Month: July 2016

Women washing hands in white sink good suds (credit: Arlington County)

Poke around any bathroom or cleaning cabinet in the US and you’re likely to find a product spiked with an antimicrobial chemical. One of the most common of these, triclosan, has shown up in about 75 percent of antibacterial hand soaps and is easily spotted in a range of other goods, from toys to toothpaste. It has also been found in about 75 percent of Americans’ urine. Yet, despite their omnipresence, these antimicrobials go largely unregulated and scientists don’t know their health effects.

In an opinion piece published Thursday in Science, Alyson Yee and Jack Gilbert, microbiologists from the University of Chicago, call for that to change. They lay out just how little data we have on the chemicals—and some of it even conflicts. Yet, it’s clear that our exposure may begin in the womb and that the chemicals do have the potential to mess up our microbiomes—the communities of microbes in and on us that strongly influence our health. Such microbial disturbances have been linked to wide ranging conditions, from neurological disorders to arthritis, allergies, obesity, and irritable bowel disorder.

As such, scientists should prioritize figuring out if the chemicals that are already all around us, are causing harm, Yee and Gilbert argue.

Two men who were arrested last year for making online threats and bringing guns and ammunition to a Boston Pokémon card game tournament have been sentenced to two years each in prison and two years of probation afterward. The Boston Globe reports that James Stumbo and Kevin Norton pled guilty to unlawful possession of the guns and nearly 300 rounds of ammunition found in their car outside the Hynes Convention Center event last August.

Stumbo and Norton, both well-known members of the high-level Pokémon card playing community, were arrested after driving from Iowa to Boston for the event as well as posting messages on Facebook showing off the guns and threatening to "kill the competition." Another message stated that "my AR-15 says that you lose." Event security was warned about the postings and notified the police before informing attendees of the issue.

Miller's attorney, Robert LeRoy, tried to downplay the pair's online postings as "adolescent stuff" that "wasn’t threatening in any capacity." He also defended their actions by contrasting Iowa's relatively lax gun laws with the stricter regulations in Massachusetts. “They basically always drive around with loaded guns in the trunk in Iowa,” he said, according to the Globe report.

Pokémon Go heralds a new dystopian age that we should all be fretting about, film director Oliver Stone has warned.

Speaking at Comic Con on Thursday to promote his new movie about US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, Stone described the data-slurping tactics of the freakishly successful game as “a new level of invasion.”

The panel—also featuring Snowden stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, and Zachary Quinto—was asked about the surveillance potential of the game.

Forget the GTX 1080: there's a new slab of graphics card hotness on the way from Nvidia, and its name is, er, the GTX Titan X. Yes, Nvidia has taken its most expensive graphics card and given it a Pascal-architecture makeover. $1200—UK price TBC, but probably £1,100—buys you 11 teraflops of FP32 performance, which is a significant 24 percent jump over the 8.9 teraflops of the GTX 1080, and just over 60 percent higher than the 6.6 teraflops of the original Titan X.

The new Titan X launches on August 2 in the US and Europe. At first it'll only be available from the Nvidia website, but it will percolate down to other retailers soon after.

The Titan X is powered by a new chip, GP102, which packs in 3584 CUDA cores. While Nvidia hasn't revealed the amount of Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), texture units, and the like, if the company uses a similar architecture to the GP104 chip (as used in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070), expect a 40 percent boost in SMs over the GTX 1080 to 28. The chip runs at a 1417MHz base clock and 1531MHz boost clock.

(credit: Getty Images | DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP)

The news earlier this week that the ambitious 54.5mpg Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency target is dead in the water was unwelcome for those worried about the ever-growing problem of climate change. But we can take some cheer from yesterday's announcement from the White House detailing plans to boost the uptake of electric vehicles here in the United States.

The plan involves a concerted effort from the government (the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, US Air Force and US Army) as well as a number of states, utilities companies, automakers, and EV infrastructure companies that is meant to make life a lot easier for EV drivers in the coming years.

As we've repeatedly noted, it's all well and good being able to buy an electric car, but widespread adoption will require the same kind of infrastructure support that already exists for fossil fueled vehicles. That's where this plan comes in. Among the specific measures announced there is $4.5 billion in loan guarantees for companies building charging facilities, the creation of alternative fuel and zero emissions corridors, more EVs on state and federal government fleets, and a plan for hackathons to find new solutions to topping up EV batteries.