Spotify has introduced a new feature that will let users block music from artists they no longer want to hear. A "Don't play this artist" feature appeared in the latest version of the Spotify app for iOS and Android, as first spotted by Thurrot. The...
Enlarge / Regional differences in the aromatic compounds found in hop varieties can significantly affect the taste of craft beers. (credit: DEA/G. Wright/Getty Images)
If you're a fan of craft beer with a strong, hoppy flavor, heed the science that says to store your beer in a cool place and drink it within three months or so, lest it lose that rich aroma. That's one of the key takeaways from a new study by German scientists published in the journal Brewing Science.
All beer contains hops, a key flavoring agent that also imparts useful antimicrobial properties with its rich aroma. (Without them, beer spoils quickly.) To make beer, brewers mash and steep grain in hot water, which converts all that starch into sugars. This is traditionally the stage where hops are added to the liquid extract (wort) and boiled to give the beer that hint of bitterness. That turns some of the resins (alpha acids) in the hops into iso-alpha acids, producing a bitter taste. Yeast is then added to trigger fermentation, turning the sugars into alcohol.
Add too many hops, however, and the beer will be so bitter as to be undrinkable. So in recent years, many craft brewers have started using dry-hopping as a way to put more hops in beer without getting excessive bitterness. Hops are added during or after the fermentation stage, after the wort has cooled. There is no isomerization of the alpha acids, so you get all that aromatic hoppy flavor without too much bitterness. Brewers can use as much as 20 times the usual amount of hops if they're dry-hopping. (Just beware of "hop creep," which can cause such bottled beers to explode.)
Enlarge / An adult male hermit crab of the species Coenobita compressus ambling along on a leisurely stroll. (credit: Mark Laidre)
Hermit crabs protect their soft, curved abdomens from harm by scavenging seashells and turning them into portable homes. That poses a challenge when it comes time to mate, since a rival can steal the shell while its occupant is, shall we say, otherwise occupied. A new paper in the journal Royal Society Interface poses an intriguing new hypothesis: some species of male hermit crabs evolved substantially longer penises so they could mate without having to venture too far outside their shells.
Mark Laidre, a biologist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, dubbed his hypothesis "private parts for private property." He's been studying the behavior of a particular species of hermit crab, Coenobita compressus, for the last decade.
Seashells are a valuable, limited resource—a kind of private property for hermit crabs and their most prized possession. This is particularly true for Coenobita compressus. This species engages in elaborate remodeling of scavenged shells to tailor them precisely to their liking, tearing out hard material inside the shell over several months to make more room for their bodies. Because the shells are so valuable, there is stiff competition to attain a really nice shell. Fights break out, crabs will kill another crab for their shells, and sometimes the beasts will just outright steal them. Since the remodeled shells prevent the creatures from drying out (which can happen within 24 hours), they are crucial to the crabs' survival.
In a new case study, Irish doctors report the baffling case of a 33-year-old man who injected his own semen intravenously for a year and a half, a self-developed “cure” intended to treat his chronic back pain. It does not appear to have worked.
If my nickname was "Backpack Kid" I'd be suing for some easy money too.
Enlarge / Actor Alfonso Ribeiro shows off "The Carlton" during a Dancing with the Stars performance.
Forza Horizon 4 no longer features two dance emotes—the Carlton and the Floss—which were previously available for use by in-game avatars. The removal is listed under the "Other Improvements" section in the notes for the game's Series 5 update, which launched yesterday with a new online adventure playlist and new Mitsubishi cars for the game, among other changes.
Microsoft has not offered a public explanation for the removal, though a spokesperson told Kotaku "Forza Horizon 4 features a large portfolio of content and is continuously updated." The move comes, though, after both dances became the subject of lawsuits regarding their similar inclusion in Epic's Fortnite.
The Carlton—popularized by actor Alfonso Ribeiro on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air—and the Floss—popularized by Russell "Backpack Kid" Horning in a Saturday Night Live performance—are the apparent inspiration for two Fortnite emotes that can be purchased as part of various Battle Pass DLC packages. Lawsuits filed against Epic by those dancers accuse the Fortnite maker of illegally profiting from their copyrighted dance creations.
Over the past few years, Ossia has impressed us with demonstrations of its over-the-air power delivery system which promises to make charging cables and pads obsolete. But it’s always been just demos of prototypes, which feels like a constant tease of a future we want right now. For CES 2019, however, Ossia worked…
Remember the countless hours we spent playing Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot? Good times.
It's going to be a real trip replaying the first Borderlands on PS4 and Xbox One. As much as Borderlands 2 made huge strides in smoothing out the overall shoot-and-loot experience, I still have a soft spot for the original. Following the Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition rating in Korea earlier this year, the as-yet-unconfirmed game has now wound up with a listing from Taiwan's ratings board. One step closer.
The new rating divulges the developer behind Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition for PS4 and Xbox One -- it's Blind Squirrel, a studio that has contributed to well-known titles like Prey, BioShock: The Collection, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, and Borderlands 2, among others. That's it for details.
It's unclear what, if any, enhancements might make it into this re-release, though the DLC is a given. The first Borderlands had four packs: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, and Claptrap's New Robot Revolution. (Knoxx was the highlight.)
As a possible point of comparison, BioShock: The Collectionmostly focused on resolution and frame rate upgrades, though the package did include extras like a director's commentary and an art gallery. It's also worth noting that 2K Games let existing PC players upgrade to the BioShock 1 and 2 remasters for free.
I fully expect this to feel like cracking open a time capsule. There's gonna be some dull stuff, to be sure, but there's sentimental value for folks like me who were way too into Borderlands in October 2009. Maybe 2K will use it as part of the ten-year anniversary celebration. Or maybe it'll tide folks over until Borderlands 3, which is taking longer than some of us were expecting. Remember that tech demo?
Either way, let's hope they get the pricing right. That's been a real sticking point for re-releases.
CES is a physically taxing event. So far, according to my trusty Fitbit Versa, I have walked upwards of 50,000 steps while carrying a 15-pound backpack. I busted my knee, I’m fighting a cold, and I don’t remember what the loving embrace of a human feels like.
People make a lot of cool stuff from colored pencils. And when Burls Art saw them, he decided to take it up an octave.
“I saw a lot of people online making bowls out of colored pencils and I thought that was really cool but I wanted to make something that I can actually utilize and enjoy more so than a bowl when it’s finished,” Burls Art told Bored Panda. “Since I play guitar, I thought this would be a cool project that would accomplish that goal. I decided on making a (Fender) Stratocaster styled electric guitar… This was the first guitar I’ve ever built”
“It was surprisingly not as difficult as I would have imagined,” he said. “The only real struggles didn’t come as much with the actual guitar building as much as it did with the colored pencil material. By that I mean, the color of the colored pencil would smear when sanded with high grit sandpaper and it looked awful. So I had to figure out a way to achieve good wood/lead color without smear (which I detail in the video at the end of this post).”
“That’s 1200 colored pencils. Bought the cheapest ones I could find on Amazon. They ended up being nearly identical to Crayola.”
“Cheap harbor freight mini miter saw cutting the pencils into 2″ pieces”
“Cutting the pencils was by far the most tedious portion of the build”
“In goes the epoxy resin”
“This is a milling jig that I made out of some spare wood I had. The router slides back and forth on here and the jig slides left to right so that I can take off about 1/8 ” off of the pencil slab. This essentially planes the slab for me”
“Tracing the template onto the slab”
“The epoxy resin / pencils combination was far too dense for me to cut with a jig saw alone, even using a diamond blade. Because of this, I had to drill out the pencil cores to make life a little bit easier on the jig saw”
“Super gluing the template on. I taped a few strips of masking tape onto the guitar and a few strips onto the template… Little bit of superglue on the masking tape and connect them together. Makes for an incredibly strong lateral hold that can easily be pulled off with no damage done to either the guitar or template”
“Routing the side of the body using a table router. This was another homemade jig using the wooden workbench and a 3×3 piece of melamine wood. Cut a hole in the middle of the melamine board and mount the router on the bottom side. Worked well. This 2.5″ router bit is a bit intimidating though, I cannot lie”
“Routing the edges gives me a near perfectly shaped body”
“Routing the cavities and neck pocket”
“This is an example of one of my struggles with the build. The entire block was sanded with 80 grit on the belt sander. Then the left side was progressively sanded up to 360 grit. So the higher grit I went, the more color smear would occur. Smearing was minimal until I went above about 220 grit. This left me with 2 choices.. either have a smooth surface and a grayish/smeared color tone… or… have good clean wood and led colors but at the cost of only being able to sand to 220. The choice was pretty obvious to me being that the colored pencils were the star of the build… I wanted to showcase their colors as much as possible”
“Fixing some tear-out I had when routing the neck pocket”
“Lots of sanding”
“Drilling the neck mounting holes. I also drilled the bridge mounts at this time. This is like a portable drill press btw… Not as good as the real thing, but it gets the job done”
“Throwing on some clear coat! I used a 2-part spray enamel, which is really nasty stuff… but it gives a beautiful finish. Dumped the entire can on it in 5 coats”
“The polishing compound I used”
“Easily the most satisfying part of the build”
“Mounting the tremolo”
Finished!!!!
“The more difficult portions of the build just had to do with figuring out ways to make use of the limited equipment and power tools that I had. For example, making a makeshift milling machine (ie: planer), making a router table out of my wooden workbench, etc.. But it goes to show that you can make a guitar in your garage with limited tools if you get a little creative.”
Burls Art couldn’t put an accurate number on the time it took him to complete his project. “I worked on it for 4-5 weeks for a few hours a day, like 2-4 hours probably. It took a long time, but for the most part, it was enjoyable. I think I could make one faster now though since I know the processes and things that I would do differently. I’d say I spent in the neighborhood of $500 on it, but some of that includes router bits and other pieces of equipment that I didn’t already have. I already had the guitar neck and hardware though so that saved some money.”
He was really happy with the final look of the guitar. “It’s a one-of-a-kind guitar as of now which I guess is pretty cool, though that’s probably soon to change now that the idea’s out of the bag.” He promised, however, that this won’t be his last unique guitar build. “I have a lot more ideas that I think will translate well that I’m going to take on in the future. Some that I think will even be more interesting than this colored pencil guitar.”
This year at CES Sony is one of the TV makers jumping into 8K with two "super-large" Z9G displays that are big enough, at 98- and 85-inches, to make use of the format's 33-million pixel resolution. According to Sony, these screens have "completely ne...
The quiet coastal town of Sidmouth, England is known to be flush with tourists each summer. But it may now be known for another accumulating mass—one that isn’t flushable.
Authorities in Sidmouth have discovered a 64-meter-long hardened clump of grease, wet wipes, and sewage—an infamous fatberg—lurking and growing in a large sewer under the town’s waterfront. For perspective, at 64 meters, the length of the mass is greater than that of six double-decker buses end to end and the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
“It is the largest discovered in our service history,” Andrew Roantree said in a statement. Roantree is the director of wastewater at South West Water, which manages the sewers in the town of about 13,000. He estimated that it will take “around eight weeks to dissect this monster in exceptionally challenging work conditions.” The team taking on the task will require “full breathing apparatus” and “special sewer jetting equipment," he said.
"..the bizarre activity went on for more than three hours."
A family in Salinas, California, had only been using their new Ring security camera for about a month before it captured nightmare fuel—a stranger fellating their doorbell around 5:00 am on Saturday morning.
Video directed by Sean Dacanay, edited by Jeremy Smolik. Click here for transcript. Special thanks to Glen Schofield and Chris Stone for assistance gathering footage.
I need to get this out of the way right up front: the War Stories video crew here at Ars loves Dead Space. The game turned 10 years old this past October, and it's a near-perfect execution of the survival horror genre—the world, the sound design, and the mechanics are all spot-on, even after a decade. It's also one of the games we've had on our War Stories to-do list since the very beginning, and we're excited to finally have this video to share with you all.
Executive producer/creator Glen Schofield was fortunately just as excited to talk about the game as we are, and he invited us into his home to tell us the tale of how Isaac Clarke and the USG Ishimura came to be. Creating Dead Space required Schofield and team to create not just an entire original IP (complete with lore and world-building) but new game mechanisms and new ways to tell a story. The focus of putting the player directly into protagonist Isaac Clarke's somewhat clunky shoes affected every decision, and the resulting game managed to be refreshingly original while also paying respectful homage to other horror movies and games (most notably Event Horizon and Resident Evil, respectively.
The fateful design notebook, showing the dismemberment chart.
Tentacle design porn
But it wouldn't be a War Stories video without a singular challenge to overcome, and for Dead Space, that singular challenge turned out to be the infamous "drag tentacle." First encountered in Dead Space's third chapter, the drag tentacle interrupts the player's progress with an unskippable (and surprisinglydifficult) arcade-esque sequence where you must shoot the tentacle's glow-y yellow bits before it hauls you away into its hidey hole and murders you into tiny pieces.
If you’ve ever been out with a big group of friends and tried to rely on text messages to get everyone back together, you already know what an act of futility that can be. “Head to the bar!” “Which bar?” “New phone, who’s this?” The LynQ tracker promises to make rounding up your posse a lot easier. It works similar to…
Thieves in Italy managed to get away with over $2 million after orchestrating an absurd, Fast and Furious-esque heist involving burning semi-trucks and backhoes ripping the roof off an armored van, Reuters and a number of Italian news siteswrite. Here’s a look at what reportedly happened in this wild Italian Job.
After the New Horizons mission zoomed by the then-unknown Ultima Thule object in the outer Solar System early on New Year's Day, the spacecraft began returning data to Earth via a deep-space network. Although only about 1 percent of that data is now on the ground, scientists were able to share some top-line findings on Wednesday.
What they have found at a distance of 44 astronomical units (AU) from Earth, or 44 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, is something of a wonderland. The Ultima Thule object, formally named 2014 MU69, is a 33km-long contact binary that somewhat resembles a snowman. Each of the two components is nearly spherical, coming together at a "neck," and this has proved important to confirming scientific ideas for how the planets and moons of the Solar System formed. Overall, the object has a reddish hue, similar to the north pole of Pluto's moon Charon.
"Hmmm, the federal government already has a close eye on me... I should solicit sex with a minor!"
Nathan Mattise
AUSTIN, Texas—More than three months have passed since a warrant (PDF) initially went out for Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson's arrest. That document detailed Wilson's alleged sexual assault against a female "child younger than 17 years of age" whom he reportedly solicited through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com. Last Friday, December 28, the State of Texas finally formally indicted (PDF) Wilson. The 3D printed gun advocate now faces multiple charges: four counts of sexual assault of a child, two charges of indecency with a child by contact, and two charges of indecency with a child by exposure.
Overwatch's winter event kicked off recently with some mostly mediocre skins with a few exceptions, and of course you get your token taste of a loot box to entice you to play more. But as of Christmas day, Blizzard is upping the ante and adding five more boxes into the fray. If you log into Overwatch from now until January 2, you can net five more boxes.
I got Grinched. After mashing that slot machine lever (spacebar) five times I came up with basically nothing outside of one (currency) gold drop. I constantly find myself wanting Heroes of the Storm's box re-roll system, but with that game on the way out Blizzard clearly knows that people will deal.
Other winter events include holiday re-themed levels and the return of last year's Yeti Hunter (Mei vs. Winston) mode.
One family cat, who was missing for 14 months, reunited with his family after he was found living in a nearby pet food factory. Clive, a Norwegian Forest cat, disappeared from his home in December 2014 and left his owners Tanya and Jonathan Irons devastated. The couple launched an appeal on Facebook and put up posters around their neighborhood but unfortunately, to no avail. Tanya later said: “He used to be very naughty and liked to go outside a lot. We thought somebody must have taken him in as he’s such a lovely cat.”
Meet Clive – the little rascal who has been living and feasting in a pet food factory for 14 months
As it turned out, nobody took Clive in – he was actually having the time of his life. Clive was found after the staff of one pet food factory noticed that the cat food had been going missing and decided to trap the burglar. They left a trail of cat treats which lead to a basket suspended over a pressure pad, which would cause it to drop leaving the suspect inside. One morning, after the staff came in, they saw that the trap worked. Workers took Clive to a vet who scanned his microchip, revealing that he was registered to the Irons family, who were living just two miles away from the pet food factory.
This is Clive (right) together with his brother, right before he went missing
Production supervisor at Kennelgate Pet Superstore Diane Gaskill later told: “I’ve been trying to catch him for weeks when I found out we had a cat living in the warehouse. I saw him run past me a couple of times and we found droppings. I set a cat trap one week night and I found him in the morning. He was hissing and spitting but he knew the game was up. We took him to the vets and we were able to get the mobile number of his owner. I rang her straight away – she couldn’t believe it.”
Retail director of the company, Colin Lewis, added: “It’s amazing. The warehouse is 20 thousand square foot of pet food. I think there’s been a few holes in some of the boxes. It was a team effort to get the cat, I think everyone had a go over the week before Diane found him. We kept finding cat poo and a few people said they saw him, but it took a while to get him. We got the trap from a cat rescue center. It’s a cage – you put some food in it, then when the cat goes in there’s a pressure pad that shuts the door behind it. Clive only ate cat food in the factory, I think he thought he was living in a penthouse.”
Finally, the family have reunited with Clive – only to realize that their beloved cat ballooned to almost twice his original size. Tanya, Clive’s owner said: “Clive was nine months old when we lost him – and he was a lot smaller then. When we got him back we were shocked to see how big and fluffy he was. He’s obviously been living the life of Riley in that pet food factory. We heard Clive was a bit smelly when they caught him, but he seems fine now. He definitely recognises us, he’s just fatter now.”
“I think he’s been enjoying himself feasting for the past year. He’s wasn’t a big eater before, but he always had to eat very quickly before his brothers stole it. He was probably glad he didn’t have to compete with them to eat for once. He has a huge appetite now though. I’ve had to leave him with a big bucket of food, he just won’t stop eating. We’re not going to put him on a diet though, he’s just a bit rounder but he’s happy.”
Authorities say a man in Montana was almost shot by a still-unidentified gunman who claimed he mistook the victim for the elusive, mythical beast known as Bigfoot.
The first trailer for Neil Marshall’s Hellboy reboot is here and it’s probably nothing like what you’d expect from the movie, but trust that it’s exactly what you need.
Mark Rober really loves to build things. So when this home electronics tinkerer discovered that some neighborhood thieves were ripping off Amazon packages from his porch, he did what any self-respecting former NASA engineer would do: He built a glitter bomb made to look like a boxed-up Apple HomePod, and he built it…
There have been a ton of negative things to talk about when it comes to Fallout 76. Last week, on the game’s one month anniversary, I recapped a number of them. But as I tried to relay in my review of the game, there’s good to be found in Bethesda’s multiplayer survival game as well. When the game works and players…
Keifer Sutherland as "The Gunslinger" fighting werewolves at a haunted dinner party in 1912 while spouting off quotes like "what in Lucifer's ballsack was that?"
Yes, please.
Activision has followed the same format for Call of Duty DLC since...well, forever. Typically they announce add-ons ahead of time, which are comprised of a handful of maps and a zombie pack, then that date comes and whatever publisher has timed exclusivity rights at that moment gets it a month early. You could either buy that DLC piecemeal or spring for the season pass. In later years, the publisher added small incentives to the pass to sweeten the deal.
That's all changed now that battle royale (Blackout) is in the mix. Now you need to buy the season pass and stuff is kind of just sprung on us randomly, like this week's DLC drop of two traditional maps, a zombies story and Blackout cosmetics.
As usual, the zombies mode is the crown jewel of the pass so far.
An explosive new report by Reuters released Friday may upturn the narrative surrounding the potential cancer risks of talcum powder. According to the report, Johnson & Johnson—the makers of the most popular consumer talc product, Baby Powder—knew for decades that its products at times contained carcinogenic asbestos,…
One of our favorite streaming shows of the last few years has been time-travel adventure Travelers.
The world of the future is in some ill-defined crisis, and the only way this can be averted is to send people back in time to make better decisions. But in a Quantum Leap-style twist, only people's consciousnesses can be sent back in time. To minimize disruption to the timelines, the mastermind of this plan, the Director, uses people who were just about to die as its targets, narrowly averting their deaths (at least most of the time) and allowing a traveler to resume their life.
Back in the earlier days of Xbox Live, while the Xbox 360 was still in its prime, the platform’s support forums used to allow users to complain about bans they’d received, and Microsoft staff would actually reply. Even if the users were being racist little shits.
Australians the world over are known for being, well, let’s just say uncomplicated. So it’s fitting that it has decided to name the first submarine slated to replace its current slate of Collins-class attack submarines with a new generation of attack subs, starting with the HMAS Attack.
wut? "Scrapping: Fixed an issue that could allow a player to unintentionally scrap their Pip-Boy."
When you release patch notes for a single player game with hidden changes, more often than not you can get away with it. If you try to do the same thing in a PVP-heavy, online game, not so much.
Bethesda dropped some patch notes last week that seemed decent at first glance, but contained a ton of secret things people had to find out on their own. When coupled with the already heated launch and broken state of the game, it was a recipe for disaster. So much so that Bethesda (or at least a rep on the website) even apologized for it, stating that they'll do better in the future.
The future has come, as the company has provided patch notes for today's December 11 update. Highlights include general performance enhancements (both in terms of client-facing gameplay and server-side), as well as a ton of C.A.M.P. (I hate typing that out) fixes that allow for easier placement of bases (one of my biggest complaints). Field of View and Depth of Field sliders, which somehow weren't in at launch on PC are now available, as is 21:9 resolution.
Stuff people won't dig like less ammo for kills (stacks of 1-5 instead of 12) are plainly communicated in the notes, so you can yell at the screen now instead of going "wait, did they nerf ammo drop rates?" while playing. You can find the full notes below: I'll see you tomorrow once you're done reading them. Good God I hope there aren't any other secret changes.
Spotify has introduced a new feature that will let users block music from artists they no longer want to hear. A "Don't play this artist" feature appeared in the latest version of the Spotify app for iOS and Android, as first spotted by Thurrot. The...
This year at CES Sony is one of the TV makers jumping into 8K with two "super-large" Z9G displays that are big enough, at 98- and 85-inches, to make use of the format's 33-million pixel resolution. According to Sony, these screens have "completely ne...
