Ars Technica. Leaked document points to $299 “Xbox 720″ for 2013. UPDATE: The original document, which had been posted to sharing site scribd, was taken down over the weekend "at the request of Covington & Burling LLP," a major IP law firm that represents Microsoft. While the move doesn't positively confirm that the document is genuine, it does heavily suggest that Microsoft is taking action to suppress confidential internal information.
ORIGINAL STORY: Some fans and observers have expressed disappointment that Microsoft didn't even bother to mention the follow-up to the Xbox 360 at this year's E3. Those people should be much less disappointed by a newly leaked planning document, which details an "Xbox 720" that will include an improved Kinect, a head-mounted "glasses" display, and a major investment in cloud gaming. The 56-page document, which started circulating widely this morning (and has since been taken down, see update above), purportedly represents a road map for the future of the Xbox platform through 2015.
Can it be real? Mating with Neanderthals is off-again, on-again. One of the odd aspects of scientific peer review is that, because it's handled anonymously, you sometimes have no idea someone else is working on the same problem or preparing a paper at the same time. That seems to have been the case with a couple of papers that have appeared online over the last couple of days on the subject of what our ancestors may or may not have done with Neanderthals. Today, a paper was released by PNAS that indicates the evidence produced in favor of interbreeding with Neanderthals is perfectly consistent with a structured population within Africa that would mean our ancestors never mated with them. Perhaps knowing this paper was in the works, however, the group that brought us the Neanderthal genome released a draft of their own work, scheduled for publication in PLoS Genetics, that argues strongly for interbreeding.
And if that wasn't enough, some of the authors of that work went and revised all the dates for our ancestors' splits with gorillas and chimps. Understanding Japan's Nuclear Crisis | Wired Science. By John Timmer, Ars Technica Following the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan has been challenging. At best, even those present at the site have a limited view of what’s going on inside the reactors themselves, and the situation has changed rapidly over the last several days. Meanwhile, the terminology involved is somewhat confusing—some fuel rods have almost certainly melted, but we have not seen a meltdown; radioactive material has been released from the reactors, but the radioactive fuel currently remains contained. [partner id="arstechnica" align="right"] Over time, the situation has become a bit less confused, as cooler heads have explained more about the reactor and the events that have occurred within it.
Inside a Nuclear Reactor Nuclear reactors are powered by the fission of a radioactive element, typically uranium. Radioactivity makes things both simpler and more complex. Unfortunately, the radioactivity complicates things. The Fission Reaction Uranium ore. Berkeley Earth project is back to re-re-confirm Earth is warming. Despite plenty of indications that the Earth has gotten warmer—like melting glaciers and ecosystems that are shifting toward the poles—there are a number of climate skeptics who simply don't accept the temperature records produced by three different organizations (NASA, NOAA, and the CRU). Many of them pinned their hopes on physicist Richard Muller, who was also not convinced the professionals had gotten it right. But Muller did something about it, forming the Berkeley Earth project, and building a huge database of land temperature records.
Back in October, Muller dropped his findings in a rather unconventional location: an editorial in The Wall Street Journal. Despite the hype, the results were rather bland. He produced a temperature record that was nearly identical to that of the other organizations. But now, Muller is back for round two, and this time he has chosen the New York Times as an outlet for his climate musings. There also seems to be an element of self-promotion involved. Building a supermassive black hole in under a billion years. Decades of astronomy have revealed that supermassive black holes, weighing up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, inhabit the centers of most galaxies, if not all of them. In some galaxies, these black holes power quasars, in which the energetic matter near the black hole emits copious amounts of light.
This output has helped us spot quasars at great distances, meaning they date from when the Universe was just a few hundred million years old. That raises an obvious question: how can you build something that big in such a (relatively) short matter of time? A review in today's issue of Science (part of a series of articles dedicated to black holes) describes several potential means for generating a black hole of this size on a very tight schedule. Most black holes are produced by supernovae, triggered by stars that are less than 100 times the mass of the Sun. But there are lots of reasons to think they wouldn't need to. A variation on this idea shifts the mergers earlier. Three decades of the Commodore 64. The BBC was kind enough to point out that one of the most significant early personal computers, the Commodore 64, went on sale in August 30 years ago. For many people, this machine was their introduction to personal computing, and for two members of the Ars staff, thinking about the machine brings up strong memories.
Running a BBS in real color For me, stepping up tp the Commodore 64 from my TI-99/4A was a quantum leap forward in computing. The multimedia experience alone was worth the price of admission—incredible graphics and sound that seemed light years ahead of the market. Then there were the games. From arcade knock-offs to innovative 2-player experiences, you never got bored with the c64. As great as the gaming was, it was my introduction to the magical world of modems and BBSs that changed everything. How good was the Commodore 64? - Jason Marlin, Technical Director Learning with user communities When I was growing up, computers were something the other kids got.
New fossils complicate human family tree. About two million years ago, the lineage that eventually produced humans underwent a significant transition, with species from the genus Homo appearing and eventually displacing their ancestors, the Australopithecines. But the exact nature of this transition has, until very recently, been poorly understood. We weren't sure which species of Australopithecus was likely to have given rise to Homo species, or which species was the first on the Homo lineage.
In 2010, however, researchers announced the discovery of Australopithecus sediba, which shared many features with Homo species, helping clarify the older side of this transition. But things remained obscure on the Homo side of the transition, where the earliest fossils included a face that lacked a lower jaw, and jaws that didn't seem to match the face, leading to arguments over whether they belonged to a single species or if two (H. rudolfensis and H. habilis) were present. Pics, because it really is happening on Mars. This feels a bit like releasing a greatest hits album after one chart-topping single, but we're going to show you some of our favorite images from the landing and activation of the Curiosity rover on Mars.
Although Curiosity is on track to be sending back data for years, its arrival and first few days on the Red Planet have been nothing short of spectacular, with a complicated landing plan going off without a hitch, and data starting to trickle in from over a dozen different cameras. You can see this in the first picture, which takes advantage of the lander's downward-facing camera during its plunge through Mars' thin atmosphere. The camera started capturing data as soon as there was light, which meant the first picture was snapped as the heat shield popped off. As a result, the rover's first view of its new home came complete with a heat shield plunging ahead of it, having already done the hard work of handling the heat of a high-speed entry into the thin Martian atmosphere. Putting the breaks on climate change with… diamonds? As the emissions of carbon dioxide have continued largely unabated over the past decade, a number of people have given thought to geoengineering, or changing the environment in a way that tweaks the planet's thermostat.
Although people have suggested some exotic interventions—reflecting sunlight away from the Earth with orbiting mirrors—more serious consideration is being given to pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. But a new paper in Nature Climate Change suggests that focus might be keeping us from considering even better options. Sulfur is a major focus in part because we know it will work, since major volcanic eruptions provide a natural test of it. The sulfur released in eruptions can reach the stratosphere, where it combines with water to produce aerosol particles that reflect sunlight back to space. It's estimated that the aerosols created in the wake of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo were large enough to drop the global temperature by half a Kelvin for two years. Wind accounts for one-third of new energy-generating capacity in US.
In 2011, roughly one-third of the new generating capacity installed within the US was in the form of wind turbines, according to a new report prepared by the Department of Energy. That represents nearly seven Gigawatts of new wind installations. Although that leaves the nation a distant second to China (which installed a hefty 17.6GW), it's about double the capacity installed in the next closest country (India) and leaves the US firmly in second place in total wind capacity, with 47GW.
It's important to note that this capacity doesn't reflect the typical output of these wind farms, since the wind doesn't always actually blow. Nevertheless, the steady growth of wind capacity has now pushed the amount that is actually generated by wind to over three percent of the annual national consumption of electricity. The top four countries in this regard—Denmark, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland—all produce over 18 percent of their needs through wind. The prospects for renewing the credits are mixed.
Putting the breaks on climate change with… diamonds? No computer required: The Doxie Go portable document scanner reviewed. One thing that struck me when I covered Consumer Electronics Week back in June was the amount of paper still being passed around. For all of the tech-savvy people attracted by this exhibition, the most common way for vendors and journalists to swap information was by handing out pamphlets, spec sheets, and business cards. Cover a show for a couple of days and you end up with an unruly stack of paper you can barely jam into your laptop bag, and that's to say nothing of the business receipts that can pile up. This is precisely where portable document scanners can come in handy. Stick a business card into one, and you’ll quickly have a digital copy that you can use to keep the stacks of paper at a manageable level.
The concept of a small, portable document scanner you can connect to your computer isn’t new, but the Doxie Go makes it simpler by eschewing the computer. You can turn this battery-powered scanner on, feed a few documents in it, and turn it off. The hardware Using the Doxie Go. One man’s trash: the state of modern waste. This week's edition of Science contained over a dozen articles on a subject that sounds deceptively simple: waste.
Human societies produce a dizzying variety of waste purely as a byproduct of functioning, from agricultural waste or discarded electronics to excrement. In a world of finite resources and limited fossil fuels, it's obvious that we have to make better use of our waste. But doing so isn't just a challenge; it's dozens of them. Organic waste Take agricultural waste. The edible portions of most plants are generally accompanied by huge amounts of inedible material, primarily in the form of cellulose (a long string of sugars) and lignin (a chemical that links them together). But one of the reviews notes that, assuming we can, diverting waste to biofuels may not make economic sense. Most waste streams aren't so simple. As for the waste itself, treatment currently consumes roughly three percent of the electrical power produced in the US, most of it spent on aeration of the waste.
Mating with Neanderthals is off-again, on-again. Samsung attacks Apple’s expert witness over product similarity. An Apple-hired expert today argued that lots of consumers can't tell the difference between the iPhone and Samsung phones, or between the iPad and Samsung tablets. The expert witness, Kent Van Liere, polled consumers to see if they could distinguish between Apple's devices and Samsung's, finding that a significant number could not. Apple argues that its "trade dress," the distinctive look of the iPhone and iPad—from their sizes and shapes to the design of their home screens and icons—has been violated by Samsung's various competing products. As such, Apple is trying to prove that Samsung created products so similar to the iPhone and iPad that people look at Samsung devices and assume they were made by Apple. In addition to Van Liere's comparison study, Apple trotted out expert witness Hal Poret, who surveyed 582 people who had purchased mobile phones in the past year or were likely to purchase one in the next 12 months.
Windows RT line-up starts taking shape, but questions remain. Microsoft has confirmed that Lenovo, Dell, and Samsung will all be producing ARM-powered devices running Windows RT. This brings the total number of vendors supporting the platform to five: the three join ASUS, which announced its Tablet 600 earlier in the year, and Microsoft's own Surface. While not going into specifics, Microsoft's post outlines the broad parameters of the forthcoming Windows RT devices. There will be tablets, tablets with dockable keyboards, and laptops, with screen sizes ranging between 10.1" and 11.6", weights between 520 g and 1200 g (1.15 lb and 2.64 lb), and thicknesses between 8.35 mm and 15.6 mm. Battery life on the ARM machines is measured at between 8 and 13 hours when playing HD video.
In the new "Connected Standby" mode, which allows devices to maintain network connectivity while otherwise asleep, they'll last between 320 and 409 hours. Notable omissions from this list of companies are HP, Acer, and Toshiba. One man’s trash: the state of modern waste. From Altair to iPad: 35 years of personal computer market share. Back in 2005, we charted 30 years of personal computer market share to show graphically how the industry had developed, who succeeded and when, and how some iconic names eventually faded away completely. With the rise of whole new classes of "personal computers"—tablets and smartphones—it's worth updating all the numbers once more. And when we do so, we see something surprising: the adoption rates for our beloved mobile devices absolutely blow away the last few decades of desktop computer growth.
People are adopting new technology faster than ever before. Humans are naturally competitive creatures. Not only do we compete with each other for money and power, but we form strong allegiances to various tribes. Whether it's a favorite sports team or a chosen computing platform, we passionately cheer when they win and feel a punch in our guts when they lose. Well—there's certainly plenty of cheerleading, but tracking the rise of fall of market share over time has more serious uses, too.