Month: May 2018

At first glance, it's easy to mistake the Surface Pro 4 for the Surface Pro 3.

Microsoft will replace Surface Pro 4s that are afflicted with a screen flickering issue that is caused by a hardware problem and is unfixable in firmware or software.

For more than a year, there have been complaints from Surface Pro 4 users that their tablet computers were developing a nasty screen flickering issue. You can see the issue in action here. The random occurrence and nature of the corruption made it clear that the hardware was the cause. To try and eke some life out of their systems, Surface Pro 4 users were going to extreme lengths. Sticking the machines in the freezer would restore normal function for a short period, and other owners felt that hairdryers were a better solution.

With Microsoft now properly acknowledging the problem, these hacks are no longer necessary. Customers with affected machines must request a replacement within three years of the initial purchase, whether it was a consumer or a corporate sale. They'll receive a refurbished but otherwise equivalent Surface Pro 4.

Enlarge / Lava pouring from a fissure in the Leilani Estates neighborhood. (credit: USGS)

Recent events in Hawaii have been producing some remarkable images. But if you’re not a geologist—or resident of Hawaii—you might be wondering what the heck is going on. We’re here to help: while lava spewing from back yards in a subdivision seems wild, it’s not really surprising.

Why is Kīlauea an active volcano in the first place?

The Hawaiian chain of islands (there are also seamounts that no longer reach above sea level) is the result of a “hotspot” in the Earth’s mantle. Hotspots in the Earth's interior are areas of rising hot rock that can turn to liquid hot magma near the Earth’s surface. These hotspots are basically stationary, while tectonic plates slowly slide around on the surface. That means a hotspot will punch a line of eruptions through the plate a bit like a sewing machine.

The Big Island of Hawaii is the youngest in the chain, still straddling the hotspot that fuels its volcanoes—there are five individual volcanoes that make up the island. Of those five, Kīlauea is the youngest, comprising the southeastern edge of the island. Kīlauea’s summit is home to a collapsed crater called Halemaʻumaʻu Crater. In 2008, a new vent appeared in the floor of the crater, which has hosted a lake of roiling lava ever since.

This week, Formula 1's long-anticipated Internet streaming service went live just ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix. The introduction of its own online stream was a huge priority for Liberty Media, the sport's owner, which is trying to bring the 21st century to a series that until now had stoutly ignored the Internet. This new stream probably represents the biggest fan-facing change Liberty has made since buying F1's commercial rights from a vulture fund, and it's an offering many of us have been crying out for. Many other racing series have been live-streaming their races for some time now. But I'm not going to sugar coat it—this new F1 viewing option seems really quite mediocre, particularly considering the cost.

You pays your money...

There are actually two different subscription levels on offer. F1 TV Pro—$11.99 per month here in the US—gets you the races as well as all the other track sessions live and on-demand after the fact, along with all 20 cars' onboard feeds, unedited team radio broadcasts, an archive of past F1 races, documentaries, live timing, and a driver tracking map. F1 TV Access—just $2.99 in the US—is a little more basic. You still get the archives, documentaries, timing, scoring, and some radio feeds, but this tier only offers replays of each session.

Paragon deserved better. Epic Games’ recently shuttered title looked like a third-person shooter, but it was all MOBA under the hood. That might not seem like an argument in its favor, as conventional wisdom says the MOBA genre is oversaturated and already behind the multiplayer curve. This gorgeous contender was a bit different, however. It learned from the mistakes of similar abandoned projects and constantly shot for something just a little bit different from mainstays like League of Legends and Dota 2. That drive to find its own niche should have been Paragon’s greatest strength, but it might have ended up as the game’s greatest weakness.

Now Epic has moved onto bigger, more profitable, and arguably better things with Fortnite: Battle Royale, the biggest thing in the gaming world since the last biggest thing in the gaming world. The 100-player slugfest is certainly more popular than Paragon’s relatively staid five-on-five battles—especially based on rumors that few people were still playing by the end.

The more I play Fortnite, though, the more I see a lot of Paragon’s DNA.

Enlarge / Horses on the Kazakh Steppe. (credit: Togzhan Ibrayeva via Wikimedia Commons)

From Neanderthals to human hunter-gatherers to the mounted horde of Genghis Khan, the Eurasian Steppe has long been a crossroads of humanity. And for the last 5,000 years or so, domesticated horses have shaped how people moved through, lived in, and dominated that vast grassland stretching from Hungary and Romania to Northeastern China. A paleogenomic study adds new evidence to the debate about where people first domesticated horses, and a related study reveals the impact of horsemanship on the peopling of the steppe.

The first evidence we have of domesticated horses comes from a site called Botai in Northern Kazakhstan, where archaeologists have found evidence of milking, corrals, and the use of harnesses. But there’s still debate about whether hunter-gatherers at Botai started domesticating horses—which they’d previously hunted for meat—in order to milk and ride them. It's possible they learned from herders farther west, such as the people whose graves have been found at Khvalynsk dating from around 7,150 to 5,930 years ago.

To get a better picture, Copenhagen University evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev and his colleagues examined the ancestry of 74 people who lived on the Eurasian Steppe from 11,000 years ago up through the Medieval period. Among other things, they wanted to see whether the Botai had interbred with the Yamnaya, the pastoral descendants of the Khvalynsk people. If they had, that would be a clue that the Botai had interacted with the Yamnaya enough to perhaps exchange cultural ideas as well as genes.

Enlarge / FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb had vowed to crackdown on the dubious clinics. (credit: Getty | Zach Gibson)

Two stem cell clinics will “vigorously defend” their dubious treatments against civil suits levied this week by the Department of Justice at the request of the Food and Drug Administration.

The two clinics are no stranger to federal officials’ bad sides; they have both received warnings and wrist-slaps in the past. In August of last year, the FDA sent a warning letter to US Stem Cell Clinic of Sunrise, Florida, and its chief scientific officer Kristin Comella for “significant deviations” from good practices. That was shortly after researchers determined that three women had permanently lost their vision after the clinic posed as a legitimate research facility conducting a clinical trial and injected an unproven concoction of cells directly into their eyeballs. The women reported paying $5,000 for the procedure, and the clinic’s supposed clinical trial never took place.

The other clinic, California Stem Cell Treatment Center Inc., of Rancho Mirage and Beverly Hills, California, and affiliates, including StemImmune Inc. and Cell Surgical Network, were likewise chided by the FDA for inappropriately obtaining vials of smallpox vaccine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The CDC maintains a stash of vaccine against the eradicated virus for research and emergency military purposes.) The clinic was mixing the vaccine into unproven, unapproved cell treatments for cancer and injecting it directly into patients’ tumors.