Month: April 2023

Enlarge / Michelle Yeoh as Emperor Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Discovery. (credit: Paramount+)

Paramount+ has announced a new movie called Star Trek: Section 31 that will star Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh, reprising her role as Emperor Philippa Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery.

It was announced in 2019 that the streaming network was exploring the idea of a series starring her—in fact, it was one of the first post-Discovery announcements—but it's been radio silence since then, and Yeoh's already illustrious career has reached new heights with the enormous critical and popular success of Everything Everywhere All At Once. Star Trek viewers could be forgiven for assuming that Yeoh—now, more than ever, beloved an artist and star as you could possibly name—might have moved on.

This announcement makes it clear that's not the case, though her expanded popularity could be the reason for reducing a series concept to just a single movie. (That bit is complete speculation on our part, though.) Yeoh released the following statement alongside the announcement:

Enlarge / An artist's conception of Ptolemy using an instrument to observe the night sky. (credit: Getty Images)

It was only natural for Alexander Jones to feel thrilled when he saw a sixth century palimpsest at the Ambrosiana library in Milan for the first time. It happened in 1984 when Jones was working on his dissertation using manuscripts in Italy. With the tools at his disposal, including a portable ultraviolet lamp and microfilm, he could only read a few lines. But Jones’ interest was piqued because there were pages of the text that no one had succeeded in reading.

Those pages remained unread until this year when a large part of the text was deciphered by Jones, a professor of History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity at New York University, who worked with Victor Gysembergh and Emanuel Zingg of the Paris-based Léon Robin Centre. The material they discovered appears to be a copy of Claudius Ptolemy’s treatise on a scientific instrument called the meteoroscope.

Finding Ptolemy

Ptolemy, who was born in 100 CE, was a renowned astronomer and mathematician who authored several important works, including Almagest and Geography. The treatise on the meteoroscope is a description of how to use the instrument for observations, as well as for doing astronomy calculations.

Enlarge / A mobile billboard deployed by advocacy group Media Matters drives past a courthouse on April 17, 2023, in Wilmington, Delaware. (credit: Getty Images | Jemal Countess )

Fox News Network and Dominion Voting Systems today reached a $787.5 million settlement, ending a trial in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox just before opening arguments would have been heard.

"Over two years ago, a torrent of lies swept Dominion and election officials across America into an alternative universe of conspiracy theories, causing grievous harm," Dominion attorney Justin Nelson said in a press conference today, according to CNN.

Nelson revealed the $787.5 million settlement figure during the press conference. He said the deal provides "vindication and accountability," showing that "the truth matters, lies have consequences."

Enlarge / A pharmacist holds a bottle containing Moderna's bivalent COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Mel Melcon)

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday altered its authorizations for mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, retiring the original monovalent versions entirely, streamlining immunizations for the unvaccinated, and offering spring bivalent boosters to those aged 65 and older and people with certain immune compromising conditions.

The changes will need a sign-off from Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, before they go into effect. The agency will convene its advisory panel of vaccine experts Wednesday to discuss the changes. Walensky is likely to sign off soon after.

With the changes, the only mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines authorized and in use in the country will be the bivalent formulations from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which initially rolled out last fall. These vaccines target the ancestral COVID-19 strain and the omicron BA.4/5 subvariants.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

In April 2022, Intel announced a new Blockscale series of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) meant for "energy-efficient blockchain hashing." In other words, chips designed for mining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The company positioned the Blockscale 1000-series ASICs to lower power usage and help ease the then-ongoing shortage of GPUs.

“For proof-of-work algorithms that are compatible with ASIC-based systems and SHA-256 hashing, the Intel Blockscale ASIC will provide the energy efficiency and computing power needed to achieve scalability and sustainability," reads an unsigned Intel blog post. "And given the nature of the silicon powering this technology, Intel will be able to supply it in volume without compromising the supply of new CPUs or GPUs.”

Today, Intel quietly discontinued the Blockscale 1000 chips, and the company told Tom’s Hardware that it has no immediate plans to introduce any upgrades or replacements. The company will "continue to support" companies that have already purchased Blockscale chips, but it looks like the project is fading away barely a year after its original announcement.

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  The Xiaomi 13 Ultra in its full camera mode regalia. [credit: Xiaomi ]

Xiaomi's newest flagship smartphone is the 13 Ultra, and it wants to be the ultimate smartphone camera. There's a big 1-inch sensor, a dual-aperture lens, and even a camera grip shutter button accessory. Along with the faux-camera-leather back and big, round camera bump, if you squint this almost looks like a point-and-shoot camera.

The headline feature is the 50 MP camera powered by a 1-inch Sony IMX989. We've seen this sensor make headlines before as the biggest, most powerful sensor on the market in phones like the non-Ultra Xiaomi 13, the Vivo X90 Pro Plus, the Sharp Aquos R7, and the Leica-rebrand of that Sharp phone, the Leitz Phone 2.

Xiaomi takes Sony's big sensor and adds a gimmick to it that we haven't seen since the Samsung Galaxy S9: a dual-aperture lens. Samsung's dual-aperture lens back in 2018 could switch from f1.5 to f2.4. While that's technically interesting, that was not a big enough range to do much of anything. The goal of a smaller aperture on a real camera is to 1) take in less light if the environment is too bright, and 2) have a bigger depth of field so more things are in focus. None of that scales to a smartphone camera. First, the tiny lenses mean they can never get enough light, so a smaller aperture tends to be detrimental to your photos. Second, smartphone cameras don't have a big enough focal length to really do anything with depth-of-field effects.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a pixel art hospital with empty windows. (credit: Benj Edwards / Midjourney)

On Monday, Microsoft and Epic Systems announced that they are bringing OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model into health care for use in drafting message responses from health care workers to patients and for use in analyzing medical records while looking for trends.

Epic Systems is one of America's largest health care software companies. Its electronic health records (EHR) software (such as MyChart) is reportedly used in over 29 percent of acute hospitals in the United States, and over 305 million patients have an electronic record in Epic worldwide. Tangentially, Epic's history of using predictive algorithms in health care has attracted some criticism in the past.

In Monday's announcement, Microsoft mentions two specific ways Epic will use its Azure OpenAI Service, which provides API access to OpenAI's large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. In layperson's terms, it means that companies can hire Microsoft to provide generative AI services for them using Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

Enlarge / Arriving on the real Protector II. (credit: Dreamworks Pictures)

Never give up, never surrender! That was the mantra of the intrepid crew of the fictional NSEA Protector starship in the 1999 science fiction action comedy Galaxy Quest. It's also apparently the mantra of Paramount TV, which has been trying to bring a spinoff series to the small screen since 2015. That persistence might finally pay off, as Deadline Hollywood reports that a Galaxy Quest TV series is back in early development for Paramount+. It's early days yet, so there are no details about what this TV series might be about or whether any surviving members of the original cast will be returning, even in cameos. Paramount has thus far declined requests for comment.

As I've written previously, the film is a clear homage to Star Trek, as well as its intensely committed fan base. The premise is deceptively simple: What if aliens watched transmissions of a popular science fiction TV show from Earth and thought it was real? An alien race called the Thermians model their entire society on the principles of a fictional Galaxy Quest TV show, building real, functional versions of the spaceship and much of the technology from the series. When their very existence is threatened by a reptilian humanoid general from another species, named Roth'h'ar Sarris, they travel to Earth to ask their heroes for help—arriving in the middle of a Galaxy Quest fan convention.

Of course, the heroic crew of the NSEA Protector are in fact washed-up actors, eking out a living making personal appearances and selling autographed photos. Suddenly they find themselves aboard an actual spaceship, facing real peril, and must rise to the occasion to save the day—in essence becoming more like the characters they once played.