Month: September 2018

给江小夏的第一千零一封信

OnePlus is working on a followup to the OnePlus 6, the OnePlus 6T. The company's latest smartphone should launch sometime in October, and until then we're getting a slow, continual drip of information on the device. The latest news is not so great. The company has revealed that it's dumping the headphone jack on the OnePlus 6T.

In an interview with TechRadar, OnePlus CEO Carl Pei confirmed that the "next OnePlus handset" would not have the ubiquitous and universally compatible audio jack. "By removing the jack we've freed up more space, allowing us to put more new technology into the product," Pei told TechRadar. "One of the big things is something our users have asked us for: improved battery life."

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Smith Collection)

Dr. José Baselga, a prominent cancer expert and chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has resigned amid revelations that he repeatedly failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from healthcare companies to prestigious medical journals in which he published high-profile research articles.

Baselga’s lack of disclosure came to light in a joint investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica, which was published by the Times on September 8.

As the investigation noted, Baselga had relationships with at least a dozen companies, including board memberships and advisory roles at corporations such as Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Some of those positions required him to assume fiduciary responsibilities to protect those companies’ interests, the Times notes. In presentations and conferences in 2017 and 2018, for instance, Baselga appeared to put an overly positive spin on results of clinical trials sponsored by Roche—without noting in those instances his ties to the company.

Longobard grave goods and skeleton. (credit: Institute for Advanced Study)

The genetics of Europe are a bit strange. Just within historic times, it has seen waves of migrations, invasions, and the rise and fall of empires—all of which should have mixed its populations up thoroughly. Yet, if you look at the modern populations, there's little sign of all this upheaval and some indications that many of the populations have been in place since agriculture spread across the continent.

This was rarely more obvious than during the contraction and collapse of the Roman Empire. Various Germanic tribes from northeastern Europe poured into Roman territory in the west only to be followed by the force they were fleeing, the Huns. Before it was over, one of the groups ended up founding a kingdom in North Africa that extended throughout much of the Mediterranean, while another ended up controlling much of Italy.

It's that last group, the Longobards (often shorted as "Lombards"), that is the focus of a new paper. We know very little of them or any of the other barbarian tribes that roared through Western Europe other than roughly contemporary descriptions of where they came from. But a study of the DNA left behind in the cemeteries of the Longobards provides some indication of their origins and how they interacted with the Europeans they encountered.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Because Volvo was only showing the 360c concept in Gothenburg, we elected to accept a paid flight and two nights in a hotel in Gothenburg in order to attend this event.

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN—Concept cars come in a range of different flavors. There's the "you'll be able to buy a slightly less stylish version of this" concept, meant to get the public ready for a new model that's just months from sale. There's the, "Hey look at us (and ignore our bland production cars)" concept, like the Chrysler Atlantic or Cadillac Sixteen. And then there's the, "Let's imagine 20 years off into the future" concept. Volvo's latest, called 360c, is definitely one of the latter.

"This is an example of how new opportunities will open up with new technologies," said Volvo CEO and President Håkan Samuelsson as we got our first glimpse of the 360c. It's an optimistic reading of how Volvo thinks the company might evolve as electric propulsion, autonomous driving, and AI assistants make the process of getting from A to B much more multimodal.

Enlarge / Better keep paying for your Switch Online subscription if you want that cloud-based save data to remain accessible. (credit: Nintendo)

[Update Sept. 25: Nintendo has now confirmed to IGN that it will retain players' cloud saves for six months after they cancel their subscription. "Nintendo will allow users who resubscribe within 180 days to access their previous Save Data Cloud backups," the statement reads, in part.

This seems to be a reversal of Nintendo's previous plans, especially since a Nintendo UK FAQ still says, "Save data stored with Save Data Cloud cannot be kept outside of the duration of your Nintendo Switch Online membership." The new policy puts Nintendo in line with Sony, which also retains cloud saves for six months after a PlayStation Plus subscription lapses.]

Original Story

Enlarge / The archaeological site of Pokrovnik during excavation with the modern village of Dalmatia, Croatia, in the background. (credit: Andrew M.T. Moore)

If you needed another reason not to lick the artifacts on your next trip to the museum, archaeologists have you covered; they’ve found chemical traces of 7,000-year-old cheese still stuck on ceramic containers from two Neolithic farming villages in Croatia.

This find is nothing like the 3,200-year-old chunk of cheese recently found in an Egyptian tomb; after 7,000 years, all that’s left is a microscopic residue on the inner surface of pottery fragments, once used by the farmers who settled just east of the Adriatic Sea to raise crops, cattle, goats, and sheep. But that faint residue of long-gone cheese is older than the Egyptian cheese by about 4,000 years, and archaeologists say it’s the earliest direct evidence of cheese production ever found.

“The cheese would likely have been a firm, softer cheese, something like what we today have as a farmer's cheese or Feta,” Pennsylvania State University archaeologist Sarah McClure told Ars Technica.

Enlarge / Johann Sebastian Bach. (credit: Elias Gottlob Haussmann)

Sony Music Entertainment has been forced to abandon its claim that it owned 47 seconds of video of musician James Rhodes using his own piano to play music written by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Last week, Rhodes recorded a short video of himself playing a portion of Bach's first Partita and posted it to Facebook. Bach died in 1750, so the music is obviously in the public domain. But that didn't stop Sony from claiming the rights to the audio in Partita's video.

"Your video matches 47 seconds of audio owned by Sony Music Entertainment," said a notice Rhodes received on Facebook. Facebook responded by muting the audio in Rhodes' video.