Month: February 2022

Replacing Spotify used to be difficult, but its competitors have caught up in many areas. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Spotify is the dominant streaming music platform in several regions, including the United States. But lately there has been a lot of interest among Spotify users in trying something new.

Some are just curious to see what else is out there since they’ve used Spotify for a long time while its competitors have continued to mature. Some are seeking to make a change because of controversies around the platform’s deal with podcaster Joe Rogan or its financial relationship with artists.

Whatever your reasons, there are several well-established competitors that offer many of the same features as Spotify. We’ll quickly run down what distinguishes them.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

In a plastic-domed case at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, researchers gave a pair of lungs a new identity. When the lungs first arrived in the lab, they were from someone with type A blood, meaning that there were certain tiny markers, called antigens, attached to the lung tissue and blood cells. But when the lungs left the lab, those antigens were almost entirely gone. In just one hour, the researchers had effectively transformed the lungs into type O.

“This is absolutely amazing,” says Aizhou Zhang, a researcher in the Cypel Lab at the University of Toronto and first author on a paper published this week in Science Translational Medicine that describes the transformation. The experiment is an important step toward giving more people access to life-saving organ transplants. More than 100,000 people in the United States are currently waiting for organs, but often those most in need can’t get help because of one big problem: their blood type doesn’t match the organs that are available.

Zhang works in a lab run by Marcelo Cypel, lead author on the paper and a thoracic surgeon who’s spent years figuring out ways to increase the number of lungs available for transplants. One of his previous innovations was creating ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP), that plastic-domed apparatus in which this study’s lungs got their new identity.

Enlarge / (l-r) Ben Schwartz as Tony Scarapiducci; Tawny Newsome as Angela Ali; Steve Carell as General Mark Naird; Jimmy O. Yang as Dr. Chan Kaifang; Don Lake as Brigadier General Bradley Gregory; Diana Silvers as Erin Naird; and John Malkovich as Dr. Adrian Mallory. (credit: Netflix)

The Netflix absurdist comedy Space Force was an Ars favorite in 2020, easily winning a spot on our annual list of best TV shows. We loved the show’s wickedly sly humor, absurdist set-ups, and unexpected heart. It’s finally back with a second season, and while much of the old magic remains intact, it’s starting to lose its luster just a bit—perhaps because we only got seven episodes instead of ten (thanks, never-ending pandemic).

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As we’ve reported previously, the series was created by Steve Carell and Greg Daniels (who also created Parks and Recreation and Upload). Space Force was inspired in part by the Trump administration’s announcement that it would establish a national Space Force. Carell plays four-star general Mark Naird, a decorated pilot with dreams of running the Air Force.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

While Presidents’ Day weekend isn’t known as an especially bountiful time for tech deals, the Dealmaster has dug up a few actually-good discounts on worthwhile gadgets, gear, and games all the same.

Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes the best price we’ve tracked on Bose’s QuietComfort 45. The noise-canceling headphones are down to $279, which matches the price we saw on Black Friday and marks a $50 drop from Bose’s MSRP. While not our top pick among wireless noise cancelers (that honor goes to Sony’s WH-1000XM4), the QuietComfort 45 are an alternative pair we recommend to those who are willing to trade some battery life and extra features for a lighter and more comfortable design. Bose also addressed one of the headphone’s shortcomings this past week by adding a customizable EQ feature, which lets users adjust the QuietComfort 45’s sound profile more to their liking.

Besides that, we also have deals on the 512GB versions of Apple’s latest MacBook Pro laptops. Both the 14- and 16-inch models are $200 off Apple’s MSRP, which brings the former down to $1,799 and the latter down to $2,299. The notebooks are still on the expensive side, to put it mildly, but both discounts represent the lowest price we’ve tracked to date. Our review called the new Pro the best laptop you can buy for heavy-duty content creation and software development last October; if you can live with its high price (and that display notch), the Pro’s blazing performance, premium build quality, ample port selection, and excellent display should be up to the mark.

Enlarge (credit: TEK IMAGE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Laurence King Publishing, based in London, is “one of the world’s leading publishers of books and gifts on the creative arts.” They have a series called “The Short Story of X”; so far it includes the Short Story of Art, of Modern Art, of Photography, Film, Architecture, Women Artists, and the Novel. The latest title is The Short Story of Science, which will be available in March.

A thing of beauty

First off, the book is beautiful, as befits its imprint. Each glossy page has a photo of scientists at work, or their apparatus, or a depiction of their discoveries; for everything before the 20th century there is a photo of an artwork, so a drawing, painting, or sculpture of the scientists being described. It has the overall feel of those DK Eyewitness travel guides, except instead of using it to plan your next trip you can use it to get a tour of “the breakthroughs that underpin our current understanding of the Universe.”

Like the other volumes, this one is organized into four sections. The art books are divided into Movements, Works, Themes, and Techniques. There are corresponding sections in this one. Histories starts with ancient astronomers circa 30,000 BCE and runs through String Theory. Experiments is pretty obvious. Theories are there as “we can only unlock hidden truths once we have imagined them.” Finally, there’s Methods and Equipment, since the materials available define and constrain the technologies we can make.