Month: October 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Microsoft / Getty Images)

In a seemingly unprecedented deal, GameStop will now share in the lifetime digital sales revenue—including for full game downloads, DLC, and subscription plans—for any Xbox console sold through its stores. How much that arrangement will impact the bottom line for the struggling retailer is still an open and heavily debated question, though.

The first sign of this new revenue sharing arrangement actually came somewhat hidden in a press release GameStop issued last week, trumpeting a "Multi-year Strategic Partnership with Microsoft." That announcement focused heavily on GameStop agreeing to use Microsoft's cloud-based infrastructure for its back-end sales systems and a deal for store associates to start using Microsoft Surface tablets going forward.

Buried in that press release, though, was a vague sentence that could be much more important to GameStop's future: "GameStop and Microsoft will both benefit from the customer acquisition and lifetime revenue value of each gamer brought into the Xbox ecosystem."

Enlarge / A firefighter battling the Mendocino Complex fire on August 7, 2018 near Lodoga, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

Verizon's 2018 controversy over its throttling of a fire department's "unlimited" data plan during a wildfire didn't stop the carrier from rolling out numerous ads claiming that Verizon service is a must-have for firefighters and other emergency responders. But a couple of those ads apparently went too far, and Verizon agreed to stop running them after a complaint that T-Mobile lodged with the advertising industry's self-regulatory body.

"Verizon committed to permanently discontinue its '5G Built Right for Firefighters' and '5G Built Right for First Responders' advertisements and the challenged claims made therein," the National Advertising Division (NAD) said today in an announcement of the complaint's outcome.

The NAD said it didn't actually review the firefighter and first-responder complaints on their merits because Verizon agreed to pull them before an investigation. But the NAD investigated other T-Mobile claims and recommended that Verizon discontinue or modify several other ads that made unsupported statements. Verizon agreed to comply with the NAD's findings.

Enlarge

At Tuesday's unveiling of the iPhone 12, Apple touted the capabilities of its new lidar sensor. Apple says lidar will enhance the iPhone's camera by allowing more rapid focus, especially in low-light situations. And it may enable the creation of a new generation of sophisticated augmented reality apps.

Tuesday's presentation offered little detail about how the iPhone's lidar actually works, but this isn't Apple's first device with lidar. Apple first introduced the technology with the refreshed iPad in March. And while no one has done a teardown of the iPhone 12 yet, we can learn a lot from recent iPad teardowns.

Lidar works by sending out laser light and measuring how long it takes to bounce back. Because light travels at a constant speed, the round-trip time can be translated into a precise distance estimate. Repeat this process across a two-dimensional grid and the result is a three-dimensional "point cloud" showing the location of objects around a room, street, or other location.

Enlarge / “What dusts the peaks of Cthulhu?” is not an arcane riddle. (credit: NASA)

We can often use our knowledge of planet Earth to explain the things we see on other worlds, although we may have to tweak the physics to account for a different temperature or a tenuous atmosphere. But planetary scientists can’t always assume that a familiar landscape feature formed in a familiar way.

When the New Horizons spacecraft gave us our first close-up look at Pluto, there were alien wonders aplenty. But there were also mountaintops dusted with something bright, looking very similar to Earth's snowcapped peaks. On Earth, these snow caps are produced by enhanced precipitation as air rises over the mountains and cools, combined with the colder temperatures at higher elevations.

On Pluto, that explanation can’t work, for several reasons. First, temperatures generally increase as you go up a few kilometers from Pluto’s surface because of gases absorbing solar energy. Winds also tend to blow downslope since the colder surface chills the air near it, making it denser. So what forms the bright dusting and how does it get there?

Enlarge / Staff from South Sudan's Health Ministry pose with protective suits during a drill for Ebola preparedness conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO). (credit: Getty | Patrick Meinhardt)

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday issued the first-ever approval for a therapy against Ebola virus disease.

Though the Ebola vaccine, Ervebo, earned approval late last year and proved 97.5 percent effective in preliminary trials, the newly approved therapy may be useful in addressing an ongoing outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, which began in June. The FDA’s approval may also boost the outlook for similar therapies being developed for COVID-19, which may become available before a vaccine.

The newly approved Ebola treatment, called Inmazeb (aka REGN-EB3), is a combination of three monoclonal antibodies made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. The antibodies target the only protein on the outside of Ebola virus particles, the glycoprotein. Ebola uses its glycoprotein to attach to and enter human cells, sparking infection. The cocktail of antibodies glom on to the protein, keeping it from invading cells.