Month: February 2016

M. Bison laughs at your puny GTX 750 Ti. (credit: Capcom)

Ars' review of Street Fighter V, which launches on PlayStation 4 consoles and Windows PCs this Tuesday, was based entirely on our impressions of the console version of the game. We're certainly curious how the game will run on various PC processors, video cards, and installed drivers, and we imagine forums will light up as fans try installing the game on all matter of machine.

In the meantime, the motherboard mavens at Eurogamer's Digital Foundry column have confirmed at least one apparently consistent issue with the PC version: gameplay that is locked to the framerate.

The above video, which hasn't yet been met with an accompanying Eurogamer article, shows exactly what happens when PC gamers try to run SFV's single-player modes with the "paltry" GTX 750 Ti, which retails for a little over $100 and includes 2GB of VRAM. Instead of running the game at normal clock speed, an underpowered computer—or an adequate one pushed too far settings-wise—will display all frames of animation, no matter how long it takes your computer to render them. Thus, if your PC would normally run the game at a locked 30 frames a second, SFV's current build will instead force the game to run at half speed, and if you're not quite up to the full 60 frames-per-second standard, slowdown will appear whenever your system needs more than 16.6 milliseconds to draw any frames.

Mattel is getting super creative this year by giving more freedom to the toy experts of the world: kids. At this year's New York Toy Fair trade show, the company announced its new ThingMaker, a $300 3D printer that will let kids make their own toys. The device will work in conjunction with a 3D printing app called ThingMakerDesign, which was created in collaboration with the software company Autodesk.

While 3D printers are getting more affordable for the average person to buy, the software that goes along with them can be confusing and certainly isn't kid-friendly. According to other reports, Mattel wanted to make its ThingMaker as appropriate as possible for kids to use and experiment with. Available for Android and iOS, the ThingMaker Design app has templates for kids to use to make all kinds of toys, including action figure-like statues, dolls, bracelets, and rings.

Kids will also be able to design toys from scratch once they feel comfortable with the software. All of the toys can be customized with different colors and textures, and the ThingMaker prints out parts of each toy so kids can assemble them on their own. The new ThingMaker is definitely the 2016 iteration of Mattel's original ThingMaker, which debuted in the 1960s and let kids pour liquid plastic into toy molds and then bake them in the oven to create figurines.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has announced a new phone running Windows: the Lumia 650. As its name numerically implies, this phone sits closer to the low-end $139 (£100) Lumia 550 than the high-end Lumia 950 and 950XL. On the outside, it has a 5-inch 1280×720 OLED screen and an 8MP camera; the inside contains a quad core Snapdragon 212 at 1.3GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB storage, and LTE support.

The device will cost around $199 in the US and around £150-160 in the UK. It's available in black and white, and both options look quite nice. With a metal band around the edge, the 650 looks more like the Lumia 830 and 930/Icon than it does the Lumia 950, and it's better for it; it looks smarter and higher-end than the flagship phones.

But those looks are deceiving. The specs and pricing alike are low end. Microsoft is positioning the phone as being a strong choice for business users, but the low specs seem to undermine that positioning. In particular, the phone lacks biometric authentication and doesn't support Windows 10 Mobile's Continuum feature that lets you hook up the phone to a mouse, keyboard, and screen to use it in a desktop-like way. These are the features we'd expect low-end phones to omit, but they're also features that ought to have particular appeal to business users.

This preternaturally adorable cow just finished being milked at the UNH Fairchild Dairy Teaching and Research Center, one of the sites of the research study. (credit: UNH)

This isn't about the cow milk that you and I enjoy. It's about the most important kind of milk, which baby mammals drink right after they are born. Like humans, cows produce a nutrient-rich milk called colostrum in the days after birth—it's full of proteins and antibodies that are crucial for calves' future health. But not all colostrum is made equal.

A new study of cow colostrum at the University of New Hampshire used a specialized device called a colostrometer to measure the density of cow colostrom. The denser this thick, yellow liquid is, the more likely it is to be packed with key antibodies like Immunoglobulin G (IgG) that help build up the infant animal's immune system. The device itself isn't particularly fancy—you simply dunk it in a tube of colostrum to see whether it floats.

By measuring colostrum quality in their research herd, the scientists discovered that cows have lower-quality colostrum in winter. They believe that this is because warmer temperatures cause the cows' blood vessels to dilate and become more permeable, allowing the antibody IgG to pass into the blood—and from there, into the cow's colostrum. They also found that a cow's lactation history was a key indicator of future colostrum quality.

Enlarge / The interior of one of Daya Bay's detectors. (credit: Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Late last week, the Daya Bay experiment in China released a new set of measurements of the neutrinos produced by the nuclear reactors on the site. The new data provides further examples of these strange particles refusing to act like we'd expect them to. This evidence further supports strange behavior that some have interpreted as evidence of the existence of particles beyond the Standard Model, but the new data doesn't bring evidence up to the level of significance required to announce discovery.

For good measure, there's also evidence of an entirely different anomaly—one that could be anything from an indication of new physics to a sign that our experiments were fundamentally misguided.

Any flavor you like

Last year's Physics Nobel Prize went to the people who discovered that neutrinos are less a single particle and more of an identity-shifting family of particles. Neutrinos come in three types, or flavors: electron, muon, and tau. But the identity of any given neutrino isn't fixed; instead, it can shift among these identities over time. Thus, even if you started with a population of pure electron neutrinos, you'd find a few muon neutrinos in the mix as well, given sufficient time.

One of the two JLENS aerostats on the ground at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Two aerostats make up a JLENS "orbit."

Last October, a Defense Department tethered radar blimp broke loose of its moorings near Baltimore and drifted across two states—taking out power lines as it dragged its tether cable behind it in a 13-hour, unguided flight. A new investigation into the incident has revealed that most of the damage could have been avoided. The aerostat—half of the pair used by the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) System—would have come down without causing nearly as much damage if someone had remembered to install its batteries.

The JLENS program, which uses two high-flying aerostats with radar domes (one a search radar system and the other a targeting radar to lock onto low-flying cruise missiles and other potential threats), has cost over $2.7 billion since the program began in 1998. Each aerostat was equipped with an automatic deflation system to bring the giant floating sensor to the ground quickly in the event of a cable break. But the system's batteries had not been installed at the time of the accident, so the system failed to activate when main power was lost.

The report, a summary of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, found that "design, human, and procedural issues all contributed" to the aerostat breaking loose, disrupting air traffic and causing jets to be scrambled to track its progress. When it finally came down 160 miles north in Moreland Township, Pennsylvania, the Army had state police bring it down the rest of the way with approximately 100 shotgun blasts. At the time, authorities believed they had no other way under the circumstances to deflate it.

George Poinar

The new fossil flower Strychnos electri in its original Dominican amber piece of mid-Tertiary age. The whole flower is less than 20 mm long and is the first finding of an asterid flower in amber from the New World.

4 more images in gallery

This delicate flower has been preserved in amber, with each petal and tiny hair intact, for as many as 45 million years. Scientists discovered the flower in a cave in the Dominican Republic along with a treasure trove of insects preserved in amber. Now the flower has been identified by an expert as a member of the vast Asterid clade of flowers, whose members include the coffee plant as well as potatoes, peppers, and the poisonous Strychnine tree.

Amber is fossilized tree sap, and pinning an exact date on it is extremely difficult. In a paper published this morning in Nature Plants, biologists George Poinar and Lena Struwe carefully used two methods of dating the material to suggest that this flower might have been fossilized as early as 45 million years ago or as late as 15 million. They came up with such a broad spread of dates largely because we still don't have very many fossils from these kinds of plants, which makes precise dates difficult.

The researchers had to date the flower by proxy by examining other life forms found in the amber cache, including the common single-celled organisms known as foraminifera and coccoliths. There are distinct evolutionary and population changes in foraminifera and coccoliths over time, and paleontologists often use these tiny animals to place fossils during specific geological periods. What's certain is that this flower bloomed long before the age of apes during the mid-Tertiary period.