Month: August 2018

Samsung

NEW YORK CITY—Samsung has officially taken the wraps off the Galaxy Note9. The phone follows closely in the footsteps of the Galaxy Note8 but with new specs, a bigger battery, and a few other upgrades.

First up, the specs. Samsung's $999 smartphone has a 6.4-inch 2960×1440 OLED display—a 0.1-inch upgrade over last year—6GB or 8GB of RAM, and a big battery increase from 3300mAh to 4000mAh. In the US you'll get a Snapdragon 845, while internationally Samsung will be using its own Exynos 9820. Storage starts at 128GB and goes all the way up to 512GB, which, with 8GB of RAM, adds up to a $1,249 price tag. If that's not enough storage for you, there's also a MicroSD slot. As usual Samsung is about a version behind the latest Android release—the phone comes with Android 8.1 Oreo, not the newly released Android 9 Pie.

After nearly a year of vague, story-focused trailers, Rockstar released a video this morning showing the first gameplay footage from the anticipated Red Dead Redemption 2.

The video places the focus on Arthur Morgan, a "senior gun in the Vanderling gang" that's on the run "from the pressures of civilized life." The gang will be continuously forced to flee from encroaching law enforcement and civilization, according to the video, setting up temporary remote camps where they can eat, sleep, do chores, play games, or share stories. It sounds like these camps will serve as the primary hub system for the game, where you can meet Morgan's fellow gang members and talk with them to "find new secrets, fun things to do, and opportunities for mischief."

While you can still shoot pretty much everything that moves in Red Dead Redemption 2, the video highlights how "guns aren't the only way to interact with the environment." Morgan will be able to talk himself into or out of trouble with rival tough guys or law enforcement officers, escalating or diffusing situations and forming friendships or making enemies.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech)

The neutron is a bit of a headache for physics. A neutron is an electrically neutral particle that helps glue protons together in the nucleus of atoms. Inside the atom, it is happily stable.

But a neutron alone is an unhappy beast. After about 10 minutes, it will emit an electron and an antineutrino and turn into a proton. The decay is all good, but there's a problem with the "about 10 minutes" part of things. In one set of experiments, we have determined that the half-life of a lonely neutron is 879.6s. But, in another set of experiments, we’ve found that the neutron has a half-life of 888s (these numbers might be slightly out of date now). The chance of these two being different by accident is now about one in 100,000. 

One possible explanation for the difference is that a subset of neutrons decays to a relatively light particle of dark matter. Now, a pair of papers has punctured that proposal.