Month: March 2016

(credit: Phil / flickr)

A patent complaint that Segway filed with the US International Trade Commission in 2014 has resulted in a wide-ranging order banning "personal transporters" that infringe some of its patents.

On Wednesday, the ITC issued a general exclusion order banning several types of the self-balancing devices often called "hoverboards." The case could affect the whole market, since a general exclusion order is the commission's most powerful remedy and can affect even parties not involved in the investigation.

There's also a limited exclusion order issued directly against the products of several Chinese companies sued by Segway. Only one of those companies responded and fought the case at all, while the others were in default.

Enlarge / The "Skull Canyon" Core i7 NUC. (credit: Intel)

Intel talked a little about its new high-end Core i7 NUC mini PC at CES earlier this year, but today at GDC the company revealed what the final model will look like along with its specs, release date, and cost.

The new NUC6i7KYK, codenamed "Skull Canyon," includes a 2.6GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) 45W quad-core Core i7-6770HQ—not the fastest Skylake laptop chip that Intel can sell you, but definitely one of the fastest. The other main draws are the Iris Pro 580 GPU, which includes 78 of Intel's graphics execution units and a 128MB eDRAM cache (compared to 48EUs and 64MB of eDRAM in the standard Core i5 NUC we just reviewed), and the Thunderbolt 3 port which also supports full USB 3.1 gen 2 transfer speeds of 10Mbps. It takes DDR4 memory, M.2 SATA and PCI Express SSDs, and comes with a built-in Intel 8260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, just like the Core i5 NUC.

It's got a good port selection, including a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, a mini DisplayPort 1.2 output, four USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, a gigabit LAN port, and an IR sensor for use with remote controls. The HDMI 2.0 port ought to make some HTPC fans happy, since the standard NUCs are still stuck on version 1.4 and can't view HDCP 2.2-protected content. And this is all in addition to the aforementioned Thunderbolt 3 port; this will be the first NUC since the original to support Thunderbolt, which opens up possibilities for external graphics cards down the line.

Can't drink just one. (credit: Tanya Bond)

There are almost no medicines available to treat alcoholism, but that might be about to change. A new study shows that a substance commonly used to treat stomach ailments may also hold the key to reducing the craving for alcohol.

Many of the scientists involved in the study, published recently in Translational Psychiatry, have been studying the molecular mechanisms of alcoholism in the body for years. One focus of their work is the way our bodies produce glucocorticoids, which are steroid hormones that help our immune systems function smoothly and reduce inflammation. People who drink compulsively often suffer from disruptions in the regulation of glucocorticoids in their bodies.

Previous studies have shown that tinkering with these steroid hormones can dramatically alter how much alcohol rodents and humans want to drink, reducing their urge to drink more after they've already imbibed. (Rodents are often used as human proxies in studies of addiction because they can become addicted to alcohol—and they have hormones in their bodies that are close analogies to the ones in humans.)

One Windows Platform for every form factor. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows developers will be able to build Universal Windows Platform apps for the Xbox One this summer, Microsoft finally confirmed at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today.

One way or another, Microsoft has been telling Windows developers to think about running apps on a TV screen using an Xbox for more than seven years now, first as part of the "three screens and a cloud" vision, and more recently as part of the Universal Windows Platform. Microsoft also said that the Windows Store and Xbox Store would be merged.

Developing for phones, desktops, and tablets has always been more or less open, with even the gatekept phone platform easy to access with no particular entry requirements. But the Xbox has always been treated differently. Building traditional Xbox games meant buying expensive Xbox development units (which aren't available on the open market), with Microsoft exercising tight control over the finished game and being deeply involved in things such as the delivery of patches.

SAN FRANCISCO—At a GDC keynote presentation Wednesday, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney showed off plenty of Unreal Engine-powered games and highlighted how developers would soon be able to build those games in a fully virtual reality editor. But the more surprising focus of his talk was the growing use of Unreal Engine 4 outside of gaming for everything from film editing to architectural planning.

"What the camera was to the 20th century, the engine is today," Sweeney said. "The media world is converging into a digital content industry... where the engine is the thing that links [different media] together in an interoperable world."

The most stunning example of this cross-media collaboration came in a gripping cut scene from Hellblade developer Ninja Theory. The highly detailed shot highlighted Celtic warrior protagonist Senua, fighting through deep psychosis and trauma on a vision quest into a Viking heartland. As Senua tried to shake off disturbing, fiery visions of hanging corpses, the camera zoomed in on her face, illuminating every tiny mouth twitch and body shiver that served as an outward sign of her internal struggle.