Month: January 2017

Enlarge / NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 10: Robert Kennedy Jr., heads up to a meeting at Trump Tower on January 10, 2017 in New York City. President-elect Donald Trump continues to hold meetings at his New York residence to fill the remaining positions in his administration. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

Today, President-elect Donald Trump met with a backer of the false idea that vaccines may be behind the rise in autism diagnoses. The result seems to be a worst-case scenario: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has accepted a position within the Trump administration, where he will chair a group evaluating vaccine safety and scientific integrity.

Trump has a history, on Twitter and in debates, of questioning the well-established science behind the US' vaccination program. He has insinuated that vaccines cause autism and has suggested that the current vaccination schedule is overly aggressive. There is absolutely no evidence for either of those positions. Numerous studies have debunked any connection between either vaccination or any specific components of vaccines and diagnoses of autism. And the vaccine schedule is based on a combination of medical risks and exposure probabilities; changing it would alter infants' risks.

It wasn't clear whether Trump's positions would lead to any policy decisions. But a worrying sign came when Trump met with Andrew Wakefield this fall. Wakefield helped establish fears of a vaccine-autism connection by publishing a paper, now retracted, that suggested a connection between the two. He has since had his medical license pulled due to misconduct during the preparation of that paper.

Enlarge / The new settings page is likely to look something like this, though Microsoft says it may change before the final release. (credit: Microsoft)

The Windows 10 Creators Update is going to introduce new settings and controls for Windows 10's privacy and data collection capabilities.

These changes have two parts. Available immediately is a Web-based "privacy dashboard" that gives access to, and the ability to delete, information collected by Cortana (if you choose to enable Microsoft's digital assistant and share the information with her in the first place): browsing history, search terms, location history, interests, contacts, and more.

Coming later this year in the Windows 10 Creators Update is a reworking of the operating system-level privacy controls. The main thing these will do is to make the choice more explicit; instead of being able to pick "Express settings," which sets a bunch of privacy-related options but does not enumerate them or fully describe them, the Windows 10 out-of-box experience will show a bunch of privacy-related options. To complete the process, particular settings must be chosen explicitly. The settings page will be more descriptive about what each setting controls and what features will be disabled when a given option is disabled.

Enlarge / The new MacBook Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Update: Consumer Reports has given the new MacBook Pros a "Recommended" rating after re-testing them. The publication does note that the 13-inch MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar does significantly outperform the Touch Bar model despite Apple's claims that the two have the same battery life, which is in line with the findings in our reviews.

Original story: In late December, review publication Consumer Reports made headlines by failing to provide a "Recommended" rating to Apple's latest MacBook Pros. It was the first time any of Apple's MacBooks had failed to earn the rating. In the publication's testing, the laptops' battery life varied wildly, sometimes lasting as long as 19.5 hours and sometimes as little as 3.75 hours. The publication didn't have these problems with older MacBook Pros or with any of the 140 other laptops it has rated.

After working with Apple over the holidays, Consumer Reports now says that the problem was caused by an "obscure" Safari bug specific to page caching, which the publication disables when it runs its battery tests. To test battery life, Consumer Reports sets laptop screens to a specific brightness level and then loads a series of webpages in the laptop's default browser (Safari in this case) in a loop until the battery dies. Apple suggests that disabling browser caching for a test like this doesn't reflect real-world use, but it does make sense for a synthetic test—users will continually read new pages rather than visiting the same static pages over and over again, so Consumer Reports wants to make sure that its test is actually downloading data over the network rather than simply reading cached data from the disk.

Yahoo's deal with Verizon seems to be going 2x slower after security revelations. (credit: Scott Schiller)

Yesterday, Yahoo revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company would change its name (to "Altaba") after it completes its transformation from an actual business to a corporate wrapper around Alibaba stock. If all goes as planned, CEO Marissa Mayer would step down, the board would be trimmed, and "Altaba" would simply continue to exist as a way for investors to own a chunk of a non-controlling interest in a Chinese e-commerce company.

Whether that transformation happens as the result of a successful sale of the Yahoo Internet portal to Verizon or some other, less-desirable outcome has yet to be determined. And as we noted in our 2017 Deathwatch, it's still far from a sure bet that the Verizon acquisition will go as planned.

The change to "Altaba" (apparently some non-trademark-infringing sort of reference to Alibaba, in which Yahoo holds a 15 percent stake) depends on the completion of the sale to Verizon of Yahoo Holdings, the new corporate wrapper for its Internet business. Verizon initially offered $4.8 billion for Yahoo last July, but the deal was in doubt after it was revealed that Yahoo had failed to disclose a huge security breach in 2014 to customers (and Verizon). A second major breach, dating to 2013, was discovered later.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Face recognition and place recognition are both critical for everyday interactions, and they both depend on specialized regions of the brain. Neuroscientists generally suspect that as these regions develop, facial and place recognition improve. If so, there may be a lot of room for improvement. A recent study published in Science found that the parts of the brain that are associated with face and place recognition continue to develop well into adulthood, long after most of the brain's architecture is in place.

The study looked at 26 children ages five through 12 and 26 adults aged 22 to 28. These subjects all participated in MRI and quantitative MRI imaging. These techniques allowed the researchers to assess the amount of brain matter in different regions, as well as the lipid composition of different parts of the brain. The brain is primarily made up of lipids—also known as fats—so differences in lipid distribution within the brain could be related to differences in functionality for different brain regions.

The researchers also looked at the activity of different brain regions. Participants’ responses to images of places and faces were tracked using fMRI, which allowed the scientists to see changes in blood flow to the brain that occur in response to stimulation. This helped them to identify which brain regions were primarily associated with recognizing these items.