Month: November 2016

Enlarge (credit: Getty | ullstein bild)

Makers of brain training games have made millions peddling the benefits of regaining the brain of your youth—a sharper, sprier mind than your now muddled, worn one. It’s questionable whether the games can actually jog your noggin. But according to psychologists at Harvard and the University of Toronto, it’s also questionable whether you should even want them to.

In a literature review published Tuesday in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the researchers argue that there's a silver lining to a gracefully aging mind: namely, that it's more creative and better at unconventional problem-solving. Those qualities, the researchers suggest, are more advantageous in the real world than simple quick wits, because they can lead to wiser decisions.

“It is no surprise then that age-related deficits often observed on laboratory-based tasks do not always extend to everyday life, where many healthy older adults are not only high-functioning but also strong contributors to society,” the authors conclude.

A Minnesota police officer who shot a black motorist—whose dying moments were live-streamed on Facebook—was charged with manslaughter and two other felonies Wednesday.

Prosecutors said St. Anthony Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez's shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop "was not justified." Video footage, taken by Castile's girlfriend and live-streamed on Facebook, shows the victim bleeding in the car while the officer watches over at gunpoint. The video, which doesn't show the shooting, has been played on social media and YouTube millions of times following the July 6 death in a St. Paul suburb.

"I would submit that no reasonable officer knowing, seeing, and hearing what Officer Yanez did at the time would have used deadly force under these circumstances," Ramsey County District Attorney John Choi told a news conference.

Enlarge / Advertisement for The Turtles' "Happy Together," from a 1967 issue of Billboard magazine.

Members of 1960s rock band The Turtles sued Sirius XM in 2013, saying that even though federal copyright doesn't apply to pre-1972 sound recordings, they deserve to get paid under state copyright laws.

The case was set to go to trial yesterday, but it appears that the two sides have worked out their disagreement. Terms of the settlement weren't disclosed. The filing of settlement papers was noted by both The Hollywood Reporter and National Law Journal.

US District Judge Philip Gutierrez had already ruled that Sirius was liable under state copyright law, so the trial would have focused on how much the band should be paid. He also ruled that some types of damages, like punitive damages, would not be available to the plaintiffs. Two former band members of The Turtles, working as "Flo & Eddie," were representing a class of thousands of owners of pre-1972 music.

Enlarge / Advertisement for The Turtles' "Happy Together," from a 1967 issue of Billboard magazine.

Members of 1960s rock band The Turtles sued Sirius XM in 2013, saying that even though federal copyright doesn't apply to pre-1972 sound recordings, they deserve to get paid under state copyright laws.

The case was set to go to trial yesterday, but it appears that the two sides have worked out their disagreement. Terms of the settlement weren't disclosed. The filing of settlement papers was noted by both The Hollywood Reporter and National Law Journal.

US District Judge Philip Gutierrez had already ruled that Sirius was liable under state copyright law, so the trial would have focused on how much the band should be paid. He also ruled that some types of damages, like punitive damages, would not be available to the plaintiffs. Two former band members of The Turtles, working as "Flo & Eddie," were representing a class of thousands of owners of pre-1972 music.

(credit: Shawn Campbell)

Late Tuesday evening, USA Today reported that Twitter had suspended several accounts associated with racist white nationalist users and groups, including the account of Richard B. Spencer.

Spencer is the president of an organization that describes itself as being “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”

That group, the “National Policy Institute,” also had its Twitter account suspended.

Enlarge / A censored version of the NSFW Twitter post that got a user suspended from PSN.

You can get suspended from PSN for a lot of different reasons, but using the PS4's "Share" function to spread a simple in-game screenshot usually isn't one of them. That's what reportedly happened to one user, though, after he shared surprising photos of exposed female genitalia that he found in Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2. Now, Ubisoft is promising to edit out at least some of the offending naughty bits in an upcoming patch.

The story began yesterday, when NeoGAF user Goron2000 wrote about accidentally blowing up a woman in Watch Dogs 2, only to find that, to his surprise, "Ubisoft had rendered a full vagina on one (or maybe more) of the females in the game." When he took a picture of the in-game adult surprise and shared it with friends online (here's the very NSFW shot in question), Goron2000 says he was soon confronted by an e-mail telling him he had been temporarily suspended from his PlayStation Network account for a breach of the service's Code of Conduct. That suspension, which was initially set for one week, was later extended to one month, according to Goron2000.

This isn't the only example of nudity to be found in the game. Other players have posted (obviously NSFW) videos showing fully nude men pissing against walls and nude women hula hooping at a hippie colony within the Watch Dogs 2 universe.

Enlarge / The formation, filling, and rotation of Sputnik Planitia. (credit: James Tuttle Keane)

The cliché is that a picture is worth a thousand words. But if you pay attention to all the information that scientists have extracted from New Horizons' photos of Pluto, then you'd be forgiven for thinking that's a gross under-estimate. Items large and small, from massive nitrogen seas to the mountain-sized icebergs that float above them, all provide hints of the geology of the alien world. And, even as more images were being sent back to Earth, planetary scientists pored over the ones we had, cataloging fault lines and pondering chemical traces.

Through their work, a picture of a dynamic world has gradually emerged. And now, two research teams have described the results of a careful look at Sputnik Planitia (formerly Sputnik Planum), Pluto's largest feature. They both find that a complex interaction between gravitational mechanics and Pluto's atmosphere likely resulted in Sputnik Planitia dragging the entire dwarf planet's axis of rotation around. And the fact that this happened reinforces earlier hints of an under-surface ocean filled with liquid water.

Sputnik Planitia is a giant basin filled with nitrogen ice. At the conditions on Pluto's surface, this ice is even more dense than water, allowing huge blocks of water ice to "float" on the surface. Yet it's also ductile enough that the entire basin is probably slowly mixing, driven by only the heat released by radioactive decay in Pluto's core. It's also expected that the basin is fed by a nitrogen cycle, as the gas sometimes sublimates off or re-condenses (there are also nitrogen glaciers feeding in from the nearby mountains).