Month: September 2016

Enlarge (credit: FBI)

Last year, the Department of Justice released a report that involved some painful self-examination. The DOJ looked at its own performance when it came to the analysis of hair samples—these were once used to identify potential suspects, but the FBI discontinued that practice in 1996. In looking over past cases, however, the feds discovered that agents had systematically overstated the method's accuracy in court, including at least 35 death penalty cases.

Now, in response to this and other reports on problems with forensic analysis, the president’s Council Of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has issued an analysis that extends to half a dozen forensic techniques, including fingerprinting. The report finds that all of them have problems when it comes to operating on a firm scientific footing, so PCAST makes strong recommendations for how to get forensic science to take its name seriously.

The history that got us here is more than a bit ironic. DNA testing, which we now consider nearly foolproof, started appearing in court in the 1980s, before the people doing it had a strong grip on how to use it effectively. The ensuing chaos eventually led to it being ruled inadmissible in a case in New York. This prompted reforms and analysis that eventually put the field on firm scientific footing. Its use to reanalyze older cases, however, revealed problems in many convictions based on other forensic techniques.

SEATTLE—I just finished playing the final level in the upcoming PlayStation VR launch title Rez Infinite and took my headset off to see the game's creator, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, looking at me with a big smile. It's always at least a little jarring to cleanly segue out of a virtual reality experience, but in this moment's case, the intensity was nearly too much to bear. As in, I teared up.

I'd been waiting with great anticipation for this, the game's "Area X" level, ever since it was announced a little over a year ago. Rez has always sat at the edge of the rhythm-gaming conversation, even more so than the nichey likes of Parappa the Rapper and Dance Dance Revolution, but I have held a small torch for the game since its early 2001 release. Now, on the eve of its 15-year anniversary, my torch has been rekindled thanks to the stunning VR reinvention coming to Sony's headset next month. At demo events, I have played this rhythm-gaming classic with new VR eyes and been delighted at how the game, and its synesthesia-loaded blasts of trance music and pulsing imagery, translates to a headset.

That excitement went over a particular threshold during a September demo ahead of the PAX West festival, when Mizuguchi-san and his team at new studio Enhance Games asked me to come by a hotel suite and test out one of the first press demos of Area X—as in, the new Rez level built specifically for this remaster.

It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media. Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still good reasons to want a reliable old USB stick. For instance, if you find yourself doing multiple installs, a USB drive may be faster than multiple downloads (especially if you use a USB 3.0 drive). Or, maybe you need a recovery disk for older Macs that don't support the Internet Recovery feature. Whatever the reason, you're in luck, because it's not hard to make one.

As with last year, there are two ways to get it done. There's the super easy way with the graphical user interface and the only slightly less easy way that requires some light Terminal use. Here's what you need to get started.

• A Mac that you have administrator access to, duh. We've created Sierra USB stick from both El Capitan and Sierra, but your experience with other versions may vary.
• An 8GB or larger USB flash drive or an 8GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. For newer Macs, use a USB 3.0 drive—it makes things significantly faster.
• The macOS 10.12 Sierra installer from the Mac App Store in your Applications folder. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary.
• If you want a GUI, we're recommending a different app than last year—take a look at Ben Slaney's Install Disk Creator from MacDaddy. There are other apps out there that do this, but this one is quick and simple.

If you want to use this USB installer with newer Macs as they are released, you'll want to periodically re-download new Sierra installers and make new install drives periodically. Apple rolls support for newer hardware into new macOS point releases as they come out, so this will help keep your install drive as universal and versatile as possible.

Enlarge / Asking Siri the important questions. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When Mac OS X (as it was then called) first moved to a yearly release cycle in 2011, Apple had trouble defining its scope for each release. Lion, the first in this cadence and the first release to pull in a significant number of features from iOS, feels like a half-finished version of Mountain Lion in retrospect. Mavericks stripped out some of previous versions' skeuomorphism and superfluous texture, but the Mac didn’t fully match with iOS 7 until Yosemite came out a year later.

Since Yosemite, things have felt more tightly controlled, more planned. El Capitan and Sierra both designate one or two big "hero" features for Apple to plan its marketing around (window management in El Capitan, Siri in Sierra), a decent range of medium-sized changes, at least one big under-the-hood addition (System Integrity Protection in 10.11, the Gatekeeper stuff in 10.12, and APFS next year if all goes well), and a smattering of minor improvements to the core apps.

It has been a long time since the Mac was Apple's favorite child, and there are places in Sierra (like the Messages app) where it clearly feels like Mac users are getting a second-tier experience compared to people on iOS. Add in the Mac’s stale, aging hardware lineup and Apple’s total lack of communication about it, and there seems to be real problems for the Mac as a platform.

The video-game-to-board-game community gained another member on Monday with the announcement of the first League of Legends board game. Titled Mechs vs. Minions, the $75 game will launch exclusively through Riot Games' own Web store on October 13.

If you're looking for a board game that replicates the "MOBA" game genre with elements like lane control and creep management, don't get your hopes up too highly. Mechs vs. Minions appears to be more of an "inspired by" product, as it eschews LoL's mechanics in favor of a "programmatic card deck" movement and battle system. Players control one of the series' four "yordle" characters—small, dwarf-like people who ride giant machines—and team up in a cooperative campaign against dozens of board-controlled bad guys.

If you've seen Avalon Hill's classic game Robo Rally, you know the drill. You'll draw from a deck of movement cards, then set those down to play out in order during your turn—and hope that your preselected movements match up with how everything else on the board eventually moves. Unlike Robo Rally, your MvM deck will also contain attack cards, along with the ability to stack matching cards for stronger movements and attacks. This stacking mechanic destroys whatever movement series you'd already established in your previous turn, so you'll need to find matching colors and stack at strategic times to make the most of the game's mechanical systems.

Enlarge (credit: Frank Moutos and Farshid Guilak)

The combination of rising populations, climate change, and depleted natural resources has emphasized the need for sustainable technology. This technology isn't limited to big devices like photovoltaic panels and wind turbines; recently, a team of researchers has developed a textile capable of harnessing energy from both sunlight and wind.

The team developed a fabrication strategy that merged two different lightweight, low-cost polymer fibers to create energy-producing textiles. The first component of the textile is a microcable solar cell, able to gather power from ambient sunlight. The second is a nanogenerator capable of converting mechanical energy into electricity.

The photovoltaic portion of the textile was composed of a copper-coated polymer fiber that was then further coated with concentric layers of manganese, zinc-oxide/dye, and copper iodide—the zinc oxide is a photovoltaic material, while the copper helps harvest the charges. These solar-cell microcables were then woven together with a copper wire.