Month: February 2018

The Asus Nexus Player (with controller, pictured) was the closest we've ever gotten to a Google gaming device.

A wild report from The Information (subscription required) claims Google is working on a subscription-based gaming streaming service, delivered either over Google's Chromecast devices or via a totally new Google-made gaming console.

The service is codenamed "Yeti," and it would be similar to streaming services like PlayStation Now—users would pay a subscription fee to access a collection of games, which are run on a remote device and streamed over the Internet. The Information notes that "an early version" of this service was designed to work over a Chromecast, which is interesting since it's unclear how a game controller would ever hook up to a Chromecast. More recently, Google has reportedly started experimenting with a Google-developed game console and controller. The project is being led by two Google hardware executives—Mario Queiroz, VP of product management, and Majd Bakar, VP of engineering—so if this ever sees the light of day, new hardware seems likely.

Game streaming removes the need to purchase expensive video game hardware, since all the game processing is done in the cloud. The tradeoff is that it puts a big strain on your Internet service and the provider's infrastructure, since every video frame and every button press has to be streamed over the Internet with minimal lag. If any company is good at building a speedy, robust internet service, though, it's Google. It already has a massive content delivery infrastructure thanks to sites like YouTube, and the company currently has a small gaming footprint with the Android-focused Google Play Games service and YouTube Gaming, a Twitch competitor.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai being interviewed at Fox Studios on November 10, 2017 in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | John Lamparski)

The Federal Communications Commission is refusing to release the draft versions of jokes told by Chairman Ajit Pai at a recent FCC dinner, claiming that releasing the drafts would "impede the candid exchange of ideas" within the commission.

In December, Pai gave a speech at the annual FCC Chairman's Dinner and played a video that attempts to lampoon critics who accuse Pai of doing the bidding of Verizon, his former employer. The video was shown less than a week before the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality rules, a favorable move for the broadband industry requested by Verizon and other ISPs.

The satirical skit shows Pai planning his future ascension to the FCC chairmanship with Verizon executive Kathleen Grillo in 2003, the last year Pai worked as a Verizon lawyer. The video shows Pai and the Verizon executive plotting to install a "Verizon puppet" as FCC chair.

Enlarge / Chatting up customers progresses the story and fills in the blanks of the world.

Cyberpunk might just be the most easily misused genre in history. Those clichéd neon-lit, smog-choked, rainy cities are evocative enough to attract creators less interested in the moral messages of the subject matter like minnows to an anglerfish. Everybody wants their speculative fiction to look like Blade Runner or evoke the ‘80s cool of Neuromancer. But very few address the power dynamics that turned those rainy megalopolises into sad, smog-choked dystopias.

The Red Strings Club is endlessly interested in who does and doesn’t wield society’s power—and what they should do about that. It flits from a corporate high rise literally towering over a fragile populace to the titular Red Strings Club bar, where social lubricants and social engineering pull the metaphorical strings of tech executives. We see people subtly manipulated and outright killed for knowing too much. And it’s all in service of asking, as well as answering, what makes a successful society.

The narrative adventure/bartending simulator isn’t always subtle in pursuing those themes—not that it can always afford to be, given its tight run time of three hours or so. Subtle or not, though, the game blessedly has more to say about its source material than “neon makes great backlighting.”

Things kick off in medias res, with one of your main playable characters bloody and plummeting to his death outside a skyscraper. But the real action begins at the club itself, where a busted android stumbles off the street and into the lives of our two heroes, Brandeis and Donovan. The computer hacking and bartending power-couple uses the bot to learn about a corporate conspiracy of infectious mind control. Utterly lacking the power to stop such a massive existential threat, they set out to do just that.

Enlarge (credit: NSF/UIC Photo)

Naked mole rats are the longest-living rodents, with recorded life spans of over 30 years in captivity. They are native to East Africa, where they live in large colonies in underground burrows. Maximum species lifespan is usually correlated with body size but, like us, naked mole rats are outliers, with longevity quotients far exceeding those expected for animals their size (approximately 35g).

We did it with hygiene, vaccines, and other modern public health measures. How do these rodents do it? A new study adds to the confused picture of how these animals maintain their health.

Senescence vs. cancer

A hallmark of cancer cells is their immortality. Cancer and aging are like opposite poles of a cellular seesaw; molecular mechanisms that protect against one tend to have the unfortunate side effect of promoting the other. But naked mole rats seem to have avoided the pitfalls of both. They almost never get cancer, but they don’t appear aged until the very end of their lives and they are capable of breeding the whole time.