Month: May 2016

17.3" HP Omen laptop (credit: HP)

Much of the time at Ars we look at laptops that tend towards the thinner and lighter end of the spectrum. These are great for portability, but they all tend to give up a little, and sometimes a lot, when it comes to raw performance. HP's new Omen gaming laptops tilt things much further in the performance direction, and they manage to do so while still offering decent portability, competitive pricing, and, refreshingly, looks that aren't too gamery: turn off the red backlit keyboards, and they'll not look too out of place as capable workhorses too.

Shipping on July 10, $899.99 will get you the 15.6 inch 1920×1080 IPS screened 4.6lb laptop with a quad core Skylake Core i7-6700HQ, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 950M GPU with 2GB dedicated memory, and a 1TB 7200rpm hard disk. Spend a bit more and you can go up to a GTX 960M with 4GB dedicated memory, 16GB RAM, and add a 128GB SSD alongside the spinning disk. All the systems have 2×2 802.11ac Wi-Fi, 2 USB 3 ports, wired gigabit Ethernet, and a full-size HDMI output. The keyboards make full use of the 15 inch form factor, sporting a full number pad alongside the keys—something that we know many of you look for in these larger laptops.

For $1029.99 you can get a 17.3 inch 1920×1080 IPS screen in a 6.3lb package. This has the same processor and 8GB RAM as the 15 inch system, but a faster Nvidia GTX 960M GPU with 4GB dedicated memory, and a 128GB SSD alongside its 1TB hard disk. Pay for options and you can get a 512GB PCIe SSD, 16GB RAM, a GTX 965M GPU, and a 4K screen. The larger laptop has all the same connectivity and networking options as its smaller sibling, and even adds an integrated DVD burner.

(credit: Melimama)

With sleepless nights and puzzling crying spells, caring for a newborn may seem like a mind numbing endeavor. But the mental abilities needed to keep a helpless, fussy infant alive may actually be the source of our smarts.

Humans’ extraordinary intellectual abilities may have arisen, in part, in an evolutionary feedback loop involving the care of helpless infants, researchers hypothesize in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the loop, big-headed babies are born relatively early in their development to ensure that they fit through the human vaginal canal. The underdeveloped newborns then rely heavily on the savviness of their parents for survival. Through generations, this selects for brainy parents, which pushes kids to have ever fatter noggins and, thus, earlier births.

“Human infants are born far more immature than the infants of other species,” study author Celeste Kidd, a brain and cognitive science researcher at the University of Rochester, said. “For example, giraffe calves are able to stand-up, walk around, and even flee from predators within hours of their births. By comparison, human infants cannot even support their own heads.”