Month: October 2018

Enlarge / A new Nintendo Switch is reportedly launching in 2019, so we're flexing with the original model in hopes that the next Switch is more powerful. (Check out our Switch-at-the-gym article, if you're wondering what the heck this image is about.) (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Plans for a Nintendo Switch hardware revision, slated to launch sometime in 2019, are currently underway, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The brief report, which went live early Thursday morning, pins Nintendo's plans for a new Switch version (assumedly compatible with all existing Switch software) in the "latter half of 2019, perhaps as soon as summer." Everything we know thus far appears to center on one part of the system's revision: the screen. The WSJ cites "suppliers" as one source of the leaked information, and the report's only firm suggestion about changed hardware revolves around the screen being upgraded from an older LCD manufacturing process. (WSJ's report does not explicitly narrow down its "supplier" sources as part of the screen-production industry.)

One insight missing from the WSJ report is that Nintendo's original primary supplier of LCD panels, Japan Display Inc, made far fewer Switch screens in 2017 than they did in the system's 2016 run-up. According to one Nikkei report, that switch may be due to JDI shifting gears as a company, and focusing more on OLED panel production than on LCD, in the past year. That report did not hint at JDI making such a switch in anticipation of Nintendo demanding higher-quality panels for future hardware.

Enlarge / A render of Civilization VI running on the iPhone XS Max. (credit: Aspyr Media)

Starting today, Civilization VI is available for iPhones on the Apple App Store. It was previously available on iPads but not iPhones. And of course, it has long been a staple of PC and Mac gaming.

The new port faces a daunting task—squeezing an extremely complex game onto a tiny screen—and it asks players to shell out for the trouble. While you can play a short free trial when you first download it, unlocking all the features and the ability to play longterm will ultimately cost $60 up front; that's the same price as the desktop version. Port developer Aspyr Media is selling the game for 60 percent off from the launch today up through October 16, though.

If you're willing to spend, you'll get the full, real, desktop Civilization VI experience in your pocket.

Enlarge / Hyperloop Transportation Technologies' new passenger capsule. (credit: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies)

In August 2013, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk published a white paper detailing a "Hyperloop," a super-fast passenger train that would overcome the usual friction by levitating above its track on air-bearings, in an enclosed low-pressure tube. In the five years since, advancements have been incremental—a few interesting engineering choices have been swamped by announcements of feasibility studies for routes between populated cities.

Back in 2013, Musk declined to start a Hyperloop company himself (although he has not hesitated to start companies since then, perhaps suggesting that the extra work load was not the limiting factor). Instead, he made his work open to any startups that might want to tackle the challenge, and started a contest series for engineering students to run their own test pods.

Two startups have since dominated the scene: Virgin Hyperloop One, which recently enjoyed a significant investment from Richard Branson's Virgin Group, and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), which began as a collaboration among 800 engineers, designers, and other interested parties.

Enlarge / Hyperloop Transportation Technologies' new passenger capsule. (credit: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies)

In August 2013, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk published a white paper detailing a "Hyperloop," a super-fast passenger train that would overcome the usual friction by levitating above its track on air-bearings, in an enclosed low-pressure tube. In the five years since, advancements have been incremental—a few interesting engineering choices have been swamped by announcements of feasibility studies for routes between populated cities.

Back in 2013, Musk declined to start a Hyperloop company himself (although he has not hesitated to start companies since then, perhaps suggesting that the extra work load was not the limiting factor). Instead, he made his work open to any startups that might want to tackle the challenge, and started a contest series for engineering students to run their own test pods.

Two startups have since dominated the scene: Virgin Hyperloop One, which recently enjoyed a significant investment from Richard Branson's Virgin Group, and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), which began as a collaboration among 800 engineers, designers, and other interested parties.

Enlarge / An artist's impression of what the massive system would look like. (credit: NASA/ESA)

At this point, we've spotted thousands of planets orbiting other stars. But we still don't have a good picture of whether exosolar systems are similar to our own Solar System. Things like asteroids and comets are far too small to resolve given our current technologies. But there is a chance we could detect the presence of a major feature of our Solar System elsewhere: exomoons. There are ways we could currently detect them, but orbital dynamics makes doing so fairly unlikely.

But a group of researchers have suggested there may be an exomoon orbiting a planet discovered by the Kepler mission, and the researchers' data was compelling enough to get them time on the Hubble Space Telescope. But the additional data both makes the case for the moon better and worse (don't worry, we will explain that). And the model that fits the data best involves a Neptune-sized moon orbiting a super-Jupiter.

Timing is everything

There are two ways to potentially identify an exomoon. The first involves the amount of light blocked while the exoplanet orbits its host star. When the moon isn't eclipsing or being eclipsed by its planet, it should block a small bit of additional light during the transit. Look at enough transits, and there could be a regular pattern of additional light blocked. But this method relies on the moon being large enough to block a significant amount of light, which is something that's far from guaranteed.

Enlarge / Leon Lederman outside Fermilab in May 2008. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

He was a leading light of particle physics, directing one of the most prestigious physics laboratories in the world. He won the Nobel Prize and irked his physics colleagues by coining the term "the god particle" to describe the Higgs boson. That long, rich life ended early Wednesday morning when physicist Leon Lederman died of complications from dementia at the age of 96.

Lederman first made his mark as a young physicist working at Columbia University's spanking-new cyclotron in the 1950s. In June 1956, two theoretical physicists, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, published a paper proposing that parity might not be conserved in weak interactions, suggesting several experiments to test their hypothesis. Parity had been considered a fundamental symmetry in physics, holding that our world is indistinguishable from its mirror image. In other words, there should be no difference, at the subatomic scale, between left- and right-handed rotations, or opposite sides of a subatomic particle.

Between Christmas and New Year's, a team of physicists at the National Bureau of Standards led by Chien-Shiung Wu performed a series of experiments. Wu and her colleagues were startled to find that—at least when it came to the beta decay of cobalt-60 nuclei—parity was indeed violated: nature appeared to be slightly left-handed. Lederman was lunching at a Chinese restaurant near Columbia with coworkers when he heard about the results. He quickly verified them by performing his own different set of experiments and came to the same conclusion.

Enlarge (credit: Garmin)

Garmin announced a partnership today that will excite its users who rely on Spotify for music. Those with Garmin Fenix 5 Plus devices can now download the new Spotify app from Garmin's Connect IQ app store. The app brings Spotify integration to the Fenix 5 Plus series, allowing users to download playlists for offline listening.

The Fenix 5 Plus series contains the newest Fenix devices, which are some of Garmin's most expensive wearables, starting at $549 for a Fenix 5. Music storage is a standard feature on all Fenix 5 Plus models, but users were previously limited to downloading personal tracks or playlists from iHeartRadio or Deezer if they are paid subscribers.

Now, Spotify joins the music sources available on the Fenix 5 Plus series with its own mobile app. When connected to Wi-Fi, premium Spotify subscribers can download playlists to a Fenix 5 Plus watch so they can listen to music without their smartphone nearby. Unlike other smartwatches like the Apple Watch Series 4, Fenix 5 Plus devices don't have built-in LTE. Users won't be able to stream music from Spotify, but they can download tracks for offline listening using Bluetooth headphones connected to their smartwatch.