Month: March 2022

Enlarge / A driver turns left at an intersection. (credit: ImageegamI/Getty Images)

It's a dangerous time to be on American roads, and that's especially true if you're on foot.

Pedestrian deaths on our roads went up by more than 50 percent in a decade, and it looks like last year may have been even worse than 2020. The problem is complex, as road design, poor standards of driving training, and inadequate enforcement of existing traffic laws all contribute to the death toll.

But a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has figured out why drivers of some types of vehicles are disproportionately more likely to hit pedestrians. Previous research has shown that cars are much safer for pedestrians than light truck vehicles, a catch-all category that includes SUVs, pickups, and vans (mini- or otherwise). And there has been speculation that the high fronts of these vehicles are more likely to mangle a pedestrian.

Enlarge / Apple's Studio Display. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Multiple reviews of Apple's new $1,599 Studio Display, including ours, came away less than impressed with the quality of the built-in webcam. We noted that the camera's image quality was passable for video calls, but it produced grainier pictures with worse detail than images from front-facing iPhone cameras or even decade-old 1080p webcams like Logitech's C920.

Apple has confirmed to multiple outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, that the Studio Display webcam's image quality is being affected by a software bug and that the company is working on a fix.

Daring Fireball's John Gruber shares slightly more detail, credited to "little birdies" (in DF parlance, usually a thinly veiled reference to Apple employees in a position to know about something). They say the Studio Display's webcam quality issues were due to "a bug introduced at the last minute" and that the software update should make the webcam's image quality look about as good as it does on iPads with the same wide-angle Center Stage-compatible camera.

Enlarge / The virtual sun rises on another day that GT7's servers remain offline.

A longer-than-expected server outage has meant that Gran Turismo 7 owners haven't been able to access large portions of the single-player game for more than a day.

The scheduled server maintenance, timed around the release of the version 1.07 patch for the game, was initially planned to last just two hours starting at 6 am GMT (2 am Eastern) on Thursday morning. Six hours later, though, the official Gran Turismo Twitter account announced that "due to an issue found in Update 1.07, we will be extending the Server Maintenance period. We will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed. We apologize for this inconvenience and ask for your patience while we work to resolve the issue."

As of this writing Friday morning, the server outage has extended to over 32 hours. While a version 1.08 patch is now available for download, the gameplay servers remain offline.

Enlarge / NIST researchers collaborated with the National Gallery of Art and other organizations to study "metal soaps" found in oil paintings. The soaps can cause the painting to degrade over time. (credit: National Gallery of Art/A. Centrone/NIST)

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards of Technology collaborated with the National Gallery of Art and other institutions to study the deterioration of an oil painting, entitled Gypsy Woman with Mandolin (circa 1870), by the 19th-century French landscape and portrait painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. The researchers used three complementary techniques to analyze paint samples under infrared light to determine the composition of the damaging metal carboxylate soaps that had formed on the top layer of paint, according to a recent paper published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

“The painting had some problems that art conservators pointed out,” said co-author and NIST researcher Andrea Centrone. “It has 13 layers, many due to restorations that occurred long after the painting was made, and at the very least, the top layer was degrading. They wanted to restore the painting to its original state of appearance and find out what was happening on a microscopic level on the top layer of the painting, and that’s where we started to help.”

Back in 2019, we reported on how many of the oil paintings at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had been developing tiny, pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservationists and scholars initially assumed the blemishes were grains of sand trapped in the paint. But then the protrusions grew, spread, and started flaking off, leading to mounting concern. Some paintings have more pronounced protrusions than others, but even when the conservators restored the most damaged canvases, the pimpling (or "art acne") returned.