Month: August 2023

Enlarge / Study reveals that compared to other contemporary Europeans, Ötzi’s genome had an unusually high proportion of genes in common with those of early farmers from Anatolia. He was also likely bald (or nearly so) when he died. (credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/Eurac/Marco Samadelli-Gregor Staschitz)

In 1991, a group of hikers found the mummified remains of Ötzi the Iceman emerging from a melting glacier in the Alps—likely murdered, judging by the remains of an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder. The mummy's genome was first sequenced in 2012, whereby the world learned that he likely had brown eyes, type O blood, blocked arteries, Lyme disease, and lactose intolerance. That first genetic analysis also determined that Ötzi was descended from Steppe Herders hailing from Eastern Europe who migrated to the region some 4,900 years ago.

However, according to a recent paper published in the journal Cell Genomics, Ötzi actually has more common ancestry with early farmers who migrated from Anatolia roughly 8,000 years ago, and the earlier findings were the result of modern DNA contaminating the original sample. The authors also used the latest advanced sequencing technology to paint a more accurate picture of the Iceman’s appearance and other genetic traits. Most notably, his skin was probably much darker than previously assumed, and he was likely bald, or nearly so, when he died.

As previously reported, archaeologists have spent the last 30 years studying the wealth of information about Copper Age life that Ötzi brought with him into the present. Studies have examined his genome, skeleton, last meals, tattoos, and the microbes that lived in his gut. For instance, in 2016, scientists used DNA sequencing to identify how Ötzi's clothing was made and found that most of it was made from domesticated cattle, goats, and sheep, although his hat was made from brown bear hide and his quiver from a wild roe deer.

Enlarge (credit: Dropbox)

Sometimes the honor system just doesn't work.

Up until yesterday, Dropbox offered an unlimited $24-per-user-per-month plan for businesses called Dropbox Advanced that came with an "as much as you need" storage cap. This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.

But as with unlimited cell phone data plans, the bad behavior of a small group of users is apparently ruining unlimited Dropbox storage for everybody. The company said in a blog post yesterday that it was retiring its unlimited storage policy specifically because people were buying Dropbox Advanced accounts "for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage." Dropbox says that these users were using "thousands of times more storage than [their] genuine business customers."

Enlarge / Early mornings were made for cars like this, the Toyota GR Corolla. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Although the vast majority of our car reviews are for hybrids and electric vehicles, we do still appreciate a good enthusiast's car. All the more so when they're tweaked versions of more pedestrian fare. Built in low volume and with something special under the hood? Count us in.

That brings us to today's topic, the Toyota GR Corolla.

Some regular readers might be feeling a touch of deja-vu at this point; Toyota builds the GR Corolla in three different specifications, and in March we drove the most expensive, most focused of them, the GR Morizo Edition. With no back seats, a $49,900 price tag, and only 200 units imported for model-year 2023, the GR Morizo is probably a bit too hardcore for most.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | pagadesign)

A federal judge yesterday granted Google's motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which claims that Google intentionally used Gmail's spam filter to suppress Republicans' fundraising emails. An order dismissing the lawsuit was issued yesterday by US District Judge Daniel Calabretta.

The RNC is seeking "recovery for donations it allegedly lost as a result of its emails not being delivered to its supporters' inboxes," Calabretta noted. But Google correctly argued that the lawsuit claims are barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the judge wrote. The RNC lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in US District Court for the Eastern District of California.

"While it is a close case, the Court concludes that... the RNC has not sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith in filtering the RNC's messages into Gmail users' spam folders, and that doing so was protected by Section 230. On the merits, the Court concludes that each of the RNC's claims fail as a matter of law for the reasons described below," he wrote.

Enlarge / The specs of AMD's Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT. (credit: AMD)

AMD has been slower than Nvidia to fill out its next-generation GPU lineup, and for months there has been a huge gap between the Radeon RX 7900 XT (currently retailing between $750 and $850) and the Radeon RX 7600 (holding steady at $270ish). Today, the company is finally filling in that gap with the new Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, both advertised as 1440p graphics cards and available starting at $449 and $499, respectively. Both cards will be available on September 6. And most Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPUs sold between now and September 30 will come with a free copy of Bethesda's upcoming "Skyrim in space" title, Starfield.

AMD kept the prices of both cards under wraps while pre-briefing members of the press about the announcement, which is unusual but not hard to explain. AMD's RX 7600 launch was spoiled a bit by Nvidia, which preempted the 7600's announcement by offering a more powerful GeForce RTX 4060 at the same $299 price that AMD had planned for the 7600. This prompted AMD to cut the 7600's price to $269 before it was even announced; we'll have to wait and see if Nvidia chooses to change its prices in response to the new Radeon cards' launch.

The full lineup of RX 7000-series graphics cards. AMD pictures a reference version of the 7700 XT, though it won't be selling one. (credit: AMD)

The RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT are based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture as the other 7000-series GPUs, which means a more efficient manufacturing process than the RX 6000 series, DisplayPort 2.1 support, and hardware acceleration for encoding with the AV1 video codec, which promises game streamers either higher-quality video at the same bitrate as older codecs or the same quality with a lower bitrate. AMD compared the 7800 XT and 7700 XT favorably to Nvidia's $600 upper-midrange RTX 4070 and the $500 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti.

Enlarge / AMD's FSR 3 will compete with Nvidia's proprietary DLSS Frame Generation feature starting in September. (credit: AMD)

Even if you're not interested in buying one of the new Radeon graphics cards AMD announced today, the company still has some software-related announcements of interest to anyone who plays games on their PC. And that includes not just owners of older AMD GPUs but people who use Nvidia GeForce or Intel Arc cards, too.

First, AMD is finally ready to reveal more details about FidelityFX Super Resolution version 3, the latest major update to the company's open source upsampling technology. A competitor to Nvidia's proprietary Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Intel's GPU-agnostic but nascent XeSS, all of these technologies attempt to generate a high-resolution image by rendering a lower-resolution image, blowing it up and filling in the gaps algorithmically to approximate what a natively rendered image would have looked like.

What GPUs support FSR 3?

Last year, FSR 2.0 went a long way toward making the technology more competitive with DLSS while also working on a wider range of graphics hardware from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Contrary to some prior speculation, FSR 3 will continue to support a wide range of old and new GPUs from all three major GPU companies. AMD has confirmed to us that the following graphics hardware should all support FSR 3: