Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Henrik5000)

Broadband industry lobby groups have appealed to the US Supreme Court in an attempt to kill the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. The groups want the Supreme Court to rule that the FCC exceeded its authority when it reclassified Internet providers in order to impose stricter regulations.

Under President Obama, the FCC's Democratic majority reclassified home and mobile broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act in order to enforce net neutrality rules.

With Republicans now in charge, the FCC is on track to overturn the rules. But a Supreme Court decision in favor of Internet providers could protect them from future attempts to regulate the industry if, for example, Democrats eventually re-take the White House and FCC.

Enlarge / Picture of the US embassy in Havana, taken on September 29, 2017 after the United States announced it is withdrawing more than half its personnel in response to mysterious health attacks targeting its diplomatic staff. (credit: Getty | ADALBERTO ROQUE)

More than half of the staff at the American Embassy in Havana, Cuba will return to the US in the wake of mysterious attacks that left diplomats with hearing damage and brain injuries, the State Department announced Friday.

The department said that the staff drawdown was necessary to ensure their safety. And, “because our personnel's safety is at risk, and we are unable to identify the source of the attacks, we believe US citizens may also be at risk and warn them not to travel to Cuba,” the department added in a travel advisory.

The attacks have injured 21 Americans associated with the embassy so far, as well as Canadian diplomats. Attacks took place in the diplomats' homes as well as hotels. The last attack occurred in August, according to the New York Times.

Enlarge / A mussel-covered vessel that washed ashore in Washington. (credit: Russ Lewis)

Well after the massive 2011 tsunami that swept across the Japanese coast, reminders of the event started appearing on the US-side of the Pacific. Various forms of debris, ranging from small hunks of plastic up to entire boats, made appearances on the US West Coast. Now, a team of researchers has found that the floating debris carried hundreds of potentially invasive species across the vast ocean with it, including a couple of species of fish.

While large tsunamis have occurred frequently, even in historic times, there's no indication of anything like this before. The difference, according to the researchers, is humanity's ability to make materials that can remain afloat in the open ocean for years.

It may seem a bit surprising that marine species couldn't just introduce themselves, given that they already live in the ocean. But coastal habitats are very distinct from those of the open ocean, and many species couldn't survive an ocean crossing on their own even if currents were favorable. While there are coastal environments across the Pacific Rim, they occur at very different latitudes, meaning the temperature conditions and nutrient availability can provide barriers to any species that might migrate around the edges of the open ocean.

Enlarge (credit: Marseille)

Well, this is a turn-up for the books. Normally an HDMI cable that claims to improve your picture quality would be just so much audiophool [editorial standards prevent me from using an appropriate noun here]. HDMI cables carry digital signals, and bits are bits, right? Add to that a "directional" claim—you've gotta plug the right end into the TV—and normally our eyes would be rolling.

But the Marseille mCable Gaming Edition appears to be a working, legitimate product. It's an HDMI cable that makes the kind of claims that we've come to expect from audiophile con men, but there's a key difference: Marseille isn't making its performance claims on the basis of specious nonsense about construction, materials, and chakras. Rather, this cord works because the Gaming Edition HDMI cable has a microchip in it. That microchip performs anti-aliasing of the signal passed through the cable.

The cable is intended for console gamers. While the Xbox One X is set to shake things up a bit when it's released later this year, the consoles currently on the market are, especially from a GPU perspective, relatively underpowered. While PC gamers can readily achieve 1080p or better with a wide range of anti-aliasing options—which offer all kinds of trade-offs between performance, image quality, and the visibility of jagged edges—console gamers have far fewer options. Their graphics processors just aren't strong enough to offer the same kind of flexibility and image quality.

Finally, we have some good news for the end of the week. According to Variety, Amazon is going on a bit of a sci-fi binge. The streaming network, which has already given us delights like The Man in the High Castle and an excellent new version of The Tick, has commissioned three new series: the Larry Niven classic Ringworld, Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk Snow Crash, and (the one that brightened my day most) Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark.

Assuming all three remain true to their source material, each will be a very different vision of the future. Ringworld takes place nearly a thousand years from now in a post-scarcity culture. Written in 1970 and the first of a long-running series of books, the titular Ringworld is a vast habitat in space.

In Ringworld, our hero is a bored 200-year old hired by some aliens to investigate this artificial world—a 600 million-mile (950 million km) ribbon orbiting a Sun-like star. It's been awhile since I've read the book but it's easy to see how previous attempts to adapt it for the screen have ended in failure. But with an Amazonian budget and and ever-more capable CGI, now might be the perfect time to try.

Enlarge / LOS ANGELES, CA - APRIL 14, 2015: Kathleen Miller, 46, right, with her children at a rally of parents and teachers who oppose efforts to end the personal belief exemption on vaccinations. (credit: Getty | Irfan Khan)

The noxious clamoring of a privileged minority has grown louder on Twitter—imperiling public health, a new study warns.

The volume of dangerous tweets falsely linking life-saving vaccines to autism spiked dramatically in recent years. But the alarming uptick doesn’t necessarily represent a surge in anti-vaccine sentiments in overall public opinion. Instead, the uptick indicates the amplifying voices of very specific demographics: people from affluent, largely populated areas in just five states—California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania.

The study’s authors, led by psychologist Theodore Tomeny of the University of Alabama, say the rise is worrying. But, they argue, keeping an eye on social media may help shush the misinformation at its source.