Month: February 2019

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Although we make every effort to cover our own travel costs, in this case McLaren flew us to Phoenix to drive the 600LT (and the 720S Spider; more on that next week) and provided two nights in a hotel.

I'll admit it: I wasn't sure if I was going to like the McLaren 600LT Spider. I wasn't the biggest fan of the McLaren 570S, the car it's based on—unlike almost everyone else who's driven one, I'd pick an Audi R8 as my daily drivable mid-engined supercar. While the 570S made concessions to practicality, I never gelled with the way it looks, and it had enough electronic foibles that they became one of my overriding memories of my time with the car. But the 600LT makes many fewer compromises in the name of everyday use, and it's all the better for it.

Veteran McLaren watchers will know from just the name that there's something special about this one: in McLaren-speak, LT means "long tail." The first long-tail McLarens—ten F1 GTR race cars and three F1 GT road cars—appeared in 1997, with new bodywork that extended the nose and tail to increase downforce at speed.

Enlarge (credit: Parker Pearson et al. 2019)

Excavations at two ancient quarry sites in western Wales suggest how ancient people probably quarried some of the stones now standing at Stonehenge.

The 42 stones in question are some of the smaller parts at Stonehenge, relatively speaking: they still weigh two to four tons each. They're called the bluestones, and they came all the way from western Wales. Chemical analysis has even matched some of them to two particular quarries on the northern slopes of the Preseli Hills.

One, an outcrop called Carn Goedog, seems to have supplied most of the bluish-gray, white-speckled dolerite at Stonehenge. And another outcrop in the valley below, Craig Rhos-y-felin, supplied most of the rhyolite. University College London archaeologist Michael Parker Pearson and his colleagues have spent the last eight years excavating the ancient quarry sites, and that work has revealed some new information about the origins of Stonehenge.

Enlarge / Qualcomm's new QTM525 5G mmWave antenna module and Snapdragon X55 5G modem. (credit: Qualcomm)

Two months ago, Qualcomm held the Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii. That's where the company talked for two days about how the Snapdragon X50 modem would usher in the era of 5G mmWave. That was all for this year, and while there still isn't a single product readily for sale with the X50 modem, Qualcomm is already talking about its 5G solution for next year.

Today, Qualcomm announced its "second-generation 5G solution," the Snapdragon X55 5G modem. To go along with the new modem is a new 5G mmWave RF antenna called the QTM525, which obsoletes the QTM052 the company was pairing with the X50 modem. Overall, it's a faster, smaller, and more-compatible version of Qualcomm's 5G chip solution. We tore into Qualcomm's first-generation 5G parts after Qualcomm's big tech show, and while these "second-generation" components don't really address the issues raised in that article, they are a step in the right direction.

Qualcomm says these new chips won't be out until "late 2019." That means the X50 and QTM052 will still be filling smartphones and sucking down batteries for the majority of 2019. With Mobile World Congress happening at the end of February, a bunch of OEMs are going to announce 5G hardware this week and next week, and those devices should run previously announced X50 hardware. The X55 is more like "Next year's 5G hardware," but Qualcomm likes to talk about these things a year in advance.

Enlarge / Not so fast, says the FDA. (credit: Getty | Silver Screen Collection)

The US Food and Drug Administration issued an alert Tuesday, February 19, warning older consumers against seeking infusions of blood plasma harvested from younger people. Despite being peddled as anti-aging treatments and cures for a range of conditions, the transfusions are unproven and potentially harmful.

In a statement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and the director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, Peter Marks, wrote:

Simply put, we're concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies.

Establishments in several states are now selling young blood plasma, which is the liquid portion of blood that contains proteins for clotting. The sellers suggest that doses of young plasma can treat conditions ranging from normal aging and memory loss to dementia, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, or post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the FDA.

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Electronic Arts is opting all users out of the "real name sharing" option on its Origin gaming service following complaints that some users may have been entered into the program without their consent.

The option to "show my real name on my profile" (as opposed to just sharing an online handle) is buried in the privacy settings for every EA Origin account, as it is for many other gaming networks. But Randi Lee Harper, the founder of the nonprofit Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, recently noted in a Twitter thread that her real name was being shared via the account without any opt-in.

Harper said anecdotal reports and spot checks of others with Origin accounts showed that the setting "has been seemingly randomly enabled" for a number of other Origin users. Accounts created between 2013 and 2015 seem to have more likelihood of having the option enabled by default, Harper said, but she added that she "can't find any kind of commonality in the data. It seems so random." (New accounts created today default the real name sharing to be off.)

Enlarge / Marketing material for SkyStream TV, which uses video from Omniverse. (credit: SkyStream TV)

Most of the major Hollywood movie studios are trying to cripple multiple alleged pirate TV services with a single lawsuit.

The studios last week filed a copyright infringement suit against Omniverse One World Television Inc., which provides streaming video to several online TV services. Omniverse claims to have legal rights to the content, but the studios say it doesn't.

The complaint was filed Thursday in US District Court for the Central District of California by Columbia Pictures, Disney, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. The studios previously used lawsuits to shut down the maker of a streaming device called the Dragon Box and another called TickBox. The studios' new lawsuit says that Omniverse supplied content to Dragon Box and to other alleged pirate services that are still operating.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, the Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a discount on the current-gen model of Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon notebook, which is down to $1,063 at Lenovo with the code "THINKPRESDAY." And yes, the coupon has to be in ALL CAPS for it to work.

Lenovo's on-site prices tend to fluctuate wildly, but the X1 Carbon typically goes for around $1,400, making this good for a roughly $340 discount. As of this writing, Lenovo is telling users to apply the code "THINKPRESIDENT," but the code above actually cuts the price by another $75 or so. Why? No clue, but the Dealmaster isn't complaining.

As for the X1 Carbon itself, it's great. You can check out our review for a full rundown, but in short, we said it ticked all the necessary boxes for a high-end Ultrabook. It's not a convertible, and there's no 4K option, but it performs well, gets good battery life, and has the necessary Thunderbolt 3 ports without ditching legacy ports like USB-A or HDMI. It's sufficiently thin (0.63 inches), light (2.49 pounds), and well-made, and its keyboard, as is typical of a ThinkPad, is excellent. Its big downside is that it's relatively expensive, but that's obviously negated here.