Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Apple's AirPods.

Holiday deals have been flowing in since November began, but we're now starting to see proper Black Friday deals take effect. With Black Friday just a couple days away, Walmart has kicked off its shopping event with a bunch of savings and discounts that are some of the best we've seen all ready. Apple products top the list: now you can get AirPods with a charging case for $129 and an Apple Watch Series 3 for $129.

As for what you’re getting here: AirPods are some of the most popular wireless earbuds available, and the newest model with the standard charging case typically goes for $144. While we have seen major retailers drop the price to $134 before, this $129 price tag is a new low. These are the second-generation AirPods, featuring hands-free "Hey Siri" voice commands, 50-percent more talk time, and the new H1 chip that helps the AirPods pair and switch between devices more quickly.

These AirPods have a battery life of around five hours, and the case that comes with them provides an addition 24 hours of life. The included case is Apple's standard AirPods case, not the optional Qi wireless charging case that Apple introduced with the second-gen AirPods. However, that's always been an optional accessory that you can get for $79 and enables you to charge the case and the AirPods themselves with any Qi-compatible wireless charging pads.

Enlarge / The new partnership will be Mediatek's first venture out of the ARM world and into x86. (credit: MediaTek)

In April of this year, Intel cancelled its 5G-modem building plans. This week, it's announcing that they're back on the table—but this time, with system-on-chip vendor MediaTek building the hardware.

The partnership has Intel setting the 5G specifications, MediaTek developing the modem to match, and Intel optimizing and validating it afterwards. Intel will also lend its marketing and integration muscle to convince OEMs to use the new hardware and help them make sure it works well in final products. This also means Intel will be writing operating-system-level drivers for the modems.

The partnership looks like a sensible one for both parties: Intel has been struggling to get its own 10nm hardware out the door on time, so getting this hardware design task off its plate may relieve some pressure there, while still keeping the company in an emerging market. MediaTek, on the other hand, can definitely benefit from Intel's software development expertise and deep integration with OEM vendors in the PC space.

Enlarge / An ivory manikin after removal of the abdominal and chest wall, ribs, and part of the uterus. Internal organs such as the lungs, intestines, as well as a fetus inside the uterus are visible. (credit: F.R. Schwartz/Duke University/RSNA)

Researchers at Duke University have completed digital scans of small medical manikins and identified the materials used to make them. They will be presenting their findings next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago.

These are not the department-store mannequins familiar to most of us today. Rather, they are tiny, intricately carved anatomical figurines dating back centuries. According to the New York Academy of Medicine, there was an explosion of interest in three-dimensional anatomical models in the mid-16th century, typically made of wax molds or carved from wood or ivory. The manikins likely emerged as a result of this trend. Scholars have pegged their origins to Germany in the late 1600s or early 1700s, possibly created in the Nuremberg workshop of sculptor Stephan Zick, known for his ivory models of human ears and eyeballs.

The figurines measure between 12 to 24 centimeters (4 to 9 inches) and have movable arms. The torso has a lid that can be removed to reveal tiny, intricately carved organs within the cavity. The removable organs include lungs, heart, intestines, bladder, kidneys, stomach, liver, and pancreas. There are some male and female pairs, but most of the manikins are pregnant female figures, with a tiny carved fetus attached to the uterus with a red cord.

Enlarge (credit: UNEP)

While the world's nations have been in agreement for some time that we should limit global warming to no more than 2°C (or even 1.5°C), action has fallen short of ambition. As such, this week saw the 10th annual UN Emissions Gap Report—an update on the gap between our current greenhouse gas emissions and the cuts that would set us up to meet those goals.

When someone who is trying to lose weight steps on a scale and sees a higher number than yesterday, it's not very encouraging. That's where we find ourselves. The report puts 2018 human-caused greenhouse gas emissions at the equivalent of 55.3 billion tons of CO₂—our highest yet. (This method combines all greenhouse gases into one number.)

The factors driving a country's emissions can be described by GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the energy used per unit of GDP, and the greenhouse gas emitted per unit energy. The wealthiest (OECD) nations are averaging about 2% economic growth, while the rest of the world is averaging 4.5%. Those two categories of nations are reducing energy per unit GDP at about the same rate, so energy use barely increased among the wealthiest nations but increased 2.8% among the others. As a result, much of the recent increase in emissions has obviously come from developing economies.

Enlarge / Louisiana State Capitol, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at dusk. (credit: Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Louisiana has brought some of its services back as it recovers from a targeted ransomware attack using the Ryuk malware on November 18. The state's Office of Motor Vehicles re-opened offices on Monday in a limited fashion. But OMV and other agencies affected—including the state's Department of Health and Department of Public Safety—are facing a number of potential hurdles to restoring all services, according to people familiar with Louisiana's IT operations.

The ransomware payload was apparently spread across agencies by exploiting Microsoft Windows group policy objects—meaning that the attackers had gained access to administrative privileges across multiple Active Directory domains. This is symptomatic of TrickBot malware attacks, which uses GPOs and PsExec (a Microsoft remote administration tool) to spread its payload.

This is the second major cybersecurity incident this year in Louisiana tied to Ryuk ransomware. In July, Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency and deployed the state's cyber response team to assist seven parish school districts. There have been many other Ryuk attacks this year that have used TrickBot and, in some cases, the Emotet trojan—an attack referred to by some experts as a "Triple Threat" commodity malware attack. At least two Florida cities and Georgia's Judicial Counsel and Administrative Office of the Courts were also hit by "Triple Threat" attacks.

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  The Galaxy S11+. [credit: OnLeaks x CashKaro ]

OnLeaks showed off renders of the Galaxy S11 a few days ago, and now he has teamed up with CashKaro to show off renders of Samsung's bigger phone, the Galaxy S11+. As usual, these are unofficial renders, but they're based on CAD drawings, and in the past they've been very accurate.

You'd normally expect the Galaxy S11+ to look just like the Galaxy S11 that was shown off earlier, but Samsung is doing something, uh, special, for the camera bump on this bigger model. Not only is it one of the biggest camera bumps of all time, housing a whopping five camera lenses, it also has a totally wild, disorganized design: nothing is horizontally or vertically aligned with anything else. The camera lenses, flash, and sensors are just kind of randomly distributed around the camera bump area. It certainly looks unique, but I'm not sure that's "unique" in a good way.

The only caveat with these renders is that the report says the placement of the LED flash is "still not confirmed," but it sounds like the cameras are going in their random positions.