Month: January 2022

Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks during a press conference on December 20, 2021 at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. (credit: Getty| Fabrice Coffrini)

The World Health Organization on Thursday pushed back on the consistent chatter that the ultratransmissible omicron coronavirus is "mild," noting that the variant is, in fact, causing a "tsunami of cases" that is "overwhelming health systems around the world."

"While omicron does appear to be less severe compared to delta—especially in those vaccinated—it does not mean it should be categorized as 'mild,'" WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press briefing Thursday. "Just like previous variants, omicron is hospitalizing people and it is killing people."

The warning comes as the US is still experiencing a vertical rise in cases and hospitalizations from the quick-spreading variant. In the week ending on January 1, omicron was estimated to account for 95 percent of all cases in the US, according to the latest analysis by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The delta variant, which was making up over 99 percent of US cases as recently as the week ending on December 4, has now been relegated to just 5 percent of cases.

Samsung has been leading the charge toward foldable smartphones for almost three years now, but the future of the company's foldable ambitions have always been on display at trade shows, going all the way back to 2008. With three versions of the Galaxy Z Fold (and two smaller Z Flips) under the conglomerate's belt, Samsung's Display division has shown up to CES with a plethora of prototypes detailing what it thinks the future of foldables will look like. For whatever reason, Samsung produced official hands-on videos of these devices but isn't hosting them anywhere, but there are some mirrors on YouTube from Abhijeet Mishra (1, 2, 3, 4).

These aren't from the "Galaxy" division (that would be Samsung Mobile), and they aren't fully featured devices. But Samsung Display's technology has been a driving enabler behind the Galaxy Fold line of devices. Now, the display division wants to tackle even bigger and more complicated form factors.

The tri-fold “Flex S” and “Flex G” concepts

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  With a tri-fold design like this, a single display can power the phone and tablet screens. (Be warned: the inner parts of these galleries have big, 20MB gifs.) [credit: Samsung ]

If one fold works on the Galaxy Z Fold, then surely two folds will be even better. The first concept, the "Flex S," folds up in an "S" shape (It's more like a "Z" but "S" has way better Samsung branding synergy). This gives you a visible front display when the device is closed and a wide aspect ratio when open. The Flex S comes in phone and tablet versions. The commercial Galaxy Fold needs a totally separate screen to have a front display, while the Flex S only needs a single screen. The Huawei Mate X tried a single-screen design with only one fold, but that meant the entire device was a display when closed, and there was no "safe" side to place on the table. The Flex S works around that problem with the second fold.

Enlarge / On Thursday, E3 made an incredibly early call about its 2022 incarnation. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

If anyone thought 2022 might be the year of E3's physical, in-person comeback, its creators and showrunners have bad news for you. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) confirmed on Thursday that it will not proceed with a traditional exposition floor plan for E3 2022, an event that, in previous years, was the games industry's biggest coming-out party of the year. Worse, organizers have yet to commit to an online-only version, as we saw in 2021.

The ESA's official explanation, first offered to VentureBeat, is "the ongoing health risks surrounding COVID-19 and its potential impact on the safety of exhibitors and attendees." When asked directly about whether E3 will return to last year's online-only format, ESA representatives declined to answer. Instead, they suggested that the organization is "excited" about such an option.

Ars Technica's attempts to contact the ESA's E3 news line, which was live during its E3 2021 period, bounced back on Thursday as undeliverable.

Enlarge / The Apple Park campus stands in this aerial photograph taken above Cupertino in October 2019. (credit: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Jeff Wilcox, Apple's director of Mac system architecture who oversaw much of the Apple Silicon transition, has left Apple to join Intel. He will head up Intel's efforts to develop its own system-on-a-chip.

Wilcox makes this move after eight years as a key player in Apple's desktop and laptop product development. Before those eight years, he was actually at Intel, so the move to Intel is a return for him, not an entirely new frontier.

He announced the change on LinkedIn over the past few weeks. In his initial LinkedIn post, he wrote:

Enlarge / Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 3. (credit: Lenovo)

While the majority of laptops still use the 16:9 aspect ratio, we've seen many companies increasingly embrace taller aspect ratios over the last couple years. Lenovo, while also playing around with the likes of 16:10 laptop screens in other upcoming machines, is taking a wider approach. At CES this week, it announced a laptop with an ultrawide display. Oh, and it has a second screen next to the keyboard, too.

Lenovo says the ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 is the first machine to use a 17.3-inch 21:10 screen. We've seen ultrawide laptops before, but laptops with a screen that's wider than 16:9 are incredibly rare today.

Toshiba tried to make it a thing in 2012. The company's 21:9 Toshiba U845W laptop promised a superior experience for watching movies (at least ones made in the same aspect ratio) and multitasking. More recently, Acer's 2017 Predator 21 X used the 21:9 aspect ratio and a unique curve to claim supreme gaming immersion (again, with supported titles).

Hello, police? I'd like to report a murder—the murder of credible science on the altar of entertainment, as evidenced in the latest trailer for Moonfall. It's the latest epic disaster blockbuster from director Roland Emmerich, in which the Earth's existence is threatened by the Moon getting knocked out of its orbit and into a collision course toward Earth.

Look, I love me some Roland Emmerich. Independence Day (1996) is top-notch entertainment, and while his Godzilla (1998) was widely panned by critics, it featured a world-weary Jean Reno as a French scientist constantly bemoaning the lack of decent coffee in America, which was worth the price of admission alone. But in recent years, the director has pivoted to what can only be called climate-change inspired "disaster p*rn," with over-the-top films like 2009's 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow (2004).

Both films made big bucks at the box office, despite mixed critical reviews and dings for their sloppy use of science. In fact, The Day After Tomorrow frequently winds up on people's lists of most scientifically inaccurate films. That's not a deal-breaker so long as the film is entertaining. As screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff pointed out at the film's Berlin premiere, "This is a disaster movie and not a scientific documentary, [and] the film makers have taken a lot of artistic license." Thus far, Emmerich has shown a talent for pushing an audience's willing suspension of disbelief to the limit without crossing the line into utter ridiculousness (or at least, audiences will be having so much fun, they'll cheer on the ridiculous aspects with glee).