Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Larva of nematode parasite Strongyloides stercoralis. (credit: CDC)

A deadly parasitic worm that quietly inhabits the guts of humans the world over has, according to some researchers, been the most neglected of the neglected tropical diseases—and health experts are finally hoping to raise its profile to stamp it out.

Infecting an estimated 370 million people, the tiny worm surpasses the worldwide reach of malaria each year. And in the right conditions, it can abruptly turn deadly, Australian health experts note in a commentary this week on The Conversation. Though it’s largely linked to the developing world, it can make its way into anyone, anywhere. In some Indigenous Australian communities, the infection rate is as high as 60 percent, the experts report. And it pops up in disadvantaged areas of the US and Europe.

The worm is Strongyloides stercoralis, a “threadworm” nematode that causes strongyloidiasis. S. stercoralis has a peculiar life cycle that involves unfortunate humans coughing up, then swallowing larva after they invade the blood stream. From there, adult S. stercoralis discreetly inhabits mucus tunnels in the small intestines, sometimes for a person’s whole life. It often causes no symptoms. But when it does, symptoms are often mild and vague, such as cramps, diarrhea, weight loss, or a rash.

Enlarge / Our first flight to the planet of Nessus—and the first of many we plan to undertake, now that Destiny 2's retail edition has left us with such strong pre-review impressions. (credit: Bungie)

The first time I reviewed a brand-new Destiny game, I gathered less than a week of impressions. Some online-shooter fans may have needed more time with a game of that caliber and scope to determine whether it was up to snuff. I did not.

After beating Destiny's too-short campaign back in 2014, I found myself dissatisfied with the lack of post-campaign content. The worlds felt tiny. The AI wasn't up to par. The game didn't deliver any long-term "economic" systems like crafting or trading, and its mix of confusing currencies never paid off. Destiny's time-tested, Halo-styled shooting mechanics made a good first impression, but nothing about its characters, missions, or worlds made me want to hang around and keep shooting its guns.

Paid expansions did their best to patch together enough content and gravitas to compel people to keep playing. They never hooked me, however. I never got over the fact that Destiny's most "epic" experience was a "loot cave," which let players essentially press a big, shiny button and make insanely powerful weapons pop out. When that's your game's hottest ticket, you're in trouble. (And no, the ridiculous bullet-sponge bosses, which did nothing more than stand around and absorb insane damage without requiring intelligent strategies, didn't count.)

Enlarge / Calvin Harris performing at the 2016 festival. (credit: Apple)

The London Roundhouse will feel emptier this September, as Apple is ending its annual music festival after nearly 10 years. The Apple Music Festival, which was called the iTunes Music Festival until 2015, has been held annually by the tech giant since 2007. London's Roundhouse had been the festival's home for most of its existence, but Apple confirmed to Music Business Worldwide that it will not host a festival at the UK venue in 2017.

The Apple Music Festival hosted many of the music industry's biggest names over its tenure: Lady Gaga, Adele, Oasis, Coldplay, Pharrell Williams, Kendrick Lamar, and most recently, Elton John and Chance the Rapper in the 2016 lineup. Tickets were given to competition winners, and many performances were streamed live on iTunes and Apple Music. However, the festival has been scaled back over the years from a concert every night in September to just ten shows in total.

Apple gave no official reason for ending the music festival, but the move comes as the company focuses more on original content for its various services, including iTunes and Apple Music. Most of these moves surround video: Apple recently hired former Sony presidents Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg to lead its original content initiative, and they'll have $1 billion at their disposal in 2018 to produce and acquire new shows and movies.

Enlarge / Which model did the best job of forecasting Harvey has a hurricane? The European model, of course. (credit: NOAA)

As a resident of Houston and a meteorologist, I closely tracked the development or Hurricane Harvey for much of the month of August. As part of that, I watched every new cycle of forecast model runs to determine which one handled the track forecast best.

For a long time, the big question with Harvey concerned what the storm would do after it moved inland into the central Texas coast late on Friday, August 25. Would it stall for one or two days and then move south? Would it stall for three or four days? Or would it slowly drift to the east-southeast, out into the Gulf of Mexico and then move up the coast?

Each of these particular solutions mattered for Texas, because whichever area lay to the northeast of the storm's center would receive the heaviest rains. Ultimately the rain bullseye fell along a corridor along Interstate 10 from Houston to Beaumont, where more than 45 inches of rain fell during a period of about four days that led to catastrophic flooding.

Bigger has typically meant better when it comes to graphics cards. But as the success of products like AMD's R9 Nano or Asus' Nvidia GTX 970 Mini have shown, there's a growing demand for powerful graphics cards that don't require a oversized tower to house them. Until recently, the most powerful card in the smallest package was the Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Mini, which measures 211mm in length.

Gigabyte has gone one better with the release of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Mini ITX 8G, which measures just 169mm in length. That's a perfect match for mini-ITX motherboards, which tops out at around 170mm in width. Many of the new breed of ITX cases, which includes the popular NFC S4 Mini, shrink the total size of the case to console-like dimensions by limiting the length of graphics cards to the length of the motherboard. While Zotac's GTX 1080 Mini will technically fit in such cases with modification, the Gigabyte GTX 1080 Mini simply slots in place.