Month: January 2017

Megan Geuss

ONTARIO, CALIF.—East of LA, a natural gas peaker plant surrounded by fields of cows got a new, futuristic neighbor. Under a maze of transmission lines, a 20MW battery storage facility made of nearly 400 closet-sized batteries sitting on concrete pads now supplies 80MWh to utilities.

The project is an anomaly not just because it’s one of the largest energy storage facilities on the grid in California today, but because it was built in record time—the project was just announced in September when regulators ordered utility Southern California Edison to invest in utility-scale battery storage, a year after a natural gas well in Aliso Canyon, California sprung a leak and released 1.6 million pounds of methane into the atmosphere. The leak prompted a shutdown of the natural gas storage facility, one of the largest west of the Mississippi. Regulators were concerned that such a shutdown would cause energy and gas shortages, although that worry has not come to fruition entirely, and SoCal Gas has begun tentatively withdrawing gas again in recent weeks.

Sebastian Anthony

Reading about the Tesla Model S has become rather repetitive. Yes, it's an electric car. Yes, supercharging is free (well, for those who bought a car before 2017). Yes, autopilot is really cool (but really quite scary on country roads). And yes, the P90D (now the P100D) 0-60mph acceleration is truly insane.

But, when you get right down to it, how important are those things for everyday use, and how many of them are just technorgiastic concepts that drive lots of headline clicks?

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The spiritual successor to Apple's Thunderbolt Display, the LG UltraFine 5K monitor, which only started shipping out from the Apple online store this week, appears to suffer from a major fault: when placed within two metres (6.5ft) of a wireless router, the display starts to flicker; move it really close, and the monitor goes black and becomes unusable. An LG Electronics support person confirmed the issue, saying it "only happens for the 5K monitors we have, not other LG monitors."

If that wasn't bad enough, 9to5Mac's Zac Hall reports that his LG 5K monitor, under the duress of a nearby Wi-Fi router, can freeze the MacBook Pro that it's plugged into, forcing a reboot to bring it back. When he moved the router (an Apple AirPort Extreme) from beside the monitor to another room, everything went back to normal.

A support rep for LG Electronics confirmed that the 5K monitor can be adversely affected by a nearby wireless router, and said that the issue doesn't affect any other LG monitors. Hall was asked to place the router "at least 2 metres away" from the monitor, and "to let us know" if the problem still persists after that.

Enlarge (credit: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Nintendo's Super Mario Run, the portly plumber's first official outing on mobile devices, has been downloaded over 78 million times. Of those 78 million, 40 million were in the first four days of the game hitting the iOS App Store, while five percent (roughly four million people) paid the one-off £8/$10 fee to unlock the full version.

Super Mario Run's success has transformed Nintendo's mobile/IP licensing business, generating revenues of ¥10.6 billion (£75 million, $93 million) for the nine-month period ending December 31 2016, compared to ¥4.4 billion (£30 million, $38 million) in 2015, according to its latest financial report. Super Mario Run has since fallen off the App Store charts, but is due for release on Android in March.

Despite Nintendo's promising start in mobile, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima told reporters that Super Mario Run's conversion rate (that is, the number of players that opted to pay for the full version) fell below the company's double digit expectations. Hopes are high for its next mobile game, Fire Emblem Heroes, which is due for release on Android and iOS on February 2. Its Animal Crossing mobile game has now been pushed back to "the next fiscal year," which could be as late as March 2018.

Enlarge (credit: Doctor Who, BBC)

Peter Capaldi's Time Lord has called time on Doctor Who, after he confirmed in a surprise announcement during a radio interview on Monday that he will leave the long-running, much-loved sci-fi series at the end of this year.

He joined as the twelfth actor to play The Doctor when he replaced Matt Smith in 2013, during the show's 50th anniversary year. It also means that Capaldi's exit will coincide with showrunner Steven Moffat's departure from Doctor Who. Moffat said last year that the tenth series of the time-bending drama, which is set to air in the UK on April 15, will be his last.

Capaldi—when confirming his exit on BBC Radio 2—said that his final episodes would reveal "a darker thing that emerges at the end." He added: "I suppose the big thing about it, for me, is that it will be my last."

(credit: Matthias Töpfer)

For years now, Twitter has been peppered by criticism for its failure to combat or—some would argue—even fully acknowledge the scale of the racism, sexism, and homophobia on its micro-blogging service. On Monday, the struggling company's vice-president of engineering, Ed Ho, said that "long overdue" changes to Twitter would be coming that will supposedly help to tackle harassment, with progress promised "in days and hours, not weeks and months."

Feminists, minority groups, and activists have complained for years that they aren't afforded due tools and protection from hate speech being spewed on the site, and it's not unknown for prominent figures to be temporarily or permanently hounded from Twitter by hordes of trolls acting during, for example, the GamerGate controversy, or more recently in support of Donald Trump's campaign for the US presidency.

After several half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts to allow victims of online abuse to report hate speech, and seemingly with no end in sight to what appears to be a growing problem with neonazi abuse, Twitter says it is finally throwing its weight behind the problem.

Enlarge (credit: Lucasfilm)

Titles for Star Wars movies must be like buses; you wait ages for one and then they come along in a clump. Last week we learned that Episode VIII—which arrives in December—will be called Star Wars: The Last Jedi. That film will be followed in 2018 by a Han Solo origin story, and thanks to Chris Miller's Twitter feed, we have a name:

Han
First
Shot pic.twitter.com/KReR6rgKFT

— Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) January 30, 2017

Miller is directing the movie alongside Phil Lord; the duo were previously responsible for the (excellent) Lego Movie. And as we discovered last August, Adam Ehrenreich is expected to star as Han Solo, possibly in more than one film. Star Wars: Red Cup might be somewhat of an inside joke; after all, the eponymous drinking vessel is made by a company called Solo. And it could just be a working title for now, the way Return of the Jedi was filmed under the moniker Blue Harvest. Then again, that was done to confuse fans hungry for news in the days before the Internet, and Miller's clapperboard does still have Star Wars written on it.

Should Miller's choice of words—Han First Shot—be taken as an undoing of George Lucas' infamous decision to retcon so many childhoods with his Star Wars special edition? After all, that change in dynamic between Greedo and Han Solo fundamentally changed the nature of the galaxy's favorite, scruffy looking nerf herder. Rogue One, the first Star Wars spin-off movie to emerge post-Disney, set a darker, more adult tone than the mainline movies, something Solo's backstory would probably need.

Enlarge / The virtual world can nicely supplement the real one. (credit: Chester Holme)

Surgeons and their patients are finding that virtual reality can relieve the pain and stress of operations—and it’s safer and cheaper than sedatives. For Mosaic, Jo Marchant travels to a Mexican mountaintop village to visit a clinic with a difference. The story is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Ana Maria has never been to Machu Picchu. The 61-year-old always wanted to visit the mountain ruins, but she suffers from hypertension, and doctors warned that the extreme altitude could cause her blood pressure to rise dangerously high. Today, dressed in a white gown and hairnet, she will explore its ancient walls and pyramids for the first time.

She’s in a private medical clinic in Mexico City and laughs nervously as she’s wheeled into a windowless operating room. The surgeon takes a Sharpie and draws a large circle on her left thigh, paints on several layers of iodine, then injects a local anaesthetic into the skin. Inside the circle is a fatty lump, a lipoma around 6 cm across, which he is about to remove.