Month: January 2016

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Calories consumed minus calories burned—it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain, but dieters often find that it doesn’t work. Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley of Gastropod investigate for Mosaic science, where this story first appeared. It's republished here under a Creative Commons license.

“For me, a calorie is a unit of measurement that’s a real pain in the rear.”

Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. He has a wife and child. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs—which means he is classed as obese.

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Electronics giant Sony has formed Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (SIE), a new company that combines Sony Computer Entertainment (PlayStation hardware and software) with Sony Network Entertainment (services like PlayStation Vue and the PlayStation Store).

That these were separate companies at all has always been odd given the close relationship between the two, but perhaps the most interesting part of SIE's formation is that it won't be headquartered in Sony's home country of Japan. SIE will be based in San Mateo, California, with Andrew House—the current president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. in Tokyo—serving as its CEO. Sony Corporation CEO Kazuo Hirai will sit on the board.

It's no secret that videogame sales in Japan have been on the decline—2014 saw its console market drop to its lowest point in 24 years. Notably, its top ten selling games for the year were for Nintendo platforms, eight of which were on 3DS, reflecting Japan's preference for handheld and mobile gaming. Meanwhile, the PlayStation 4 continues to fly off Western shelves. Sony has sold 35 million units to date, far outpacing the sales performance of the PS2, the best-selling console of all time.

Renewable energy is generally limited by the weather. Wind, solar, and hydroelectric are all sensitive to the local conditions. Given that the US doesn't have a national electric grid, that means they're very intermittent; if the sun's not shining in California, then the golden state doesn't get much photovoltaic power.

Expanding the source of power over much larger regions can overcome the weather dependence; it's essentially unheard of for the entire US to be experiencing low-wind conditions. But this runs up against the structural limits of the US grid, where shifting power over large distances is either impossible or highly inefficient.

A new study released Monday looks into what would happen if that limitation were eliminated. It envisions a massive web of high-voltage, direct-current transmission lines, hooked up to 32 nodes spread across the US. This allows a massive spread of renewable power that could be dispatched anywhere in the nation. The result is a grid with dramatically lower carbon emissions and the bonus of lower costs to consumers.

Remember when affordable UHD monitors were the new hotness and everyone desperately tried to figure out how to push their games to run at obscenely large (3840×2160) resolutions? How about when everyone realised they'd need at least two GTX 980 Ti graphics cards to do it, and thus decided that high-res 21:9 "ultrawide" monitors (3440×1440) were the real sweet spot between performance and resolution, with extras like G-Sync, 144Hz refresh rates, and curved panels making them even more expensive than UHD displays?

Well, good news everyone! UHD and 21:9 are dead to us now. The new, new display hotness—according to a report by TFCentral— is LG's upcoming LM375UW1, a 37.5-inch panel sporting a 2.4:1 aspect ratio at the unusual resolution of 3840×1600 pixels. For those keeping count, that's basically a very high-res ultrawide, with slightly less pixels than a UHD monitor. While it'll be a little easier to drive than a full 16:9 UHD display, the LM375UW1 isn't geared towards gaming (it has a 14ms response time). It's likely gaming-focused displays will appear at a later date, though.

That is unless Samsung's new super-ultrawide 32:9 displays take off. Yes, the new, new, new display hotness for 2016 is Samsung's as-yet-unnamed and absurdly large 41-inch 32:9 FHD+ panel. It'll be joined by an even bigger 49-inch version, which is likely to stretch almost the entire width of a desk. The exact specs and resolution of the displays haven't been confirmed, but a 32:9 aspect ratio works out to a 3840×1080 resolution. That might not make for the most practical desktop use, or the most compelling pixel density, but for games where you want a broad field of view it'll be quite something. The LG and Samsung panels are due for release this year.

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If Charter Communications is allowed to buy cable rivals Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks (BHN), just two Internet service providers could control about 70 percent of the nation's 25Mbps-and-up broadband subscriptions.

Comcast would remain the country's largest ISP with 22.87 million Internet subscribers, while Charter's merger will push it into second place with at least 20.56 million. (AT&T has 15.83 million.) Combined, Comcast and Charter would account for less than half of home Internet connections. But under the Federal Communications Commission definition of "broadband," which requires download speeds of at least 25Mbps, Comcast and Charter would reign supreme in the US.

The FCC changed its definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream/1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps/3Mbps a year ago and uses the new definition to evaluate whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans at a reasonable and timely pace. Though many Americans get by with slower speeds, the FCC argues that higher speeds are necessary for multi-person families using the Internet to quickly download big files and use high-quality video and voice applications.

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Monkeys with a human gene turned on in their brains displayed behaviors similar to those seen in some people with autism, researchers reported Monday in Nature. The monkeys avoided social interactions, were overly anxious, and performed repetitive movements, namely obsessively running in circles.

The genetically engineered animals are the first non-human primate to model autism-like behaviors. The researchers behind the modified monkeys are hopeful that the new animal model could be used to develop treatments for the symptoms of autism. But, with the complexity of the disease in humans and the simplicity of the similar behaviors observed in the monkeys, some researchers are leery about how useful the animals will be in autism research.

In humans, autism spectrum disorder has a wide range of symptoms, which collectively may involve hundreds of genes as well as environmental factors. The monkeys, on the other hand, are engineered to mimic a rare autism-like disorder caused by having multiple copies of a single gene called MeCP2. Mutations in this gene are also linked to another neurodevelopmental disorder that has overlapping symptoms with autism, called Rett syndrome.

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About a week ago, colleagues were sending me copies of a Medium post ricocheting all over the Internet: a crucial Bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, was calling it quits. The announcement unsurprisingly spawned media speculation and opinion pieces with headlines like, "RIP Bitcoin, it’s time to move on." Bitcoin’s trading price in US dollars fell by about 10 percent in about 24 hours.

But take it from an admitted Bitcoin skeptic—the cryptocurrency isn’t anywhere close to being dead. At least, it's not dying anytime soon.

Hearn is certainly much more knowledgeable about Bitcoin than I am, and he outlines a compelling case for why Bitcoin is in crisis. I hadn’t known, for example, that the blockchain is controlled by a majority of miners based in China where outbound international traffic has high latency. I didn’t realize there’s a huge drag on completing Bitcoin-based transactions. And after reading Hearn’s previous piece arguing in favor of the Bitcoin XT fork, I didn’t realize so many people hated the idea. Users wanted the term banned entirely from a prominent Bitcoin forum.