Many Android phones can create handy hotspots to share your phone’s internet connections, but they can be tedious to set up. Google wants to fix this with its new Instant Tethering feature.
A pinch of salt is a great way for chefs and bakers to temper bitter flavors, but it’s a handy trick for at-home bartenders as well. Here’s how to make a saline solution that will boost the flavor of your cocktails.
The future you’ve been waiting for has arrived. Amazon has added a new accepted wake word to activate your personal voice assistant: Computer. I don’t need to explain how cool this is to Star Trek nerds.
The Chicago law firm that became synonymous with "patent troll"-type litigation is shutting down, following the death of founding partner Raymond Niro.
The remaining partners of the Niro Law Firm are shuttering the firm, according to a report in Crain's Chicago Business. A core group, including Niro's son Dean Niro, will launch a new firm called Vitale Vickrey Niro & Gasey.
"We wanted a new start," said Paul Vickrey, who became Niro Law's managing partner after Ray Niro passed away in September of last year. "The Niro firm has been synonymous with patent litigation, and a group of us wanted a new firm with a broader focus."
REM sleep is known to help solidify memories, but the mechanism for making memories more permanent is not well-understood. A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience shows that, during REM sleep, some of the structures neurons use to make connections with each other are pruned, while others are maintained and strengthened. The findings indicate that sleep's role in solidifying memories comes through allowing the brain time to selectively eliminate or maintain newly formed neural connections.
Dendritic spines are small outgrowths on a neuron’s dendrite, which is the portion of the neuron that receives chemical signals from other neurons. These spines enhance the strength of connections between neurons so they can play an important role in strengthening new neural circuits and solidifying new memories. These spines aren't permanent structures; instead, nerve cells can create new ones or get rid of existing ones (a process called pruning) as the importance of different connections shifts.
The new memories in this case were formed in mice, which were trained to complete a treadmill-like motor task. Then, the mice were either deprived of REM sleep or allowed to experience this form of sleep. The mice that were allowed REM showed significantly higher pruning of new dendritic spines compared to the mice that were REM sleep deprived. This difference in pruning was only seen for new dendritic spines, and previously existing dendritic spines were pruned at the same rate.
In the tight-knit community of competitive fighting games, it's not rare for specific characters, stages, or moves to be banned because they throw off the game's competitive balance. In the Killer Instinct community, though, players in one major tournament are faced with a ban on "teabagging," which has nothing to do with competitive balance and everything to do with taunting, sportsmanship, and "professionalism."
Teabagging involves crouching on top of a prostrate opponent repeatedly, humiliating them by sticking your character's virtual crotch in their face when they're powerless to stop it (mature, we know). While the taunt is most popular in online first-person shooters, the act has found some traction in the fighting game community as well. Killer Instinct gives more opportunities for teabagging than most other fighting games, because winning players can continue to move and teabag opponents in between rounds.
The Killer Instinct World Cup first instituted a ban on teabagging last year, and that ban is being extended after debate over the issue got particularly heated in a private Facebook group. Fighting game tournament organizer and team manager Rotendo Camarena described the Facebook discussion to PVPLive:
Enlarge / A scene from Prelude to Axanar. (credit: Axanar)
On Friday, litigants announced a settlement to end a contentious copyright lawsuit over a short film and a proposed feature-length film based in the Star Trek universe. The lawsuit was filed last year and involves Star Trek fan-fiction producer Axanar Productions, Paramount Studios, and CBS.
The parties did not disclose all the details of the settlement, which is sealed from the public record. But a joint statement from Axanar and the plaintiffs noted that the defendants “acknowledge that both films were not approved by Paramount or CBS and that both works crossed boundaries acceptable to CBS and Paramount relating to copyright law.” A spokesperson from Axanar told Ars Technica in an e-mail “we’re not paying anything,” with respect to the settlement.
The settlement will also require the fanfic producer to “make substantial changes to Axanar to resolve this litigation.” According to a statement from Axanar, this includes changing the proposed feature-length film into two 15-minute short film episodes, which will be posted on YouTube without advertising from which Axanar could earn revenue. The 20-minute Prelude to Axanar will be allowed to stay on YouTube.
Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturing company best known for its partnership with Apple, has said that it is mulling a $7 billion investment in US manufacturing that could create between 30,000 and 50,000 jobs. According to The Wall Street Journal, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou says the company is talking with the state of Pennsylvania among others about getting the land and electricity subsidies it would need to build a factory.
“If US state governments are willing to provide these terms, and we calculate and it is cheaper than shipping from China or Japan, then why wouldn’t Sharp build a factory in the US?" said Gou.
The factory would build flat-panel screens under the Sharp name—Foxconn bought Sharp around this time last year for $5.1 billion. Sharp President Tai Jeng-wu hinted in October of 2016 that US manufacturing could be a possibility for Sharp, and he also indicated that Apple could begin using OLED display panels in future iPhones. Apple currently uses OLED in the Apple Watch and in the new MacBook Pro's Touch Bar, but otherwise it hasn't pushed to adopt the technology as some Android phone manufacturers have.
So a guy on Reddit posted about how he was interested in console gaming but was kinda poor and didn’t know where to start. As you can see above, Redditors stepped up and not only led him in the right direction but straight up gave him a game collection, as seen above.
So the next time you hear someone talking about how Reddit is all fedora wearing neckbeards you remind them they are usually INCREDIBLY kind and selfless people! Props to all involved. You give gamers a good name (sometimes).
A game where YOU kidnap the princess and YOU play as the boss against a motley group off wanna be heroes? With some of the boss fights being RECOGNIZABLE bosses from video games of the past, this retro looking (new) game finally gives the power to the bosses and you get to experience giving the beatings to all those heroes you once wore the very crowns of. That game is Nefarious on Steam and it looks like an absolute blast!
Enlarge / The bullet closer, which has been viewed as a demonstration of dark matter. (credit: APOD)
Throughout the Universe, there are lots of signs that there's more gravity out there than there is visible matter to produce it. Over the last few decades, physicists have slowly come to the conclusion that it is not the laws of gravity that need to be changed, but rather that a massive particle is responsible for the extra gravity.
Now, it should be pointed out that this is not a whim. The distribution of dark matter describes all manner of gravitational phenomena at all scales, including some really weird things, like the Bullet Cluster. So, understandably, particle physicists and cosmologists get a bit touchy when people say that we should just modify gravity instead.
Erik Verlinde, a Dutch theoretical physicist, doesn't seem to care. The alternative title to Verlinde's talk, presented at a conference I'm attending, could be "How to piss off a room full of physicists in under 20 minutes."
Enlarge / This CG model of the USS Discovery is pretty much all there is to see about CBS' newest Trek. (credit: CBS)
If you've been waiting patiently for CBS to release its new Star Trek series, prepare to keep waiting. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Star Trek: Discovery has been delayed indefinitely while CBS gives the "ambitious project" more time to incubate.
"We've said from the beginning it's more important to do this right than to do it fast," CBS said in a statement. "There is also added flexibility presenting on CBS All Access, which isn't beholden to seasonal premieres or launch windows."
The Reporter also says that James Frain (Orphan Black, Gotham, Tron: Legacy, and more) has been cast as Spock's father, Sarek, and that the series is set to begin production "next week."
Enlarge / The Lawnmower Man revival's naive idiocy makes this guy very angry! (credit: New Line Cinema)
Last year's Sundance Film Festival was marked, in part, by quite a case of virtual-reality fever. Content creators and filmmakers began to embrace 360-degree videos, just as consumer-grade VR headsets started rolling out in greater numbers.
This year, Sundance appears poised to continue the trend, with the fest's kickoff being marked by the announcement of a VR project that nobody was necessarily asking for: The Lawnmower Man.
On Thursday, Jaunt, a 360-degree video production company, announced a slate of upcoming projects that will require VR headsets. Lawnmower Man stands out in this list as the only one based on a previously known film, though the only names currently attached to the project are its "rights holders." No directors, writers, actors, or production dates have yet been announced.
Enlarge / A diagram of the transistors built in this paper, next to a false-colored image of the actual hardware.
Atomically thin materials like graphene and carbon nanotubes have the potential to provide significant benefits compared to today's electronics, like smaller features, lower operating voltages, and more efficient performance. So, even though we're struggling to figure out how to use them in bulk manufactured electronics, lots of organizations are spending money, brains, and time to work that out.
Note the phrasing above—potential. Since it's been incredibly hard to make transistors based on these materials, we aren't entirely sure how all of them will behave. A group of researchers from China's Peking University decided it was time to cut down on some of the uncertainty. The answer they came up with: transistors made with carbon nanotubes and graphene that perform so well they're pushing up against the fundamental limits set by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
We still can't necessarily make a chip full of these things, but their work does show it's worth the continued effort to try to figure out how.
In the near future, a weary Logan cares for an ailing Professor X in a hideout on the Mexican border. But Logan’s attempts to hide from the world and his legacy are up-ended when a young mutant arrives, being pursued by dark forces.
SABAN’S POWER RANGERS follows five ordinary teens who must become something extraordinary when they learn that their small town of Angel Grove — and the world — is on the verge of being obliterated by an alien threat. Chosen by destiny, our heroes quickly discover they are the only ones who can save the planet. But to do so, they will have to overcome their real-life issues and before it’s too late, band together as the Power Rangers.
This would completely erase the original Star Wars trilogy! Nooooooo! You were suppose to figure out a way to permanently erase the prequel trilogy, not the good ones!
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is getting a big upgrade, with the same processor used in the recently released Raspberry Pi 3.
The Compute Module, which is intended for industrial applications, was first released in April 2014 with the same CPU as the first-generation Raspberry Pi. The upgrade announced today has 1GB of RAM and a Broadcom BCM2837 processor that can run at up to 1.2GHz. "This means it provides twice the RAM and roughly ten times the CPU performance of the original Compute Module," the Raspberry Pi Foundation announcement said.
This is the second major version of the Compute Module, but it's being called the "Compute Module 3" to match the last flagship Pi's version number.
Enlarge / Brian Armstrong, as seen here in 2014, is the CEO of Coinbase. (credit: TechCrunch)
Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, has estimated that it will cost the company between $100,000 and $1 million to defend its customers from what he described as an “overly broad subpoena.”
Last month, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Coinbase could be ordered, at the request of the Internal Revenue Service, to provide years of data that would reveal the identities of all its active United States-based users.
The IRS is concerned that some of Coinbase’s customers may have used its service to circumvent or mitigate tax liability. Federal investigators say they need Coinbase’s records to be able to identify some Bitcoin wallets and to check against tax records to make sure Coinbase’s users are paying any and all proper taxes on their Bitcoin-related income.
Not going to argue. I find this theory highly plausible.
This would completely erase the original Star Wars trilogy! Nooooooo! You were suppose to figure out a way to permanently erase the prequel trilogy, not the good ones!
