Month: August 2016

Asus’ ZenBook UX305C was almost a perfect midrange laptop, at least by my estimation. The cheaper models were missing extras like touchscreens or backlit keyboards and they weren’t as fast as Dell’s XPS 13 or the MacBook Pro, but they offered enough speed for most people and Asus got a lot of stuff right: $700 for a 1080p IPS screen, a sturdy build, a decent keyboard and trackpad, and a respectable 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. There are better laptops and there are cheaper laptops but that one sat right at the intersection of both.

Asus’ follow-up to the UX305C is a slightly different riff on the same idea. The Zenbook Flip UX360CA (hereafter Zenbook Flip or just Flip) still uses Intel’s Skylake Core M processors, still includes 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, still uses a 1080p screen, is still really thin, and still starts at $700. But it’s got a Lenovo Yoga-style 360-degree hinge and a standard touchscreen, turning what was once a basic laptop into a basic laptop that can pretend to be a tablet.

A lot of what I liked about the old Zenbook design is still here, but a few things have been improved and, sadly, a few things have gotten worse.

(credit: Jim Resnick)

Judged by its reputation, the Mini Cooper S should be a sporty little thing with telepathic steering, go-kart handling, and zippy throttle response. Yet, my very first impression—and this continued on throughout the test—is to ask no one in particular, yet everyone collectively: "Where the hell is its engine?" I certainly couldn't hear it.

Top up, down, engine idling, engaging the clutch, launching hard—even bouncing off the soft rev limiter—was there mechanical music? Was there merely mechanical? No. They've over-silenced the engine. The 189hp (141kW) turbocharged four-cylinder unit actually makes decent power, but it's either so stuffed full of turbo plumbing or blanketed by NVH nannies that you'll simply never hear evidence that it exists.

Inside, the Mini is expectedly quirky. Some quirks of past Minis have gone conventional, like the old dash-mounted chrome window levers. Those are gone, replaced by press-and-lift buttons on the doors like almost every other car on the lot. However, some of its quirks feel more like simple mistakes. The center armrest is in the way of the car's iDrive-like infotainment control on the center console. This armrest also impedes your right arm's freedom of movement, an unforgivable error in a car with a manual transmission. (Pivoting it backwards helps only marginally.)

The business end of the University of Rochester's Omega laser. (credit: Lawrence Livermore National Lab)

Last month, we reported on a small but enduring mystery in cosmology: why is there so much of one isotope of lithium around? Both ⁶Li and ⁷Li should have been produced when the first atoms formed after the Big Bang. But how much of them should have been made.

The question comes down to basic nuclear physics. When two hydrogen atoms collide under pressure, what is the probability that they will make helium? That sort of physics also applies to collisions between other elements, some of which produce lithium. It is an astonishing achievement that cosmologists can, from basic physics, predict the relative fractions of hydrogen and helium produced in the Big Bang. It is just as astonishing that we can look back in time and measure these fractions and know that cosmologists have it almost exactly right.

Almost. These calculations fall flat when it comes to lithium. They suggest there should be much more ⁷Li than we observe in the Universe and a lot less ⁶Li. Does that mean the estimates are wrong, or is there a real discrepancy? New experiments indicate that when it comes to ⁶Li, the problem seems to be with the Universe and not our calculations.

Twitch has been expanding its content horizons beyond games for a while now (did you marathon Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting?), but now the Amazon-owned site will be hosting some of its parent company's content. According to a report from Deadline, Amazon will stream the pilots of new shows including a reboot of superhero show The Tick and a comedy titled I Love Dick on Twitch for 24 hours on August 31.

Prime Video subscribers will have access to the new shows on Amazon on August 19, but the pilots will also be available on Twitch for one day at the end of this month. Amazon has tested original content with Prime Video subscribers in the past, tracking how well the shows are received. It's likely Amazon wants to do the same with this Twitch integration, seeing how much interest that community has for new shows. However, it's currently unclear if the Twitch community's reaction to the pilots will have any effect on the fate of the shows.

It's also just another way for Amazon to test out non-gaming content on Twitch. In October 2015, Twitch launched its Creative channel, where artists can show off their work by airing episodes of classic shows including Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting and Julia Child's The French Chef. Twitch has a very established community that, until recently, only used the platform for gaming content. Finding out what strikes a chord with these users could help Amazon create more Twitch-only content that's not solely focused on gaming.

(credit: David Goehring)

The food preferences of toddlers are a mind-boggling enigma. On the one hand, kids under two years old are the most likely age group to accidentally poison themselves—by deciding it’s a great idea to guzzle detergent, for instance. Yet, when parents try to coax them into ingesting nutritious, non-lethal options, tots may cook up a fit.

According to a new study, toddlers may actually have some logic to their apparent dietary madness—at least a little logic, that is. By watching toddlers react to people’s food preferences, researchers found that the little ankle-biters seem to make generalizations about good eats and who will like them based on social identities. Toddlers expected people in the same social groups to like the same foods and appeared puzzled if that wasn’t the case. But if one person expressed a dislike for a food first, toddlers seemed to expect that everyone would follow suit regardless of social identities.

The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that toddlers soak up social information about food choices and may be particularly sensitive to any signal that a food is bad or perhaps dangerous. Though more study into toddlers’ gut feelings on foods are necessary, the authors speculate that campaigns to improve kids’ diets may be better served by including social aspects of eating rather than just nutrition information.