Month: September 2017

Enlarge / T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere. (credit: Netflix)

T-Mobile USA is giving free Netflix subscriptions to customers who buy at least two lines of T-Mobile One service.

"Through an exclusive new partnership with Netflix, T-Mobile One family plans will now come with Netflix—at absolutely no extra charge... anyone with two or more qualifying T-Mobile One lines can get Netflix on us," T-Mobile announced today.

T-Mobile One is the carrier's unlimited voice, data, and text plan, and it costs $120 a month for two lines ($60 for each line). The per-line charges go down as you buy more lines. The Netflix promotion will begin on Tuesday, September 12. Starting on that day, T-Mobile customers with at least two lines can activate their free Netflix subscription online, in T-Mobile stores, or by calling T-Mobile customer service.

Enlarge / Harvey as seen from the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

Strong and sturdy as bedrock may seem, it’s possible to pile enough weight onto the Earth’s surface to squish it downward a bit. The planet’s great ice sheets, for example, have done this on a pretty significant scale. Many regions that are now relieved of the ice sheets they hosted during the last ice age are, in fact, still slowly rebounding upward today.

The coverage of modern, sensitive GPS networks allows us to see subtler versions of this process playing out even over the annual cycle of wet and dry seasons. And, it turns out, these networks may have caught Hurricane Harvey’s record-setting rainfall depressing Earth’s crust just a little.

On Monday, Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher Chris Milliner posted a plot of the change in GPS station elevation immediately after Harvey. The data showed that the Houston landscape had sunk as much as two centimeters. While that’s not enough to worsen flooding that was measured in (many) feet, it’s actually quite impressive for a sudden change from a single weather event. That’s a testament to the weight of the preposterous amount of water the area was under.

Enlarge / Montgomery County Hospital District responds to a 911 call in a flooded neighborhood during Hurricane Harvey. (credit: Getty | Anadolu Agency)

As contaminated flood waters recede in the Houston area, patients with skin infections are spilling into local hospitals and clinics, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Over the holiday weekend, doctors saw significant—but not overwhelming—upticks in soggy skin wounds and infections, as well as other ailments linked to Hurricane Harvey clean-up and recovery efforts. Those included respiratory problems, such as mold allergies and pneumonia cases, issues with drug withdrawals in those who lost access to medications during the disaster, and other injuries that include those from electrical shocks.

Dr. James McCarthy, chief of emergency medicine at Memorial Hermann Hospital’s Red Duke Trauma Institute, south of Houston’s Midtown, told the Chronicle that the natural disaster altered the very nature of holiday medicine. "Harvey changed the composition of our Labor Day weekend census from the typical overload of trauma cases from traffic accidents to a lot of soft-tissue infections," he said.

Enlarge / Surface Pro with a Cobalt Blue Type Cover.

Microsoft is holding a two-day event in London at the end of October called "Future Decoded." A range of speakers, including Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, will be speaking. Included among their number is Panos Panay, corporate vice president of Microsoft Devices. Panay's presence, according to sources speaking to The Verge, is because Microsoft will be releasing at least one new Surface-branded device at the event.

What that device may be isn't known. We know, because the company has told us, that a LTE version of the 2017 Surface Pro is planned, so Microsoft may use the unusual venue—most Surface events have been held in New York City—for a relatively minor release. Alternatively, the company may be moving away from using NYC for its Surface events; the 2017 Surface Pro itself was announced at an event in China.

Beyond the LTE Surface Pro, an updated Surface Book and a new generation of ARM-powered Windows devices are also possible candidates for the event. According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is not yet ready to release updated versions of the Surface Hub whiteboard/conferencing system or the Surface Studio all-in-one PC, though both would be good candidates for a refresh once Intel's Coffee Lake processors are on the market.

Enlarge / An image from an early Pokemon Go trailer that still doesn't reflect anything that's possible in the actual game...

For over a year now, dedicated Pokémon Go players have been asking for the ability to use their collected monsters more like they do in traditional Pokemon games, by trading and battling directly with other players directly. Pokemon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara confirmed to Bloomberg this week that those features were still being planned for the game.

“We’ve only accomplished 10 percent of what Pokémon and Niantic are trying to do, so going forward we will have to include fundamental Pokémon experiences such as Pokémon trading and peer-to-peer battles, and other possibilities," the executive said.

This isn't the first time monster trading has been promised for the hit mobile game, which still had five million daily users as of its first anniversary in July. Those features were shown off in the game's very first trailers and mentioned in interviews around the game's launch last year. But developer Niantic has been mum on the issue in recent months, focusing instead on updates like Raid Battles and changes to gym functionality.

Google

Google's got a hot new ride. The company has a new Street View car with updated cameras, and—surprisingly—a set of Lidar (Light, Detection and Ranging) cans! Google doesn't have anything up officially about this, but Wired has the scoop on the new vehicles.

The new cars are all Hyundai Elantra GTs with a sweet paint job (ok, probably a vinyl wrap) featuring—what else?—Street View imagery of beautiful vistas. The cars mostly end up being blue and brown, which is a lot more subtle than the old Google Maps-themed Street View cars and their big green doors. Still, it's hard to miss the giant camera on top.