Month: December 2022

Enlarge / Fire TV on the Amazon Echo Show 15. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon's Echo Show 15 versatile smart display now has a more mainstream purpose: streaming TV and movies. Amazon pushed a free software update today that grants the Echo Show 15 with Fire TV capabilities, and newly purchased devices will be able to stream content from the likes of Disney+, Peacock, and other Fire TV apps.

Amazon initially announced plans to Fire TV-ify the Echo Show 15 in September. At the time, it said 70 percent of people who used the 15.6-inch smart display in the prior month did so to watch videos.

Upon release, the Echo Show 15 supported Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu; (though you could only summon them by asking Alexa). But today's news puts those apps under one umbrella while adding additional streaming services, including HBO Max and Discovery+ (soon to merge into Max?) and Paramount+.

Enlarge / Artist’s impression of GRB 211211A. The kilonova and gamma-ray burst is on the right. (credit: Aaron M. Geller/Northwestern/CIERA)

A year ago, astronomers discovered a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) lasting nearly two minutes, dubbed GRB 211211A. Now that unusual event is upending the long-standing assumption that longer GRBs are the distinctive signature of a massive star going supernova. Instead, two independent teams of scientists identified the source as a so-called "kilonova," triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Because neutron star mergers were assumed to only produce short GRBs, the discovery of a hybrid event involving a kilonova with a long GBR is quite surprising.

“This detection breaks our standard idea of gamma-ray bursts,” said co-author Eve Chase, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We can no longer assume that all short-duration bursts come from neutron-star mergers, while long-duration bursts come from supernovae. We now realize that gamma-ray bursts are much harder to classify. This detection pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limits.”

As we've reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. The first gamma-ray bursts were observed in the late 1960s, thanks to the launching of the Vela satellites by the US. They were meant to detect telltale gamma-ray signatures of nuclear weapons tests in the wake of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The US feared that the Soviets were conducting secret nuclear tests, violating the treaty. In July 1967, two of those satellites picked up a flash of gamma radiation that was clearly not the signature of a nuclear weapons test.

Enlarge / Former Theranos COO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani and his legal team leave the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building on July 7, 2022 in San Jose, California. Balwani was found guilty on 12 counts of conspiracy and fraud for allegedly engaging in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud investors. (credit: Getty | David Odisho)

A federal judge has sentenced Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, 58, to nearly 13 years in federal prison for fraud related to the defunct blood-testing startup Theranos, which promised to perform more than 200 medical tests with just a few drops of blood despite its technology never working properly.

Balwani, who served as Theranos' chief operating officer, was convicted of all 12 counts of fraud in a unanimous verdict in July. Unlike Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, Balwani was convicted of defrauding investors and patients. Holmes' conviction on four counts of fraud only related to defrauding investors; she was acquitted of counts related to defrauding patients.

Holmes and Balwani, who were previously romantic partners, were co-conspirators in Theranos' fraud and were indicted together four years ago. However, US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California, separated their cases in 2020.