Month: January 2016

(credit: Microsoft)

Dropbox has updated its Windows 10 app. It's now a Universal Windows Platform app, with a mobile version promised soon, and it takes advantage of a number of features new to Windows 10 that weren't possible for Windows Store apps in Windows 8.

The Dropbox app allows you to (optionally) specify a passcode that has to be entered before it'll show your files, and this leads to its more exciting new feature: Windows Hello integration. While Windows Hello is so far mainly used for biometric authentication—the facial recognition used by the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, or fingerprint recognition in a range of laptops—that's not the full extent of it. There's a corresponding API that allows applications on Windows to tap in to the same biometric infrastructure. Instead of a four-digit PIN to reveal your files, the Dropbox app lets you use your face or finger.

Actionable notification. (credit: Microsoft)

It also has interactive notifications for invitations to shared folders that allow those invitations to be accepted or rejected from the notification itself.

(credit: CDC Global)

As health experts continue to combat vaccine fears and myths with pamphlets and explainers, as politicians rush to install stricter rules on vaccination requirements for school children, and as fiery feuds about the life-saving medicines continue to rage online… something is working—at least in the state of California.

On Tuesday, officials there reported a 2.5 percent increase in vaccination rates of kindergarteners attending public and private schools. For the 2015-2016 school year, 92.9 percent of the state’s more than half a million ankle-biters were up to date on their shots. That’s up from 90.4 percent in 2014 and 90.2 in 2013, the state reported.

The vaccination data tracks shots that prevent diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTAP); measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR); polio; hepatitis B; and chicken pox.

Playing ping pong in space. (credit: NASA)

Scott Kelly and his Russian colleague, Mikhail Kornienko, hit the 300-day mark on board the International Space Station on Thursday, and they're now less than two months away from flying home in a Soyuz capsule.

To celebrate the milestone, Kelly sent down a nifty little video in which he uses two hydrophobic paddles to bounce a droplet of water back and forth in microgravity.

Try this, Mary Poppins! Super-hydrophobic polycarbonate ping-pong paddles and a water ball in space! #YearInSpace https://t.co/BB0Z35jbVa

— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) January 21, 2016

On Earth, of course, gravity pulls water droplets down to fill in whatever container water is poured into. But in space the water molecules at the surface are bonded such that the tension holds them together as spheres, and water can be bounced back and forth, like a ball.

(credit: Richard Cabrera)

Hollywood as an industry may be excited about drones but the Southern California city of West Hollywood is not. Three months ago, an errant drone in West Hollywood crashed into some electrical wires, cutting one to the ground. The collision caused almost 700 residents to lose power for three hours, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Tuesday evening at West Hollywood’s city council meeting, city officials passed an ordinance (PDF) requiring every drone operator flying in the city to get a permit for their drone from city officials. (That’s in addition to the registration drone operators are now required to get from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA).) The city said it would give each registered drone a sticker with an identification number which must be clearly visible on the drone from the ground.

In addition to this, the ordinance requires that drone operators comply with FAA regulations by avoiding piloted aircraft, maintaining a line-of-sight view of the drone, and flying the drone no higher than 400 feet above the ground. In addition, drone pilots can’t fly their drones at night without explicit permission from the FAA, nor can they fly the drone within 25 feet of another person (excluding takeoff and landing).

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. (credit: AT&T)

US politicians have been urging tech companies to weaken the security of smartphones and other products by inserting encryption backdoors that let the government access personal data.

Numerous tech companies—including Apple—have come out strongly against the idea, saying that encryption backdoors would expose the personal data of ordinary consumers, not just terrorists.

But tech company leaders aren’t all joining the fight against the deliberate weakening of encryption. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this week that AT&T, Apple, and other tech companies shouldn’t have any say in the debate.

Functional MRI scans show areas in the brains of poor children with normal connectivity highlighted in red and blue, and weakened connectivity shown in green. The areas in green are among several areas -- detailed in other brain scans—where connections are weakened in children raised in poverty. (credit: Deanna Barch)

Growing up poor is known to leave lasting impressions, from squashing IQ potential to increasing risks of depression. Now, as part of an effort to connect the dots between those outcomes and identify the developmental differences behind them, researchers have found that poverty actually seems to change the way the brain wires up.

Compared to kids in higher socioeconomic brackets, impoverished little ones were more likely to have altered functional connections between parts of the brain. Specifically, the changes affected the connections from areas involved in memory and stress responses to those linked to emotional control. The finding, appearing in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that poor kids may have trouble regulating their own emotional responses, which may help explain poverty’s well-established link to depression and other negative mood disorders.

“My take-home message is that poverty gets under the skin,” lead author Deanna Barch, a psychologist and a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Ars. If people weren’t already energized to start addressing poverty and its myriad, deep-seated effects, this should be a fresh call to action, she said.

From tonight's episode of The 100, "Wanheda: Part One." (credit: Cate Cameron/The CW)

You can be forgiven for not being caught up with The CW’s dystopian-future series The 100. Based on a decent but neglected young adult (YA) book series, the series took some time to find its footing. But then, last season, the story of 100 teenagers dumped from an orbital space station onto a toxic, abandoned Earth morphed into something altogether more interesting and complex. Violent and fascinating, the show is full of cultural clashes, compelling alliances, and a relentless, uncompromising worldview. This show may not have been on your radar before, but with the third season starting tonight, it deserves to become a priority.

Breathless propulsion

In the series, a small fraction of humanity has survived after a nuclear apocalypse, and the titular Hundred are one hundred (very attractive) criminal teens sent from the Ark space station to investigate whether Earth is now hospitable to human life. Led by Clarke, the show’s protagonist, and a variety of other teenage misfits, the Hundred quickly discover that the Ark residents are not the only people who survived the bombs.

Eliza Taylor as Clarke Griffin in The 100. (credit: The CW)

Far from empty, Earth is populated by numerous tribes and factions with complicated inter-relationships and a unifying wariness of each other. Some of the show’s most surprising and compelling twists arise due to clashes between communities with distinct cultures and vastly different levels of technology. Sky People (former Ark residents) have education and tech know-how but are perpetually at a loss for resources; Grounders live in a bow-and-arrow paradigm; the residents of Mount Weather, who feature throughout season two, are both highly sophisticated and dangerously weak.

(credit: Photograph by ChipperMist)

Overall, we've been pretty happy just to have the ability to play select Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One since Microsoft first rolled out the feature back in November. Digital Foundry has spent the past few months putting this backward compatibility through its technical paces, though, and the site's findings are a decidedly mixed bag.

While the Xbox One's system-level forced vsync eliminates the screen tearing common to many Xbox 360 games, that benefit "sometimes comes with a penalty of lower frame rates," as the site puts it. This problem is especially apparent in gameplay scenes with lots of moving on-screen characters; all that action puts additional stress on the tri-core CPU in the Xbox 360 and even more stress on an Xbox One trying to emulate that difficult chip architecture.

This means siginficant frame rate dips in the most hectic parts of games like Gears of War, Mass Effect, and Halo Reach. Those frame rate drops lead to noticable problems with the controls as well, as Digital Foundry says the system misses certain controller inputs amid the dropped frames during intense firefights and driving sections.