Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Right lateral view of the Cioclovina calvaria exhibiting a large depressed fracture. A new paper concludes this is evidence of fatal blunt force trauma. (credit: Kranoti et al, 2019)

Some 33,000 years ago, a man was violently clubbed to death by a left-handed attacker wielding a club or similar object. That's the conclusion of an international team of scientists, who published the results of their forensic analysis in a recent paper in PLOS ONE.

The so-called Cioclovina calvaria is a fossilized skull around 33,000 years old, discovered in a cave in South Transylvania in 1941 during a mining operation. That makes it one of the earliest fossilized human remains yet known, so naturally it's been studied extensively by scientists interested in learning more about the Upper Paleolithic period, which started around 40,000 to 45,000 years, and marks the major dispersal of modern humans in Europe.

"The Cioclovina individual is particularly important, as it is one of the earliest and relatively complete skulls of modern Europeans from the Upper Paleolithic period," co-author Katerina Harvati of Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen in Germany told Live Science. "Human remains from this period are very rare and often very fragmentary."

Enlarge / Bass guitarist Mark Sandman and saxophonist Dana Colley in concert with their band Morphine in the '90s. (credit: Getty Images / Tim Mosenfelder)

I'm a firm believer in the power of a live performance. A television broadcast or DVD doesn't capture the same thing as a theatrical production or a concert. You gotta be there.

But what about when you can't? What recourse is there when you're in love with an artist or performer who you can't physically interact with for any number of reasons?

I've thought about this for decades from a few perspectives: as a former full-time music critic; as a frequent chronicler of how information is presented and exchanged online; and perhaps most of all, as a music fan who had one freaking band slip through his hands.

Before his resignation in late 2017, Uber's then-CEO Travis Kalanick faced more than his fair share of scandals. But by far the most (read: least) important of these was Kalanick's oft-repeated claim that, at one point, he "held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game," as a New York Times profile confidently stated without qualification.

Ars dug deep to get at the truth of this claim, publishing a 3,000-word expose that proved definitively (read: probably) that Kalanick was really just confused about what it means to have a "high score" in a game like Wii Sports Tennis.

Now, over two years after that blockbuster report shook the world of tech-executive video game high-score competition, new information has come to light that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of this important (read: pointless) story yet again.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Dell's Inspiron line doesn't make as many headlines as the XPS line does, but that could change quickly. Over the past year or so, Dell has taken premium features that come standard in XPS machines and translated them for the Inspiron line. The company knows it can't rely on the XPS family alone to draw in customers that care about how their laptops look and feel—it needs more machines that feel as versatile as those XPSes.

The improved Inspiron line will offer a lot to these users: aluminum designs, 8th-gen Intel processors, 4K touchscreen support, optional Optane memory, inking abilities, and more. The new Inspiron 13 7000 2-in-1 Black Edition comes as close as the line gets to an XPS, but it has a convenient twist. In addition to all of the features previously listed, the new design includes a top-mounted webcam and IR camera along with a magnetic pen garage built into the hinge. While it can get expensive even for an Inspiron, it has a lot of things that are omitted in the XPS family—things some users will definitely want in their primary laptops.

Look and feel

Coming into 2019, it felt like pop culture only had two things on its mind: the final season of Game of Thrones and the final chapter in Marvel's Avengers saga. Looking back from the half-way point in the year, hey, at least one of those delivered.

Of course, pop culture is never that straightforward or simple, and 2019 so far has brought plenty of delightful surprises. Netflix finally hit on another series with the loop-y Russian Doll. Jordan Peele followed up perhaps the most beloved horror movie in years with another winner called Us. And maybe HBO didn't please everyone with the last chapter in Westeros, but seemingly everyone has adored the company's surprise historical hit, Chernobyl, to say nothing of the (currently airing) delightfully weird supernatural comedy, Los Espookys. 

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Around Ars, we don't really indulge in Best Of list-making until December rolls around, and there's a simple reason for that: six more months of highly anticipated stuff and out-of-nowhere surprises await all of us. So as folks work their way through a certain hyped Hawkins, Indiana, show this weekend, don't worry about binging too fast and being without something new and exciting on the horizon. Here's the pop culture from the rest of 2019 that already has us counting down the days.