Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Nurses wait at empty tables for more patients to arrive to receive a dose of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at a pop-up vaccination site in Gardena, California, on April 17, 2021. (credit: Getty | Patrick Fallon)

Though COVID-19 vaccines are now open to all US adults, vaccinations in the country are on the decline.

In the past week, the rolling seven-day average of daily vaccinations has slipped nearly 11 percent, falling from a high on April 13 of nearly 3.4 million shots per day to the current average of just over 3 million. And scores of counties across the US have begun declining shipments of vaccine doses, according to reporting by The Washington Post.

It’s the first time since the nationwide vaccination effort began last December that the country has seen a sustained decline in vaccinations—except for a brief dip in February which was linked to winter weather-related delays and cancellations.

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  You can probably hear the title being screamed upon seeing this image. [credit: WarnerMedia ]

Mortal Kombat's third live-action movie, launching this week after over two decades of cinematic silence, is a weird one.

It's not good. You wouldn't mistake this for a classic action or martial arts film, and it borrows clumsily from genre giants without building upon their shoulders in any meaningful way.

Most recent Mortal Kombat games (and a pair of Injustice games, starring DC Comics characters in MK-like fights) have impressed largely because they're a hoot to sit back and watch, full of entertaining, tongue-in-cheek cut scenes. Strip these out and put them on a streaming service as an animated series, and you'd get hours of fatality-filled butt-kicking and silliness—all better than what's on display in this feature.

Researchers at ITMO University in Russia have created a "laser paintbrush" capable of creating localized color on a metallic canvas, using their method to create miniaturized replicas of various works of art—including Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night. Their technique even makes it possible to change or erase or rewrite the colors several times. They described their work in a new paper published in the journal Optica.

Traditional paints get their colors from various pigments (often derived from minerals), but there are many examples of structural color in nature, like the bright colors in butterfly wings. As we've reported previously, those colors don't come from pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured. The scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except these naturally occurring photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength. And the perception of color doesn't depend on the viewing angle.

Manmade "nanopillars" can also be used to generate structural colors, for instance, by illuminating nanopillar arrays with white light to produce specific colors (red, blue, and green light), simply by varying the sizes (widths) of the nanopillars. In fact, last year, scientists at the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) used millions of nanopillars in an array to control both the color and intensity of incident light, projecting a faithful reproduction of Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring as proof of concept.

Enlarge / Picture of a Comcast router/modem gateway from the company's website. (credit: Comcast)

Comcast today offered the latest hint of a future in which its cable customers won't be limited to 35Mbps upload speeds. Announcing a recent lab test, Comcast said its research team "deliver[ed] upstream and downstream throughputs of greater than 4Gbps" and that "future optimization" will allow "even greater capacity."

This was "the first-ever live lab test" of a Broadcom "system-on-chip (SOC) device that will pave the way for Comcast to deliver multigigabit upload and download speeds over its hybrid-fiber coaxial (HFC) network," Comcast said. It won't require installation of more cables because the "technology works using the same types of connections already installed in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide," Comcast said.

Cable customers have been waiting a long time for upload speeds that aren't a tiny fraction of download speeds. Comcast's cable uploads, ranging from 3Mbps to 35Mbps, are so low that Comcast hides them deep within its online ordering system. While cable download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps are prominently displayed, Comcast doesn't tell customers what upload speeds they'll get until they enter a valid credit card number.

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  Hard to see Cyberpunk 2077 as anything but a massive driver of a record quarter in this chart... [credit: CD Projekt ]

Back in December, developer CD Projekt Red made waves by offering full refunds to Cyberpunk 2077 players who were dissatisfied with the game's poor performance, especially on older consoles. Days later, Sony delisted the game from the Playstation Store and made its own refund offer, which was followed by a similar refund offer from Microsoft.

Today, with the release of the CDPR's Consolidated Financial Statement for the 2020 fiscal year (which ended December 31), we know how much that refund program cost the company last year and how much CDPR expects those refunds and lost sales to cost in 2021. All told, it seems the impact will be very low to an otherwise record-setting financial year.

Buried in the "Other Provisions" section of the 90-page financial report, CDPR acknowledges about $51.2 million (194.5 million PLN) that the company says it "has recognized [as] provisions for returns and expected adjustments of licensing reports related to sales of Cyberpunk 2077 in its release window, in Q4 2020." Translated into plain English, that number seems to include all digital and retail refunds for the game in 2020, as well as expectations for continued refunds and lost sales projected through 2021 (thanks to F-Squared's Mike Futter for helping me parse the tortured language in the report).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The switch to electric vehicles is going more slowly in the US than in some other parts of the world. EVs reached a higher market share in 2020 than in any year past, but they still only accounted for 1.8 percent of all new cars and trucks. So for now, there's not really much impact on the grid from people charging their cars at home at the same time. At least not yet. But power consumption due to EV charging will be a growing concern as the country decarbonizes in the coming years, particularly given how fragile the US's electrical infrastructure is in places.

Just when EV charging will become a problem is something we've looked at before. A study by Matteo Muratori at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado found that a residential distribution transformer could handle six EVs all charging at once, as long as those EVs were only charging at 120 V. But adding just one 240 V (level 2) charger to the mix was enough to exceed the transformer's nominal capacity.

Muratori's proposed solution? Smart charging.