Month: July 2019

Enlarge / A Google Stadia controller and a Google Chromecast Ultra. (credit: Google)

The Google executive in charge of the company's new Stadia game-streaming service says he thinks data caps won't be a problem—but his prediction largely depends on the generosity of ISPs.

In an interview Friday with GameSpot, Google VP Phil Harrison said his confidence stems from US broadband providers' history of treating their customers well.

As he told GameSpot:

Enlarge / What's going on in that swim diaper? (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Whatever you do this summer, don’t drink the pool water.

Outbreaks of the gastrointestinal parasite cryptosporidium have been spurting upward since 2009, with the number of outbreaks gushing up an average of 13% each year, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The germ spreads via the fecal-oral route and causes explosive, watery diarrhea that can last for up to three weeks. Most victims pick up the infection from recreational waters, such as swimming pools and water parks.

The main trouble is that crypto is extremely tolerant of chlorine and can happily stay afloat in well-treated pools for more than seven days. Thus, sick swimmers are the main source of infection—often young children who have yet to master toilet skills and also have more of a tendency to gulp pool water. An infected person can shed 100 million parasite eggs in one bout of diarrhea. Knocking back just 10 or fewer eggs in contaminated pool water can lead to an infection.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

The key to avoiding distracted driving is simple, according to new research from MIT: just keep your eyes on the road and look where you're going. That might sound horribly obvious, given "look where you're going" is one of the earliest lessons we learn as we become mobile. But this new study reinforcing that lesson was focused on a slightly more complicated question: is the problem with distracted driving one of trying to concentrate on two separate tasks at the same time, or could it be a matter of where your eyes are pointing?

When I learned to drive in the early 1990s, distracted driving wasn't really on anyone's minds. But then cellphones became ubiquitous, and smartphones followed, and so texting drivers became another thing we have to watch out for on the roads. It's not like the auto and tech industries aren't aware of the problem. Just about every new car sold today provides a way for a driver to connect their phone for hands-free calling. Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and MirrorLink all exist to cast certain apps from a smartphone to a car's infotainment screen.

On top of that, new cars are increasingly packed full of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that will alert the driver about potential collisions or if the car is drifting out of its lane on the road. Unfortunately, none of that seems to be making much difference. People still use their cellphones when they drive, even if they know it's bad.

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  Gene Kranz returned to his second home last Friday, the Apollo Mission Control room. [credit: NASA ]

Last week, NASA unveiled a restored Apollo Mission Control room at Johnson Space Center. Former Flight Director Gene Kranz, who led the Apollo 11 Moon landing and then gained fame after his role was popularized in the movie Apollo 13, led fundraising for the effort. Kranz also narrates the visitor experience to the restored control room, in which the screens light up to show displays as they were during the lunar descent.

At times on Friday, Kranz appeared to be overcome with emotion as he reminisced about those heady days 50 years ago. "When I walked into that viewing room it was dazzling," he said. "Overwhelming. All of a sudden you were 50 years younger. I wanted to get to work."

Before the restoration, the old Apollo flight control room, which was used for the early space shuttle missions and then largely abandoned, had deteriorated.The carpet was torn and held together with yellow Duct tape. Visitors had picked over the original consoles for souvenirs. "That place was not representative of historic mission control," he said.

It is a universally acknowledged truth—at least by major studio heads—that any successful film reboot must be in want of a sequel. Such is the case for 2017's Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a reboot of the original 1995 film starring the late Robin Williams. The first trailer for Jumanji: The Next Level dropped this morning, and initially it looks like it might recapture some of the clever charm of its predecessor.

In the original Jumanji, a young boy in 1969 finds a supernatural board game and begins to play with his neighbor, Sarah. The game unleashes actual jungle hazards into the real world, and the only way to make it go away is to face down your fear and finish the game.  Of course, this proves complicated: Alan gets sucked into the game and a panicked Sarah stops playing, leaving it to two young orphans in 1995 to finish the game he and Sarah started 26 years before.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle updated the concept, turning the board game into a video game. In 1996, a disaffected teen named Alex is given the board game by his father, who found it on a beach. He's not into old school board games, so the game transforms into a video game cartridge. Alex, like Alan before him, also gets sucked into the game for 20 years until four high school students discover the game while serving detention. It was a clever twist, with the teens taking on avatars—a source of much of the film's humor—tackling the various levels of the game, hoping to finish before losing all their allotted three lives.