Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Don't you know that your DNA is toxic? (credit: Jive Records)

Today we present the second installment of my interview with medical geneticist Robert Green, about the promise and pitfalls that could lie in reading out your full genome. Part one ran yesterday—so if you missed it, click right here. Otherwise, you can press play on the embedded player, or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

In this installment, we discuss why some medical researchers view personal genetic information as a literal toxin. This isn’t strictly out of paternalism (although there are elements of that). A tiny fraction of people might indeed make discoveries that are both horrible and unactionable. A larger fraction could suffer anguish from the sheer ambiguity of what’s divulged. After carefully studying both the psychology and consequences of these situations, Robert is fully convinced that personal genetic information should be made available to any adult who seeks it, after being soundly apprised of the ramifications.

We next discuss rare genetic diseases, and how incongruously common they are. Robert’s groundbreaking research recently revealed that as many as a fifth of us are recessive carriers of some exotic genetic horror or another. Which brings us to the important notion of partial “penetrance,” or diseases that can be slightly (and often mysteriously) manifest in a recessive carrier. High school biology trains us to think of recessive/dominant and afflicted/unafflicted in very binary terms. In reality, there are many gradations between the poles.

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A Star Citizen backer who went to small claims court seeking a refund of $4,496 he had put toward the long-delayed crowdfunded space sim has seen his case dismissed.

Ken Lord, a data scientist from Colorado, had been a massive Star Citizen backer since the game first launched on Kickstarter in 2012. But he's since grown disillusioned with the title's numerous delays, broken promises, and changes in scope, according to pieces on Motherboard and Kotaku

Key among those changes was a new direction for spin-off shooter Squadron 42, which removed a planned multiplayer co-op mode and adding required first-person portions to the game. Lord, who has multiple sclerosis, said this now means "my money’s stuck in a game I can’t possibly play."

Enlarge / The Google search app on an Android portable device on February 5, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The European Commission today fined Google $5.05 billion (€4.34 billion) for violating EU antitrust rules, saying that "Google has imposed illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators to cement its dominant position in general Internet search."

The commission said that Google is violating antitrust law by requiring phone manufacturers to pre-install the Google search app and Chrome browser "as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store)."

Google also violated EU antitrust rules by "ma[king] payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-installed the Google Search app on their devices," the commission said.

Enlarge (credit: Walmart)

Walmart may be the next giant to enter the video streaming wars, according to a report from The Information. The retailer is reportedly considering launching its own video streaming service to battle Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. But Walmart wants to undercut its competition by pricing its service at $8 per month—or lower.

According to the report, the $8-per-month price comes from the idea that Netflix and Amazon are more popular with customers on the East and West Coasts. Customers living in the middle of America may gravitate toward a lower-cost option. Currently, Netflix prices its service between $8 and $14 per month while Amazon Prime Video is roughly $8 per month.

Both services have seen price increases recently as well—Netflix raised the price of its top-tier 4K streaming plan by $2 and its mid-tier plan by $1 at the end of last year, while an Amazon Prime annual subscription jumped to $119 in May (Prime Video is included in a Prime membership).