Month: December 2023

Enlarge / Myth: You own the digital content you buy. (credit: MythBusters/YouTube)

If you purchased any Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store, Sony has some bad news for you to discover.

The company recently announced that all Discovery content purchased on the PlayStation Store will be erased before 2024. The brief notice, signed by the PlayStation Store, says:

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.

We sincerely thank you for your continued support.

PlayStation Network started selling TV shows and movies with 2008's PlayStation 3, and at the time you were allowed to transfer content to different Sony devices, Kotaku noted. That feature went away with the PlayStation 4. With the growth of streaming TV apps, many of which could be accessed through a PlayStation, the PlayStation Store stopped selling movies and TV shows in 2021.

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  The OnePlus 12. [credit: OnePlus ]

The OnePlus is doing its usual early flagship launch in China. The OnePlus 12 is official there, but won't be released in the US until 2024. We can still fire up Google Translate and go over it, though.

This will be one of the first devices on the market with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm's new SoC for 2024. This uses an Arm Cortex X4 CPU and a novel 1:5:2 core arrangement, all built on a 4 nm process. That's one big X4 core, five "medium" A720 cores, and two A530 cores for background processing. The base model has 12GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, while higher tiers will let you go up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The phone is only IP65 rated for dust and water resistance; in other words, it can't be submerged in water like most other flagships.

The battery is getting a big boost beyond the usual 5000 mAh capacity phones have been stuck at for years and is now up to 5400 mAh. The Chinese version has 100 W wired quick charging (this will probably be downgraded to 80 W in the US) and sees the return of 50 W wireless charging. Both will need proprietary OnePlus chargers. The display is a 6.82-inch, 3168×1440 120 Hz OLED that can hit 4,500 nit peak brightness. Unlike some other flagships that are dumping curved displays, this one is still curved.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

AI face detection now counts among the tools that could be used to help adult sites effectively estimate UK user ages and block minors from accessing pornography, the UK's Office of Communications (Ofcom) said in a press release on Tuesday.

The only foreseeable problem, Ofcom noted: There's little evidence that the AI method of age estimation will be fair, reliable, or effective.

The UK's legal age to watch porn is 18. To enforce that restriction, under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom will soon require all apps and sites displaying adult content to introduce so-called "age assurance" systems that verify and/or estimate user ages. Sites and apps risk potential fines if they fail to "ensure that children are not normally able to encounter pornography on their service."

Enlarge / The Fiat 500e returns to the US early in 2024. (credit: Fiat)

It probably hasn't escaped your notice that, among the flurry of new electric vehicles reaching showrooms, there are very few smaller, cheaper EVs. As we noted last week, automakers have been concentrating on the upper end of the market, mostly building premium electric SUVs that bring in fat profit margins (or perhaps costing the OEM smaller losses). But early next year, another smaller, cheaper EV will reach the US—the 2024 Fiat 500e.

We've known for some time that the 500e was US-bound; Fiat broke that news in 2022. But it's now released a lot more information on the 500e, which is coming here at first as a (RED) edition, meaning it might match your iPhone or iPod. Fiat says it's incorporating a "product drop" strategy, so expect other special editions accompanied by as much hype as the automaker can generate, presumably.

Regarding specs, it looks like Fiat used the Mini Cooper SE as the benchmark and then set out to beat it in various attributes. The 500e has a curb weight of 2,952 lbs (1,342 kg), which Fiat says makes it the lightest passenger EV in the segment, so it's about one small adult lighter than the Mini.

Enlarge / "Oobleck" is a classic kitchen science example of a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid. (credit: Screenshot/PBS)

Oobleck has long been my favorite example of a non-Newtonian fluid, and I'm not alone. It's a hugely popular "kitchen science" experiment because it's simple and easy to make. Mix one part water to two parts corn starch, add a dash of food coloring for fun, and you've got oobleck, which behaves as either a liquid or a solid, depending on how much stress is applied. Stir it slowly and steadily, and it's a liquid. Punch it hard, and it turns more solid under your fist. You can even fill small pools with the stuff and walk across it since the oobleck will harden every time you step down—a showy physics demo that naturally shows up a lot on YouTube.

The underlying physics principles of this simple substance are surprisingly nuanced and complex, and thus fascinating to scientists. Molecular engineers at the University of Chicago have used dense suspensions of piezoelectric nanoparticles to measure what is happening at the molecular level when oobleck transitions from liquid to solid behavior, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Toward the end of his life, Isaac Newton laid out the properties of an "ideal liquid." One of those properties is viscosity, loosely defined as how much friction/resistance there is to flow in a given substance. The friction arises because a flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is; the slower one layer slides over another, the less resistance there is. But the world is not an ideal place.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

A former Tesla employee who leaked thousands of accident reports and other documents expressed his doubts about the safety of Tesla's Autopilot system in an interview with the BBC published today.

"I don't think the hardware is ready and the software is ready," ex-Tesla employee Lukasz Krupski said. "It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads. So even if you don't have a Tesla, your children still walk in the footpath."

The nonprofit group Blueprint for Free Speech recently awarded Krupski with its Whistleblowing Prize. "In late 2021, Lukasz realised that—even as a service technician—he had access to a shockingly wide range of internal data at Tesla," the group's prize announcement said. "Not only did access controls seem almost entirely absent, other lapses were evident in the data Lukasz was seeing: serious lapses that risked putting Tesla's customers, and those sharing the roads with them, in danger." Those safety risks included sudden accelerations and braking.