Month: August 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Steven Gottlieb )

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced an investigation Tuesday into an ongoing outbreak of a rare subtype of Salmonella enterica linked to exposure to pet turtles.

So far, the outbreak involves 37 cases of Salmonella enterica serovar Agbenia infections across 13 states, which led to 16 people being hospitalized. Overall, 12 of the sickened people are children aged five or younger, an age group particularly vulnerable to the bacteria. No deaths have been reported.

With lab testing and epidemiological data, the CDC linked the outbreak to exposure to pet turtles or their habitats. The charmingly slow, half-shelled reptiles are known carriers of Salmonella. When infections jump to humans, they can cause diarrhea, fever, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, headache, and urinary tract infections. Young children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems are particularly vulnerable. For these reasons, the CDC has warned of the dangers of owning pet turtles, particularly tiny ones that children like to handle, snuggle, and—in some cases—pop into their mouths.

Enlarge / A prototype screenshot from someone's idea for Half-Life 3. You can do better than that, right?

All right, smart guy... you say you're tired of waiting over 11 years now for Valve to release a promised new Half-Life installment? You say you've had it with the countless broken promises and vague hints that "Episode 3" still exists in some form? You say you know exactly what Valve needs to do to make the sequel everyone has been wanting for years?

Well, prove it. Now you can attempt to make your own version of Half Life 3, if you're so danged smart.

Developer Laura Michet (Frog Fractions 2) and her Itch.io page will host the Epistle 3 Game Jam from now through the end of October. The premise is simple: "Marc Laidlaw has released a genderswapped Half Life 3 plot synopsis on his blog," Michet writes. "Some say the dream is dead. WE SAY... THE OPPOSITE. Half Life 3 is finally free, where it belongs: out in the world, with us. Half Life 3 belongs to the people. LET'S MAKE IT." There are no restrictions for submissions, only a requirement to use Laidlaw's plot in whole or in part.

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By the end of the year, you'll be able to tell your Windows 10 PC "Hey Cortana, open Alexa" and talk to Amazon's personal assistant. Or if your Echo is in earshot, you'll be able to tell it "Alexa, open Cortana" to talk to Microsoft's assistant instead. Microsoft and Amazon are working together to ensure that their voice-driven digital assistants will be able to work together in a surprising collaboration.

Both companies have reach in areas the other does not; Microsoft says that there are some 145 million monthly active Cortana users on Windows 10 PCs, while Amazon has found success selling its Echo speakers into living rooms and bedrooms. With this partnership you'll be able to take advantage of Alexa's easy online shopping from your PC or Cortana's stronger calendar integration on your sofa.

The integration will, at least initially, be a little clunky, as you'll have to ask one voice assistant to start up the other before you can use it. Long term, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that he hopes this won't be necessary and that each device's primary assistant will be able to defer tasks to the secondary assistant as appropriate. The collaboration was Bezos' idea. He approached Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in May last year to suggest bringing the two voice agents together, and Nadella agreed.

Mark Walton

If you like your laptops thin and light then boy has Asus got the laptops for you. Asus has dubbed its new ZenBook Flip 14 the "world's thinnest 2-in-1 with high-performance discrete graphics," which is an impressive qualifier if there ever was one. Still, at just 13.9mm thick, weighing 1.4kg, and with a 14-inch 1080p screen in the footprint of a typical 13-inch laptop, the ZenBook Flip 14 is certainly portable enough.

Inside is an 8th generation Intel Core i7 quad-core processor (otherwise known as Kaby Lake Refresh), along with 16GB of memory, and an Nvidia Geforce MX150 graphics card. The MX150 certainly won't win any speeds awards, but it should handle e-sports games without issue, as well as help speed up rendering tasks in compatible applications. There's also a 512GB PCIe SSD inside, a fingerprint sensor, and a battery rated for up to 13 hours of use. Prices start from €799.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of trolls' slack-jawed reaction to Blizzard's newly announced enforcement policy.

Overwatch will soon start laying down harsher penalties on trolls that face player complaints under its existing reporting system, according to director Jeff Kaplan. Posting in the Battle.net forums, Kaplan says that the current system of temporarily silencing accounts for abusive chat will be replaced with immediate account suspension for such issues "pretty soon."

Past that, Kaplan promised that in the medium term, "we have a new series of punishments we're going to try that escalates much more quickly... As part of these increasing punishments, we're looking to make it so that offenders get blocked from Competitive play much sooner." Kaplan also said that new systems were being put into place to prevent players from manipulating their skill rating through self-serving play. Players will soon receive better notifications of the effects of their reports on other players as well.

The announcement of stricter enforcement comes after a separate Battle.net forum thread discussing an account that Kaplan confirmed had 2,247 separate complaints filed against it. Despite that ridiculous player backlash—which averages out to over four reports per day for every single day the game has existed—the account has received just three temporary suspensions and seven chat "silences" over that time. In his update, Kaplan said the new system should fix "egregious cases" like that one, banning consistent problem players.