Month: November 2023

Enlarge / Red wine headache (RWH) might be caused by quercetin, which inhibits an enzyme that processes acetaldehyde in the blood. (credit: Mick Stephenson/CC BY-SA 3.0)

As the holiday season kicks off this week, many will be making a consequential choice at dinner: red wine or white wine? And if your choice is red, will you be risking a headache? The fact that red wine can sometimes cause headaches in certain individuals (especially those prone to migraines) is common knowledge—so much so that the phenomenon ("RWH") even has its own Wikipedia page. The Roman encyclopedist Celsus wrote in his treatise De Medicina about the pain felt after drinking wine, while six centuries later, Paul of Aegina mentioned that drinking wine could trigger a headache.

But the science to date is largely unclear regarding which components of red wine are responsible, as well as the mechanisms behind the phenomenon. A team of California scientists has narrowed down the likely culprits to a flavonol called quercetin, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, although they have yet to run experiments with participants prone to RWH to test their hypothesis.

It's a knotty issue because of the complexities of both wine and human genetics/physiology. Wine is basically water and alcohol, along with acids, dissolved sugars, and other compounds that lend color and flavor. For instance, the tannins in wine are polyphenolic compounds responsible for much of the bitterness and astringency in a given wine; they're derived from the skins and stems of the grapes, or as a result of aging in oak barrels.

Enlarge / Then-Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 20, 2023, in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images | Kimberly White )

The CEO of self-driving car firm Cruise resigned yesterday following an accident in which a Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian 20 feet. California officials accused Cruise of withholding key information and video after the accident, and the company's self-driving operations are on hold while federal authorities investigate.

"Today I resigned from my position as CEO of Cruise," co-founder Kyle Vogt wrote in a post on twitter.com. "The startup I launched in my garage has given over 250,000 driverless rides across several cities, with each ride inspiring people with a small taste of the future," he also wrote.

Cruise is owned by General Motors, which bought the company in 2016. Vogt expressed optimism about Cruise's future without him, saying the team is "executing on a solid, multi-year roadmap and an exciting product vision."

Enlarge / The Steam Deck OLED (bottom) sunbathing with its older brother. (credit: Kyle Orland)

In our review of the Steam Deck OLED last week, we noted that the upgraded 90 Hz screen "has a pretty direct impact on how it feels to play reflex-heavy games." Now, Digital Foundry has used input lag-testing hardware to quantify the precise size of that amorphous feeling, which it found is significant even in games running at 60 fps and below.

Digital Foundry's testing used Nvidia's Latency and Display Analysis Tools running on two reflex-heavy games: Doom Eternal and Crysis 3 Remastered. The tool measures the total time between a mouse click and the flash of an on-screen muzzle that indicates a shot being fired—the lower, the better for the game's responsiveness.

Unsurprisingly, the best improvements in input lag were measured when the Steam Deck OLED was running at a full 90 fps. Compared to the 60 fps LCD Steam Deck, input lag was reduced by an average of 26.1 ms for Doom Eternal and 32.5 ms for Crysis 3. While some of that reduction can be attributed to the shorter time between frame refreshes on the OLED (11.11 ms on the OLED at 90 fps versus 16.66 ms on the LCD at 60 fps), the size of the reduction here amounts to multiple 90 fps frames.

Enlarge / Starship launched on Saturday with all 33 Raptor engines burning nominally. (credit: SpaceX)

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas—Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue.

Before I had even left the launch viewing area in South Padre Island on Saturday morning headlines started to fill my news feed. The Wall Street Journal led with, “SpaceX second Starship test flight ends in another explosion.” Bloomberg was still more dour, “SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Launch and Failure.” Perhaps, after consultation with their beat reporters, editors subsequently changed these online headlines. And the stories themselves better reflected the reality. Nevertheless, much of the media coverage of the launch delivered a harsh verdict: Another failure for Elon Musk and SpaceX.

I mean, yes. The first stage of the Starship rocket, Super Heavy, did explode. And the upper stage, Starship, had a failure that caused its flight termination system—explosives on board in case a vehicle begins flying off course—to detonate. But that was to be expected on such an experimental, boundary-pushing test flight.