Month: February 2017

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Amazon is marking its territory for the company's growing fleet of cargo airplanes. The online retailer announced it will build a new air cargo hub at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport in Hebron, Kentucky. This hub will house Amazon's family of cargo airplanes that transport packages across the country, and it shows Amazon is serious about its efforts to better control the process of sorting, shipping, and delivering its packages.

“As we considered places for the long-term home for our air hub operations, Hebron quickly rose to the top of the list with a large, skilled workforce, centralized location with great connectivity to our nearby fulfillment locations, and an excellent quality of living for employees," Dave Clark, Amazon's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations, stated in the press release. "We feel strongly that with these qualities as a place to do business, our investments will support Amazon and customers well into the future."

The hub will reportedly cost about $1.5 billion to build and would create over 2,000 jobs with 600 full-time positions coming initially. According to the Cincinnati Business Courier, this new hub will be Amazon's largest in the world. The new jobs created will add to the already 10,000 employees Amazon has in that area.

Graphics card maker Nvidia is putting a stop to the resale of bundled promotional game keys by tying them to a specific graphics card purchase.

Previously, retailers sent promotional game codes to customers that purchased a qualifying product. Those codes could then be redeemed on Nvidia's website, which spit out the relevant Steam, Uplay, Origin, or Microsoft Store key. Since the promotional game codes were not tied to a specific account, many users took to either gifting spare keys to friends, or selling them on eBay in order to offset the cost of the graphics card purchase.

Now, users have to redeem codes via the GeForce Experience (GFE) app, which is directly linked to third-party services like Steam and Uplay. Users must also ensure that the requisite graphics card is "installed before redemption." GFE then performs "a hardware verification step to ensure the coupon code is redeemed on the system with the qualifying GPU." It's not yet clear whether the codes will be tied to a specific serial number/hardware identifier, or whether they will be tied to an overall product line like a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080.

(credit: Farrukh)

By preschool, lots of toddlers will proudly don superhero attire and fervently expound on the need to stand up to bullies, defeat villains, and fight for good and justice. It may seem like their sponge-like minds have sopped up every dribble of virtue from their parents, peers, and cartoons. But a new study suggests that their noble credos may actually be hardwired into their noggins long before they can recite the Spiderman theme song, babble ‘mama,’ or even roll over.

Infants as young as six-months old grasp the complex interactions between a bully, a victim, and an intervening protector—and they root for the brave protector, researchers report this week in Nature Human Behaviour.

Their ingrained support for heroic acts preceded even their understanding of what a hero is, the researchers found. In follow-up experiments, it was clear that the six-month-olds lacked the cognitive wherewithal to grasp intentions—something 10-month old babies seemed to get. That is, the younger babies seemed to understand that the protector helped the victim in the end—a good thing that the babies preferred. But they couldn’t tell the difference between an intentional act of heroism and an accidental one.

Los Angeles-based Retroblox Inc. has a new take on the emulation-based retro gaming console: swappable hardware modules and a built-in optical disc drive. Dubbed the Retroblox, the new device builds on the likes of the Hyperkin Retron 5 and Retro Freak by allowing users to not only play original cartridges for the likes of the Nintendo NES, SNES, and Sega Mega Drive (Genesis), but to also play CD-based games from consoles like the Mega-CD, PC Engine CD, and Sony PlayStation.

Unlike the Retron 5, however, the Retroblox won't accept all cartridges out of the box. The base unit ships with a "Hitachi LG Data Services" DVD drive for playing CD-based games, but cartridge-based games will require the additional purchase of "Element Modules." These modules add a cartridge slot as well as a pair of controller ports compatible with original controllers for the system being emulated.