Day: October 8, 2018

When it comes to longer gaming sessions, uncomfortable, toasty ears are something that comes along with the territory. Many headsets claim to remedy this frustrating malady, but just use valves to let air in, rather than providing active cooling.  Enter the Hp Omen Mindframe, which uses thermoelectric magnets to chill its ear cups,  This $199 gaming headset isn’t the height of style, but it’s an excellent that delivers real comfort.

Pros

• Fantastic cooling effect
• Great spatial audio
• Comfort without compromise and even weight distribution on head

Cons

• Unwieldy microphone
• Occasional sound leakage

Verdict

The HP Omen Mindframe gaming headset stands out with tech that keeps your ears cool and has great sound, but its microphone is unwieldy and there is occasional sound leakage.

Specifications

Speaker Drivers	40mm Neodymium
Driver Frequency Range	15 Hz – 22 KHz
Sensitivity	98 dB
Driver Impedance	32ohm
Mic Type	Adjustable, mutes when lifted
Detachable Mic	✗
Connectors	USB 2.0 Type-A
Cable Length	78.7 inches
Wireless	X
Volume Control	✓
Noise Cancelling	✓
Weight	1.05 pounds
Software	HP Omen Command Center

Design and Comfort

The Mindframe features a lot of angles, including the square with rounded corners that serves as the design on both exterior earcups. There’s an LED light surrounding both squares, powered by the device’s USB plug (this is the only way it can be hooked up). The headset’s plastic frame is sturdy and  accompanied by an adjustable band that sits comfortably on the top of the head.

The mic itself is a bit unwieldy, as it’s simply a folding, solid rectangle that can be flipped up or down but not extended or repositioned. It’s an interesting, minimalistic design, but it could benefit from additional customization by way of an extendable portion or some sort of flexible material to help snake it around and closer to your mouth. While the mic is on the left side of the headset, there’s a volume knob on the right side.

The headset’s angular, plastic-laden design isn’t as comfortable as many competitors in the same price range, but it gets the job done. The cloth-covered earcups don’t offer as much pliability as the plush leatherette of other models.

The fabric earcups bring car seats to mind rather than high-end headsets, but the material is breathable, which helps with the cooling. The Mindframe uses thermoelectric magnets to transfer heat from the inside of the cups to the outside, expelling warm air. The gimmick works; when you push the cups closer to your head, they feel like a breathe of fresh air.

The patented Frostcap cooling technology is something we’ll likely see more of in the future, considering it does actively work to keep your ears’ temperature down in a noticeable way, and compared to the valves on products like the Victrix Pro AF ANC that must be activated manually via switches to allow cool air in from the outside, it delivers.

The outside of the earcups start feeling warm to the touch after prolonged gaming sessions, which I experienced after a few rounds of Overwatch for testing, but the inside stays relatively mild, as though you’ve switched on the air conditioning in a steamy room. The cooling effect makes no noise, so you notice nothing but the heat being directed up and out of the acoustic chamber to make your experience a much more comfortable one. 

Gaming Experience

When I played Overwatch, the headset’s unique noise cancellation method, referred to as “sidelining,” was most noticeable. While I needed to communicate for many of the test matches, there were more than a few times I was thankful that flipping up the microphone automatically muted it , a feature more headsets should implement.

Further, the headset’s appropriately vivid soundscapes delivered fast and furious bass with plenty of crisp treble. During Overwatch, calls for healing and support came through as clear as day, while bullets zipping past my head were audible in the 3D space around me. It was far simpler to ascertain the position of my teammates in dire need of Zenyatta’s healing orbs than usual, so I was able to score a few more Play of the Games.

The headset’s lush virtual 7.1 surround sound support was a true enhancement in Call of Duty: WWII. Faraway shells and the sound of shotguns blowing enemies away penetrated my eardrums with a ferocity I don’t often hear, making it much simpler for me to judge where the assaults were coming from and dodge them appropriately.

I also put the Mindframe through its paces with Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It was made with noise-cancelling headphones in mind and its use of binaural audio offered immediate payoff upon starting the game. The multiple voices whispering in heroine Senua’s head from the beginning moments of her journey came through with startling clarity. The immersion factor was nearly overwhelming, and I wished I had played the entire game with this headset in the first place.

Music Experience

The Mindframe’s range was pleasant and noticeable across a range of tracks, be it Die Antwoord’s bassy Donker Mag or the poppy stylings of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way. It was appropriately loud, with those around me hearing every single note of the tracks I ran through Spotify. That typically isn’t an issue with most of the other headsets I use (and my go-to pair of SMS Audio Star Wars headphones). This isn’t a dealbreaker, but could become an issue if you plan on using this headset to cut down on noise around you or during quieter times in your home.

The isolation and thumping beats of my chosen songs were enough to make me reconsider my everyday pair to swap them out for the Mindframe instead, especially with its cooling effect, which is also useful when listening to music for an extended period of time. Whether I selected relentless house and disco beats or hip hop, listening to my go-to tracks was a treat with HP’s newest release.

Features and Software

Using the Mindframe requires you to install the HP Omen Command Center software (available only from the Windows Store), where you can adjust the cooling settings as well as the RGB lighting controls if you’re not so keen on the default red for the headset exterior.

The software is simple to use, but if you’re not interested in further customizing your headset’s RGB lighting or adjusting the level of cooling, you won’t spend much time with the  application.

Bottom Line

The HP Omen Mindframe is an interesting specimen. Its cooling technology, which works as advertised, adds to a solid laundry list of features. It’s an excellent choice for gaming as well as casual music streaming, with a svelte design, customizable RGB lighting and a companion app that offers plenty of options for hardcore headset fanatics. It’s a product that will no doubt influence future headsets that attempt to solve the problem of sweaty ears.

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We need tech to stand a chance of capping global warming at 1.5°C

This story was originally published on PopPhoto.com.

Sixty years ago NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) officially became NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and the early days of the space race began. The Apollo program launched a few years later in 1961. It’s purpose: get a human being to the moon and bring them back home safely.

These missions to the moon meant innumerable advances for the scientific community—and also some incredible imagery. Bill Anders ‘Earthrise’ photograph, which was snapped during Apollo 8, became one of the most iconic images ever taken, but there are plenty of other awe-inspiring images that were taken during these trips.

The Project Apollo Archive collects them all in one place and features images taken during all eleven of the manned-Apollo missions. The archive is extensive and includes a lot of images that would now be considered throwaway frames. A number of them are underexposed and out of focus, but if you are willing to dig you can find some incredible vintage shots from space—like the frames where you can see modified Hasselblad cameras strapped to the chests of astronauts.

Below, our favorite frames.

The Earth is expanding, satellite by satellite, every rocket launch carrying a piece of the planet’s crust into orbit. Should this incidental geoengineering venture continue, it will reshape our planet’s profile as seen across even interstellar distances—giving our smooth sphere a noticeable bulge.

If we’re puffing up our planet, other civilizations could be doing the same to theirs, producing a ring of satellites that we might be able to spot with telescopes we have today. That’s according to Hector Socas-Navarro, an astrophysicist at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, who gave a talk on the topic at NASA’s Technosignatures Workshop in Houston last week. Scientists have long speculated that fantastical sun-sized structures might betray the presence of technological aliens, but while a mega-solar panel blocking a distant star is theoretically easy to spot, such notions remain squarely in the realm of science fiction. Thought experiments like Socas-Navarro’s, however, show that now, equipped with better telescopes than their predecessors, researchers are taking searches for planet-level changes more seriously.

Socas-Navarro realized that one planet-scale project in particular should have a specific and visible effect. Imagine a world something like Earth but a few hundred years ahead, technologically speaking. In this world, the alien military has launched GPS satellites to help with navigation. Alien NASA and alien Google have also launched countless weather and mapping satellites to deliver real-time feeds of the entire planet. Many of these satellites sit in special spots, geosynchronous and geostationary orbits, where they move in lockstep with their planet, letting them monitor the same area all the time. Fill in those special orbits and you get a thin cylinder ringing the planet, one that, when it passes between its star and an observer (like us), casts a slightly different shadow out into space than the naked planet would alone. When that shadow sweeps by the Earth, planet-hunting satellites like the aging Kepler and newly functional TESS could witness the alien star dimming in a specific way.

Socas-Navarro published preliminary simulations in The Astrophysical Journal in March showing what that dimming would look like to modern telescopes if we were to watch such an Earthlike planet about ten light-years away. A satellite ring as thin as ours would be too sparse to see, he concluded, but Kepler could spot one about a billion times denser—a radical, but not impossible change that we could pull off in 200 years if launches continue to grow at current rates.

Plenty of people are already studying these stellar flickers, searching for something similar: a planet with natural rings. “It makes for a tricky transit, a tricky shadow,” says Masataka Aizawa, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo who found one possible Saturn cousin in 2017. He agrees that the dimming from a dense satellite belt should look unique. Natural rings spread out equatorially like a record while geosynchronous orbits form a north to south tin-can shape with vanishingly thin walls (ours currently measures just 450 feet thick), and the two geometries should cast two distinct shadows. But he still considers the paper’s suggestion, which he calls “science fictional,” a long shot. “I saw almost all of the [dimming] curves in the Kepler data, and there is no such evidence in my study,” he said.

Whether satellite-loving aliens are out there or not, running more detailed simulations of how the dimming patterns of moons differ from those of rings and satellite swarms helps all exoplanet researchers, Socas-Navarro points out. “We have to make sure we don’t misinterpret something as interesting as aliens, that we don’t mistake [them] with a natural ring or a natural moon,” he says. “If you look deeply they are different.”

While the technosignatures workshop focused on listening, not talking, Socas-Navarro’s ideas also suggest a sweeping conclusion about the nature of the first contact between two species. For decades our radio receivers and telescopes have restricted our potential pen pals to what he colorfully dubs “big brothers”—civilizations with unthinkably advanced technology. These species would be capable of engineering feats such as literally moving stars around, but recent surveys for traces of “astroengineering” have come up short.

As humanity’s capacity to observe advances, the type of civilization we can detect grows closer in nature to our own. Socas-Navarro’s satellite ring is the mark of a moderately advanced civilization just centuries ahead of us, rather than millennia. And he’s not the only one thinking along those lines. Others have proposed looking for orbital mirrors that could warm or cool a planet, something we humans have recently discussed as a potential solution to our own changing climate.

Any thought experiment about alien civilizations has to start with the only civilization we know, and compared with the technologists of the 1960s, climate change has burdened modern researchers with a more nuanced understanding of how technology can destabilize a civilization. “We are facing global problems that we didn’t have before, like global warming,” Socas-Navarro says, “so there is motivation to start global scale projects.” Based on our current experience, it’s not a big jump to wonder whether other civilizations, if they exist, have faced similar challenges—and found technological solutions.

Over the last seventy years, our machines have developed from being able to observe a civilization that controls stars to one that controls merely its own planet. And in the not too distant future, Socas-Navarro predicts, the synthesis of next-gen telescopes with the developing field of astrobiology will bring us to another tipping point. “We are not far from the transition,” he told an interdisciplinary audience of astronomers, archeologists, and anthropologists in Houston on Thursday. “In the next few decades we will be able to see ourselves at interstellar distances, and then we will become big brothers.”

Since little brothers can most easily detect big brothers, the hypothesis suggests that contact will tend to occur between species with a sizeable technology gap. Such contact between human civilizations has not turned out well for the little brother historically, but Socas-Navarro sees one potential reason for optimism.

Based on humanity’s experience with rapid development, researchers speculate that a “sustainability filter” may stop more violent species from reaching technological maturity. Expansionists that fail to check their aggressive impulses may quickly overrun their environment, triggering a technology-resetting crash, or even outright extinction.

Our current struggle to find a balance with our ecosystem suggests we could be facing just such a filter. Climate change threatens to render swaths of the planet uninhabitable by the end of the century, a blow that would derail economic and technological development. Clearing this hurdle, and finding a way for seven to ten billion people to live comfortably yet sustainably, will require that we take an active hand in managing the planet’s climate and resources. Should we reach that point, we’d be able to keep launching satellites and engage in other planet-shaping activities that could be seen from afar. By the same logic, other highly visible civilizations are also more likely to be active curators of their planets.

“They will implement changes to their planet just as a gardener will change his garden,” Socas-Navarro says.

In such a universe, most instances of first contact would be between mature gardeners and those grappling with their own unruly gardens. The likely outcome of such contact, one hopes, would be a gardening lesson.

10:35pm ET Update: On Sunday night, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off as scheduled, and ascended into space. After about three minutes, the second stage carried its payload onward, toward a successful deployment of the SAOCOM 1A satellite into a Sun synchronous orbit.

After it separated from the second stage, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket arrested its forward movement, and began falling back toward Earth. It, too, found success in landing at a new site north of Los Angeles. This marked the first time a Falcon 9 rocket had landed on the West Coast, and was SpaceX’s 30th landing of a first stage overall.

Ars had photographer Trevor Mahlmann on site for the historic landing, and we will post his photographs after he collects his remote cameras.

Original post: The US Air Force has a message for residents of Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties—do not be alarmed on Sunday night around 7:30pm local time if you hear a loud noise. That’s just the sonic boom of a rocket’s first stage, returning from space, and landing for the first time ever at site along the West Coast of California.

On Sunday night, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. While the company has landed several first stage boosters on a drone ship offshore from California, until now it has not attempted to land at a site along the coast. But now it has completed the “Landing Zone 4” facility and received the necessary federal approvals for rockets to make a vertical landing there.

For long time employees of the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company there must be some satisfaction in this. More than a decade ago, when SpaceX sought to begin launching its Falcon 1 rocket, the company asked the Air Force for permission to launch from Vandenberg. But the military and some of the companies using the facility to launch national security missions, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, looked coolly upon the requests from SpaceX. Now SpaceX has built a landing zone on the former site of Space Launch Complex 4W, where Titan rockets built by Lockheed were previously launched.

Today, Microsoft announced its plans to enter the world of video game streaming with Project xCloud, an ambitious service with a silly title that promises to allow the streaming of Xbox One games across computers, phones, and tablets.

Microsoft says it’s currently testing out Project xCloud and plans to open up tests to the public next year. In a blog post, the company said that game developers will be able to support the streaming service “with no additional work,” and that in addition to trying to solve the big ol’ latency problem (with Microsoft’s many datacenters), the team is developing “a new, game-specific touch input overlay” for controller-free playing.

“Our goal with Project xCloud is to deliver a quality experience for all gamers on all devices that’s consistent with the speed and high-fidelity gamers experience and expect on their PCs and consoles,” the company said.

This news comes just a week after Google announced its own stab at the streaming world, Project Stream, which entered a closed beta test this weekend and allows users to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in a Google Chrome tab.