Month: April 2017

Enlarge / The Jet Black iPhone 7, replete with fingerprints. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple is said to be planning not one, not two, but three new iPhones for release this fall, if "people familiar with the matter" speaking to Bloomberg are to be believed.

Two of those models will use the same 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch IPS screens that we're already used to, though Bloomberg doesn't say whether the designs will look much different from the current iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. But this year Apple is also said to be preparing a third higher-end model with a dramatically different approach, a slim-bezeled design with curved glass and an OLED screen that takes up most of the front of the device. If true, it's something that doesn't sound all that different from what Samsung is doing with the Galaxy S8.

According to the report, all three phones would be revealed at the same time, but the redesigned model wouldn't actually ship until later.

Enlarge (credit: US Navy)

Northrop Grumman has announced that new software for the Navy's MQ-4C Triton long-range patrol drone has passed a key flight test. The Triton is an upgraded maritime patrol version of Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk, and it's now on track for initial deployment by the Navy next year. The new software upgrade is a step toward tackling a problem that had grounded Northrop Grumman's program to provide long-range drones to Germany—and it has wider implications for autonomous aircraft of all sorts.

The new software includes a feature called the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS)—a capability that provides the remote operator of the aircraft with awareness of other aircraft operating nearby independent from air traffic control data. This proactively allows drone pilots to avoid other aircraft and prevent potential collisions. Earlier versions of the Global Hawk (including the Euro Hawk built for Germany) did not include this type of technology, and as a result those devices were not allowed to operate in the same airspace as civil air traffic in the US and Europe. With the new tweaks, Germany now plans to buy the Triton.

Additionally, the software upgrades now allow a single operator to control multiple Triton drones and provide modes for operating the Triton's Multi-Function Active Sensor radar. The Triton, which has a range of 8,200 nautical miles (about 9,400 miles, or 15,000 kilometers), is intended to perform long-range ocean and coastal intelligence collection, including tracking and identification of ships. Flying for more than 24 hours at a time, the Triton will be capable of observing over a million square miles of ocean during a flight.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Scott Olson)

Banishing trans fats from foods is linked to reductions in the number of heart attacks and cardiovascular deaths in the years after the bans are implemented, according to data from cities and counties in New York that have made the cut.

After three years, the areas banning trans fats from eateries seemed to have an extra 6.2 percent reduction in heart attacks and strokes compared with those that didn’t, researchers report in JAMA Cardiology. Last year, other researchers reported in the Journal of Health Economics that the New York bans appeared to cut deaths from cardiovascular disease by 4.5 percent—that is, they spared about 13 lives from cardiovascular deaths per 100,000 people each year.

While the decade of bans that have gone into effect in the state offer “natural experiments” on how cutting out trans fat may affect health, the results back up a slew of older studies—animal, controlled trial, and observational studies—that found harms of trans fats, plus benefits of ousting them from people’s diets.

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

The Federal Communications Commission has helped clear the path for AT&T to buy Time Warner Inc. without a lengthy public-interest review.

The FCC conducts public-interest reviews of mergers when FCC licenses are transferred, but AT&T and Time Warner have been trying to structure their $85.4 billion deal to avoid direct transfer of any licenses. That means Time Warner has to get rid of its FCC licenses, including one for a TV station in Atlanta, before it's swallowed up by AT&T.

The FCC helped Time Warner achieve that this week by approving a sale of its WPCH-TV license in Atlanta for $70 million to Meredith Corp., which was already operating the station for Time Warner under a separate agreement.

High speed, high-resolution.

We've noted a few times recently how the impending launch of Scorpio is making the Xbox ecosystem look more and more like the tiered PC gaming space. A couple of Microsoft's first-party developers made that connection more explicit recently, telling Gamasutra that making games for the Scorpio is very similar to the multiple hardware targets seen in PC game development.

Forza developer Turn 10 got a head start on this process by developing Forza Motorsport 6 Apex, a 4K-capable slice of the larger game made for the PC. Making that version of the game forced Turn 10 to "start dealing with all of the wheels that were there for scaling across different PC specs," studio software architect Chris Tector told Gamasutra.

"And that included things like kind of revamping our authoring process so that we now were capable of creating and building and packaging 4K assets, and delivering them in the way that we wanted to, so we could still deliver car packs like we've always done." Tector said. He added that moving to Direct3D 12 helped streamline the company's production pipeline and "submission efficiency" greatly when it came to these higher quality art assets.