Before it plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn on its final death dive, the Cassini spacecraft made 22 orbits of the planet that followed a path no probe had taken before: It flew between the massive planet and its rings. During those final orbits, Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) spotted water ice and complex organic molecules flowing from the rings to the atmosphere of the planet: ring rain. But it turns out, “ring rain is more like a ring downpour,” according to Hunter
The European Parliament has voted to approve new regulations that will place a European content quota on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Once the new rules are formally approved, 30 percent of video-on-demand platform content catalogs will have to be European — a move aimed at supporting “the cultural diversity of the European audiovisual sector.” Additionally, these companies will be asked to support the development of European productions either through direct investment or by paying into national funds, contributions that should be “proportional to their on-demand revenues in that country.”
While some companies, like Netflix, are already nearing that quota, they’ll be required to maintain it going forward. Last month, Roberto Viola, head of the European Commission’s communications networks, content and technology division, told Variety that the European Union would publish information on how streaming platforms currently stand in regards to their European content. The figures are expected this month.
The new regulations still need to be approved by the Council of EU ministers. Afterwards, EU member states will have 21 months to incorporate the rules into their own legislation.
In a moment where you need to quickly book a ride, but don’t want to fidget with ride-sharing apps or would like to see a comparison of fares? Google Assistant can now help in an easier way. Just say to your phone or Google Home, “Hey Google, book me a ride to the airport.”
Once you do that, your phone will pop-up a list of available options including price and how far away the next driver may be. Depending on market, it should bring up both taxis and ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. Tapping on an option will take you right into Uber or Lyft to show you pricing and exact wait times for drivers.
You’ll still need access to apps, if you go with a ride-sharing service, but the quick comparison is handy.
Google says that this new ride requesting in Google Assistant is available in English and “any country where one of our supported ride service partners operate.” In the coming months, they’ll expand to more languages.
Two weeks ago, Hurricane Florence slammed into the Carolinas, unleashing six months of rain in a matter of hours. In inland Cumberland County, the Cape Fear River rose 40 inches, inundating Fayetteville with the worst flooding the city has seen since 1945. But as the waters receded and citizens returned to their ruined homes, a new plague was just beginning to descend.
Drive through Fayetteville today and you’ll pass house after house emptied of belongings, the mud-stained detritus piled high on curbs across the county. But you’ll have a hard time seeing the storm’s aftermath through the clouds of monstrous, hyper-aggressive mosquitoes spattering across your windshield. Twenty-seven counties in North Carolina, including Cumberland, are in the midst of a mega-mosquito outbreak. On September 26, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper ordered $4 million in relief funds to combat invading swarms of the nickel-sized bloodsuckers, known to scientists as Psorophora ciliata and to everyone else as gallinippers.
“They’re just everywhere,” says Tom Turturro, an environmental health program specialist with Cumberland County. The area gets a small amount of gallinipper activity each year during the rainy season, but this has been an especially bad bout. His office has gotten more than 500 calls in the last week. Worried it will hamper clean-up efforts, the county sent out pesticide-spraying trucks this week, and is looking into aerial efforts as well. While not known to transmit human disease, the super-sized skeeters are quick to mob any mammal they can find, any time, day or night, and deliver a fearsome bite. “It’s like somebody shoving a hot poker in your arm,” says Turturro. “It burns like hell.”
All mosquitoes come equipped with serrated mouthparts called maxillae they use to carve through skin. For most species, these structures are so small and sharp that you don’t feel much more than a tingle to let you know you’ve been bitten. But the gallinipper’s chompers are designed for bigger prey—it’s one of the only species that can pierce cattle hide. Its bite is so deep it sets off nerve cells in the epidermis designed to alert the body to a serious wound. In other words, your body thinks it’s being stabbed.
“It’s a much more intense pain because if that part of our skin has been compromised, that means the body is in big trouble,” says Deby Cassill, a biologist at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
While the giant mosquito can usually be found in low numbers throughout the southeastern US, Cassil says the animal is native to the swamplands of the Mississippi delta. Pressure from pesticides and human development in more populous parts of the region have caused other mosquito species to become smaller and reproduce faster—sometimes up to multiple generations in a year. But Psorophora ciliata has a different strategy. The massive females overproduce eggs, laying them in the millions in low-lying grasslands. Most will dry up and die over the next year or two. But should a big rain roll through, any viable eggs will quickly hatch. “They’re adapted to these rare events where they can really benefit,” says Cassill. “It’s kind of like a dinosaur in that way.”
So what happens as these rare flooding events, like Florence, increase in frequency?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that the science isn’t clear on whether a warming planet will deliver more hurricanes, only that any hurricanes that do happen will be worse. More moisture in the atmosphere and warmer seas mean more rain and more storms like Florence and Harvey, which park for days over the coast.
“It’s a great question, and a really hard one for scientists to predict,” says Michael Reiskind, a public health entomologist at North Carolina State University. “But I have to think that if every single year we had a major flooding event like Florence, populations of these mosquitoes would go up.” More frequent flooding would mean lower egg mortality year to year—the thing that, for the moment, is keeping giant mosquitoes from being an annual scourge.
Humans have worked hard over the centuries to minimize the flooding that was a natural part of the coastal ecosystem—draining swamps and rerouting rivers, installing dams and levies to protect growing cities. But all those measures weren’t designed to withstand the new extreme weather events of a climate-changed world. Often, it actually makes matters worse.
Super-fueled hurricane seasons threaten to bring recurring floods to the American South in the near future. And with them, a six-legged pestilence. “Wherever in our country gets warmer and wetter, the insects are going to come,” Cassill says. The resulting impacts could be more than just a few bad bug bites. Recently, researchers estimated that for every degree Celsius of warming, 10 to 25 percent of the world’s crops will be lost to insects. And that’s a scourge that will require more than some DEET and well-screened windows to ward off.
If you’ve picked up a Switch you’ve no doubt been impressed by the games and the overall design, but decidedly underwhelmed by the display—which is uglier than the ones found on cheaper products like the $100 Amazon Fire. Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Nintendo is considering another model of the Switch—this time with a display that actually shows off all those pretty games.
The current Switch ships with a subpar 6.2-inch, 720p LCD display. The LCD is not pretty, with elevated black levels that remove the contrast from images and leave everything looking washed out compared to the same content on a television (or a phone). I couldn’t stand the display back when the Switch launched, and was still unimpressed when I revisited the Switch 18 months later. So the idea of a new Switch, with a proper display, is mighty appealing.
According to the Wall Street Journal the display would not be an OLED—as is popular in the iPhone XS and Samsung Note 9—but an LED. That’s the kind of display found in products like the Essential Phone and Apple’s upcoming iPhone XR. LED displays aren’t quite as power efficient as OLEDs and don’t produce as dark blacks, but they are less expensive and can produce richer colors.
A 6.2-inch LED display would make the Switch feel like a much more quality hand held product—though it should be noted that while such a display could improve battery life, display quality, and even make the Switch thinner, it would also, likely, result in a more expensive product—and potentially one that is more easily damaged than the current model.
It should also be reiterated that this is not a done deal on Nintendo’s part. The Wall Street Journal story notes that Nintendo is only considering a new Switch, and that the new display is just one redesign option on the table.
The Switch, while selling well, is starting to see sales stagnate. Thus the new model to encourage more sales.
It’s not unusual. The Nintendo 3DS has had six different models available since it launched in 2011. The Sony PS4, which launched in 2013, has seen at least three models—same for the Microsoft Xbox One which launched that same year. As the cycle between major console refreshes grows larger, the number of mid-cycle updates grows too.
As for when a Switch refresh could appear? The Wall Street Journal reports that Nintendo is eyeing a 2019 launch. Better start saving now. (I’m mainly talking to myself.)
Get ready for the next generation of wifi technology: Wi-fi 6 (for so it is named) is going to be appearing on devices from next year. But will you have to throw out your old router and get a new one? And is this going to make your Netflix run faster? Here’s everything you need to know about the new standard.
A brief history of wifi
Those of you of a certain age will remember when home internet access was very much wired—only one computer could get online, a single MP3 took half an hour to download, and you couldn’t use the landline phone at the same time.
Thank goodness for wifi technology then, which gradually became cheap and compact enough to fit inside a router suitable for home use. The first wifi protocol appeared in 1997, offering 2Mbit/s link speeds, but it was only with the arrival of 802.11b and 11Mbit/s speeds in 1999 that people seriously started thinking about home wifi.
Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)
Wifi standards, as well as a whole host of other electronics standards, are managed by the IEEE: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Specifically, IEEE 802 refers to local area network standards, and 802.11 focuses on wireless LAN. In the 20 years since 802.11b arrived, we’ve seen numerous new standards pushed out, though not all of them apply to home networking kit.
The introduction of 802.11g in 2003 (54Mbit/s) and 802.11n in 2009 (a whopping 600Mbit/s) were both significant moments in the history of wifi. Another significant step forward was the introduction of dual-band routers with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, tied to the arrival of 802.11n, which could offer faster speeds at shorter ranges.
Today, with 802.11ac in place, that 5GHz band can push speeds of 1,300Mbit/s, so we’re talking speeds that are more than 600 times faster than they were in 1997. Wi-Fi 6 takes that another step forward, but it’s not just speed that’s improving.
Explaining wifi technology can get quite technical. A lot of recent improvements, including those arriving with Wi-Fi 6, involve some clever engineering to squeeze more bandwidth out of the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz your router already employs. The end result is more capacity on the same channels, with less interference between them, as well as faster data transfer speeds.
Turning wifi up to six
One of the most important changes Wi-Fi 6 brings with it is, of course, the new naming system: Using a simple succession of numbers is going to make it a lot easier for consumers to keep track of standards and make sure they’ve got compatible kit set up. The more technical term for Wi-Fi 6 is 802.11ax, if you prefer the old naming.
Older standards are getting retroactively renamed too—the 802.11ac standard becomes Wi-Fi 5, the 802.11n standard becomes Wifi 4, and so on. Expect to see the new Wi-Fi 6 name on hardware products and inside software menus from 2019, as well as funky little logos not unlike the one Google uses for its Chromecast devices.
As always, the improvements with this latest generation of wifi are in two key areas: Raw speed and throughput (if wifi was a highway, we’d be talking about a higher maximum speed limit for vehicles, as well as more lanes to handle more vehicles at once). Wi-Fi 6 will support 8K video streaming, provided your internet supplier is going to give you access to sufficient download speeds in the first place.
In practice that means support for transfer rates of 1.1Gbit/s over the 2.4GHz band (with four streams available) and 4.8Gbit/s over the 5GHz band (with eight streams available), though the technology is still being refined ahead of its full launch next year—those speeds may, in fact, go up (it’s been hitting 10Gbit/s in the lab). Roughly speaking, you can look forward to 4x to 10x speed increases in your wifi.
Another improvement Wi-Fi 6 will bring is improved efficiency, which means a lower power draw, which means less of a strain on battery life (or lower figures on your electricity bill). It’s hard to quantify the difference exactly, especially as Wi-Fi 6 has yet to be finalized, but it’s another step in the right direction for wifi standards—it shouldn’t suck the life out of your phone or always-on laptop quite as quickly.
Refinements in Wi-Fi 6 hardware and firmware should also mean better performance in crowded environments. You might finally be able to get a strong signal at your sports bar of choice, though don’t hold your breath. As always, a host of other factors (walls, microwaves, the number of people streaming Netflix in your house) are going to have an impact on the final speeds you see.
What will you have to do?
Not a lot. As is usually the case, Wi-Fi 6 is going to be backwards compatible with all the existing wifi gear out there, so if you bring something home from the gadget shop that supports the new standard, it will work fine with your current setup—you just won’t be able to get the fastest speeds until everything is Wi-Fi 6 enabled.
How long that takes is going to depend on hardware manufacturers, software developers, internet service providers, and everyone else in the industry. You might just have to sit tight until your broadband provider of choice deems the time is right to upgrade the hardware it supplies to you (though you could just upgrade the router yourself).
Photo: Adam Clark Estes (Gizmodo)
When you’re out and about in the wider world you might start to see certain networks advertising faster speeds, using the new terminology, but this rebrand is brand new: We’ll just have to wait and see how these new names and logos get used in practice. Would you swap coffee shops for Wi-Fi 6?
Bear in mind that it’s also going to take a while for this to roll out properly. When we say 2019, that’s the very earliest that fully approved Wi-Fi 6 devices are going to start appearing on the scene, so it might be months or years before everyone catches up. Some early devices making use of the draft technology have already appeared on the scene.
Even if you have no problems with download and upload speeds right now, Wifi 6 is intended to fix some of the pain points that still exist: Trying to get decent wifi in a crowded space, for example, or trying to connect 20 different devices to the same home router without the wireless performance falling off a cliff.
If you think about the number of smart speakers and smart lights and streaming dongles set up in the modern-day home, anything that adds more capacity to the network is going to help. And of course, those faster data transfer speeds don’t hurt either.
Data center hardware used by Apple and Amazon may have been fitted with surveillance micro-chips by Chinese server company Super Micro, claims Bloomberg in a new report. Almost 30 US companies reportedly fell prey to the “attack,” with the chips used to snatch intellectual property and trade secrets, according to Bloomberg‘s anonymous government and corporate sources. The report notes that no “consumer data is known to have been stolen.”
Apple has flat-out denied the allegations, claiming that it did not find the chips, while Amazon said it had “found no evidence to support claims of malicious chips or hardware modifications.” As for Super Micro, it denied that it introduced the chips during the manufacturing phase. And China’s foreign ministry has said that the country “is a resolute defender of cybersecurity.”
That just leaves Bloomberg, which claims the issue was first discovered by Apple in May, 2015 and quietly reported to the FBI. Later, Amazon independently found the chip and also informed US authorities. Apple reportedly severed ties with Super Micro in 2016. A follow-up investigation was then conducted, which reportedly remains open to this day. Apple and Amazon, however, both deny working with the FBI on a top-secret probe. The report lays the blame for the so-called “hardware hack” squarely at the feet of China’s regime.
Apple — which tends to refrain from issuing direct responses to specific reports — has taken the unorthodox step of categorically denying Bloomberg‘s revelations. “Over the course of the past year, Bloomberg has contacted us multiple times with claims …of an alleged security incident at Apple,” the company said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. “We have repeatedly and consistently offered factual responses, on the record, refuting virtually every aspect of Bloomberg‘s story relating to Apple.
“On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement.”
This isn’t the first time a Chinese company has come under fire for surveillance in the US. Earlier this year, Donald Trump signed an act banning government personnel from using Huawei and ZTE devices, following years of concerns over the companies’ ties to China’s government.
