Month: August 2018

Enlarge / The Logitech G Pro Wireless Gaming Mouse. (credit: Logitech)

Gaming hardware is not often known for the tastefulness of its design, but the $150 Logitech G Pro Wireless Gaming Mouse bucks that trend—you could use this in public without drawing any undue attention to yourself.

The new mouse has been designed with the feedback of more than 50 pro gamers—including a pro Overwatch team that used it when it won the first Overwatch League—to ensure a comfortable size and shape. The gaming cred shows in a few places: it has a new 16,000 dpi sensor that can track movement at over 400 inches per second to enable quick, precise motion, and it can report its motion up to 1,000 times per second to ensure low latencies. Its low weight (80 grams) and lack of cable mean that it can be thrown around effortlessly, enabling the fastest reactions.

Though the new sensor boasts a high resolution, Logitech claims it uses one-tenth the power of its previous optical sensor. The result is that the mouse can last 60 hours on a single charge. This is enough to go many games—even a whole tournament—without having to worry about power.

Enlarge / Excavations in the Denisova Cave. (credit: IAET SB RAS, Sergei Zelensky)

One can be forgiven for thinking that the first modern humans who ventured out of Africa stumbled into a vibrant bar scene. DNA from just a single cave in Siberia revealed that it had been occupied by two archaic human groups that had interbred with the newly arrived modern humans. This included both the Neanderthals, whom we knew about previously, and the Denisovans, who we didn't even know existed and still know little about other than their DNA sequences. The DNA also revealed that one of the Denisovans had a Neanderthal ancestor a few hundred generations back in his past.

But in almost all of these cases, the ancestry seems to have come from a single exchange of chromosomes many generations prior. There was little indication that the interbreeding was frequent.

Now, the same cave has yielded a bone fragment that indicates the interbreeding may have been common. DNA sequencing revealed that the bone fragment's original owner had a mom that was Neanderthal and a father who was Denisovan. The fact that we have so few DNA samples from this time and that one is the immediate product of intermating gives us a strong hint that we should expect more examples in the future.

Enlarge / Human villains and rivals ground Octopath Traveler in a set of societal rules to follow or break.

Octopath Traveler isn’t structured like most other Japanese RPGs. Part of this is apparent on the face of it: the game splits its narrative into eight stories following just as many protagonists. Each has its own tale to tell, and they don’t criss-cross very often.

But the differences from usual JRPG fare run deeper than that. Octopath Traveler rarely sports the classic good-versus-evil tropes of its genre peers. The laws and rules of its world aren’t cleanly established by some magic order, world-ending demons, or fantastical religions. instead, those details are built slowly and organically in the player’s mind through characters’ actions and motivations.

Each playable character has a role to play, tied to a “job” system like the ones found in certain Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games. Therion, a thief, can steal items from enemies during combat, for example. Primrose, a dancer, uses her movements to inspire her allies with different improvements.

These jobs don’t just determine the game’s mechanics, though. They also play an equally important role in defining the story of each character and how they perceive, and are perceived by, the world around them. At its best, Octopath Traveler uses these professions to force its cast to learn important lessons about that world, which would otherwise be left up to the player to guess at.

Enlarge / A West Covina firefighter pulls hose away from a horse barn that burns as the Mendocino Complex Fire moves through the area on July 31, 2018 in Lakeport, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

A fire department whose data was throttled by Verizon Wireless while it was fighting California's largest-ever wildfire has rejected Verizon's claim that the throttling was just a customer service error and "has nothing to do with net neutrality." The throttling "has everything to do with net neutrality," a Santa Clara County official said.

Verizon yesterday acknowledged that it shouldn't have continued throttling Santa Clara County Fire Department's "unlimited" data service while the department was battling the Mendocino Complex Fire. Verizon said the department had chosen an unlimited data plan that gets throttled to speeds of 200kbps or 600kbps after using 25GB a month but that Verizon failed to follow its policy of "remov[ing] data speed restrictions when contacted in emergency situations."

"This was a customer support mistake" and not a net neutrality issue, Verizon said.