Month: March 2016

Mazda walks us through the new MX-5 RF and its folding hardtop. Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

If cars were food, Mazda’s MX-5 Miata would be all hot fudge sundae on flavor but all broccoli on nutrition. In other words, if you can’t make a satisfying meal out of the Miata, you’ve got some DNA gone seriously wrong.

As inevitable as night following day, the latest generation Miata takes a page from its parents with the new Miata RF ("Retractable Fastback"), employing a folding roof aimed at those who dare to be a bit different.

BMW and Alpina show us around their new flagship performance sedans, and we check out some more connectivity options and the hybrid 740e. Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—There are a number of new supersedans on display at BMW's stand at the New York International Auto Show this year. For the performance-oriented driver, there are two to choose from, both with mighty 600hp (447kW) engines. One has been tweaked by BMW's M Division; the other is from Alpina, a factory-linked tuning house that has been making fast-but-subtle versions of BMWs for 50 years now. And if your tastes are more "save the planet" than "how fast can I lap the Nürburgring," then good news—there's also a hybrid available.

A Concord, North Carolina man has been arrested on suspicion of failing to return a video rented 14 years ago. James Meyers is accused of failing to return a rented tape to a video store that no longer exists, according to local media and his own account on YouTube.

Meyers said he was pulled over Wednesday, allegedly for having a taillight out. A Concord police officer ran a background check, and that's when an outstanding warrant surfaced. The arrest warrant was for Meyers being well over a decade late in returning Freddy Got Fingered, a comedy starring comedian Tom Green.

"He goes, 'Sir, I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s a warrant for your arrest from 2002. Apparently, you rented a movie Freddy Got Fingered and you never returned it... And we’re here to take you to jail,'" Meyers said of the incident with a Concord police officer.

Netflix has been throttling its video streams on the Verizon Wireless and AT&T mobile networks, reducing the default bitrate to 600kbps in order to help users stay under their data caps.

Netflix's admission yesterday came a week after T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere said that AT&T and Verizon deliver Netflix video at a resolution of only 360p. AT&T and Verizon responded that they don't downgrade the quality of video, and it turns out that Netflix is the one doing the bitrate capping.

Netflix applies this default bitrate worldwide across most mobile carriers and says it has been doing so for more than five years, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. But Netflix isn't throttling on Sprint and T-Mobile USA, telling the Journal that “historically, those two companies have had more consumer-friendly policies.” Sprint and T-Mobile both offer data plans where customers can exceed their caps without being automatically charged extra fees, but they have to make do with slower speeds the rest of the month unless they purchase more high-speed data.

In a new report, the court-appointed receiver assigned to investigate an alleged cryptocurrency scam has found no evidence of "any legitimate Gemcoin or other viable business."

In October 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had sued a Southern California company over an alleged Ponzi scheme resulting in a loss to investors of at least $32 million. If the government’s accusations are correct, that would make Gemcoin one of the largest digital-currency-based financial schemes ever.

The lawsuit came days after the United States Marshals Service and the Arcadia Police Department froze assets and raided corporate offices in Arcadia, north of downtown Los Angeles. Alliance Finance Group and its assets were promptly put into the hands of a court-appointed receiver, whose job it remains to examine what went wrong.

It's common to think of the Solar System as a fairly static place. Yes, everything is moving around all the time, but the same basic system of planets and most of their moons seems to have more or less existed as-is since the relatively early days of the Solar System. Earth’s Moon, for example, is thought to have formed less than 100 million years after the Solar System coalesced, coming into existence when Earth collided with a Mars-sized body. And so it has gone for the last 4.5 billion years.

In contrast, a series of observations suggests some of Saturn’s moons may be mere 100 million years old. That is the theory put forth in a new paper published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal, authored by scientists from the SETI Institute and the Southwest Research Institute. The researchers believe, based upon observations made by the Cassini spacecraft, that the interior moons could only have existed in their relatively pristine orbits for a short time. “I think we are at a point where we can confidently say that the inner moons are not as old as the planet,” Matija Ćuk, lead author of the new research paper, said in an interview.

Saturn has a complicated system of at least 62 moons in addition to its famous rings, making it the busiest planetary system in the Solar System. Titan, the largest and best-known of Saturn’s moons, is covered in exotic hydrocarbon seas. But equally interesting to scientists is one of its inner moons, the much smaller Enceladus. Cassini found the moon to have geysers at its southern pole, blasting water from its interior into outer space. Since then, scientists have wondered whether life may exist in the warm, interior oceans of Enceladus. Ćuk and his colleagues, Luke Dones and David Nesvorný, have an answer that astrobiologists may not like.

Almost all autism spectrum disorders (ASD) risk factors that we know about are found in the unaffected, general population. (That’s what makes them risk factors, rather than genetic determinants.) And in that general population, there is a very wide range of social awareness, engagement in relationships, and communication styles.

The relationships among ASD genetic risk factors, normal variability in social functioning, and neuropsychiatric disorders (like ASD) have not been carefully examined. So a bunch of geneticists, psychiatrists, epidemiologists, and bioinformaticists decided it was time to examine it.

Genetic links to ASD—not causes of autism, but links to it—have been identified through genome wide-association studies. In these studies, the genetic variants present in people with ASD are compared to those of controls to see which variants might be associated with risk. This is the method by which genetic links to other psychiatric disorders have been identified, and it has been effective; over a hundred ASD associated mutations have been found this way.