Month: August 2017

(credit: Don Davis/NASA)

There are a few hellish episodes in Earth’s unfathomably long history that make even Hollywood’s most bombastic disaster movie look like a sunny picnic. The end-Cretaceous extinction is the most well-known, since it wiped out the dinosaurs (minus the birds, of course) and opened the door for the mammalian revolution—which most human beings regard as generally a good thing.

Though the story is probably familiar, there are still significant questions about exactly what happened during that cataclysm. Many species were seemingly in trouble before that colossal meteoroid crashed into the coastal Yucatan, perhaps partly because of a long-lived series of massive volcanic eruptions in what is now India. This has led some to question whether the impact was as deadly as it's made out to be. But we've also filled in some details of just how the meteoroid impact would mess up the Earth, and these include mind-blowing tsunamis, rampant wildfires, and see-sawing climate effects. So how lethal was the impact?

A team led by Charles Bardeen at the National Center for Atmospheric Research employed a climate model to investigate one major aspect of this story. In many places around the world, there is a thin geologic layer that marks the time of the impact event. It contains soot that apparently blanketed the planet after wildfires kicked it up into the air. (These wildfires would be triggered globally by the heat of debris reentering the atmosphere.) Was there enough soot to black out the Sun?

Ferrari

The Frankfurt International Motor Show is fast approaching, and while more than a few car makers have chosen to skip this year's event, Ferrari has something new in store for us. It's replacing the California T with a newer, lighter convertible—the Portofino. It's a more aggressive look for the company's entry-level model, and the looks have been heavily influenced by the aerodynamics department, something that's fast becoming a Ferrari calling card.

We were pleasantly surprised by the California T when we tested one last year; the car has an undeserved reputation, probably because it's not mid-engined or doesn't have a massive V12 up front. It's no out-and-out sports car, for even Ferrari describes it as a GT (grand tourer), but we imagine the Portofino is going to offer a noticeable performance bump over the outgoing car.

Enlarge / Microsoft and Gamestop are hoping strong performance for the upcoming Xbox One X can help "lagging" current performance for Xbox One software.

With Microsoft no longer reporting specific hardware or software shipments for the Xbox One, public market watchers are forced to use tidbits from other sources to try to divine the system's performance relative to the console competition. Gamestop provided one of those tidbits in its latest earnings report, noting that its new and preowned software sales were both hurt by "lagging Xbox One sales."

The mega-retailer, which has nearly 4,000 stores in the U.S. and 2,000 more internationally, didn't share specific breakouts for the Xbox One or other consoles, but said that new and preowned software sales had declined 3.4 and 7.5 percent, respectively. Microsoft's "lagging" performance was the only reason for that drop the retailer shared publicly, citing it a number of times in an earnings call yesterday. "In both new and preowned, we're seeing underperformance in Xbox One versus PS4, which we believe is due to the coming Xbox One X launch," Gamestop CFO Robert Lloyd said in that call.

Yes, this report just reflects sales from one (major) retailer, and doesn't take into account direct software downloads through the Xbox One itself. Still, the "underperformance" can't be a good sign for an Xbox division that has been falling well behind Sony on the hardware front for years now (though Microsoft has downplayed the importance of that relative race). For current Xbox One owners, poor sales relative to other consoles could continue to impact the presence of third-party exclusives and cross-platform ports on the system, at least at the margins.

Enlarge / Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong, right, is escorted by a prison officer as he leaves the Seoul Central District Court in Seoul, South Korea, on Friday. Lee was convicted of bribery and sentenced to five years in prison, a blow to the heir apparent of the world's biggest maker of smartphones and memory chips. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Lee Jae-yong, the head of the Samsung Group empire, was convicted in a South Korean court Friday on corruption allegations. He was sentenced to five years in prison in connection to a bribery scandal that took down the nation's president, Park Geun-hye. Among other things, Lee was found to have paid Park bribes in exchange for favors.

The 49-year-old Lee, who is the heir to one of the world's largest companies, was also found guilty of perjury, embezzlement and of hiding assets outside South Korea following a six-month trial. The development comes two days after Samsung unveiled its latest flagship mobile phone, the Note8.

The court concluded that the billionaire Lee and four other Samsung executives paid $6.4 million in bribes to win governmental approval for the $8 billion merger of two Samsung affiliates in 2015—a complicated deal that included Samsung Electronics, the globe's biggest mobile phone and chipmaker. Samsung's empire is responsible for about 20 percent of South Korea's gross domestic product.