Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Promotional image of Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow emerging from a stylized image of the female genital anatomy. (credit: Netflix)

Netflix released a trailer Monday for the six-episode series The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow, which—as expected—appears to spew as much pseudoscience and evidence-free wellness muck as the mogul's notorious "contextual commerce" business, Goop.

In Netflix's own words, the show intends to guide "deeply inquisitive" viewers through "boundary-pushing wellness topics," such as "energy healing and psychics." The show—like Goop—appears to be largely aimed at women, and the trailer's release was accompanied by an image of Paltrow appearing to descend into an artist's rendition of a vagina.

Goop critics were quick to decry the show, arguing that—like the brand—it actually intends to guide exploitable viewers through unproven and potentially dangerous health practices, such as the same garbage Goop has been promoting for years. And the show—like Goop—claims to "empower" women only by convincing them to try dubious treatments and products.

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  Dell's Concept UFO portable PC game console. [credit: Valentina Palladino ]

CES may be flooded with new tech coming out soon, but it's also a place for companies to show off new things that may (or may not) become a reality in the future. Dell's doing just that within its Alienware gaming family with a new concept device dubbed Concept UFO, a handheld gaming console that looks quite similar to the Nintendo Switch but is built for full-fledged portable PC gaming.

We should preface the rest of this article by saying that this is exactly what its name suggests: a concept. While we got a few minutes to mess around with working models of Concept UFO ahead of CES, Dell currently does not have concrete plans to bring Concept UFO to market. Most questions about specs or detailed capabilities were promptly deflected as well, so the details we know about the inner workings of the device are limited.

First impressions

However, unlike many other concepts I've tested in the past, Concept UFO was quite impressive because it actually worked. It's a rectangular handheld gaming console with an eight-inch display and removable controllers on both ends. Working models I saw all ran Windows and were able to render playable games in handheld mode; docked mode, in which the console was connected to an external display and its controllers were detached; and another portable mode in which the controllers were detached but connected by a center "bridge."

Enlarge / If you're bad, you get coal. (credit: Donna Pizzarelli, USGS)

A lot of the discussions about switching sources of electricity focus on costs, specifically whether going renewable will cost more than fossil fuels. But the costs of fossil fuels goes well beyond simply the costs of supplying the fuel. Fossil fuels create costs by harming human health and the environment—these costs aren't priced into electricity produced. Instead, they wind up being paid for by society at large—and that's before pricing in the inevitable costs of climate change.

In fact, in the United States, the rationale for Obama-era climate rules included the idea that the regulations would save money by avoiding these costs. That claim was controversial, however, and the Trump administration's rollback of these rules also claimed to provide economic benefits.

What's been lacking is a clear measure of the impact of pollution from fossil fuels. In an attempt to rectify that, Jennifer Burney of the University of California, San Diego, took advantage of a natural experiment that the US has been undertaking: shuttering older coal plants and replacing them with natural gas, which produce far less pollution. Using data from a decade of vanishing coal plants, Burney found that tens of thousands of deaths had been avoided by replacing coal plants. And, as an added bonus, the productivity of nearby farms increased as well.