic that just keeps dragging on. And on.

Fortunately, while there were indeed some hiccups, we still had plenty of fantastic television on hand to take our minds off the grim daily reality, ranging from established franchises and quirky newcomers to imaginative adaptations and several foreign offerings that proved to be surprise breakout hits. With apologies to the many great series we just didn’t have room for on this year’s list, here are our favorite TV watches and binges for 2021, in no particular order:

Enlarge / A gecko perches on a leaf. A September study found that geckos are very good gliders, and their tails help stabilize them when they crash-land into tree trunks. (credit: MPI for Intelligent Systems)

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Asian flat-tails geckos gliding in the wild use their tails to stabilize the landing after colliding head-first into tree trunks.

There are plenty of examples of gliding animals: flying squirrels, for instance, as well as certain snakes, lizards, and frogs. Now we can add geckos to that list. Researchers caught Asian flat-tailed geckos gliding in the wild on high-speed video, and found they used their tails to stabilize the landing after colliding head-first into tree trunks, according to a paper published in September in the journal Nature Communications Biology. They verified the biomechanics by building a mini gecko-bot and simulating the gliding behavior in the lab.

As we’ve reported previously, the diminutive gecko is capable of some extraordinary feats of locomotion, zipping along vertical walls with ease and even running short distances across water. Precisely how they accomplish these feats has long interested scientists. For instance, geckos are known for being expert climbers, able to stick to any surface thanks to the tiny hair-like structures on the bottoms of their feet. The little lizards can also zip along the surface of water at high speeds to elude predators. They can’t do it for very long; the energy expenditure required is too great.

Enlarge (credit: RAJESH JANTILAL / GETTY IMAGES)

Based on various measures, the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine has appeared to be less effective than those based on mRNA technology. It has also been associated with some rare blood clotting complications that recently caused the CDC to revise its endorsement of the vaccine. Still, the vaccine is easy to produce, transport, and store, and there have been some indications that it provides longer-lasting protection than some alternatives. And there have also been indications that at least some of the efficacy differences came from its use as a single-dose vaccine.

With all vaccines now expected to include a booster significantly after the initial vaccine dose, we’re starting to get a sense of how the J&J vaccine performs in more than one dose. Early results indicated that a J&J vaccine boosted by an mRNA dose provides a big increase in protective antibodies. But a J&J/J&J combination didn’t look to be as effective.

Recent research preprints, however, may indicate that the protection continues to increase over time, engages non-antibody-producing immune cells, and provides some protection against the omicron variant.

Enlarge / A Boston Medical Center pediatrician performs a checkup on an 8-month-old while her father provides her comfort in a pediatrics tent set up outside of Boston Medical Center in Boston on April 29, 2020. (credit: Getty | Boston Globe)

The number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US is skyrocketing amid the omicron wave, with new admissions up 66 percent in the last week and now past the all-time record high for the pandemic.

The surge in pediatric hospitalizations comes amid a record-smashing vertical rise in overall cases, which is being driven by the ultratransmissible omicron coronavirus variant. Though preliminary data continues to link omicron waves to milder disease and fewer hospitalizations compared with previous variants, it’s still unclear if the variant is intrinsically less virulent in people generally, and specifically children, specifically.

Laboratory studies continue to indicate that omicron causes milder lung disease in rodents than previous variants. But, mild omicron waves in humans have largely been seen in populations with high levels of preexisting protection from prior COVID-19 infection and/or vaccination. Such populations are expected to have less severe disease overall.

Enlarge / The Blackberry Torch, the company’s first touchscreen phone, is held for display during its debut in New York in 2010. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

BlackBerry, the company that once dominated smart mobile devices, recently announced that it was finally discontinuing key services that support its phones. As of January 4th, the phones will no longer be provided with provisioning services, meaning that they will gradually lose the ability to join networks, including the cellular network.

It may seem difficult to imagine if you weren’t using cell phones at the time, but BlackBerry once dominated the smartphone market. Its keyboard-based hardware was widely adopted in corporate settings, in part because the services it provided typically ran through BlackBerry servers, allowing for high levels of security and control. An indication of its importance is that early internal builds of Android looked like a cheap BlackBerry knockoff, rather than the cheap iPhone knockoff that was eventually released.

Unlike the people who developed Android, BlackBerry’s leadership was blindsided by the iPhone’s popularity. It dismissed on-screen keyboards, and counted on its stranglehold on corporate services to maintain its market. It took over a year after the iPhone’s release for the company to come out with its own touch screen phone, and its software remained an awkward mix of old and new for some time after. In the mean time, corporate users fell in love with their Apple and Android phones, and compelled their IT departments to support them.