Month: April 2018

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Mitchell reacting to the news (actually a parody of Mitchell featured in a Regular Show cartoon, but still...)

Twin Galaxies, the long-running video game high score tracker recognized by Guinness World Records, has banned Billy Mitchell and removed all of his past scores from its listings after determining that two million-plus-point Donkey Kong performances he submitted were actually created with an emulator and not on original arcade hardware as he consistently claimed. The move means that the organization now recognizes Steve Wiebe as the first player to achieve a million-point game in Donkey Kong, a question central to the 2007 cult classic documentary The King of Kong.

Nearly two months ago, Mitchell's scores were also removed from the leaderboards at Donkey Kong Forum. Forum moderator Jeremy "Xelnia" Young cited frame-by-frame analysis of the board transitions in Mitchell's Donkey Kong tapes, which showed visual artifacts suggesting they were generated by early versions of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) and not original Donkey Kong arcade hardware.

After checking Mitchell's original submitted score tapes and "meticulously test[ing] and investigat[ing] the dispute case assertions as well as a number of relevant contingent factors," the Twin Galaxies administration unanimously determined that two of Mitchell's disputed scores were created by an emulator: A 1.047 million point performance that was highlighted in The King of Kong and a 1.05 million point score achieved at a Mortgage Brokers convention in 2007. Twin Galaxies wasn't able to make a definitive determination on a third, 1.06 million point score Mitchell claimed to have at Florida's Boomers arcade in 2010.

Max Schrems is leading a group called Europe vs. Facebook to force the social network to comply with EU data protection law. (credit: Europe vs. Facebook)

The Irish High Court has formally asked the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to figure out whether it's legal under European law for Facebook to routinely transfer user data to the United States. The referral to the court was published Thursday, and Facebook has until the end of the month to respond to the Irish court.

If the CJEU rules against Facebook, it could put a slew of American tech giants on notice and throw what is generally a smooth and orderly process into chaos. Right now, European Twitter, Google, and Facebook users have their data captured in their home countries, but the data is processed and/or stored by the American parent companies.

As part of a five-year legal battle involving Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, the CJEU is now being asked to determine whether the current set of rules that govern those transfers, known as "Privacy Shield," are adequate. The case is being heard in Ireland as it involves Facebook Ireland, which keeps all non-American and non-Canadian data is funneled through.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | John Greim)

It is fairly common knowledge that the uterine environment affects fetal development; if you don’t believe that, you have clearly never tried to order a coffee or have a sip of wine in public while pregnant. It's enough to elicit dirty looks and even nasty reprimands from complete strangers.

But it's not just chemicals. Historical analyses indicate that waves of neurodevelopmental disorders occur after viral and bacterial pandemics. Studies in mice suggest that it is maternal inflammation, rather than a direct infection, that elicits these disorders; when pregnant mice are given proinflammatory molecules without any infectious agent, their pups exhibit altered behaviors. But the implications for human health haven't been clear.

Now, a team has some evidence of a direct connection between inflammation in humans and changes in their offspring.

Enlarge / In January, Rocket Lab reached orbit for the first time with the second launch of its Electron vehicle. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Life is pretty good for Rocket Lab and its founder Peter Beck right now. With two test flights of its Electron rocket completed in the last 10.5 months, the company says it will move into commercial operations later this month. The 14-day launch window for the "It's Business Time" mission, carrying two private payloads, opens on April 20.

In an interview, Beck said Rocket Lab hopes to fly eight missions in 2018 and reach a monthly launch cadence by the end of the year. The company's initial test flight in May 2017 failed to reach orbit, but a second flight in January of this year was almost entirely successful. Rocket Lab will become the first of a number of small-satellite launch companies to begin serving customers.

As a result of that January test flight, Beck said customers have responded. "Over the years, companies in this market have come and gone, and at some point in time, customers said, 'show me when it works,'" Beck said. "Now we have proof that it works. Since January, the sales team has just been going flat out. It’s fairly obvious when you have a pent-up market, and you have a solution, life becomes good."

Enlarge / Tesla's Model X. (credit: Jordan Golson)

Tesla on Tuesday escalated its media battle with the family of Apple engineer Walter Huang. Huang died in Silicon Valley last month when his Model X vehicle crashed into a concrete lane divider at high speed. Tesla's Autopilot driver assistance system was engaged at the time. Tesla made its clearest statement yet that Huang—not Tesla—bore responsibility for his death on a Mountain View freeway.

Huang's family has hired an attorney to sue Tesla. In an on-camera interview with local television station ABC 7, Huang's wife, Sevonne, said that prior to his death, Huang had complained to her that the car had a tendency to drive toward the exact traffic barrier that ultimately killed him.

But in a statement to ABC 7 on Tuesday evening, Tesla turned this argument around.

Jeff Dunn

Vizio has announced its newest crop of televisions for 2018.

The Irvine, California-based company this week refreshed its entire lineup, with updates to its affordable E- and D-Series, midrange M-Series, and higher-end P-Series sets.

Enlarge / Mother with newborn. (credit: Getty | Tim Clayton)

In the US, the rate of women dying from pregnancy and childbirth is higher than in any other developed country—much, much higher. And we’re bucking the global trend of improving the situation. While the rest of the world largely saw its maternal mortality rates drop by more than a third between 2000 and 2015, the US was one of the few countries that seemed to experience increases in the rate of women dying from pregnancy-related causes.

The state of maternal health in the US is so grim that researchers can’t even get quality data on the deaths. In fact, the country has not published an official maternal mortality rate since 2007 due to the lack of accurate data from individual states. In 2016, a group of researchers didn’t mince words about the situation: “It is an international embarrassment that the United States, since 2007, has not been able to provide a national maternal mortality rate to international data repositories,” the researchers concluded in a study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Now, a new study in the same journal goes further to highlight just how bad the state of maternal health data is in the US. The study links a dramatic rise in maternal deaths in Texas to errors from a poorly designed drop-down menu in the state’s electronic death records system. While the discovery drags down the state’s stratospheric maternal mortality rate, the corrected numbers are still extremely high for a developed country. Moreover, having to make these types of corrections squanders precious resources, experts note.

Enlarge (credit: Eric Bangeman)

Like many Gen Xers, my first car was a Volkswagen—a 1973 Beetle, to be exact. Back then, VW was known primarily for making quirky, fun cars like the Beetle, the Thing, the Bus, and the Karmann Ghia. You could get behind the wheel of a Rabbit or Jetta for a more conventional driving experience, but that was not VW's strong spot a few decades ago.

Times have changed. Volkswagen is now one of the three largest car companies in the world, and its lineup reflects that reality. And as of the 2018 model year, VW's vehicle lineup includes a three-row SUV, the Atlas. Even though it has been on the market for only a year, the Atlas had become VW's second-most-popular car in the German automaker's lineup in March 2018, showing that the American car-buying public's thirst for crossovers and SUVs remains unslaked. (The small crossover Tiguan topped VW's sales charts.)

Marketed as a "family SUV," the Atlas starts at $30,750 and comes in five trim levels. As is the norm for press cars, the Atlas I drove was the SEL Premium with 4MOTION, the highest trim level with all the bells and whistles for $49,415. VW offers two engine options: a standard four-cylinder, 2.0L turbocharged direct injection engine that gives you 235hp (175kW) and 258lb-ft (350nM) of torque that comes standard, and a 3.6L V6 engine that generates 276 horsepower (206kW) and 266lb⋅ft (361Nm) of torque. Both are available across the Atlas, except for the Premium, which excludes the 2.0L power plant. All told, the Atlas weighs in at 4,728lb (2,144kg) with the V6 and AWD.