Month: August 2018

Enlarge / A few gadgets we think will be appreciated this school year. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

College is a time for meeting new people, opening up your worldview, taking in new experiences, reading (please, for the love of God, read), and generally experiencing the last years of a life untainted by taxes and a daily job.

It is not a time to care about things—if I could just write “books” and leave this buying guide at that, I would. But a modern student requires a few equally modern gadgets to get through the school year, and there are certainly a few pieces of technology that can make their life on campus feel a little less overwhelming and a little more enjoyable.

So, as we’ve done a few times already this year, we’ve dug through our recent reviews to put together a list of preferred gadgets, this time aimed at those heading back to school in the next few weeks. Because we’re dealing with students, we mainly focused on the affordable stuff. (We also tried to avoid anything that could too easily become a beer bong—books, everyone, books!)

Enlarge / A few gadgets we think will be appreciated this school year. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

College is a time for meeting new people, opening up your worldview, taking in new experiences, reading (please, for the love of God, read), and generally experiencing the last years of a life untainted by taxes and a daily job.

It is not a time to care about things—if I could just write “books” and leave this buying guide at that, I would. But a modern student requires a few equally modern gadgets to get through the school year, and there are certainly a few pieces of technology that can make their life on campus feel a little less overwhelming and a little more enjoyable.

So, as we’ve done a few times already this year, we’ve dug through our recent reviews to put together a list of preferred gadgets, this time aimed at those heading back to school in the next few weeks. Because we’re dealing with students, we mainly focused on the affordable stuff. (We also tried to avoid anything that could too easily become a beer bong—books, everyone, books!)

If you need more power than the typical 13-inch Ultrabook can handle, Lenovo's new mobile workstations might be the answer.

The ThinkPad P1 looks like a 15-inch Ultrabook, 0.7 inches thick and under 4lbs, but inside, it has a mobile Xeon processor, up to 64GB of ECC RAM, and as much as 4TB SSD storage. A discrete GPU, up to the Nvidia Quadro P2000, drives that display (either 1920×1080 300 nit, 72 percent of NTSC, or 3840×2160 400 nit 10-bit-per-channel supporting 100 percent of the Adobe color gamut and touch). It has a good selection of ports—two Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C, two USB 3.1 generation 1 Type A, HDMI 2.0, mini-gigabit Ethernet (with a little dongle), 3.5mm headset, and microSD, and it has 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5. The battery is a substantial 80WHr.

Lenovo

If you need more power than the typical 13-inch Ultrabook can handle, Lenovo's new mobile workstations might be the answer.

The ThinkPad P1 looks like a 15-inch Ultrabook, 0.7 inches thick and under 4lbs, but inside, it has a mobile Xeon processor, up to 64GB of ECC RAM, and as much as 4TB SSD storage. A discrete GPU, up to the Nvidia Quadro P2000, drives that display (either 1920×1080 300 nit, 72 percent of NTSC, or 3840×2160 400 nit 10-bit-per-channel supporting 100 percent of the Adobe color gamut and touch). It has a good selection of ports—two Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C, two USB 3.1 generation 1 Type A, HDMI 2.0, mini-gigabit Ethernet (with a little dongle), 3.5mm headset, and microSD, and it has 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5. The battery is a substantial 80WHr.

Lenovo

Enlarge / Artist's reconstruction of the east and west mounds at Çatalhöyük. In the foreground, you can see the newer west mound, with the older east mound decaying in the background. (credit: Çatalhöyük Research Project)

Around 8,200 years ago, melting glaciers poured fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic, causing the climate in Europe and Southwest Asia to turn suddenly colder and drier for about the next 160 years. Evidence of that event shows up in ice cores from Greenland, tree rings and lake sediments in Europe, and lake sediments and peat deposits in Southwest Asia.

How did it affect people who were only beginning to adapt to agriculture? Archaeologists can’t confidently link what was happening at an archaeological site, like Çatalhöyük in Turkey, with what pollen and oxygen isotopes say was happening 160km (99.4 miles) away at Lake Nar, because local conditions can vary.

New chemical analysis of animal-fat residue in broken pottery has now given us a clearer look at how changes in the North Atlantic impacted life at Çatalhöyük. Local climate turned slightly cooler year-round and noticeably drier in the summer, which would have reduced crop yields and food availability for local farmers’ cattle and goats. Equipped with direct evidence of local climate shifts, archaeologists examined artifacts at the site to understand how people coped with the lean times.

Enlarge / Artist's reconstruction of the east and west mounds at Çatalhöyük. In the foreground, you can see the newer west mound, with the older east mound decaying in the background. (credit: Çatalhöyük Research Project)

Around 8,200 years ago, melting glaciers poured fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic, causing the climate in Europe and Southwest Asia to turn suddenly colder and drier for about the next 160 years. Evidence of that event shows up in ice cores from Greenland, tree rings and lake sediments in Europe, and lake sediments and peat deposits in Southwest Asia.

How did it affect people who were only beginning to adapt to agriculture? Archaeologists can’t confidently link what was happening at an archaeological site, like Çatalhöyük in Turkey, with what pollen and oxygen isotopes say was happening 160km (99.4 miles) away at Lake Nar, because local conditions can vary.

New chemical analysis of animal-fat residue in broken pottery has now given us a clearer look at how changes in the North Atlantic impacted life at Çatalhöyük. Local climate turned slightly cooler year-round and noticeably drier in the summer, which would have reduced crop yields and food availability for local farmers’ cattle and goats. Equipped with direct evidence of local climate shifts, archaeologists examined artifacts at the site to understand how people coped with the lean times.

Raphael GAILLARDE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Bugatti in 2018 is precisely where corporate parent Volkswagen wants it to be. The Alsatian automaker is once again known the world over for making what some consider to be the ultimate road car: a V16 engine with four-digit horsepower, a top speed so fast no tire can handle it, and a build so over-engineered it has a seven-digit price tag. We're living in the second heyday for a marque that first rose to prominence almost a century ago.

That first golden age was built at the race track. The company's most famous machine was the Type 35, a car you could drive to a Grand Prix, win, and then drive home—assuming you had the talent and could afford one, obviously. In its latest incarnation, Bugatti has largely avoided competition. But in the mid-1990s, just before VW assumed control of the storied name, it had another go at finding a motorsports halo.

Enlarge / Apple demonstrates Group Facetime at WWDC 2018. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Apple released the seventh beta build of iOS 12 today. The update is focused on performance improvements on older devices—a tentpole promise of iOS 12—but the beta release notes reveal something unexpected about the public release of iOS 12 later this year: the Group FaceTime feature won't make the cut.

Demonstrated prominently in Apple's WWDC keynote event earlier this year, Group FaceTime would allow more than two people to participate in a FaceTime video call at once, with a presentation similar to that of longtime conference-call staple Google Hangouts. Apple has said Group FaceTime will support up to 32 simultaneous participants and that it will be supported on both macOS and iOS.

Apple's iOS 12 beta 7 release notes (PDF) note the removal of Group FaceTime from the beta (and from the eventual public release) with the following: