Month: August 2018

Enlarge (credit: Movies Anywhere)

Microsoft's Movies & TV app for Windows 10 and Xbox now supports the Movies Anywhere service. And for a limited time, if you add your Microsoft account to the Movies Anywhere app, you'll get a free film.

Movies Anywhere, originally launched by Disney in 2014, brings together movies you've bought from a wide range of content providers, including Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes, and Vudu. Rather than having to hunt through different apps (and even different devices) to figure out which service you bought a given film from, Movies Anywhere, means all your films will show up in one app and the app can run on a wide range of devices. The Movies Anywhere app also supports buying from any service that you've connected.

Movies Anywhere movies will show up within Microsoft's Movies & TV apps, even if they were bought on competing platforms. At least, so long as you live in the US, because "anywhere" does not actually mean "anywhere."

Enlarge / Want to explore Fallout 76 on PC this fall? You'll need to install the Bethesda.net launcher to do so. (credit: Bethesda)

Bethesda has become the latest video game publisher to begin pulling a major game series from rivals' download services. The publisher's latest announcement about the online RPG Fallout 76 included hints to a first for a 3D Fallout game: it won't be sold via Steam.

Our suspicions were raised by the game's beta FAQ, which went live on Monday and included many mentions of the Bethesda.net store and launcher for the game's Windows version... but no mention of Steam. Once we clicked through all of the FAQ's questions (all hidden with spoiler tags), we found a definitive answer near the bottom: "Both the beta and the game will be available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and on PC (via Bethesda.net only)."

The Bethesda.net launcher debuted on Windows PCs in 2016, and since its debut, it has featured two exclusive free-to-play games during their PC launch windows: Quake Champions and Fallout Shelter. Both of those games' PC versions eventually found their way to Steam. Bethesda's latest statement, on the other hand, does not include any indication that the retail-priced Fallout 76 will ever find its way to Valve Software's popular storefront and game-launch service, which charges third-party publishers a 30-percent fee for any transactions.

Enlarge / Some people can do raise goosebumps voluntarily, but how they do so is mysterious. (credit: Fuschia Foot / Flickr)

Imagine taking a popsicle stick and scraping it over your lower teeth. The feel of the wood's texture might give you a case of the squirms, but for Susan Wilson, it’s a gateway to an unusual ability: thinking about it gives her goosebumps, on demand.

Eating popsicles as a young child, she says, “There was a little bit that always stuck on that wooden stick, and you’d scrape—” she breaks off with a mild yelp. “Ooooooh, it’s happening, right now while I’m talking to you. And then I realized as I got older that I just had to think about it and it would give the exact same—oh, I can’t get rid of them now—it would give the same response.”

Based on what we currently know about the body, this probably shouldn’t be possible: the muscles that pull on individual hairs to raise them, goosebump-style, are smooth muscles that aren’t under your control the same way your biceps or quadriceps are. But a paper published last week makes a cautious start on studying the phenomenon, exploring the experiences of 32 people like Wilson. The research found that people who can trigger their own goosebumps describe very similar sensations and triggers—and that the interplay between goosebumps and personality could give useful insights into how emotion works.

Enlarge / A ceamy, white beverage of some sort. (credit: Getty / Thomas Trutschel)

Almonds surely don’t lactate—but keeping various milk products straight may not be a breeze.

HP Hood LLC is voluntarily recalling more than 145,000 half-gallon cartons of its Vanilla Almond Breeze almond milk after a batch was tainted with cow’s milk. “Employee error” was to blame for spoiling the non-dairy drink, according to the company, which announced the recall late last week.

The udder mix-up spilled the bitter truth about the almond milk’s production: it’s being processed in the same facility as cow’s milk, its legen-dairy rival. The revelation may leave a sour taste for some as regulators and lawmakers are currently grappling with the definition of “milk.” The dairy industry, of course, is continuing with its long-standing argument that companies selling non-dairy beverages are profiting off moo-juice’s good name.

Enlarge / The massive stars of η Carinae are enshrouded in a cloud of their own creation. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

During the 1840s, an apparently unremarkable star began to brighten. Over the course of roughly a decade, it became one of the brightest stars visible from Earth. Often, brightening like that means a supernova has destroyed the star, but η Carinae (or Eta Carinae) was still there when it was all over, and it underwent a number of smaller events over the ensuing century and a half.

Modern astronomy hardware has revealed that the resemblance to a supernova goes deeper than these early observations. Imaging of the complex nebula that surrounds η Carinae has revealed that a giant star had ejected roughly 10 times the Sun's mass worth of material into its surroundings during what's now known as the Great Eruption. Imaging also revealed that the system is a binary, containing a second enormous star in an eccentric orbit around the first.

We can't go back in time to observe the Great Eruption with modern instruments. But a team of researchers has been tracking its progress using echoes of light reflected off some dust that was more than 100 light years away from the star. The echoes reveal some material moving at a phenomenal speed—roughly 20,000 kilometers a second. That, combined with other unusual features of the system, led them to propose that there used to be three stars in η Carinae, and the outburst was the result of two of them merging.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks at the International Astronautical Congress on September 29, 2017 in Adelaide, Australia. Behind him is a rendering of the Big Falcon Spaceship that could transport people to Mars. (credit: Mark Brake/Getty Images)

No one can deny that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has thought a lot about how to transport humans safely to Mars with his Big Falcon Rocket. But when it comes to Musk's highly ambitious plans to settle Mars in the coming decades, some critics say Musk hasn't paid enough attention to what people will do once they get there.

However, SpaceX may be getting more serious about preparing for human landings on Mars, both in terms of how to keep people alive as well as to provide them with something meaningful to do. According to private invitations seen by Ars, the company will host a "Mars Workshop" on Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the University of Colorado Boulder. Although the company would not comment directly, a SpaceX official confirmed the event, and said the company regularly meets with a variety of experts concerning its missions to Mars.

This appears to be the first meeting of such magnitude, however, with nearly 60 key scientists and engineers from industry, academia, and government attending the workshop, including a handful of leaders from NASA's Mars exploration program. The invitation for the inaugural Mars meeting encourages participants to contribute to "active discussions regarding what will be needed to make such missions happen." Attendees are being asked to not publicize the workshop or their attendance.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

Announced back in June, AMD's second-generation Threadripper processors are now available for preorder. The top-end part, the Threadripper 2990WX, is a 32-core, 64-thread processor with a total of 64MB of level 3 cache, running at a base clock of 3.0GHz, boosting as high as 4.2GHz. It ships on August 13 and is selling for $1,799.

The basic building blocks of the second-generation Threadrippers are the same as the first-generation parts. Threadripper processors are multi-chip modules (MCMs) containing multiple dies and Infinity Fabric interconnects. AMD calls the basic building block of each chip a Core Complex (CCX), which has four cores, eight threads, and 8MB of level 3 cache. Each chip contains two CCXes. The first round of Threadrippers had four chips, with two of them active and two inactive, for a total of 16 cores and 32 threads. The new second-generation parts announced today make all four chips active, bringing the counts up to 32 cores and 64 threads.

The new chips increase the total power to 250W compared to 180W for the first-gen parts. However, AMD has said that the new processors will work in existing motherboards using the X399 chipset. Motherboards that can't deliver substantially more than 180W will see limits to overclocking and turbo boosting, but they should nonetheless work correctly. New boards built for the second-gen parts should offer a bit more headroom.