Never mind that Google took over the week with its Pixel device announcements. Samsung held a keynote for its developer’s conference today, and it announced its new soundbar, the HW-Q900C, which can act as a centralized SmartThings smart home hub.
Source: Gizmodo – Samsung Adds SmartThings to Its Soundbars and Smart TVs
Enlarge / An FBI agent takes a photo of a memorial for victims of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 27, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Police were criticized for delaying for more than an hour confronting the shooter. Such criticism has led some police to respond more aggressively to hoax school shooting calls. (credit: Michael M. Santiago / Staff | Getty Images North America)
Within the past year, there have been approximately five times more school shooting hoaxes called in to police than actual school shootings reported in 2023.
Where data from Everytown showed “at least 103 incidents of gunfire on school grounds” in 2023, The Washington Post recently uncovered what seems to be a coordinated campaign of active shooter hoaxes causing “swattings”—where police respond with extreme force to fake crimes—at more than 500 schools nationwide over the past year. In just one day in February, “more than 30 schools were targeted,” The Post reported.
Education safety experts and law enforcement officials told The Post that this “wave of school shooting hoaxes” is unprecedented. And Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, warned that just because there’s no shooter, that does not mean these schools aren’t endangered by the hoaxes.
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Source: Ars Technica – Hundreds of US schools hit by potentially organized swatting hoaxes, report says
Your ring camera is not only going to be the source of an Amazon-fueled Big Brother dystopia—it may also capture evidence of extraterrestrial life. On the off chance that you record an alien being on your Ring camera, the tech company is willing to pay you for it.
Source: Gizmodo – Amazon Will Pay You Million for Alien Footage From Your Ring Doorbell
President Joe Biden is suspending 26 environmental laws to build a border wall in south Texas, a move announced by the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday. The laws include the Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Environmental Policy Act—all waived in favor of…
Source: Gizmodo – Biden Suspends 26 Environmental Laws to Build Border Wall
The global average temperature for September broke records by such an absurd margin that climate experts are struggling to describe the phenomenon. From a report: “This month was — in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather, a researcher with Berkeley Earth, said on the social media platforms Bluesky and X. The numbers are stark. September 2023 beat the previous record for the month, set in 2020, by 0.5C (0.9F), according to data sets maintained by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The temperature anomaly for the month was roughly 1.7C above pre-industrial levels, which is above the symbolic 1.5C mark set as the stretch goal in the Paris Agreement.
“We’ve never really seen a jump anything quite of this magnitude,” Hausfather said. “Half a degree C is analogous to slightly less than half of all the warming we’ve seen from pre-industrial [temperatures].” Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of rising temperatures. The global average temperature this year has also seen a boost from El Nino, a natural climate shift in the Pacific. Other factors may also be pushing temperatures up incrementally, such as a decline in cooling aerosol pollution from ships. Hausfather said next September may be unlikely to have all the same compounding factors, and consequently may be not as extreme. But either way, he described September 2023 as a “sneak peek” of what the back-to-school month may feel like in a decade as climate change pushes temperatures higher.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – September Broke the Global Heat Record by a ‘Gobsmackingly Bananas’ Margin
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the company is adjusting Unreal Engine pricing for non-gaming developers in fields like film / TV and automotive. “We haven’t officially announced this, but in the interest of transparency, we want to put it out there,” Sweeney said in a presentation from Unreal Fest 2023 posted on X (formerly Twitter) by @ImmatureGamerX (via Game Developer). The CEO didn’t mention specific pricing but said Epic’s licensing model would resemble those of tools like Maya and Photoshop.
Sweeney sounded (understandably) determined to differentiate Epic’s price hike from Unity’s. The latter stirred the ire of countless developers as it announced a per-install pricing model that many smaller developers claimed would have put them out of business. Unity ended up walking back many of the plan’s most contentious changes. However, whether the softened stance will prevent a full-on developer exodus remains to be seen. Several months before its pricing fiasco, Unity cut its workforce for the third time in less than a year.
Epic’s CEO briefly addressed his company’s recent layoffs, where it let go of 16 percent of its workforce. “This was a survival move that was necessary,” Sweeney said. He added that Epic began running into “financial problems” about 10 weeks ago, but he sounded satisfied that the move puts Epic back on solid ground. “One thing, we stabilized our finances so we won’t run out of money as we build the metaverse,” he said. Epic has been bullish on constructing a virtual universe, including a partnership with Meta, Microsoft, and others to develop metaverse standards.
Sweeney explained that Fortnite‘s revenue had subsidized other parts of the company and that it was time for change. He claimed aspects of Epic’s business had grown too reliant on the cash cow. “A funny thing about being funded so heavily by Fortnite over the past six years is we’ve had different parts of our business get disconnected from their revenue streams. We have big teams serving different industry verticals, building this and that set of features for custom clients without revenue to support it,” he said.
The co-founder sounded as invested as ever in the Epic Games Store. “We think the Epic Games Store is a cure to a disease that’s impacting a lot of the industry right now, where the mobile platforms have become overlords and are extracting vastly higher payment processing fees than any same payment process around there,” he stated. “And we’re fighting that.” The company has taken on Apple and Google’s stranglehold on mobile payments.
Sweeney’s speech wrapped by framing the moment as a crucial turning point laced with optimism. “In summary, this is a pivotal moment for us,” he explained. “Our commitment now is to operate differently. We are determined to avoid falling back into a precarious position. Through the highs and lows, we promise to support you,” Sweeney said.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/unreal-engine-will-get-more-expensive-but-not-for-game-devs-191959514.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Unreal Engine will get more expensive, but not for game devs
Saw X is a film that only works because it’s the 10th film in the franchise. This story could not have been told by the second or third Saw movie; if this movie were to exist at all, it could only come now, and the franchise is better off for it.
Source: Gizmodo – Why Saw X Works So Damned Well
Google has finally released a version of Gmail for Wear OS to accompany the launch of the Pixel Watch 2, as originally spotted by 9to5Google. The company teased this feature back in May at I/O, but we were left wondering when it would actually launch. Well, here it is, giving you prime wrist access to your emails.
This has been a long-awaited option for Wear OS users, as Google hasn’t offered a direct way to access Gmail with its smartwatches, outside of notifications, until now. Being as how Gmail is one of the company’s tentpole offerings, it’s a mystery as to why it took this long. Still, better late than never.
The app seems robust, with options to refresh your inbox, scroll through emails and even switch between multiple accounts on the fly. You can also adjust the overall settings so new email notifications pop up on the watch’s face as you go about your day. The app works with 2021’s Wear OS 3 and the just-released Wear OS 4, so those with slightly older smartwatches can also read an endless barrage of campaign donation emails. Gmail for Wear OS is available now via the Google Play Store.
Back at I/O, Google also announced that the company’s Calendar app was coming to Wear OS, but that has yet to materialize. Calendar for Wear OS is expected to allow users to check schedules, RSVP to invites, update tasks and to-do lists and more. Additionally, Google’s smart home ecosystem will soon get improved Wear OS integration, letting you answer your Nest doorbell from your wrist.
However, as Wear OS 3 and Wear OS 4 continue to gain new features, the company’s older smartwatch operating systems are losing features. Google recently announced that its proprietary voice assistant would no longer work on watches running anything before Wear OS 3.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-gmail-app-for-wear-os-is-finally-available-185420301.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – The Gmail app for Wear OS is finally available
Enlarge / “They excised what, now?” Puck is nonetheless intrigued by new findings about the mechanisms behind a cat’s purr. (credit: Jennifer Ouellette)
There are few things more gratifying to cat lovers than a contentedly purring feline. But the precise mechanisms by which kitties produce those pleasant, low-frequency rumblings has been a matter of some debate among scientists. Now a team of Austrian scientists has determined that connective tissues embedded in cats’ vocal cords play a crucial role in this ability, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The authors argue that their findings call for a reassessment of the current prevailing hypothesis about how cats purr.
Purring is mostly exclusive to cats, although certain other species can produce purr-like sounds, including raccoons, mongooses, kangaroos, badgers, rabbits, and guinea pigs. And cats are usually divided into those that purr (Felinae) and those that roar (Pantherinae); no cat species can do both. The latter category includes lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards, and scientists have suggested that the roaring capability is due to an incompletely ossified hyoid bone in the larynx. “Purrers,” by contrast, have a completely ossified hyoid, although the purring snow leopard is a rare exception.
We know the fundamental frequency at which cats purr—between 20 to 30 vibrations per second, although purrs can go up to about 150 Hz—but that is lower than expected based on vocal cord anatomy. As a general rule, larger animals have longer vocal cords and thus create lower-frequency sounds. But cats are relatively small, typically weighing on the order of a few kilograms, and their vocal cords are also relatively short. Hence the curiosity about how they produce such low-frequency purrs.
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Source: Ars Technica – We now know how cats purr—why they purr is still up for debate
theodp writes: With Microsoft President Satya Nadella testifying in the Google antitrust trial that the tech titans are engaged in a Generative AI Gold Rush, it’s no surprise to learn that tech giant-backed and advised nonprofit Code.org has chosen “Creativity with AI” as the theme for this December’s Hour of Code, the annual global event that aims to whet K-12 schoolchildren’s appetite for rigorous computer science. “We’re taking Hour of Code to new heights with ‘Hour of Code: Creativity with AI’,” explained Code.org. “Whether it’s coding new apps and algorithms, generating unique art, or crafting choreography to get us dancing, AI is opening up fresh opportunities for digital expression that expand our understanding of creativity. What’s new? Did you catch that reference to ‘dancing’? That’s right: Code.org’s Dance Party [a ‘CS lesson’ developed in partnership with the ‘childhood to career’ Amazon Future Engineer program] will be better than ever this year! Coming soon, this Hour of Code activity will use generative AI to help students add awesome backgrounds and visuals to the dance parties they build with code.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Tech-Backed Code.org Picks ‘Creativity With AI’ As Theme For 2023 Hour of Code
Lucid has unveiled its most affordable Air EV trim yet. A rear-wheel drive variant of the Lucid Air Pure is available now for a starting price of $77,400. Lucid says this version, which is $5,000 less than the dual-motor all-wheel drive model, completes its Air lineup.
The brand is well-known for offering a large range in its EVs and it hasn’t skimped in that department here. When equipped with 19-inch wheels, the Air Pure RWD has a range of 410 miles, according to the automaker. The Environmental Protection Agency gave it an even more generous range estimate of 419 miles.
However you slice it, Lucid claims the Air Pure RWD has a larger range than any other electric car on the market save for its own models. The lineup tops out with the Lucid Air Grand Touring, which has an EPA-estimated range of 516 miles.
You won’t have to hang around by a charger for too long to top up your battery either. Lucid says the Air Pure RWD can add 150 miles of range after being plugged into a DC fast charger for less than 12 minutes.
The EV has Lucid’s most compact battery pack to date, which helps give those in the back seat more legroom, according to the automaker. Lucid also claims this model is the most aerodynamic car that’s in production right now.
The Air Pure RWD comes with Apple CarPlay, a 34-inch curved Glass Cockpit display, heated front and rear seats and steering wheel, DreamDrive driver assistance systems and the Lucid UX digital environment all as standard. While it’s still a pricey vehicle, the Air Pure RWD lowers the barrier to entry for those looking to hop into a Lucid EV.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lucids-most-affordable-air-ev-still-has-a-projected-410-mile-range-183806231.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Lucid’s most affordable Air EV still has a projected 410-mile range
In a galaxy of compelling species, the Ferengi are one of Star Trek’s most peculiar, and most fascinating. Growing from not-quite-threatening villains in their TNG debut to a fascinating capitalist foil to the Federation’s post-scarcity utopia in DS9 through characters like Quark, Rom, and Nog, their outside…
Source: Gizmodo – Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Exploration of the Ferengi Does Deep Space Nine Justice
Enlarge / This illustration shows what the shore of ancient Lake Otero may have looked like 21,000 years ago.
People really were walking around in the southwestern US during the middle of the last Ice Age, according to a recent study that double-checked the dates on a set of surprisingly ancient human footprints at White Sands National Park.
Many thousands of years ago, someone walked along the muddy shore of an ancient lake at what’s now White Sands. They crushed ditchgrass seeds and grains of conifer pollen beneath their feet with every squishing, slippery step. Bournemouth University archaeologist Matthew Bennett and his colleagues (including the authors of the current study) unearthed eight layers of tracks at the site in early 2020; they radiocarbon-dated the ditchgrass seeds from the oldest layer of footprints to 23,000 years old and the youngest layer to around 21,000 years old.
Their 2021 paper sparked immediate debate.
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Source: Ars Technica – More evidence that humans were in North America over 20,000 years ago
An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person. Nature: Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists “are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem,” David says. He decided he needed some data. The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David’s speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he’d missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint, one of the first published comparisons of human versus machine for finding doctored images.
The findings come as academic publishers reckon with the problem of image manipulation in scientific papers. In a 2016 study, renowned image-forensics specialist Elisabeth Bik, based in San Francisco, California, and her colleagues reported that almost 4% of papers she had visually scanned in 40 biomedical-science journals contained inappropriately duplicated images. Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors’ motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.
Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications — the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin’s developers. Bik has been using Imagetwin regularly to supplement her own skills and calls it her “standard tool,” although she emphasizes that the AI has weaknesses as well as strengths — for instance, it can miss duplications in images with low contrast.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – AI Beats Human Sleuth at Finding Problematic Images in Research Papers
Fossilized human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico are every bit as old as the 23,000 years-and-change they were dated at in 2021, according to new analysis published in Science.
Source: Gizmodo – Oldest Human Footprints in North America Really Are That Old, New Dating Confirms
Google announced today that the original Pixel Watch will be getting the Wear OS 4 “later this year”. We were already aware that the new Pixel Watch 2 is releasing with Wear OS 4 but it will be available for the 2022 model as well.
Source: Gizmodo – The Original Pixel Watch Is Also Getting Wear OS 4
Blenders, lawnmowers, kitchen knives. These are common household items you expect to see featured in a horror film. You don’t expect to see the serene things. You don’t expect to see things known for their beauty. You don’t expect to see a killer pool.
Source: Gizmodo – Watch the Freaky Trailer for Blumhouse’s Killer Pool Movie
Enlarge (credit: BMW)
LISBON, Portugal—Last week we wrote about driving a pair of new M-badged electric BMWs. With the arrival of the i5 M60 and the iX M70, there are now go-fast variants of all four of BMW’s battery-electric vehicles. But as BMW will openly admit, those aren’t true M cars. That’s not to say that BMW’s M Division is afraid of electrification—last year it debuted the XM, a performance plug-in hybrid SUV. And next year, the XM’s powertrain will reappear in a plug-in hybrid M5. But when might we see a purely electric M car?
Conveniently for us, Frank van Meel, CEO of BMW M, was on hand in Portugal to sit down and talk about the future of M performance and electrification. And, as it turns out, we might see a fully electric BMW M car in plenty of time before the end of this decade.
“Well, if you look on social media, you can already see our mule test car with quad motors, because for us, that is a very promising concept for high performance,” van Meel said, referring to recently released photos of a BMW i4 EV with the license plate M HP 4 E.
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Source: Ars Technica – When will we see an electric BMW M car? We speak to its boss to find out
Developer CD Projekt Red just announced it is in the early stages of developing a live-action TV show or movie based on the once-hated and now-beloved Cyberpunk 2077 game. Details are scant, as we don’t even know if it’ll be a film or ongoing series, but the game developer has teamed up with production company Anonymous Content to bring Night City to glorious live-action life.
You probably don’t know Anonymous Content by name, but the company’s behind a slew of high-profile and critically-acclaimed TV shows, like True Detective and Mr. Robot. It’s also helped produce recent films like The Revenant and Spotlight, but also classics like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. This is a serious production company, so we could be in for something special.
While CD Projekt Red hasn’t announced whether this will be a show or movie, there are some hints indicating it’ll be a TV series. The developer went out of its way to note that it’s working closely with certain members of the Anonymous Content team, all of which are heavily involved in the TV side of things. For instance, the dev called out the company’s Head of Television Garret Kemble and noted Chief Creative Officer David Levine’s decade-long tenure at HBO. Levine was heavily involved with getting Game of Thrones and Westworld on the network, in addition to other hit shows.
This situation here looks slightly different from Netflix’s The Witcher show, as that’s adapted from the source books and not the video game series. Cyberpunk 2077 is a wholly original IP, giving CD Projekt Red a good amount of creative control over how the story plays out. To that end, the developer hasn’t indicated this would be a one-to-one adaptation of the game, rather stating its “set in the world” of Cyberpunk 2077.
This looks to be in the extreme early stages of development, so it could be years before we see the lawless Badlands or the slums of Dogtown in live action. This series or movie will join the Netflix cartoon Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
When you think about it, it’s pretty nuts that the Cyberpunk IP is flourishing in this way. The game launched as a buggy mess, forcing Sony to actually pull it from its online store and both CD Projekt Red and Microsoft to issue refunds to unhappy customers. Since that disastrous launch, the developer has slowly and steadily improved just about every aspect of the game, transforming whole gameplay mechanics in the process. The end result? Cyberpunk 2077 is now considered to be a truly special video game, with 25 million sales to prove it. Even the recently-released Phantom Liberty DLC has already racked up 3 million downloads. There’s also a pseudo-sequel on the way.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/theres-a-live-action-cyberpunk-2077-show-or-movie-on-the-way-172248247.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – There’s a live-action Cyberpunk 2077 show or movie on the way
A week after laying off almost 900 employees, Epic Games has said that it’s increasing the price to use Unreal Engine — just not for the game development community. From a report: The news came from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney himself in a presentation at Unreal Fest 2023. In a video captured by Fortnite Creative developer Immature, Sweeney explains that developers using Unreal Engine in the film, TV, automotive, and other industries can expect to start paying a per-seat licensing fee. He claimed that the pricing model will not be “unusually expensive or unusually inexpensive,” and that its pricing structure will be similar to subscription services like Maya or Photoshop. Sweeney said he wanted to announce these changes now in the name of “transparency.”
He also shed some light on the business decisions that led to the company making unexpectedly significant business shifts in the last week. Apparently Epic Games began running into “financial problems” about 10 weeks ago, meaning that the company was facing some sort of financial downturn from late July through September. Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams. It adds some context to previous comments made by Sweeney about the impact of declined Fortnite revenue — if the company’s signature game had started to not turn a profit, other parts of Epic Games may not have easily been able to make up for declining revenue.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Epic Games To Update Unreal Engine Pricing for Devs Outside Game Industry
