Month: April 2019

Enlarge / Say hello to the Valve Index, developed and manufactured by game studio Valve. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

BELLEVUE, Washington—The Valve Index, a new virtual reality system from the creators of beloved video game series like Half-Life and Portal and the mega-popular Steam game store, is an aspirational product. Its sales pitch, as explained by various Valve staffers, revolves around the VR experience of tomorrow.

That's a nice way of saying that Valve is going for features and dreams rather than affordability with its $999 Valve Index kit, which ships "by the end of June" after "limited" pre-orders go live on May 1 for users in the contiguous US and most of Western Europe (the UK is left out for now).

But through the course of Valve's reveal event, its aspirations for VR's future became abundantly clear—and abundantly conservative. If you saw last month's news about Valve's VR headset and began dreaming big, today is the day to scale those dreams back.

Enlarge / Bonobos carrying the footprint of an ancient, extinct species of ape. (credit: flickr user: Reflexiste)

Chimpanzee fossils are thin on the ground. After their lineage parted ways with ours, our human ancestors spent millennia kicking about in arid regions and caves ideal for preserving our remains. The ancestors of modern chimpanzees and bonobos, meanwhile, were hanging out in the lush jungles of central Africa.

“There’s a reason pretty much every image of a paleontologist in the field is in a desert or badlands,” writes paleontologist Dave Hone. Fossils can be found only when we have access to exposed rocks that were formed in the epoch of interest, and so “the rainforests of the Congo... are useless.” Add to that the quick decomposition of bodies in rich, acidic rainforest soil, and you have a huge gap in understanding where our modern cousins come from.

But “genomic fossils” could fill some of that gap. A paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution this week reports finding the footprint of an extinct ape species in the genome of modern bonobos. That footprint can tell us roughly when these ancient apes must have lived, and where. It can even—with a lot of speculation—hint at some of the characteristics of the “ghost ape.”

Enlarge / Even this copperhead thinks that's crazy. (credit: Getty | Smith Collection)

Snakebites can be painful and scary. But they may seem like weak nips after the hospital’s billing department sinks their teeth in.

Emergency treatment for a copperhead bite in a 9-year-old Indiana girl last summer cost a jaw-dropping $142,938, according to a report by Kaiser Health News. The bill includes $67,957 for four vials of antivenin. That works out to $16,989.25 for each vial—more than five times the average list price of $3,198. The bill also included $55,577.64 for air-ambulance transportation.

The girl, now 10, was away at summer camp last July, hiking in Illinois. When she went to step over a cluster of rocks on the trail, she got a bite on a toe on her right foot. Her camp counselors suspected it was a copperhead snake that bit her and rushed to get her medical treatment. She arrived at St. Vincent Evansville hospital in Indiana by air ambulance where doctors gave her four vials of an antivenin called CroFab. She was then transferred to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis for recovery. All in all, she was released within 24 hours of the bite.

Enlarge / An early version of the collision model, showing a head-on impact.

The Earth and its moon are unique in our Solar System. Earth is the only rocky planet with a large moon, and only the dwarf planet Pluto has a moon that's so similar in size to its host planet. The Moon is also remarkably similar to the Earth in terms of its composition, suggesting they formed from the same pool of material instead of the Moon forming elsewhere and having been captured.

This collection of properties led to a number of ideas about how the Moon formed, all of which failed to fit the data in various ways. Eventually, however, scientists came up with an idea that seemed to get most of the big picture right: a collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized object happened early in the Solar System's history, creating a cloud of debris that coalesced into the Moon.

While that got the major features of our two-body system right, there were still some subtle differences that weren't resolved by the impact model. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that there's a way to tidy up some of these loose ends: having the impact take place while the Earth was covered in a molten magma ocean.

Enlarge / Close-up of logo for Tesla Solar, a home solar power generation solution offered by Tesla Motors, San Ramon, California, March 28, 2018. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

In Tesla's first-quarter financial statement last week, the company said that it would revitalize sluggish solar panel sales by streamlining the purchase process. "Our residential customers can now purchase solar and energy storage directly from our website, in standardized increments of capacity," the company wrote.

Now, the New York Times is reporting that Tesla intends to slash solar panel prices by 38 percent today, with, Tesla Senior Vice President of Energy Operations Sanjay Shah telling the paper that "Tesla customers could expect to pay $1.75 to $1.99 per watt, depending on where they live." The Solar Energy Industries Association says the average cost of residential solar panels is currently $2.85 per watt.

Tesla's plan to undercut its competitors is ostensibly possible because the company is eliminating many so-called "soft costs" of solar panel installation. Instead of sending contractors out to a house to design and optimize a solar panel installation, customers will now order solar panels online, in preset increments of power. Each increment will be able to produce 4 kilowatts (kW) of power with 12 panels.

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  It's Team Human, led by Jon "Oh, geez, this isn't going well" Snow... [credit: HBO ]

Halfway through the last season of Game of Thrones, we put together an after-action analysis of the major military engagements driving the plot of the series in the season's two central episodes—"The Queen's Justice," in which the forces allied against Queen Cersei got seriously pasted, and "The Spoils of War," in which Daenerys Targaryen, her dragons, and her Dothraki rapid response force swept down on the Lannister army's wagon train and turned it into a macabre cookout.

Now we're halfway through the final season of the series, and we're at a similar pivot point. The second episode of the season—"A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms"—laid out the somewhat awful strategic position of the combined allied forces under the command of Daenerys Targaryen and her Warden of the North, lover and likely nephew Jon Snow. And in the most recent episode—"The Long Night"—that situation reached its climax and conclusion in what could set the record for the least number of photons registered in a film or video production of its length ever.

As we were writing this, we were beaten to the punch by one of our favorite military Twitterati and bloggers, Angry Staff Officer, a master of fictional tactical interpretation, in his excellent but perhaps slightly misguided analysis for our sister publication, Wired. It's definitely worth reading, and you should do so right after you read this—unless you have not seen the episode and are averse to spoilers. In that case, come back and read both once you're ready.

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  The Pixel 3 XL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Alphabet, Google's parent company, had its earnings call yesterday, and, while these calls are primarily about advertising click-through rates and traffic-acquisition costs, yesterday's call actually contained some information about Google's smartphone sales. It turns out sales of the Google Pixel flagship are down year over year, meaning the Pixel 3 is selling worse than the Pixel 2.

Here's the full quote from Alphabet and Google CFO Ruth Porat:

Hardware results reflect lower year-on-year sales of Pixel, reflecting in part heavy promotional activity industry-wide given some of the recent pressures in the premium smartphone market.

"Recent pressures in the premium smartphone market" can mean a lot of things, but basically Google is admitting that there is some tough competition out there for the Pixel 3 and that the phone isn't selling as well as its predecessor. Google doesn't break out "hardware results" in its earnings report, so we can only guess at what the year-over-year difference is. It was bad enough to mention in an earnings call, though.