Darendukes

Enlarge (credit: Marseille)

Well, this is a turn-up for the books. Normally an HDMI cable that claims to improve your picture quality would be just so much audiophool [editorial standards prevent me from using an appropriate noun here]. HDMI cables carry digital signals, and bits are bits, right? Add to that a "directional" claim—you've gotta plug the right end into the TV—and normally our eyes would be rolling.

But the Marseille mCable Gaming Edition appears to be a working, legitimate product. It's an HDMI cable that makes the kind of claims that we've come to expect from audiophile con men, but there's a key difference: Marseille isn't making its performance claims on the basis of specious nonsense about construction, materials, and chakras. Rather, this cord works because the Gaming Edition HDMI cable has a microchip in it. That microchip performs anti-aliasing of the signal passed through the cable.

The cable is intended for console gamers. While the Xbox One X is set to shake things up a bit when it's released later this year, the consoles currently on the market are, especially from a GPU perspective, relatively underpowered. While PC gamers can readily achieve 1080p or better with a wide range of anti-aliasing options—which offer all kinds of trade-offs between performance, image quality, and the visibility of jagged edges—console gamers have far fewer options. Their graphics processors just aren't strong enough to offer the same kind of flexibility and image quality.

Enlarge / Accused NSA leaker Reality Leigh Winner.

The NSA might have all sorts of high-tech methods to prevent and sniff out internal leaks. But sometimes all it takes is a pair of pantyhose to steal highly sensitive, classified information.

Consider how the agency was able to pin down an alleged leaker of a classified intelligence report, published by The Intercept, that said Russian military intelligence launched a cyberattack on a US voting software company and sent spear-phishing e-mails to local US election officials ahead of the November election.

NSA investigators quickly narrowed down suspects to Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old linguistics contractor for Pluribus International Corporation, a company that provides analytical, translation, and cyberwarfare development services to the intelligence community. When The Intercept asked the NSA in June to confirm the document's authenticity, the online news agency unwittingly exposed the leak's alleged source. The copy of the report showed fold marks that indicated it had been printed—and it included encoded watermarking that revealed exactly when it had been printed and on what printer.

Enlarge (credit: Shaweesh)

Saudi Arabia's under-secretary for curricula has been fired and exiled to Dagobah after an official Saudi social studies textbook included a photo of Jedi Master Yoda. In the photo, Yoda can be seen sitting next to Saudi Arabia's King Faisal at the 1945 ceremony that created the United Nations. The textbook page began circulating on social media last week.

The photograph was created by Saudi artist Abdullah Al Shehri, who goes by the nickname Shaweesh. He told the BBC that he hadn't meant any disrespect to King Faisal.

"The 2013 artwork, entitled United Nations (Yoda), is part of a series in which symbols of American pop culture—ranging from Captain America to Darth Vader—are superimposed onto archive photos of historical events," the BBC reports.

Enlarge / Say hello to an actual, honest to goodness Ataribox. Or, at least, a prototype. But, hey, at least it's not just a 3D render. (credit: Atari)

The trademark and license borg that currently calls itself Atari continues to push ahead with an "Ataribox" project, and, after being teased in July, the device has begun to take shape. Fans and press alike may have expected a low-priced, retro-gaming living room device—since they're all the rage and since this thing looks like a tiny, restyled Atari 2600—but Tuesday's news suggests something a little more ambitious.

The spec sheet, as announced, is still pretty vague, but Atari has confirmed a few notable things, starting with a price point between $250 and $300. In exchange for costing roughly as much as a Nintendo Switch, Xbox One S, or PlayStation 4, the Ataribox will come packed with an "AMD customized processor with Radeon graphics technology." Additionally, this will not be an Android system. Instead, the Ataribox will run Linux "with a customized, easy-to-use user interface."

Enlarge / Sonequa Martin-Green plays protagonist Michael Burnham, first officer of the USS Shenzhou, on new CBS All Access series Star Trek: Discovery. (credit: CBS)

Almost 10 million people tuned in to CBS on Sunday to watch the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery. And the premiere also drove record signups for CBS' proprietary streaming service, which will be the exclusive source for later episodes of the new Star Trek series.

But others have turned to good old-fashioned Internet piracy to get their Star Trek fix.

The premiere of Star Trek: Discovery is the twelfth most actively pirated show among users of the Pirate Bay right now, according to the Pirate Bay's list of most downloaded videos. Discovery's second episode isn't far behind, at number 19.

Enlarge / The speaker goes where? (credit: Babypod)

As the person who is responsible for covering the annual Nobel Prizes in the sciences, it's always good to get a warning that they're about to be awarded. For me, that warning is provided by the Annals of Improbable Research, which has spent the last 27 years hosting its First-Annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

Complete with a ceremony that features a mini-opera and a Nobel Prize winner who's tasked with sweeping paper airplanes off the stage, the awarding is an act of inspired lunacy that's matched only by the prize-winning research itself. As is typical, this year's winners are a mix of scientists being goofy, taking scientific methods to unconventional problems, and real scientific questions that have... unconventional consequences. Without further ado, let's get to them.

Obstetrics: Whose idea was this anyway? Presumably, one of the three Spanish researchers being honored came up with the question that nobody else was asking: would a fetus enjoy music more if it was played in the nearby vagina? To find out, the team played music against the mother's abdomen and from a speaker inserted in her vagina and compared those to vibrations in the vagina. Though there was no discussion of the mother's facial expression during the vibrations, the fetus only responded to intravaginal music, though it had to be older and better developed to do so. Naturally, the team patented an intravaginal speaker and has a product on the market.

Enlarge / The administration and community building of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. (credit: P199 via Wikimedia)

A drug company has found a novel way to avoid challenges to some of its most prized patents: handing them off to a Native American tribe for safe-keeping.

On Friday, Allergan disclosed that it gave six patents covering its top-selling dry eye drug Restasis to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe in Northern New York. The deal will provide the tribe with $13.75 million immediately and an annual royalty of $15 million as long as the patents are valid. The new deal was soon reported in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 

Allergan made the unprecedented move because it will prevent any meaningful challenge to the company's patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or PTAB. Challenging patents at the PTAB in a process called "inter partes review" (IPR) was authorized by the America Invents Act of 2011, and the IPR process has significantly changed the patent landscape since then. While invalidating a patent in district court typically costs millions of dollars, invalidating a patent via IPR can happen for the relative bargain of a few hundred thousand dollars.

A Juicero juicer on display. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for The Humane Society of the United States) (credit: Getty Images)

In a letter posted on its website on Friday, Juicero said that it would be closing down its business. The Silicon Valley startup sold a cold-press juice machine that squeezed juice out of proprietary bags of fruit and vegetable matter. The bags were delivered to the Juicero owner’s home on a subscription basis.

“[A]fter selling over a million Produce Packs, we must let you know that we are suspending the sale of the Juicero Press and Produce Packs immediately,” Juicero wrote today.

The company was hailed by tech investors, but it ran into problems with price. The juice press was very expensive—it started out at $700 until the company reduced the price of the hardware to $400. That was not including the price of the juice bags, which cost $5-$8 each.

Enlarge / Roughly translated, many parts of the Voynich Manuscript say that women should take a nice bath if they are feeling sick. Here you can see a woman doing just that.

Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era. (UPDATE: Scholars have started to debunk his claims.)

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.

A GIF showing the difficulty/skin-color choices in South Park: The Fractured But Whole (credit: Ubisoft)

Writers from John Scalzi to author Shannon Sullivan have called being white living life in "easy mode" when compared to the treatment that people of color receive. The upcoming RPG South Park: The Fractured But Whole takes that concept and integrates it right into the gameplay, increasing the difficulty for created characters as their chosen skin tone becomes darker.

Eurogamer was among the first to notice and publicize the feature. At a recent preview event, the site captured footage showing difficulty levels ranging from "easy" for a light-skinned character to "very difficult" for the darkest skin option. "Don't worry, this doesn't affect combat," character Eric Cartman says as you operate the slider. "Just every other aspect of your whole life."

As the developers clarified to Eurogamer, the difficulty setting "affects the amount of money you receive and the way other characters speak to you throughout the course of the game." That raises the concept beyond a throwaway joke on the character creator and into an integral part of the way the game proceeds.

Enlarge / Watch out for that cow. (credit: Getty | Tim Graham)

The World Health Organization sets a list of medical conditions into well-used code called the “International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems,” or ICD for short. The official alphanumeric ciphers are used in medical records and insurance claims worldwide, noting the wide range of ailments and conditions a human may experience—everything from “tuberculosis” and “gastric ulcers” to “struck by orca” and “burn due to water skis on fire.”

The latter categories of unusual and puzzlingly specific conditions even inspired the 2014 book Struck by Orca: ICD-10 Illustrated.

But how often are these peculiar codes actually used? An insurance data company did the work to find out. The most bizarre ICD codes listed in the 2014 book, such as the title “struck by orca,” were not used in the US in the last 12 months, which is both good and disappointing. But codes just slightly less bizarre were used—some quite a lot, such as W503: “accidental bite by another person.”