Month: August 2019

Enlarge / The new Porsche Taycan electric car is the first to feature Apple Music integration into the infotainment system. (credit: Porsche)

Porsche's new battery-electric Taycan sedan is probably the most hotly anticipated car of the year. The car's official launch—and our deep dive into its technology—happens early in September. Later that month, we'll be able to tell you how it drives, ahead of the first customer deliveries in December. But we do have some news we can share about the car now. On Monday evening, Porsche revealed that it has worked together with Apple to integrate the Apple Music streaming service into the Taycan's infotainment system. All Taycan customers will receive a six-month free trial to the service, and Porsche says that Taycans will also come with three years free data service.

The addition of Apple Music is in addition to (and separate from) CarPlay, which is still a standard feature of the Taycan's infotainment system. But as CarPlay users will know, it's a highly sandboxed way of interacting with content from your phone. That's not the case with the new Apple Music feature. It has been added as a separate input in the Taycan's media player app, alongside broadcast radio, bluetooth devices, and so on.

Playlists can be shown on the main instrument panel in front of the driver and controlled using the multifunction steering wheel as well as though the infotainment screen in the center stack. The tight integration into the infotainment system means that if you hear a song you like on the radio—and it has been correctly tagged—you can easily add it to your Apple Music library or even create a new Apple Music playlist based on that track. In addition to the stuff you expect to find in Apple Music, Porsche is also proving some curated playlists for Taycan owners.

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  The game's logo from its trailer. [credit: Private Division ]

During the Gamescom opening night livestream, game publisher Private Division released a new trailer revealing and announcing Kerbal Space Program 2, a sequel to the popular 2015 physics-based spaceship construction and spaceflight sim. Kerbal Space Program 2 will be released in the first quarter of 2020.

We've included the trailer below. Set to music by M83, it's a pre-rendered cinematic that humorously juxtaposes dramatic spaceflight documentary tropes with the characters and frequent accidents of the game.

Newly announced features include "new planets to explore, new technologies to traverse the stars, and the ability to establish colonies, all rooted in real-world science," according to Private Division's press release. Additionally, the sequel will bring multiplayer to the franchise, and players will be able to build "without the constraints of planetary gravitation for the first time," which should allow for more elaborate constructions than were possible in the previous game.

A humble chef is granted mystical powers to hunt down five powerful warlords in Wu Assassins, a new supernatural action drama from Netflix. Unfortunately, a talented cast and terrific fight choreography can't keep the show from sinking under the weight of its leaden, uninspired script. No martial arts series should be this much of a slog.

(Some spoilers below.)

Indonesian martial-arts star Iko Uwais (The Raid, Stuber) stars as Kai Jin, a Chinese-Indonesian chef in San Francisco's Chinatown who finds himself chosen as the last of the Wu Assassins, a long line of fighters tasked with killing the five Wu Warlords. The warlords all possess elemental supernatural powers tied to fire, wood, earth, metal, and water. These powers were conferred upon them by the Wu Xing: five shards that are absorbed into the body when touched. Kai's task is to kill the current crop of Wu Warlords, reassemble the shards, and send them back to heaven where they belong, thus ridding the world of their influence. Not that the Wu Xing are necessarily evil: we learn they reflect the character of whoever possesses them. It just so happens that bad people tend to crave the immense power they confer.

Enlarge / Artist's rendering of players that aren't interested in game streaming reacting to news that Orcs Must Die 3 is a Stadia exclusive. (credit: Robot Entertainment)

[Update (7:45pm ET): In a "clarification" post on Reddit this evening, Robot Entertainment CEO Patrick Hudson said that Orcs Must Die 3 would be a timed exclusive for Stadia, but the company wouldn't say how long that timing would last. This is a relatively standard setup for third-party exclusive games these days.

"OMD3 would not be possible today without Google's support," Hudson wrote. "They are behind the game in a big way. We've hired more developers to bring it to life. It;s the OMD game that fans of the first two games have been wanting, and we’re thrilled that we have the opportunity to make it."]

Original Story

Enlarge / The arrows point to bony growths called external auditory exostoses, or swimmer's ear, in the skull of a Neanderthal from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in France. (credit: Erik Trinkaus)

Swimmer's ear happens when constant exposure to cold water irritates tissues in the ear canal, causing bony growths to form. As its name implies, it commonly shows up in people who spend a lot of time in the water. But it also shows up in almost half of Neanderthal skulls from Eurasia, according to a recent study.

Washington University paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues studied fossils, digital scans, photographs, and other archaeologists' reports from 77 Neanderthals and Homo sapiens who lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene. Based on this sampling of remains with preserved inner ear bones, a surprising number of Neanderthals were running around Pleistocene Eurasia with swimmer's ear.

Lifestyles of the cold, damp, and windy

You won't get swimmer's ear from a single cold-water surfing trip. It takes long-term exposure to cold water or cold, damp air for the irritation to actually reshape the bone. If you're looking at a skeleton, swimmer's ear is the kind of trait that can tell you something about a person's habits in life. Anthropologists still aren't exactly sure what swimmer's ear tells us about Neanderthals' lifestyle, but it may have something to do with genetics, hygiene, and a taste for shellfish.