Month: January 2017

Enlarge (credit: Harry Klee, University of Florida)

Large-scale modern agriculture has a fair number of detractors, but the ones that ultimately matter most are the consumers. And consumers almost uniformly hate what's happened to the tomato. Over the past few decades, a fruit that once exploded with taste and aroma has become synonymous with bland, textureless mediocrity.

But some researchers haven't given up on the tomato. Taking a mix of flavorful heirloom strains and modern agricultural varieties, they've deployed everything from chemical chromatography to consumer taste tests to identify the key genes behind the loss of flavor. And with the new information, we're in a much better place to rescue the tomato.

This isn't new work, and some of the people involved were already talking about the outlines of it at science conferences back in 2013. But today's issue of Science features a major progress report from a large international team of scientists. As they describe the issue, a large team of scientists, along with the equipment they bring in tow, is really what you need to understand the tomato.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Thinkstock)

If you don't go far enough in chemistry, it's easy to get the impression that metallicity is an innate property of certain elements. But "metallic" is simply defined as substances with electrons that can move around easily. These electrons give metals properties like good conductivity and an opaque, shiny appearance. But these traits are not exclusive to specific elements; carbon nanotubes can be metallic, and elements like sulfur become metallic under sufficient pressure.

In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10,000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, "was way off." It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms—at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers have upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal.

All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up.

The long, long wait for a video game truly based on Marvel's Avengers superhero team appears to be ending. After a social media tease from both Marvel Entertainment and Square Enix, the companies confirmed their new partnership on Thursday, announcing an Avengers video game as the beginning of a “multi-game” deal.

Square Enix’s two biggest Western game studios, Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider) and Eidos Montreal (Deus Ex), will work together on an as-yet-unnamed Avengers game—because a video game about a combined supergroup requires a combined supergroup of developers, apparently. The only hint we have of the game's form is a 55-second teaser that only shows three relatively static, Avengers-related images (like Captain America's shield). And with such slowed-down footage, it's hard to really tell whether the teaser contains "in-engine" footage.

Syfy

Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for The Magicians S1 and early S2.

The Magicians will sneak up on you. At first it might seem like a cheesy CW show about angst and magic at an exclusive East Coast college. But suddenly, it gets seriously twisted and frightening. Seemingly adolescent rivalries bleed into murder and erupt into cross-dimensional authoritarian regimes. There's a nasty, dark sense of humor nipping at the edges of the story. Perhaps most importantly, the characters are multi-layered, and their magic has real-world consequences. The Magicians' second season premiered last night on Syfy, but you've got plenty of time to catch up with the most interesting fantasy series on TV right now.

A book of lies

Based on Lev Grossman's bestselling series of novels, The Magicians sometimes gets compared to Harry Potter. It's about young people learning magic in school, and it centers on an unlikely group of friends/frenemies. But that's pretty much where the comparison should end. The series is creepy and messed up in ways that Harry Potter never is, and it also deals a lot more with the non-magical world. Main character Quentin (Jason Ralph) has been in and out of mental hospitals for depression, and he's spent far too much time obsessing over a series of Narnia-like fantasy novels about a magical land called Fillory. When he finds out that magic is real and that he's been accepted to a magical Ivy League school called Brakebills, Quentin basically soils the bed with glee.

Enlarge / AT&T will own a bunch of new media properties if it is allowed to buy Time Warner. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

US Senate Democrats led by Al Franken (D-Minn.) yesterday challenged AT&T to prove that its proposed purchase of Time Warner will benefit the public interest. Franken's letter comes as AT&T attempts to avoid a Federal Communications Commission review of its $85.4 billion Time Warner purchase. In an FCC review, the company would have to file what's known as a "public interest statement." This detailed document—the one AT&T filed for its DirecTV purchase was 349 pages long—is meant to prove that a merger is good for the public instead of merely being good for the merging companies.

But AT&T and Time Warner only have to seek an FCC review if Time Warner transfers FCC licenses to AT&T, and the companies have been working up a plan in which Time Warner would transfer or sell those licenses to someone else.

Franken isn't happy about that. His letter, cosigned by 11 other Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), asked AT&T to provide a public interest statement even if the company skips an FCC review.

Enlarge / Hugo Barra and Mark Zuckerberg celebrate Barra's hiring in Facebook's (unnamed and unreleased) social VR app. (credit: Mark Zuckerberg)

Hugo Barra, a former vice president at Xiaomi and Google, is leaving Xiaomi to lead the VR efforts at Facebook. The move was announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on (where else?) Facebook last night. Zuckerberg said Barra would "lead all of [Facebook's] virtual reality efforts, including our Oculus team." In a later post, Barra said his title was "VP of Virtual Reality" and that he would "lead the Oculus team."

Barra became well known in the tech world when he worked at Google, where he was the VP of Android. At Google he was generally the company's main presenter for events, where he introduced several Nexus phones and versions of Android. Barra left Google for Xiaomi, where he was "VP of International." Again he was basically the face of the company outside of China and hosted most of the company's product launches. In a post on Facebook, Barra said he left Xiaomi due to a desire to move from China back to Silicon Valley, which he considers his home.

At Xiaomi, Barra launched Xiaomi Global under which the company expanded to India, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and 20 other markets. Xiaomi partnered with Google to launch the "Mi Box" Android TV device in the US, but the company has yet to bring its smartphones to the US. Xiaomi recently released the stunning Mi Mix in China, but tough times are ahead as Chinese rivals Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo are passing the company in sales. Xiaomi has also said it's skipping out on Mobile World Congress this year.