Month: October 2018

Ron Amadeo

The Pixel 3 has been one of the wildest product launches in recent memory. The leaks arrived early and continuously, starting with the screen protector leak all the way back in May. This not only gave us the basic outline of the phone, but it provided some extremely accurate renders, too, giving the Internet a look nearly five months before Google intended to ship. The initial response to the design was brutal, but it was too late—the Pixel 3 was already in the late stages of production. From there, leaks continued, and the launch lead-up felt like a slow-motion car crash. Dread it. Run from it. The Pixel 3 design arrives all the same.

It's now year three of Google's hardware initiative, and some product categories are clearly going better than others. The shining example of what Google Hardware should be is probably the Google Home brand. Google built a comprehensive lineup of unique, beautiful, well-performing hardware and paired it with industry-leading software, all at a range of prices that make the ecosystem easy to dive into.

Enlarge / In first-person view, you're staring at a wall. With the third-person emote camera, you can see what's coming around that corner. (credit: Twitter / GameSkinny)

The first-person perspective in shooters usually brings an inherent kind of balance to the constant battle for cover—if you peek your head out to see an opponent, they'll be able to see you as well. Over the weekend, though, Black Ops 4 players found the game's new gesture system had the unintended side effect of breaking this balance, letting players easily and safely see around cover from a third-person perspective.

When you perform a Fortnite-style gesture in Black Ops 4, the camera instantly zooms out to a third-person view with full, free-look control of the camera. The intent is for players to enjoy their own animations from any angle. But the new viewpoint also allows for illicit and completely protected peeking around walls and corners, as can be seen in multiple video and photo examples that have been posted online since the game's launch.

Developer Treyarch is wasting no time in addressing player concerns over the apparently unintended unbalancing. In a statement posted to Reddit Saturday, the company wrote that it is working on an update that will remove the free-look third-person camera from the "competitive" portions of the game.

Enlarge (credit: Julie Doll, MSU/NSF KBS LTER Site)

The climate crises humanity is producing due to our profligate burning of fossil fuels is happening in the face of mounting evidence that said burning was very, very bad for the Earth. Some of the problems are now officially going to come even sooner than anticipated. If we want to have a hope of even mitigating these problems, we must change our habits, preferably yesterday.

While burning fossil fuels is a huge part of the problem, food production is also a primary driver of climate change. It is responsible for about 25 to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond that it also depletes groundwater, converts carbon-sequestering forest and jungle into cropland, and dumps excess nitrogen and phosphorous into soil, water, and air. Under business-as-usual scenarios, these effects will probably at least double by 2050 since the global population is slated to increase by about a third, and the income of the global population is also slated to increase—all of those new and newly rich(er) people are likely going to want to eat and eat well.

At that point, the environmental effects of food production will be “beyond the planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity.”

Enlarge / Barley grain used in the production of beer at the Asahi Kanagawa Brewery in Japan (credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

There's nothing quite like putting your feet up after a long, hot summer day and enjoying a refreshing cold brew if you're a beer lover. But a warming climate could give rise to global barley shortages, with a resulting shortage of beer. That's the conclusion of a new study just published in Nature Plants.

Beer brewers account for roughly 17 percent of the barley consumption worldwide, although it varies from region to region, with the vast majority of crops harvested as feed for livestock. If barley becomes too scarce, more of it will be funneled to livestock, since beer is technically a luxury good. The shortage of barley will give rise to steep price hikes and corresponding decreases in global consumption. While the most affluent beer lovers will still be able to indulge in a pint or two, "Future climate and pricing conditions could put beer out of reach for hundreds of millions of people around the world," says study co-author Steven Davis of the University of California, Irvine.

Davis himself is a beer aficionado and home brewer, who frequently travels to China for research collaborations. During one such trip a couple of years ago, he spoke with a scientist at the Chinese Agricultural Academy of Sciences, who was studying the global supply of beer. (China is currently the largest consumer of beer and thus would be hit hard by a severe barley shortage.) They decided to collaborate on a study investigating the impact of climate change on beer, partnering with other researchers in the United Kingdom and Mexico.

Enlarge (credit: Stefan Marjoram)

There's sad news from the UK this morning, and it doesn't even involve Brexit. (Actually, it does, sort of.) Bloodhound SSC, the land speed record car that's been designed to break the 1,000mph limit, has entered administration (a process similar to bankruptcy in the US). This isn't the final outcome for the project, but Bloodhound SSC does need to raise about $33 million (£25 million) in order to see things through to completion. And as if fate were not cruel enough, the announcement comes 21 years and a day after the last successful land speed record attempt, one that involved many of the same people.

Setting a new land speed record is no easy task. First, you have to build a wheeled vehicle capable of the speed required. In this case it's a single-seat machine, powered by a one-two combo of jet engine (a Rolls-Royce EJ200) and rocket (a hybrid solid fuel/liquid oxidizer design from Nammo).

But even once you have your vehicle working, you need somewhere suitable to run it. A successful land speed record requires timed runs over a one-mile distance, run in both directions within one hour, so even a really long runway is only good if you want to test the first 20 percent of the speed range.