Month: June 2021

A solitary man living in a dystopian near-future helps people recover lost memories and ends up uncovering a violent conspiracy in Reminiscence, a sci-fi thriller that feels like a cross between classic film noir and ambitiously heady fare like Memento and Inception. That's no surprise, as it's the feature film directorial debut of Lisa Joy, co-creator (with husband Jonathan Nolan) of HBO's critically acclaimed series Westworld.

Per the official premise:

Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a private investigator of the mind, navigates the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae's disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?

During a virtual event on Wednesday, Joy said she was inspired to make Reminiscence after finding an old photograph among her grandfather's belongings. The picture was of an unknown woman her grandfather had never mentioned to anyone in the family. "It made me start to think about memory and our lives in general," she said. "And the moments that maybe pass by, and maybe disappear—they don't stay with us, those connections necessarily—but that meant something, that changed us and touched us. And how nice it would be able to go back to these memories fully for a moment, to live that life and feel the way you felt when you experienced them."

Enlarge / The v1 SmartThings Hub from 2013. It's dying at the end of the month. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung has spent the last year or so upending its SmartThings ecosystem. SmartThings was born as an independent company in 2012 when it launched one of the largest Kickstarter campaigns ever: a $1.2 million funding program for the company's first smart home hub. Samsung bought SmartThings in 2014, and in June 2020, the Korean giant announced a plan that would basically shut down all of the stuff it acquired, forcing everyone over to in-house Samsung infrastructure. A big part of that plan is happening at the end of the month, when Samsung will kill the first-generation SmartThings Hub.

The SmartThings Hub is basically a Wi-Fi access point—but for your smart home stuff instead of your phones and laptops. Instead of Wi-Fi, SmartThings is the access point for a Zigbee and Z-Wave network, two ultra low-power mesh networks used by smart home devices. Wi-Fi is great for loading webpages and videos, but it's extreme overkill for something like turning on a light switch or working a door sensor; these things need to just send a few bits for "on or off" or "open or closed." Zigbee and Z-Wave are so low-power that you can run the devices on AA or coin cell batteries for months. The Hub connects your smart home network to the Internet, giving you access to a control app and connecting to other services like your favorite voice assistant.

You might think that killing the old Hub could be a ploy to sell more hardware, but Samsung—a hardware company—is actually no longer interested in making SmartThings hardware. The company passed manufacturing for the latest "SmartThings Hub (v3)" to German Internet-of-things company Aeotec. The new Hub is normally $125, but Samsung is offering existing users a dirt-cheat $35 upgrade price.

Enlarge / We've since touched up GT7's last significant advertisement, as per this week's platform update. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Aurich Lawson)

On Wednesday, Sony published a wide-ranging interview with the head of its PlayStation Studios division, arguably to set expectations ahead of the usual barrage of mid-June game announcements and reveals. In Sony's case, setting expectations now requires telling fans which console to expect future games to land on—especially in a world where chip shortages have made it tough to purchase the company's new and very popular PlayStation 5.

This week's PlayStation announcement marks a change for multiple games that had been previously advertised as PlayStation 5 titles. We have now learned that God of War: Ragnarok and Gran Turismo 7 are officially coming to both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The news follows last week's confirmation that Horizon: Forbidden West will also launch as a cross-gen game.

While the God of War sequel's backward-compatibility status was unclear, the Gran Turismo 7's announcement comes as a big surprise, since it was revealed to the world in June 2020 with a loud "get ready for next gen" tagline, followed by an outright declaration six months later that the game would be a "PlayStation 5 exclusive." Both video advertisements for the anticipated racing game revolved around intense reflection effects that take material properties and car surface warping into account. While Sony Interactive Entertainment has yet to detail exactly how the game's tech works, what we've seen so far will likely hinge on next-gen processing power, perhaps with ray-tracing or double-rendered geometry.

Enlarge (credit: Leah D. Rubin)

Sharks have been swimming and hunting in the world's oceans for 450 million years, and though their numbers have recently declined because of human activity, they're still with us. But the world once had many more, and many more varieties of, the large marine predators compared to today. In fact, new research published in Science suggests that 19 million years ago, the vast majority of sharks and shark species died off. We don't understand why or how this large extinction event occurred.

“Sharks have... weathered a large number of mass extinctions. And this extinction event is probably the biggest one they've ever seen. Something big must have happened,” Elizabeth Sibert, one of the authors of the paper, told Ars.

Sibert is a Hutchinson postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Institute for Biospheric Sciences, and she was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for the initial phases of this research back in 2017.

Enlarge / If you've ever gone looking for answers to software development questions, this screenshot probably looks quite familiar. (credit: Jim Salter)

Legendary programming Q&A site Stack Overflow is being acquired by Prosus N.V., Europe's largest tech investment firm. According to a press release on Prosus' website, the two companies entered into a definitive acquisition agreement yesterday.

According to Amazon Alexa web analytics, Stack Overflow is the 46th most heavily engaged site in the world. Since 2008, the site has served as the first stop for developers searching for answers to their programming-related questions—and eventually, their non-programming-related questions, as the Stack Exchange network of sites expanded into categories including culture, recreation, arts, science, business, and more.

Prosus will likely be much less familiar, particularly to Americans, as the Amsterdam-listed investment firm has a much lower public profile. Although based in Europe, Prosus invests internationally; for example, it has the largest single stake in Chinese gaming and social media company Tencent.

Enlarge / Joby Aviation's electric aircraft takes off for a test flight. (credit: Joby Aviation)

Over the last two days, two companies have outlined radically different—yet oddly familiar—visions for the future of air travel.

One idea is built around a buzzing network of small, electrically powered vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft ferrying commuters in and out of dense urban areas, a tantalizing vision prophesied since at least the 1950s. The other vision bets on a fleet of a few dozen supersonic airliners jetting well-heeled travelers from one global city to another, a dream that many thought died with the Concorde some 20 years ago.

Oddly, it's the flying cars that seem closer to reality this time. Yesterday, Joby Aviation announced another step in its plan to bring eVTOL services to the masses. The company has signed an agreement with two real estate companies, Neighborhood Property Group and Reef Technology (the latter is a sort of WeWork for non-office commercial real estate), to allow rooftop access to Reef’s 5,000 parking garages in the US and Europe. By comparison, there are about 5,600 US heliports, which are managed by a patchwork of owners.

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  When Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota Motor Corporation, wanted to demonstrate to Japanese customers that hydrogen power is safe, he decided to convert a Corolla to use H2 in an internal combustion engine and then entered the car in an endurance racing series. He was even one of the drivers. [credit: Toyota ]

In late May, a special Toyota Corolla entered the track at Fuji Speedway in Japan to take part in a 24-hour race. Unlike the other cars in the race, this one was hydrogen-powered. But it didn't use a fuel cell like the Mirai sedan; instead, this car's three-cylinder engine was converted to burn the gas instead of burning gas(oline). The driver line-up for the car showed why. Among the racers listed was a "Morizo," better known to the world as Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor Company's president.

No pressure, then.

"The reason for competing in a 24-hour endurance race is that simply lasting three or five hours is not enough. You have to have done the preparation to last for 24 hours," Toyoda said in the weeks before the race. There's no doubt about it—completing a 24-hour race is no easy thing, and the crucible of racing will often reveal problems that engineers don't encounter on the test bench.