Category: Uncategorised

A message Netflix gave Verizon home Internet customers during a money dispute in 2014. (credit: Yuri Victor)

Netflix has been throttling its video streams on the Verizon Wireless and AT&T mobile networks, reducing the default bitrate to 600kbps in order to help users stay under their data caps.

Netflix's admission yesterday came a week after T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere said that AT&T and Verizon deliver Netflix video at a resolution of only 360p. AT&T and Verizon responded that they don't downgrade the quality of video, and it turns out that Netflix is the one doing the bitrate capping.

Netflix applies this default bitrate worldwide across most mobile carriers and says it has been doing so for more than five years, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. But Netflix isn't throttling on Sprint and T-Mobile USA, telling the Journal that “historically, those two companies have had more consumer-friendly policies.” Sprint and T-Mobile both offer data plans where customers can exceed their caps without being automatically charged extra fees, but they have to make do with slower speeds the rest of the month unless they purchase more high-speed data.

In a new report, the court-appointed receiver assigned to investigate an alleged cryptocurrency scam has found no evidence of "any legitimate Gemcoin or other viable business."

In October 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had sued a Southern California company over an alleged Ponzi scheme resulting in a loss to investors of at least $32 million. If the government’s accusations are correct, that would make Gemcoin one of the largest digital-currency-based financial schemes ever.

The lawsuit came days after the United States Marshals Service and the Arcadia Police Department froze assets and raided corporate offices in Arcadia, north of downtown Los Angeles. Alliance Finance Group and its assets were promptly put into the hands of a court-appointed receiver, whose job it remains to examine what went wrong.

Saturn's moons push and pull on its fluid, making it bulge around the middle. (credit: NASA)

It's common to think of the Solar System as a fairly static place. Yes, everything is moving around all the time, but the same basic system of planets and most of their moons seems to have more or less existed as-is since the relatively early days of the Solar System. Earth’s Moon, for example, is thought to have formed less than 100 million years after the Solar System coalesced, coming into existence when Earth collided with a Mars-sized body. And so it has gone for the last 4.5 billion years.

In contrast, a series of observations suggests some of Saturn’s moons may be mere 100 million years old. That is the theory put forth in a new paper published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal, authored by scientists from the SETI Institute and the Southwest Research Institute. The researchers believe, based upon observations made by the Cassini spacecraft, that the interior moons could only have existed in their relatively pristine orbits for a short time. “I think we are at a point where we can confidently say that the inner moons are not as old as the planet,” Matija Ćuk, lead author of the new research paper, said in an interview.

Saturn has a complicated system of at least 62 moons in addition to its famous rings, making it the busiest planetary system in the Solar System. Titan, the largest and best-known of Saturn’s moons, is covered in exotic hydrocarbon seas. But equally interesting to scientists is one of its inner moons, the much smaller Enceladus. Cassini found the moon to have geysers at its southern pole, blasting water from its interior into outer space. Since then, scientists have wondered whether life may exist in the warm, interior oceans of Enceladus. Ćuk and his colleagues, Luke Dones and David Nesvorný, have an answer that astrobiologists may not like.

(credit: Mayo Clinic Gene Expression Core)

Almost all autism spectrum disorders (ASD) risk factors that we know about are found in the unaffected, general population. (That’s what makes them risk factors, rather than genetic determinants.) And in that general population, there is a very wide range of social awareness, engagement in relationships, and communication styles.

The relationships among ASD genetic risk factors, normal variability in social functioning, and neuropsychiatric disorders (like ASD) have not been carefully examined. So a bunch of geneticists, psychiatrists, epidemiologists, and bioinformaticists decided it was time to examine it.

Genetic links to ASD—not causes of autism, but links to it—have been identified through genome wide-association studies. In these studies, the genetic variants present in people with ASD are compared to those of controls to see which variants might be associated with risk. This is the method by which genetic links to other psychiatric disorders have been identified, and it has been effective; over a hundred ASD associated mutations have been found this way.

Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope team used a robotic arm to install the last of the telescope's 18 mirrors onto the telescope structure. (credit: NASA)

Since Galileo first discovered the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, telescopes have gotten larger, more accurate, and more powerful. They're now installed all around the world from mountaintop observatories to suburban backyards. And over those 350 years, all of them have battled the same enemy: our Earth’s atmosphere.

The thin layer of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide that makes life possible on our planet makes observation of everything beyond the planet maddeningly difficult. The atmosphere absorbs a great deal of the light outside the visible part of the spectrum, blocking or severely attenuating information about the cosmos. Its turbulent motions distort what does get through. It scatters our own light back down into our eyes and instruments, making the night more like a slightly darker day, washing out all but the brightest celestial objects in a haze of light pollution.

A comparison of ground-based and Hubble images of Pluto and Charon. (credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI Ground Image: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Hawaii)

We can reduce this atmospheric obfuscation slightly by situating our observatories at high altitudes, far from population centers. But it is not enough. If only we could open a hole in our gaseous shroud and peer through it...

This image is from Codemasters' F1 2015, which is has the official license for the sport. Alter this game at your peril! (credit: Codemasters)

There's a bit of a fuss going on in the sim racing community right now. A website called RaceDeparment—which serves as a hub for many a sim racing game—took down many pages of content containing mods for a pair of Codemasters Formula 1 games as well as Reiza Studio’s Automobilista following a cease and desist from the sport's commercial rights holder.

RaceDepartment was hosting mods for F1 2013, F1 2014, and Automobilista that let players update their games so that the cars look like this year's machines (rather than several years out of date). But those mods were unlicensed by Formula One World Championships Ltd, which owns the commercial rights to all things F1 (including TV broadcasts, online videos, and video games). That's riled a few people up, if this hyperbolic (and sometimes-profane) rant at Pretend Race Cars is anything to go by.

However one feels about unlicensed game mods, it ought not to be too surprising that the content has been removed. For one thing, RaceDepartment's terms of service unambiguously state that copyright- and trademark infringement isn't cool, and even tells users that "When creating or uploading free to use mods, car skins, helmets, cars, tracks etc users should seek official permission first from the copyright or trademark holders," something that didn't happen here, since Codemasters is the only organization with an official license for Formula 1. And being able to update a two- or three-year old game to the 2016 season isn't exactly helpful to Codemasters either, giving gamers one less reason to pay for this year's game.