Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Left to right: a looming Netgear Orbi satellite, an upside-down Plume superpod, and an older Eero model. (credit: Jim Salter)

The Great Telework Experiment of 2020 has brought a lot of network challenges to the fore. Obviously some jobs are better suited to remote work than others, and some companies were better prepared to shift in that direction. However, successful telework isn't just about the company infrastructure—it's about employees' home setups, too.

Most of the folks needing to work from home also need to work from Wi-Fi. And Wi-Fi, unfortunately, doesn't scale very well: the more people and devices you cram onto it, the slower and balkier it gets. There are two ways you can alleviate this problem: you can plug your device directly into the router (or a connected switch) with an Ethernet cable, or you can improve your Wi-Fi itself.

Buying a new router is unlikely to substantially improve your Wi-Fi—but if you've got a single router now, upgrading to mesh almost certainly will.

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  This gallery includes Nvidia's provided "after-and-before" images of the impact you can expect from a path-traced lighting system and material-based shaders. Here's the "after," with Minecraft RTX Beta effects enabled. [credit: Nvidia / Mojang ]

Minecraft fans have waited years for an official visual overhaul—something that retains the Mojang game's iconic, blocky aesthetic yet embraces next-gen visual flair. This wait has included both teases and failures to launch from the series' developers. This week, finally, the teases become a very, very pretty reality—at least, for those who can access it.

On Thursday, April 16, Mojang will release the Minecraft RTX Beta as a free update exclusively on Windows 10. As its name implies, this beta version of the game was co-developed with Nvidia, the makers of the RTX line of GeForce graphics cards, and as of press time, these cards are the only ones compatible with its hook into the current DirectX ray-tracing API, along with Nvidia's proprietary DLSS pipeline.

Every image and video in this article was provided by Nvidia and Microsoft, and members of the press were invited to test the Minecraft RTX Beta ahead of today's announcement. However, for now, we're forbidden from commenting any further on what we've played. Does the Minecraft RTX Beta look as good in action as it does in the above gallery? I'm not allowed to say until Thursday.

Enlarge / An artist's impression of 'Oumuamua. A new study based on computer simulations offers a comprehensive theory for how it formed and where it came from, that accounts for the interstellar object's odd characteristics. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

In late 2017, our Solar System received its very first interstellar visitor: a bizarre cigar-shaped object hurtling past at 44 kilometers per second. Scientists have been puzzling over its origin and unusual characteristics ever since. A new paper in Nature Astronomy offers a new comprehensive model to explain some of the object's oddities. 'Oumuamua, as it is called, may be the fragment of another, larger parent body—a long-period comet or debris disk, perhaps, or even a super-Earth planet—torn apart by tidal forces as it passed too close to its host star.

"Our objective is to come up with a comprehensive scenario, based on well understood physical principles, to piece together all the tantalizing clues," said co-author Douglas Lin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We showed that 'Oumuamua-like interstellar objects can be produced through extensive tidal fragmentation during close encounters of their parent bodies with their host stars, and then ejected into interstellar space."

The interstellar object was first discovered by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 telescope, part of NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations program to track asteroids and comets that come into Earth's vicinity. The team dubbed it 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first"). Other telescopes around the world soon kicked into action, measuring the object's various characteristics, which turned out to be very odd, indeed. For starters, it was accelerating away from our Sun much faster than could be explained by gravity alone. As Ars' John Timmer wrote in 2018,