Month: March 2018

Ron Amadeo

Believe it or not, the high-end Android smartphone market isn't super competitive. LG's mobile unit is regularly the company's worst-performing division, so much so that the company is backing away from a yearly release cycle and delaying its flagship smartphone. HTC's January 2018 was the company's worst month in over a decade—until even worse numbers were reported in February. Google makes the all-around best Android phone, but it is either uninterested in creating or unable to create a competitive distribution and marketing chain, leaving many people unable to buy the phone.

We hear talk about new brands from China, but Huawei was essentially banned by the US government from meaningfully competing here, Xiaomi keeps pushing back a US launch, and LeEco's US arrival was a crash landing with no survivors.

Ford

Ahead of this month's New York International Auto Show, Ford released some info about its plans to adapt to the changing world of transportation. The Blue Oval says it's "going all-in on hybrids," including versions of the F-150 truck and Mustang sports car. The automaker is also readying six new battery electric vehicles by 2022, with the first due in 2020, and adding more performance versions of its SUV line up. Additionally, by the end of 2019, every new Ford will have 4G LTE connectivity, and the company is developing a new cloud platform that will deliver over-the-air updates.

New hybrids

"Hybrids for years have been mostly niche products but are now on the cusp of a mainstream breakout," said Jim Farley, Ford president of global markets. "The valuable capability they offer—plus fuel efficiency—is why we’re going to offer hybrid variants of our most popular and high-volume vehicles, allowing our loyal, passionate customers to become advocates for the technology." So America's best-selling truck (the F-150) will get the ability to act as a mobile generator, something that should come in handy on job sites.

Logitech

Logitech announced a new frameless mechanical keyboard for gaming today. It's called the G513, and it's the successor to the G413, which has been a popular choice since its launch last spring. The company also announced new gaming PC speakers with the same Lightsync colored-LED technology you'll find in the company's gaming keyboards and mice.

Logitech brags of a 1ms report rate for the G513, but the main—albeit not unique—appeal of the keyboard is that it comes with two options for mechanical key switches built by Omron—the Romer-G Tactile and the Romer-G Linear. Logitech is notably not using the leading switch manufactuer, Cherry MX.

Enlarge / No word on whether study participants were more likely to do a cool walk away from explosions without looking back. (credit: Rockstar Games)

A new, longer-term study of video game play from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Germany's University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf recently published in Molecular Psychiatry found that adults showed "no significant changes" on a wide variety of behavioral measures after two straight months of daily violent game play.

Most scientific studies on the effects of video game violence measure participants right after the completion of a gameplay session, when the adrenaline prompted by the on-screen action is likely still pumping. Researcher Simone Kuhn and her co-authors argue that "effects observed only for a few minutes after short sessions of video gaming are not representative of what society at large is actually interested in, namely how habitual violent video game play affects behavior on a more long-term basis."

To correct for the "priming" effects inherent in these other studies, researchers had 90 adult participants play either Grand Theft Auto V or The Sims 3 for at least 30 minutes every day over eight weeks (a control group played no games during the testing period). The adults chosen, who ranged from 18 to 45 years old, reported little to no video game play in the previous six months and were screened for pre-existing psychological problems before the tests.

Excavations in the Denisovan Cave have yielded tiny bone fragments that have had an outsized impact on our understanding of human evolution. (credit: Bence Viola)

For a brief period in our species’ history, we shared our world with other sapient humans, closely related to us but distinct. We don’t know much about how our ancestors interacted with these other now-extinct hominins, but we know that at least some of those interactions were pretty intimate, because many modern humans now carry traces of DNA from Neanderthals and another ancient hominin group called Denisovans.

Most modern people of European and Asian descent carry between one- and three-percent Neanderthal DNA, and most people of Asian and Oceanian descent carry about one- to five-percent Denisovan DNA. Because Neanderthals and Denisovans arose outside Africa, the ancestors of modern African people would never have encountered them, although researchers have suggested that a so-far unidentified hominin species in Africa mingled with our ancestors there, so all of us may carry traces of that distant relative as well.

These weren’t isolated incidents. The genetic legacy that many of us now carry is probably the mark of years of sustained contact between two groups. Consistent with that, it now turns out that humans may have had contact with Denisovans not just at one place and time, but two.