Majority of Ukrainian hospitals could run out of oxygen today as omicron rages: WHO

Enlarge / A worker is seen servicing oxygen cylinders for COVID-19 patients in Kramatorsk city hospital. (credit: Getty | SOPA Images)

The majority of Ukrainian hospitals could run out of life-saving medical oxygen as soon as today, putting at risk the lives of thousands of critically ill patients amid the pandemic, the World Health Organization warned Sunday.

The United Nations agency said it is looking into ways to increase supplies, which would likely require a safe-transit corridor through Poland. "It is imperative to ensure that lifesaving medical supplies—including oxygen—reach those who need them," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WHO Regional Director for Europe Dr. Hans Kluge said in a joint statement.

Amid the Russian attack and invasion, trucks are currently unable to transport oxygen supplies from producers to hospitals across Ukraine, including the capital of Kyiv, the WHO reported. The onslaught is also hampering the production of medical oxygen in the country. Several medical oxygen generator manufacturers are running low on zeolite, a critical production component that is imported. Safe transport of zeolite into Ukraine is also needed. Drs. Tedros and Kluge also warned that patients are at risk because hospitals are facing power shortages, and ambulances transporting patients are at risk of being caught in crossfire.

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Lenovo brings 16:10 trend to the small screen

Enlarge / Lenovo ThinkVision M14d. (credit: Scharon Harding)

We've been watching PC screens get taller, especially those of laptops, and now Lenovo is bringing that trend to its ThinkVision line of small screens. Today, it announced the ThinkVision M14d, Lenovo's first portable monitor with a 16:10 aspect ratio.

Lenovo's other portable monitors, as well as most PC displays, use the 16:9 aspect ratio these days. But more customers are embracing options with additional vertical space, citing a nostalgia for screens of the past and more length to display long articles, spreadsheets, and such as marked improvements. Lenovo is touting the display as the first 14-inch, 16:10 portable monitor, based on research analyst Omdia conducted in December.

But that doesn't mean you have to stay committed to 16:10. Lenovo demoed the monitor's 16:9 button to Ars Technica. It takes the screen from 16:10 to 16:9, or vice versa, with one press.

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Russia pulls out of European spaceport, abandoning a planned launch

Enlarge / Russian workers assemble a Soyuz rocket for the launch of satellites for the European Space Agency in December 2021. (credit: European Space Agency)

Russia has decided to suspend cooperation with European launch officials, and says it will withdraw its personnel from Europe's main spaceport.

The chief of Russia's main space corporation, Dmitry Rogozin, announced the decision on Twitter Saturday morning, saying his country was responding to sanctions placed on Russia by the European Union. Europe, the United States, and other nations around the world issued significant sanctions on Russia this week after the country's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Approximately two dozen Russian technicians and engineers work at Russian facilities in French Guiana. This spaceport, called the Guiana Space Center, is where Europe launches its fleet of orbital rockets, including a "Europeanized" version of the Russian Soyuz vehicle for medium-lift missions. The Russians had been working to prepare a Soyuz rocket to launch two Galileo satellites for the European Union on April 6.

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How the games industry shake-up could play out

Enlarge / Valheim (credit: Iron Gate AB)

Kylan Coats came up with a plan to start a studio before he had even made a game, as an undergrad spending summers as a QA tester between classes. Back then, his mid-thirties seemed like the age to make this transition. If things went to plan, he would have the experience to succeed, but if everything exploded, he could still return to a AAA career. Coats worked in the industry for 14 years, but it was only after an unforeseen layoff from Obsidian Entertainment that his husband reminded him of this conviction. “He brought it up like, ‘Hey, you've been talking about starting your own studio for the longest time, why not now?’” Coats says.

After a good year doing contract work, more profitable than any year previous, he started Crispy Creative. His first game was an idea he’d been mulling over for a while. “Every dev always has a few of their own game ideas,” he says. A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is a queer narrative space opera, in Coats’ words. Players control a rogue spaceship fleeing between colorful Mœbius-like planets; tasks include shuttling drag queens off on grand adventures. It's not the type of game a bigger studio would touch, he says. With Crispy, not only is he free to be creative, but his work environment is healthy: Staff don’t have to kill themselves to meet a deadline, and he can nurture mental health and inclusivity. He'd been critical of leadership in the past, so starting Crispy was the moment to put up or shut up, he says.

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Do birds have language? It depends on how you define it

Enlarge / Zebra finches sitting together on a tree branch and sunning. (credit: sagarmanis | Getty Images)

In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessential human capacity for language, scientists are finding that the most tantalizing clues lie farther afield.

Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though nonhuman primates can learn how to use innate vocalizations in new ways, they don’t show a similar ability to learn new calls. Interestingly, a small number of more distant mammal species, including dolphins and bats, do have this capacity. But among the scattering of nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of the bush of life, the most impressive are birds—hands (wings?) down.

Parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics, and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.

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Webb Telescope reaches major milestone: All its light is in one place

Enlarge (credit: NASA/STSci)

Today, NASA shared an image indicating that it had successfully completed the image alignment stage of commissioning the Webb Space telescope. The Webb's primary mirror is composed of 18 individual segments and, as of today's update, all of those segments are aligned so that a single star shows up as a single object. While there are still several more focusing steps required, the path to commissioning the telescope keeps getting shorter.

Immediately after launch, the focus was on unfolding all the pieces of the telescope that had to be held in a compact configuration to fit in the launch vehicle. This process included reorienting and extending the primary mirror, lowering the secondary mirror into place, and stretching out the multi-layered sunscreen that helps keep the imaging hardware cold.

To the surprise and delight of many people, that all went incredibly smoothly. Since then, the focus has shifted to... well, focus. The Webb's primary mirror consists of 18 separate mirrors in a hexagonal array, each of which can be controlled separately. Initially, when the mirror was first unfolded, these produced 18 individual smears scattered across the secondary mirror.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine will have myriad impacts on spaceflight

Enlarge / In 2018, during happier times, NASA, Russian, and European astronauts are seen on board the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine this week will have devastating consequences for the people on the ground. Although the terrestrial implications of this war are far greater than those for spaceflight, there will nonetheless be ripple effects felt by space programs around the world.

During a speech on Thursday about US sanctions on Russia as a result of its invasion, President Joe Biden even mentioned space. "Between our actions and those of our allies and partners, we estimate that we’ll cut off more than half of Russia’s high tech imports and will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military," he said. "It’ll degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program."

So what does this mean? While it is very early in this crisis, this article will attempt to draw the broad outlines of how this conflict may impact spaceflight. As the situation is dynamic and the political landscape is tumultuous, please note that rapid changes are possible.

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Steam Deck: The comprehensive Ars Technica review

Enlarge / The Steam Deck has arrived. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The Steam Deck, the new $399-and-up Switch-like PC made by Valve, sometimes feels like the most impressive portable gaming system ever made. But it's also not finished.

Like other hot electronics in 2022, Valve's first bespoke PC launch—which resembles a supersized Game Gear but is, at its heart, a Linux PC—is limited by a strained supply chain and an ongoing chip shortage. But if you'd like to feel better about missing the Deck's first wave of preorders, or seeing a delayed shipping estimate of "Q2 2022" and beyond for new orders, this review is for you.

Produced by Sean Dacanay. Transcript available soon. (video link)

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Linux on Steam Deck: What you need to know, what currently works

Enlarge / Linux on a Steam Deck! Let's dive in. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Our Steam Deck review is now live, and it's massive—almost as big as Valve's new portable PC. With that in mind, I decided to write a shorter article about the Steam Deck's implementation of Linux since a lot of Ars Technica readers are interested in that use case.

Our full review goes into greater detail about installing and playing Windows games through Valve's customized Wine compatibility layer, dubbed Steam Proton. This is the default way to access your favorite Steam games, and as our review explores, that proposition is currently iffy. But that's not the same as using the Deck as a Linux machine. In this companion article, we'll explain what's going on with Valve's first dedicated Linux PC and what it currently can (and cannot) do.

Donating some Plasma knowledge

As Ars Technica reported last year, the Steam Deck runs on a customized fork of Arch Linux. SteamOS is basically a GUI wrapper that runs on top of Arch Linux, and visually, it splits the difference between Steam's "Big Picture Mode" and the controller-friendly menus of the Nintendo Switch. If you want to use the Deck primarily as a gaming machine, with access to common Steam features like friends lists, notifications, achievements, and forums, SteamOS delivers. Many of its pages work natively with the Steam Deck's buttons and joysticks, but some run inside a web browser and can only be manipulated by swiping and tapping the Deck's screen.

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USPS sticks with decision to buy inefficient 8.6 mpg trucks

Enlarge / The Next Gen Delivery Vehicle looks adorably goofy, but the vast majority of these new mail trucks will belch almost exactly as much carbon dioxide into the air as the old Grumman LLV trucks. (credit: USPS)

In February 2021, the United States Postal Service made a controversial decision to replace its fleet of aging and inefficient mail trucks with a new fleet made up almost entirely of new, inefficient diesel mail trucks. Although the vast majority of USPS delivery routes are ideally suited for electric vehicles, the USPS decided that a mere 10 percent of the planned order would be battery electric.

In early February 2022, that decision resulted in severe criticism from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who accused the Postal Service of failing to properly examine the environmental impact of its decision, as required by law.

This week, the USPS released its final record of decision and record of environmental consideration for the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle purchase. And it's bad news for anyone who cares about climate change or air pollution, as the Postal Service has dug in and refuses to alter its plans. That means that 90 percent of the 50,000-165,000 NGDVs that are being ordered will use gasoline and will only average 8.6 mpg (28.86 L/100 km) when used with air conditioning.

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