Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Scott Olson)

Verizon’s long-rumored live TV streaming service appears to be having some issues.

Bloomberg reported this past March that the telecom giant was planning to launch an online TV service that would ostensibly compete with the likes of Dish’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV Now over the summer. A couple months later, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam seemed to confirm that the company had its eyes on an over-the-top service, one that may use its new Oath brand.

But no new service ever came to pass, and now Bloomberg reports that Verizon is targeting next spring to try its luck in the growing online TV market. The report cites technical issues, staff turnover, and complications in programming rights negotiations as reasons for the delay, and the story notes that this is “at least” the second time the Web-based service has been delayed internally.

Enlarge / Ethanol Plant, Milton, Wisconsin. (Photo by Education Images/UIG via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

In an October 19 letter to corn-belt lawmakers, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt said that he won’t seek any rollback to biofuel blending rules, according to Reuters.

The agency had been considering some changes to rules set by the Obama administration that ratchet up the amount of renewable biofuel that refineries must blend into the gas and diesel they sell. According to Bloomberg, the EPA had specifically been considering “a possible reduction in biodiesel requirements” as well as “a proposal to allow exported renewable fuel to count toward domestic quotas.” In early October, the EPA asked for public comment on cutting biodiesel quotas.

The Bloomberg story cited unnamed sources who said President Trump personally directed Pruitt to back off any proposals that would relax biofuel quotas after pressure from lawmakers from corn-producing states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois. Trump, who courted both fossil fuel interests and corn-belt states in his campaign, has had pressure from each side on this debate. Uncertainty surrounding the future of biofuel use during Trump's administration has caused volatility in biofuels markets for months, Reuters notes.

Enlarge (credit: International Fund for Animal Welfare)

Why are humans so smart? We must have evolved in an environment that made more intelligent individuals likely to survive. But this just raises new questions: what factors in the environment could have created an evolutionary pressure for intelligence? And how have other species that faced similar pressures ended up evolving?

One prominent hypothesis about our brains is that the human lineage became especially social, which required a suite of advanced cognitive skills to manage the relationships that were intertwined with survival. There’s evidence that social behavior is associated with bigger brains across the primate family, and the same correlation has been found in birds.

There's now evidence that whale and dolphin brains show the same relationship. The finding offers new support for the “social brain hypothesis," and it's an exciting discovery. But not all researchers agree on how this evidence should be interpreted.

How much will the second flight of the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft cost? We don't know. (credit: NASA)

This week, the US Government Accountability Office reported on progress the space agency is making to prepare the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and launch systems at Kennedy Space Center for future missions. NASA is making progress on these complex integration activities, the report finds, but the space agency has a long ways to go to make a test flight in late 2019 or early 2020.

One surprise in the report is that NASA still has not provided Congress (or anyone else) with cost estimates for the first crewed mission of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which could occur in 2023 or later. This "Exploration Mission 2," which would entail flying a crew of four into deep space and possibly delivering the first component of a space station into lunar orbit, would mark the first human mission after 12 years of development of the rocket and nearly two decades of work on Orion.

"Establishing a cost and schedule baseline for NASA’s second mission is an important initial step in understanding and gaining support," the report states of NASA's exploration plans, which include building the deep space station and then going to the lunar surface, or onto Mars. "NASA’s ongoing refusal to establish this baseline is short-sighted, because EM-2 is part of a larger conversation about the affordability of a crewed mission to Mars."

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Getty Images)

In the beginning of 2017, Twitter said it would take on harassment and hate speech. CEO Jack Dorsey said the company would embrace a "completely new approach to abuse on Twitter" with open dialogue along the way.

For months, though, the company has offered few details about what it would do, or when. That changed late yesterday, when Twitter posted a timeline with specific promises on actions it will take.

The changes begin next week. On October 27, Twitter will expand what types of "non-consensual nudity" (aka "revenge porn") that it takes action against. The company will already act when a victim complains, but Twitter will soon act even in cases where the victims may not be aware images were taken, instance like upskirt photos and hidden webcams. "Anyone we identify as the original poster of non-consensual nudity will be suspended immediately," the October entry reads.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Thinkstock / Taito)

Developers that want to stop cheaters in their Windows games are getting a little additional system-level help from Microsoft via TruePlay, a new API being rolled out through Windows 10's Fall Creators Update.

The feature, which is now documented on the Windows Dev Center lets developers easily prioritize a game as a protected process, cutting off some of the most common cheating methods by essentially preventing outside programs from looking at or altering the game's memory. TruePlay also "monitor[s] gaming sessions for behaviors and manipulations that are common in cheating scenarios," looking at usage patterns on a system level to find likely cheaters.

TruePlay is only available to developers using the somewhat controversial Universal Windows Platform, which Microsoft has been encouraging developers to embrace for a while now. The anti-cheat system can be applied across an entire game or only certain portions, so developers can monitor cheating only in multiplayer matches, for example.