Month: May 2022

Enlarge / This is what can happen if you don’t secure your wrist strap before playing Nintendo Switch Sports. (credit: Reddit / Equivalent_Actuary_6)

When you’ve covered the game industry for as long as I have, you tend to see the same types of stories appearing over and over. Still, new reports that Nintendo Switch Sports players are breaking their TVs with accidentally thrown Joy-Cons are a bit too reminiscent of similar stories during Wii Sports‘ heyday in the mid-2000s.

So far, these new reports of virtual sports-related accidents are limited but dramatic. Twitch-streamer 63man started things off by breaking his monitor live on stream during a particularly energetic tennis swing Saturday. “HAS HE MENTIONED HE DOESNT HAVE A WRIST STRAP,” one viewer wrote in chat shortly following the incident.

The next day, Reddit user Equivalent_Actuary_6 shared an image showing “my first broken TV playing Switch Sports.” In a subsequent comment, that poster said they had lost the wrist straps originally provided with the Joy-Cons but that they were “confident on [sic] my grip” after playing through The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword strapless.

Enlarge / NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is seen in firing room four during the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Crew-4 mission in April. (credit: Joel Kowsky/NASA via Getty Images)

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson appeared before a US Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday to discuss NASA’s budget request for the upcoming fiscal year. Then, quite unexpectedly, he dropped a bombshell.

After his opening remarks, Nelson was asked what, in his opinion, was the biggest threat to NASA’s goal of landing humans on the Moon by 2025. Nelson responded that the agency needed competition in its program to develop a Human Landing System. In other words, he wanted Congress to support NASA’s request for funding to develop a second lander alongside SpaceX’s Starship vehicle.

But Nelson didn’t stop there. He said Congress needs to fund this lander contract with a fixed-price award, which only pays companies when they reach milestones. This contracting mechanism is relatively new for the space agency, which traditionally has used “cost-plus” contracts for large development programs. Such awards pay contractors their expenses, plus a fee.

Enlarge / Kindles still won’t directly open ePub files, but there’s one less hoop to jump through now. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Amazon’s Kindles are some of the best dedicated e-readers you can buy, but a longstanding criticism from users of DRM-free books from non-Amazon sources is that they don’t support the open ePub standard. That has changed at some point in the recent past, as spotted by Good E-Reader: Amazon’s Kindle Personal Documents Service will now accept ePub files sent to your device’s Send to Kindle email address, the same way it currently handles PDF files, Word documents, and other image and text files.

Kindles still don’t natively support sideloading ePub files—the Send to Kindle service converts the documents to AZW3 files, something users could already do themselves using a variety of free tools. But official support from Amazon removes a step from the process and will help users avoid shady ad-riddled third-party conversion sites. We’ve tested it with an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite running the latest version of the Kindle software, and the conversion process seemed to go off without a hitch.

If using the Send to Kindle email address is still too onerous, Amazon’s support document says it will add the same ePub conversion support to its Send to Kindle apps at some point in late 2022. Amazon also says that it will discontinue Send to Kindle support for MOBI files in late 2022, since those files “won’t support the newest Kindle features for documents.” MOBI files already on your device will remain there and will continue to work as they currently do.

Enlarge (credit: Krisana Antharith / EyeEm)

Earth Day was April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.

Countless things we use in modern societies, from food to food containers, rely on industrial-scale chemistry. That chemistry often produces materials that aren’t useful to us—and in some cases, they’re hazardous or toxic. Not only are these materials wasteful, but paying to dispose of them safely can add to the costs of materials.

Early developments in green chemistry have mostly focused on finding reaction pathways that limit the production of unwanted byproducts and the use of toxic solvents. But researchers are looking beyond that, trying to find ways to better integrate chemistry into a circular economy, where source materials are either sustainable or recycled.