Month: December 2021

Enlarge / LG Display’s OLED Shelf. (credit: LG Display)

LG Display wants to make OLED panels a more compelling to consumers and is showing off some concepts in advance of the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

The OLED Shelf concept uses two transparent, 55-inch OLED displays that LG Display initially commercialized in in 2019. They’re 40 percent transparent, but according to The Verge, LG’s concept includes an opaque sheet that can roll down “like a projector screen” to make the images look more saturated.

One display sits atop another, as discernible from the visible horizontal line diving the two, and the pair has a mantle-like shelf on top.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Delmas | Getty Images)

Riot Games has settled a class-action lawsuit for $100 million. Filed in 2018 by two female employees and later certified as a class-action, the lawsuit accused the studio of discrimination, sexual harassment, and unequal pay.

Under the terms of the settlement, Riot Games will pay $80 million directly to women who have worked at the company from November 2014 through to the present, including full-time, part-time, and temporary employees. The remaining $20 million will go to attorneys’ fees.

In addition to the $100 million payout, Riot Games will enact workplace policy reforms. These include the creation of an application pipeline for current or former contractors to apply for permanent positions and more transparency regarding salaries for job applicants.

Enlarge / These rodents seemingly manage to avoid developing cancer. (credit: Jason Hollinger / Wikimedia Commons)

Cancer is a sad fact of life, as nearly 40 percent of people are diagnosed with it at some point in their lives. But humans aren’t alone in this. Many different species can also develop the disease—some more often than others. By studying these species and their habits and natural defenses (or lack thereof), we can learn new ways to combat the disease.

New research that involves a comprehensive survey of cancer shows that many mammals can indeed get cancer. To gain insight into this, the team looked at records for 110,148 animals from 191 species that died in zoos. The data came from Species360, an international non-profit that collects and unifies this kind of data from zoos across the world, according to Orsolya Vincze, a research fellow at the Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary and one of the paper’s authors.

Using the data gathered by the organization, the research team could “collect information on what the animals died of,” she told Ars.

Enlarge / Capturing carbon, as this algae-growing plant does, may not be the most economical way to reach our climate targets. (credit: Santiago Urquijo / Getty Images)

What will it cost if the climate exceeds the Paris Agreement temperature goals this century—even if we later remove carbon dioxide from the air and manage to bring temperatures back down to meet those targets by 2100? And how does that compare with the costs of staying below those targets?

Most plans that are consistent with the Paris Agreement goals assume that temperatures will rise above 1.5° or even 2° C before 2100. They then heavily rely on the success and wide adoption of what are called negative carbon emissions techniques, which involve the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring temperatures back down. That’s a gamble for a number of reasons.

“Betting on being able to bring temperatures down after a larger overshoot is very risky because of the uncertain technological feasibility and because of the possibility of setting off irreversible processes in the earth system with even a temporary temperature overshoot,” wrote second author Christoph Bertram, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, in an email to Ars Technica. “Furthermore, such an approach would be unfair to future generations, as it basically would shift more of the mitigation burden on them.”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

In the world of tech policy news, 2021 began with Twitter and other social networks banning then-President Donald Trump after the January 6 insurrection. Many other noteworthy stories followed in the ensuing months.

The Elizabeth Holmes trial featured fascinating revelations about Theranos, while the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial didn’t let the prosecutor use an iPad’s pinch-to-zoom feature. Missouri’s Republican governor claimed that viewing HTML code is “hacking,” WhatsApp forced users to share data with Facebook, Apple announced a controversial plan to scan photos, and the Supreme Court saved the software industry from API copyrights. President Joe Biden failed to give Democrats a majority on the Federal Communications Commission, and Republicans are now fighting Biden’s belated attempt to fill the FCC’s empty seat.

As usual, we wrote plenty of stories about telecom companies behaving badly—such as when Verizon forced users onto pricier plans to get $50-per-month government subsidies. This article lists and summarizes our top policy stories of the year, which we selected based on reader interest and importance.