Month: May 2020

AMC's NOS4A2 flew under the radar for many viewers last summer, struggling to compete in a crowded seasonal market for film and television. That's too bad, because it's a great show. In my review last year, I called it a "haunting fable" that is "as much a depiction of the potentially destructive nature of artistic gifts as it is about the tragedy of dreams deferred—just all draped in supernatural trappings." The first trailer for S2 has dropped in the middle of a global pandemic, and with less competition, hopefully more people will discover this gem.

(Some spoilers for book and S1 below.)

The series is an adaptation of the 2013 award-winning horror novel of the same name by Joe Hill. It's about a woman named Vic McQueen with a gift for finding lost things. She's one of a rare group of people known as "strong creatives," capable of tearing through the fabric that separates the physical world from the world of thought and imagination (their personal "inscapes") with the help of a talisman-like object dubbed a "knife." For Vic, her knife is her motorcycle (a bicycle when she's younger); for a troubled young woman named Maggie, it's a bag of Scrabble tiles. And for psychic "vampire"/child abductor Charlie Manx, it's a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith.

Enlarge / The RNA being copied is in dark blue; the copy is in turquoise; the enzyme is in pale green; and the drug is in pink.

Just this week, we had the first promising report of a drug that appears to improve the recovery time of patients suffering from COVID-19. Hot on the heels of that announcement, a scientific journal has released a paper that describes how the drug interferes with the virus. While there's no real surprises in what has been revealed, it provides key details of how SARS-CoV-2 can be blocked.

Copying machine

Targeting a virus with a drug is a challenge. Viruses make their living by using their host's proteins to do most of the work of making new viruses. That means a drug has to target some of the few proteins encoded by the virus while not interfering with any of the far more prevalent host cell proteins. In the case of coronavirus, biologists have identified a number of distinct features of the virus that may be targeted without an obvious risk of causing severe side effects.

Remdesivir, which saw a large clinical trial produce promising results, is a drug that's designed to target one of these virus-specific vulnerabilities. The coronavirus genome is encoded using the chemical RNA, as opposed to the DNA used for our genome. In fact, there's nothing about our cells that requires them to make an RNA copy of an RNA molecule. As a result, the coronavirus genome encodes proteins that do this RNA-to-RNA copying, called an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. Remdesivir was designed to look like one of the building blocks of RNA in the hope that it would bind to an RNA virus' polymerase and inhibit it.

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  Here's your Demo-2 crew: Doug Hurley, left, and Bob Behnken. [credit: NASA ]

Officials from NASA and SpaceX spoke at a series of briefings on Friday to preview the upcoming flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the discussions was, after nine years since the space shuttle's retirement, how very close astronauts really are to launching from Florida again into orbit. So far, everything remains on track for a May 27 launch to the International Space Station on a Falcon 9 rocket.

As the briefings were taking place, in fact, SpaceX conducted its 27th and final test of Crew Dragon's Mark 3 parachute system. This successful test essentially closes out the last major technical hurdle standing between the spacecraft and launch.

Enlarge / What if Comet Lake, but longer? This wafer litho image gives us a bird's eye view of the layout of one of the Comet Lake S-series CPUs, featuring two more cores than prior generations. (credit: Intel Corporation)

So far, 2020 is a tough year for Intel CPU fans—in both senses of the word. The newest generation of Chipzilla's desktop CPUs have arrived, and Intel is scrambling to find ways (mostly involving overclocking) to make them look good compared to AMD's 7nm Zen 2 parts.

The 10th generation Core, Pentium, and Celeron parts follow the trend established by Intel's recent laptop H-series launch: they're old process technology tweaked to within an inch of its life, and Intel still isn't delivering any hard performance numbers which could be compared directly to the competition's.

Performance

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  Intel is leaning heavily on raw clock rate with the new Comet Lake S-series, just as they did with the H-series laptop parts earlier this year. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

For the most part, Intel's pre-launch benchmark data looks like what they provided us for Comet Lake H-series laptop CPUs—razor-sharp focus on unqualified raw clockspeed, and a healthy smear of Vaseline on the lens when looking at real performance. Once again, we're seeing single-core turbo speeds on the highest SKUs in excess of 5GHz—and a noticeable veer away from hard performance data that might be directly compared to AMD's 7nm Ryzen CPUs.

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  The High Quality Camera with the 16mm lens attached. [credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation ]

Attention tinkerers: Raspberry Pi has released a new camera for its tiny single-board computers. The "Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera" is on sale now for $50, and it will be sold alongside the older Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, which will still be the usual $25. This is a for-real camera system, so that $50 won't get you a ready-out-of-the-box Raspberry Pi camera, you'll also need to buy a lens for the—get this—interchangeable lens system that the high-quality camera supports.

Both cameras plug into the Raspberry Pi computer's camera serial interface using a ribbon cable, but the High Quality Camera looks like a massive upgrade, both in size and (hopefully) in image quality. While the $25 Camera Module V2 uses an ancient, low-end smartphone camera sensor with a microscopic lens, the High Quality Camera is a different class of product entirely. It's not a newer smartphone sensor, which is what I assumed when I first saw the news, but instead it's something that was originally intended for camcorders. It's a 12.3MP Sony IMX477 sensor with pretty huge 1.55 µm pixels and a 7.81 mm diagonal (1/2.3"-type). That's about double the sensor area of the Camera Module V2.

As the Raspberry Pi foundation puts it in the blog post, "there are limitations to mobile phone-type fixed-focus modules. The sensors themselves are relatively small, which translates into a lower signal-to-noise ratio and poorer low-light performance; and of course there is no option to replace the lens assembly with a more expensive one, or one with different optical properties. These are the shortcomings that the High Quality Camera is designed to address."

Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2015. (credit: ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Tesla's stock is down sharply in Friday trading. One likely reason for that: CEO Elon Musk tweeted that "Tesla stock price is too high imo."

Musk posted that tweet at 11:11am Eastern time. At the time, Tesla's stock was worth around $760—down less than 3 percent from Thursday's closing price of $781.

By 11:30, the stock plunged to $722, a 5 percent fall in 19 minutes. It has since fallen further to around $710—about 9 percent lower than Thursday's closing price. The broader stock market is down less than 3 percent today.