Month: October 2017

SAN FRANCISCO—We're live from Google's big hardware event, and the latest item to be announced is the Google Home Mini. If Google's Home hardware strategy is "copy whatever Amazon is doing, but with Google software," then the Google Home is the Amazon Echo, and the Mini is Google's answer to the Echo Dot.

The original $129 Google Home combined Google Assistant smarts with a speaker system good enough to fill a room with sound. The Google Home Mini drops the beefy speaker setup for one designed to mainly handle voice responses. In return, you get a much smaller body and a presumably smaller price tag.

Enlarge / If you want to see this on TV next year, you'll need ESPN. (credit: Peter J Fox | Getty Images)

On Wednesday morning, the sports network ESPN announced that starting next year, it will be the new broadcaster of Formula 1 racing here in the US. It's a return of sorts, as ESPN's parent company ABC was the first US network to televise the sport back in 1962. ESPN said that it will air more than 125 hours of F1 in 2018, including all the on-track action at each of the 21 Grand Prix weekends—three practice sessions, qualifying, and the race itself. "ESPN has had a long commitment to motorsports, and Formula 1 is a crown jewel in the sport," said Burke Magnus, ESPN's vice president of programming and scheduling.

According to the schedule released by the network (see image below), the overwhelming majority of races will be shown live on ESPN2. But the Monegasque, Canadian, and British Grands Prix are important enough to jump over to the main ESPN channel, and ABC will air both the US and Mexican races. (ABC will also rebroadcast the Monaco race immediately following the Indy 500.) The channel hopping was to be expected, and US broadcast rights for the sport have usually insisted that several of the races be broadcast on free-to-air network TV rather than a cable channel.

"This linear and digital partnership with ESPN represents a significant step forward in achieving Formula 1’s aim of broadening the sport’s appeal. The US market is very important growth opportunity for Formula 1, and we are looking forward to working with ESPN to ignite the growing fan interest," said Sean Bratches, F1's new head of commercial operations. Before he was hired by F1's new owners, Bratches was head of sales and marketing at ESPN.

Enlarge / The UC3 Nautilus in early sea trials in 2008. (credit: Frumperino)

Copenhagen prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen announced in a court hearing today that "images" of the torture, decapitation, and burning of a woman were found on a computer hard drive at RML Spacelab, the organization devoted to building a manned suborbital rocket led by Peter Madsen. The BBC reports that the images, "which we presume to be real," said Buch-Jepsen, were on a computer believed to belong to Madsen—the suspect in the death of journalist Kim Wall in an incident aboard his submarine the UC3 Nautilus.

Madsen, for his part, claimed the video was not his and that the computer the video was on was on a computer that everyone in the lab had access to. But other evidence presented in this latest hearing on his case has prompted the judge overseeing the case to order he be held in custody another four months, as Buch-Jepsen told the court of the video and other evidence that have "strengthened" the case against Madsen since his last hearing on September 5.

Wall's headless, limbless torso was found on the shore on August 21, ten days after Madsen deliberately sank his sub in shallow waters near Copenhagen. The body was identified by DNA, and traces of Wall's blood were found within the submarine after it was raised. Autopsy results found that Wall had been stabbed in her ribcage and genitals, either at the time of her death or shortly afterward, though no cause of death was determined.

Enlarge / Demonstrators gather near the National Assembly as they protest against the new chemical formula of the Levothyrox, a manufactured form of the thyroid hormone, in Paris on September 8, 2017. (credit: Getty | CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT )

In the six months since pharmaceutical giant Merck reformulated a thyroid hormone replacement drug distributed in France, patients there have filed dozens of lawsuits. Hundreds of thousands signed a petition to reverse the change, and around 9,000 reported illnesses and side-effects, some dramatic. They complain of hair loss, cramps, weight gain, extreme fatigue, headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, memory loss, and heart palpitations.

The outcry has created a political and media blitz. Rumors and conspiracy theories have flown, including that Merck switched production of the drug to a plant in China to cut costs. (The drug, which has no competition in France, is produced in Europe.)

Bowing to the intense backlash, the French government began investigating and last week made the unprecedented request that Merck restore the old drug formulation to the market, Science reported. On Tuesday, French police searched the drug maker’s plant in Lyon, Reuters reported. Authorities are investigating whether Merck is guilty of “aggravated deceit, involuntary attacks on the physical integrity and endangering the lives of others,” according to a translated report by Le Monde.

Here at Ars, we have a minor obsession with modern discoveries of Easter eggs from relatively ancient games. That includes a timing cue in Punch-Out!!, debug menus hidden in Mortal Kombat cabinets, and the first-ever Easter egg found in a game from 1977. But a Level Select Easter egg that involves physically hitting a Sonic 3D Blast Genesis cartridge—and the story behind it—is probably the weirdest such hidden feature we've ever heard of.

In a new video explanation, Traveller's Tales founder Jon Burt, who worked on 3D Blast and a number of Sega games back in the '90s, details how the unintended "smack the cartridge" Easter egg really grew out of an attempt to get around Sega's onerous certification requirements for Genesis cartridges.

As Burt explains it, Sega's certification process at the time took "a few weeks" and required re-submission for any failures, including crashes after the game was left running for days at a time. So Burt started catching any generalized, crash-worthy errors the game might trigger and disguising them as Easter eggs the player had stumbled on—such as a "secret time warp" that bounced the player around in Mickey Mania. As Burt recalls, "most things that were to crash the game just brought up the secret time warp, so Sega wouldn't know it was actually a bug."