Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: flickr user: NH53)

If humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans can all do something, but monkeys can’t, that tells a certain evolutionary story: it suggests that the ability emerged sometime after the apes split off from the monkeys on our evolutionary tree. But if a bird comes along with that ability, it throws the whole story off course. Corvids—a family of birds that includes ravens, jays, and crows—seem to delight in doing just that.

Humans pretty obviously plan for the future, from packing a brown bag lunch to saving for retirement. Other apes also seem to be able to plan for the short-term future, at least up to one night. Monkeys don’t. But a paper in Science this week reports a small group of corvids succeeding at future-planning tasks. That points to a complex evolutionary story.

Two cognitive scientists at Lund University in Sweden, Can Kabadayi and Mathias Osvath, conducted a series of experiments with five captive, hand-raised ravens. Obviously, that’s not a lot of ravens, and hand-raised ravens do not behave like wild ravens. But when it comes to figuring out the outer bounds of cognitive abilities for a species, those aren’t the most important problems to worry about. Testing more ravens, and wild ravens, comes later.

Enlarge / Just as there are no wires visible in this promotional shot, soon there will be no wires on a future Oculus standalone headset.

Yesterday, a report from Bloomberg revealed that Oculus is planning to release a $200 wireless standalone VR headset. Today, we have additional details on Oculus' overall VR hardware plans.

Ars Technica has confirmed that Oculus is exploring multiple different options in a "spectrum" of standalone devices for the future. That includes continued investment in standalone headsets that have "six degree of freedom" full motion tracking akin to the Santa Cruz prototype shown at last year's Oculus Connect conference. Oculus will not release any hardware before the end of 2017, though.

Oculus doesn't see its wireless standalone headset plans as a replacement for the existing Rift, however. Instead, the company sees PC-connected Rift headsets and mobile phone-powered holsters like Gear VR as completely separate categories that will operate parallel to any standalone VR hardware. Oculus hopes people who purchase the Rift today will still be able to enjoy it for years without regret.

NASA

A pair of Apollo-era NASA computers and hundreds of mysterious tape reels have been discovered in a deceased engineer’s basement in Pittsburgh, according to a NASA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Most of the tapes are unmarked, but the majority of the rest appear to be instrumentation reels for Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, NASA’s fly-by missions to Jupiter and Saturn.