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Enlarge / The "Skull Canyon" Core i7 NUC. (credit: Intel)

Intel talked a little about its new high-end Core i7 NUC mini PC at CES earlier this year, but today at GDC the company revealed what the final model will look like along with its specs, release date, and cost.

The new NUC6i7KYK, codenamed "Skull Canyon," includes a 2.6GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) 45W quad-core Core i7-6770HQ—not the fastest Skylake laptop chip that Intel can sell you, but definitely one of the fastest. The other main draws are the Iris Pro 580 GPU, which includes 78 of Intel's graphics execution units and a 128MB eDRAM cache (compared to 48EUs and 64MB of eDRAM in the standard Core i5 NUC we just reviewed), and the Thunderbolt 3 port which also supports full USB 3.1 gen 2 transfer speeds of 10Mbps. It takes DDR4 memory, M.2 SATA and PCI Express SSDs, and comes with a built-in Intel 8260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, just like the Core i5 NUC.

It's got a good port selection, including a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, a mini DisplayPort 1.2 output, four USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, a gigabit LAN port, and an IR sensor for use with remote controls. The HDMI 2.0 port ought to make some HTPC fans happy, since the standard NUCs are still stuck on version 1.4 and can't view HDCP 2.2-protected content. And this is all in addition to the aforementioned Thunderbolt 3 port; this will be the first NUC since the original to support Thunderbolt, which opens up possibilities for external graphics cards down the line.

Can't drink just one. (credit: Tanya Bond)

There are almost no medicines available to treat alcoholism, but that might be about to change. A new study shows that a substance commonly used to treat stomach ailments may also hold the key to reducing the craving for alcohol.

Many of the scientists involved in the study, published recently in Translational Psychiatry, have been studying the molecular mechanisms of alcoholism in the body for years. One focus of their work is the way our bodies produce glucocorticoids, which are steroid hormones that help our immune systems function smoothly and reduce inflammation. People who drink compulsively often suffer from disruptions in the regulation of glucocorticoids in their bodies.

Previous studies have shown that tinkering with these steroid hormones can dramatically alter how much alcohol rodents and humans want to drink, reducing their urge to drink more after they've already imbibed. (Rodents are often used as human proxies in studies of addiction because they can become addicted to alcohol—and they have hormones in their bodies that are close analogies to the ones in humans.)

One Windows Platform for every form factor. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows developers will be able to build Universal Windows Platform apps for the Xbox One this summer, Microsoft finally confirmed at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today.

One way or another, Microsoft has been telling Windows developers to think about running apps on a TV screen using an Xbox for more than seven years now, first as part of the "three screens and a cloud" vision, and more recently as part of the Universal Windows Platform. Microsoft also said that the Windows Store and Xbox Store would be merged.

Developing for phones, desktops, and tablets has always been more or less open, with even the gatekept phone platform easy to access with no particular entry requirements. But the Xbox has always been treated differently. Building traditional Xbox games meant buying expensive Xbox development units (which aren't available on the open market), with Microsoft exercising tight control over the finished game and being deeply involved in things such as the delivery of patches.

SAN FRANCISCO—At a GDC keynote presentation Wednesday, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney showed off plenty of Unreal Engine-powered games and highlighted how developers would soon be able to build those games in a fully virtual reality editor. But the more surprising focus of his talk was the growing use of Unreal Engine 4 outside of gaming for everything from film editing to architectural planning.

"What the camera was to the 20th century, the engine is today," Sweeney said. "The media world is converging into a digital content industry... where the engine is the thing that links [different media] together in an interoperable world."

The most stunning example of this cross-media collaboration came in a gripping cut scene from Hellblade developer Ninja Theory. The highly detailed shot highlighted Celtic warrior protagonist Senua, fighting through deep psychosis and trauma on a vision quest into a Viking heartland. As Senua tried to shake off disturbing, fiery visions of hanging corpses, the camera zoomed in on her face, illuminating every tiny mouth twitch and body shiver that served as an outward sign of her internal struggle.

Sean McMahon

Reconstruction of the Tully Monster as it would have looked 300 million years ago, swimming in the Carboniferous seas. Notice the jointed proboscis, the multiple rows of teeth, and the dorsal eye bar.

4 more images in gallery

The "Tully monster," a mysterious animal that swam in the inland oceans of Illinois more than 300 million years ago, left behind a tantalizingly detailed map of its body in a well-preserved package of fossils. Unfortunately, nobody could figure out what the creature was for half a century—until now.

Francis Tully found the remains of the tiny beast (it's only about 10 centimeters long) in Illinois in 1958 and gave it the whimsical scientific name Tullimonstrum (nickname: Tully monster). A long stalk extends from the front of its body, which ends in a toothy orifice called a buccal apparatus. Its body is covered in gills and narrows down into a powerful tail that it probably used for propulsion. Its eyes peer out from either end of a long, rigid bar attached to the animal's back.

The Tully monster lived during the Carboniferous period, when the North American Great Basin was an enormous inland sea. Trees were colonizing the land for the first time, transforming the soil and filling the atmosphere with higher levels of oxygen than Earth had known before or since. Giant arthropods, like the 8-foot-long millipede known as Arthropleura, crawled through the new forests. It was a good time to be a weird animal, and the Tully monster probably fit right in.

(credit: Uber)

The nation's second-largest rapid transit system is shut down today, and ride-hailing service Uber has assured users it will cap its "surge" pricing at 3.9x.

The Uber app automatically imposes surge pricing based on the ratio of riders to drivers, but that algorithm gets very controversial during times of extreme stress. When residents of downtown Sydney were fleeing a hostage situation in 2014, a 4x surge turned into a storm of criticism. (Uber quickly refunded those high-priced rides and began offering free rides in the city.)

In early 2015, Uber adopted a policy of limiting surges during natural disasters and other emergencies. However, a Metro outage in DC in May caused spikes in prices again, since Uber didn't consider that event an emergency. This time, it will impose the surge cap.