Month: June 2019

You know that annoying houseguest who overstays their welcome and just won't leave? It looks like the interdimensional monster known as the Mind Flayer, from Stranger Things, may be one of those guests. That's the big takeaway from the latest trailer for season 3 of the popular Netflix series.

(Some spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

Stranger Things was an instant hit when it debuted on Netflix the summer of 2016. Set in the town of Hawkins, Indiana, in the early 1980s, it was a refreshing love letter to a bygone era, when kid-centric films like The Goonies, Ghostbusters, and E.T. led the box office. But all was not normal in this sleepy little town: an accident at a secret government lab opened an inter-dimensional portal and unleashed a supernatural threat from a different dimension.

Enlarge / How it's made: silicon wafers! (credit: Micron)

At Micron's memory chip fabrication facility in the Washington, DC, suburb of Manassas, Virginia, the entire manufacturing area is blanketed in electronic detectors in all their various forms. But the primary purpose isn't to keep intruders out or anything so prosaic. "A lot of them are microphones,” a spokesman for Micron said. “They listen to the robots."

It turns out that there are thousands of microphones throughout the facility, or "fab," as silicon manufacturing plants are commonly known. There are microphones inside the giant $70 million cameras that imprint the component layout on the silicon surface of a memory chip. There are microphones lining the tracks of the robot controlled railways that carry colorful plastic FOUPs (front opening universal pods) along the ceiling throughout the plant. There are microphones near essentially every moving part in the facility.

All those thousands of microphones are listening for signs of wear—for variances to develop in the noises made by the machines—so that maintenance can be scheduled before anything breaks and causes downtime. Downtime, as you might imagine, is about the worst thing that can happen to an automated chip-making facility.

Enlarge / Google's customary "We're going to kill this service soon" pop-up.

Another day, another dead or dying Google product. This time, Google has decided to shut down "Hangouts on Air," a fairly popular service for broadcasting a group video call live over the Internet. Notices saying the service is "going away later this year" have started to pop up for users when they start a Hangout on Air. Hangouts on Air, by the way, is a totally different and unrelated service from "Google Hangouts," which is also shutting down sometime in the future.

Hangouts on Air was popular with podcasters, since it was a super easy way to get a group of people together, on video, and have the conversation broadcasted live. Hangouts on Air started life on Google+ and transitioned to a part of YouTube in 2016, where live group video conversations could be created in the YouTube interface and then be recorded as a video for your YouTube channel. The service had great features like chat, screenshare, and an automatic camera system that would switch to the person that was talking, making it perfect for easy podcast videos.

With Hangouts on Air dying, there really is no equivalent easy way to do a live streamed group video chat. Google's shutdown message points people to YouTube.com/webcam, but that page is only for a single person on a local webcam, not a group video chat. Rolling your own Hangouts on Air replacement would probably involve connecting multiple programs and services together. Skype can record calls but won't livestream them natively, for instance, so you'd need to pipe your calling software into some kind of livestream program like OBS, and from there you could hook it up to a Twitch or YouTube broadcast. That might be a normal workflow for live streaming pros, but it's a lot more complicated than just a few clicks on YouTube.com done entirely in a browser.

Enlarge / Horns and bull, a succinct summary of this news. (credit: Getty | Tim Graham)

The Washington Post on Thursday published a story suggesting that the use of mobile devices is causing young people to sprout horns from their skulls. But a look at the scientific data behind the story finds that such a splashy takeaway is tenuous at best—and atrocious reporting at worst.

The Post’s story was primarily based on a study published back in February 2018 by two Australian researchers. It earned fresh attention last week after being mentioned in a BBC feature on how modern life is supposedly transforming the human skeleton. The study was published in Nature’s open source journal Scientific Reports, which is supposedly peer-reviewed. But the study has significant limitations and flaws, and the Post breezed over them for a sensationalized story.

Perhaps the most striking problems are that the study makes no mention of horns and does not include any data whatsoever on mobile devices usage by its participants who, according to the Post, are growing alleged horns. Also troubling is that the study authors don't report much of the data, and some of the results blatantly conflict with each other.