carmaker’s Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-GMP). Suppliers have been asked to provide parts, and according to “sources in the automobile industry,” the first working example will be ready come this December. Labeled with the code “NE,” the bodystyle is described as a compact SUV, with a range of around 450 kilometers on a charge. That’s likely a WLTP-based figure; the
AT-AT. The mountain-climbing contraption was built on the E-GMP platform. In conjunction with the Elevate, Hyundai announced that one component of its future mobility roadmap was to “introduce
and a “quieter and more stable driving experience.”
According to a Hyundai exec, a primary benefit of the E-GMP will be in offering customers “customizable features, allowing drivers to alter space and configuration more efficiently.”
Business Korea
says a concept of the coming EV will be revealed in June next year. By hewing to the general trend for Hyundai to start
believes the production EV “will enter mass production by early 2021 as planned.” That strikes us as absurdly optimistic, since Hyundai’s still gathering parts to build a prototype, and a new EV on a new platform will require more than one year of testing. Whenever the NE arrives, it will be an important part of Hyundai’s plan to put
Every six hours, at his home in the high desert outside Kingman, Arizona, midway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, Brian Goss downloads the latest blocks from the bitcoin blockchain via satellite. He receives the transmission through a dish he installed this January; it arrives with messages, too—tweets, blogs, odes to Satoshi—sent by bitcoiners around the world. Goss rebroadcasts them from a radio device perched on his roof, in case the neighbors care to tune in. There’s nothing wrong with Goss’ terrestrial internet connection, he assures me—Kingman is not that remote. But if bitcoin is truly digital gold, as he believes, contingencies are important. If the internet goes down, how else will you access your cache?
Gregory Barber covers cryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial intelligence for WIRED.
For some, the trouble with bitcoin, the internet’s native currency, is the internet. Sure, bitcoin may be “decentralized,” with copies of its ledger stored on computers all over the world. But is it really decentralized if it relies on the pipes of your local internet provider? For those wary of tracking and censorship, analog signals—through satellites and land-based radio devices—offer a welcome buffer from central control. Plus, if you believe that bitcoin, which is again worth more than $10,000, is the right place to store your wealth, satellites offer the comfort of redundancy.
The idea isn’t totally irrational. Consider India, where officials recently proposed jailing people for 10 years for using bitcoin. Or Egypt, where the government unplugged the internet in 2011. Perhaps you live on a remote island tethered to the internet by a single undersea cable, or a place without any internet access at all.
Bitcoin’s celestial coverage comes from Blockstream, a blockchain software company. To be clear, Blockstream isn’t launching satellites itself; it rents a small portion of the bandwidth on commercial satellites, which are mainly used for TV. The data is beamed up with enough bandwidth to ensure the blockchain stays up to date. Users can also send along messages, paid through the Lightning Network, a technology that allows small bitcoin payments. The satellites broadcast the signals back down to whoever might be listening.
Listening is the hard part. “It was super outside my technical skill,” says Goss, a radiologist by day. “I didn’t know anything about any of this.” It took him about a week to install the equipment, which he estimates would cost about $100 to buy new. He mostly used spare parts: a 2014 Mac Mini and an idle satellite dish that came with the house. (“We’re not much of a TV family,” he says.) There was some fiddling with software and a few hours of drilling in the equipment, but most of his time went into figuring out where to point the thing.
“This is why you hire someone to install DirectTV,” says Elaine Ou, a blockchain engineer who set up a receiver, with no small effort, at her Bay Area home. Beyond cypherpunk cred, there are practical reasons for receiving blockchain by satellite, she says. Cryptocurrency exchanges have been hit with so-called partition attacks, where data is surreptitiously delayed or faked, knocking the targeted computers out of sync with the rest of the blockchain network. Those attacks happen over the internet, so having an alternate, analog connection means you’re less likely to be fooled.
Ou first started experimenting with alternative ways to send and receive bitcoin back in 2016, around the time China was considering a cryptocurrency ban. Recalling the difficulty the Soviets had jamming American radio transmissions, she and her colleague Nick Szabo, a well-known digital currency researcher, devised a plan to bypass the Great Firewall by sending bitcoin transactions via ham radio. The method offered at least one advantage over satellite: Satellites let you receive data without an internet connection, but you can’t use them to send.
The Chinese ban never materialized. But in March, Ou was able to test out the concept, sending a Lightning payment over the airwaves to an engineer in Toronto. The process wasn’t exactly seamless, she says. It required plenty of coordination over Twitter and Telegram to ensure they communicated across the same narrow band. And it’s not much good for maintaining stable access to your digital hoard, either; low bandwidth means you can’t transmit the data fast enough, so you’ll end up falling behind the network as it updates. She says she’ll stick with satellite for that.
GoTenna, a startup known for making communication devices used in natural disasters, thinks it has an answer to the send-and-receive problem of satellites: radio mesh networks, which work by relaying information over short distances from person to person. The company, which mainly deals with text messages, started supporting bitcoin transactions last year, and it recently partnered with Blockstream to let people use GoTenna’s device to rebroadcast the satellite data they receive.
For now, bitcoin is “still kind of niche” in the mesh networking community, says Richard Myers, who engineers “decentralized applications” for GoTenna. But the company is also exploring how bitcoin could be used to incentivize people to build mesh networks in places with low connectivity. Basically, you’d get paid for forwarding somebody else’s texts.
For now, Goss is happily part of that niche. He tunes into the Blockstream dispatches from time to time: There’s a person who blasts out the news of the day, and a user in Eastern Europe transmits regular blogs. On the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, someone broadcast the Wikipedia article about the event, in case anyone in China was listening. Sometimes the messages are encrypted, seeking out a listener with the keys. “It’d be a great thing for a spy,” Goss muses. “Plausible deniability.” He does his part by broadcasting the messages down to the interstate, which is just within range of the GoTenna. Anyone driving by with a device set to listen will carry it with them to Vegas or Phoenix.
For the most part, the conversation is idle and directionless, sporadic on its most active days and entirely one-sided. Why listen at all? Goss tells me about mining bitcoin nine years ago, when the cryptocurrency world was so small that his home desktop at times made up 1 percent or more of the computing power on the network. It was an era before massive bitcoin mines, before billion-dollar crypto funds, before a Facebook cryptocoin. “This is what bitcoin felt like back then,” he says.
Biometric identification has become part of everyday life. We’ve got facial recognition in airports, cars that can be unlocked just by looking at them, technology that detects a person’s unique way of walking, and of course the ubiquitous fingerprint, used for everything from smart phones to event ticketing. Next on the agenda? Your heartbeat.
As MIT Technology Reviewreports, the Pentagon has developed a laser that can identify people — from a distance — by their heartbeat. The technology, known as Jetson, uses laser vibrometry to identify surface movement on the skin caused by a heartbeat, and it works from 200 meters away.
Everyone’s cardiac signature is unique, and unlike faces and fingerprints, it can’t be altered in any way. As with facial recognition and other biometrics which rely on optimal conditions, though, Jetson does have a few challenges. It works through regular clothing such as a shirt, but not thicker garments, such as a winter coat. It also takes about 30 seconds to collect the necessary information, so right now it only works if the target is sitting or standing still. And, of course, its efficiency would also depend on some kind of cardiac database. Nonetheless, under the right conditions, Jetson has over 95 percent accuracy.
Obviously, the technology could prove a massive boon for the military and surveillance organisations, hence the Pentagon’s request for it several years ago — official documents from the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO) suggest this has been in the works for some time. However, it could have other applications as well. As MIT notes, doctors could check heartbeats without having to touch the patient, while hospitals could wirelessly monitor a patient’s vitals. Perhaps this kind of technology will even one day render cutting-edge advances in facial recognition obsolete.
Philo, one of the streaming TV services, now has a standalone Android app. If not having one was a reason for not trying out the service sooner, here we are.
With the app, you can stream your shows in HD on up to 3 devices, save new shows, create profiles, as well as access your unlimited recordings. It’s got all of the bells and whistles you’d expect.
Philo itself features quite a few of the big channels, such as AMC, Comedy Central, Discovery, HGTV, MTV, and Food Network. There are 58 channels in total and costs $20/month, so if you’ve been looking for access to those channels, check it out. There’s a week-long trial if you’re new.
Over the weekend, Dota Underlords lured 200,000 concurrent players onto its checkered battlefield of swords, sorcery, and slot machines. Meanwhile, Riot’s Teamfight Tactics continued to duel with Fortnite for the Twitch throne. Also, I played Dota Underlords like it was my dang job. If it feels like these Auto Chess games have taken over the world overnight, that’s because they kinda have.
Unlike battle royale, which existed in various forms for years before ascending to video game royalty with games like Fortnite and PUBG, Auto Chess as we know it actually started in 2019. It began with Dota Auto Chess, a Dota 2 mod that came out on January 3. Less than two weeks later, it was one of the single most popular games on Steam despite being a game within another game. Months later, two of the biggest companies in video games, Valve and Riot, have released their own variations on the formula.
There is no great mystery as to how this genre took off. There’s now a well-oiled pipeline that helps propel these things into the zeitgeist. Steam’s Workshop gives exact numbers on how many people are subscribed to a certain mod. Twitch tells us how many viewers are watching people stream it. On both these platforms, games that do big numbers get more prominent placement. Media sites obsessively track these numbers and report irregularities and spikes. These processes and systems have been optimized even more than they were a couple of years ago, when PUBG came out of nowhere to turn battle royale games into a sensation. Popularity has always begotten more popularity, but now it does so in record time. It doesn’t hurt that, in the Fortnite era, players, streamers, reporters, developers, and business execs are all on the lookout for the next big thing. In Auto Chess, it’s possible they’ve found it.
The question, then, is what particular elements make Auto Chess—or the auto battler genre, as people have taken to calling it—so universally appealing as to inspire an initial fervor that not even chess, the sport of kings, or Dota, the sport of people with an annual opportunity to become kings, could rival. It’s one of those things that makes immediate sense if you just play these games, which of course means it’s riddled with intangibles that are nearly impossible to articulate. Time to articulate them.
What’s an Auto Chess?
Despite being attached to notoriously difficult-to-get-into games like Dota 2 and League of Legends, auto battlers are remarkably simple. At the start of each round, players buy units. Players can then combine those units to make stronger versions of the same units. Certain types of units get bonuses for being on the field at the same time. You deploy these units, and they fight each other automatically, with no player input involved whatsoever. Units’ stats and special abilities and the way those abilities counter opponents’ units determine who wins and who loses. The remaining units in the winning army then do damage to the loser’s central health pool. If you lose all your health, you’re out.
There are eight players per match, and each of you square off one-on-one in a mini-tournament sort of format until only one is left standing. Those are the core pillars of the entire genre. You only really need to know those facts to do alright in your first match. (You won’t win, mind you. It took me, like, five hours to win my first Dota Underlords match. But you won’t drown, either.)
MOBAs like Dota 2 and League of Legends require at least a degree of mechanical skill. You need reflexes, timing, and sometimes even accuracy in addition to tactical smarts. You also have to cooperate with other people, flesh-sealed nightmares that leak feelings and opinions everywhere. Auto battlers strip away many of those elements. They’re multiplayer, yes, but you are your entire team, and all you’re doing is making decisions. There are no expectations about the number of actions you take per minute, nor are there teammates around to yell at you for not meeting those expectations.
Technically, yes, you’re squaring off against seven opponents in a battle royale where you can get stomped and embarrassed if you’re not able to think on your feet, but it’s all relatively chill compared to other multiplayer games. You just sit back, make your moves, and watch your tiny action figure army do its best.
So how do you get good?
Auto battlers use their first impression to inspire intrigue. There are so many different types of units, and they form rewarding synergies. It’s fun to just toss out a few same-type units just to see what happens. Maybe you go with a couple of druids in Dota Underlords, only to realize that one of them also falls into the “fierce” category, meaning they have a stat-boosting synergy with your tanky warrior unit. Suddenly, with just three units, you’ve got the backbone of a strategy. You can get away with experimentation like this, because the early game is pretty forgiving. Units respawn after dying, and nobody’s dealing much damage at the beginning, so even if your fledgling army gets wiped out a few times in a row, your central health pool isn’t in much danger. You can still mount a comeback a handful of rounds later, after you’ve amassed more resources and better units.
Before too long, you may start asking other questions. How, after only a few rounds, do some of your opponents have multiple two-star units? Or even a max-level three-star unit? (Stars represent statistical strength.) How can you do that? In my case, my favorite early Dota Underlords discovery was one of the many answers to that question: those druids. If you have at least two druids on the field, your lowest-level druid automatically gains a level. In the early game, this feels like cheating. Every two-star unit is a game-changer in the first handful of rounds, and you can get an extra one with basically zero effort by plopping down a couple druids. I cackled the first time I did it, and then I cackled even more when I leveled those druids up to two stars the regular way, by combining units. Then the lowest-level druid on the field was a two-star and, because of the aforementioned auto-leveling rule, I suddenly had a three-star world-eating mega-hero relatively early in a match.
Auto battlers are absolutely ridden with strategies like these, and each one feels like the sort of revelation somebody has when they decide to become a professional card shark. “I can get away with that?” you will ask many times while playing these games. “And I won’t get arrested?”
Why are auto battlers so appealing?
Fun tactics are all well and good, but the secret behind the explosive popularity of Dota Underlords, Teamfight Tactics, and their ilk is gambling. No, auto battlers don’t try to vacuum real money out of your wallet (at least, not mid-match), but the start of each round sees you buy new units from a slot-machine-like system. Don’t like what you see? Drop in a couple gold to re-roll and get a new selection of heroes. Maybe you’ll luck out and get two of a hero you already have, allowing you to upgrade that hero to a two-star. Or maybe you’ll finally get the OP hero who’s the linchpin of your whole strategy (hi there, Kunkka). Then you’ll want to start upgrading them. Maybe you’ll break the bank and get nothing at all. But at the end of your turn, win or lose, you’ll get more gold, at which point the cycle begins anew.
There a countless meta strategies within this system. For one, you can gain interest on gold if you accumulate enough (one additional gold for every ten gold you hold onto per turn in Dota Underlords, for example). It’s often worthwhile, then, to sandbag for a few rounds and build up a healthy chest of glittering prizes. Then you can sink a ton into re-rolls until your army soars right past everybody else’s. All the while, you’ll want to keep an eye out for crucial heroes—or even just copies of the scrub heroes you put onto the field during the first handful of rounds. You’ve got to plan ahead, even if it means lugging around a bunch of useless copies of Tusk, the walrus-punching warrior who is also a walrus, because eventually, in 10 or 15 or 20 turns, you might be able to turn him into a three-star. Then you’ll have a massive upper hand.
The randomness of these games can be insanely frustrating. Occasionally, it can feel like you lost to the fickle RNG gods, idly tugging at the strings of your fate from inside their cushy digital heavens, instead of clever opponents. Most of the time, though, RNG giveth as much as it taketh away, and the rest is about smart planning and intelligent split-second decision-making. Depending on how long you last, games can go for 40+ rounds, so over time you’ll have plenty of chances to get new units. This means that every game—even if you’re planning to employ the exact same strategy as last time—is a new adventure.
This, in a nutshell, is the magic of auto battler games. You never entirely know what to expect, but you’ll slowly learn to control and even harness the chaos. Figuring out the inner workings of this infernal slot machine is diabolically compulsive. You lose one match, but you figure out how to slightly optimize your strategy for a particular build. Or you realize that if an important unit had appeared just a few turns earlier, you’d have wound up duking it out for first place instead of slumming it in the middle of the pack. You play again. Matches usually only last 20-30 minutes, so what’s the harm? Maybe this time, you get different units early and end up accidentally figuring out a better way to implement your preferred strategy. Or perhaps your early-game unit selection forces you to employ a different synergy strategy entirely, but you realize you like that one more. You do slightly better than last time. You learn a few more lessons. So you play again. And again. And again. Suddenly, your whole Saturday is gone, and your previously-made Sunday plans are starting to look awfully optional.
What’s the history of auto battlers?
For a few months, the Dota 2 Auto Chess mod was the main auto battler on the block. Released in January by Chinese developer Drodo Studio, it was regularly played by hundreds of thousands of people at a time on Steam. As of now, it has nearly 10 million Steam subscribers.
It wasn’t exactly shocking, then, when Valve announced its own auto battler, Dota Underlords, last month. In fact, the only surprise was that Valve wasn’t working with the mod’s original developer, given the company’s history of hiring mod developers like it did with Dota 2’s own designer, IceFrog. Instead, Valve and Drodo decided to make their own standalone auto battlers with each other’s respective blessings. Drodo’s Auto Chess shed the Dota license (but little else) and appeared on mobile devices earlier this month. Drodo will also be releasing a PC version on the Epic Games Store in the future. Dota Underlords, meanwhile, entered open beta on PC and mobile last week. It immediately pulled in hundreds of thousands of players on Steam. Despite an interface that’s well-suited to mobile, however, neither Auto Chess nor Dota Underlords are currently in the iOS App Store’s list of top-100 free games.
League of Legends developer Riot also caught wind of the auto battler trend and similarly adapted its pre-existing MOBA to suit the formula. It announced Teamfight Tactics earlier this month and begin testing it on PC shortly before the release of Dota Underlords. While Riot isn’t as transparent with its numbers as Valve, Teamfight Tactics has been a huge hit on Twitch, which means it’s making waves. Twitch success, however, is not necessarily indicative of a gargantuan player base, nor does it inherently portend long-term interest.
For now, both Dota Underlords and Teamfight Tactics are surfing on waves of early momentum despite the many kinks that come part and parcel with beta releases. The question now is whether they’ll be able to maintain that momentum, especially given that these are far from fully featured games, given Valve and Riot’s apparent desire to capitalize on the trend as quickly as possible.
Why is it called “Auto Chess” when it has nothing to do with Chess?
An abandoned hotel building in Pripyat, a few miles from Chernobyl. (Fotokon/Shutterstock/)
Chernobyl has become a byword for catastrophe. The 1986 nuclear disaster, recently brought back into the public eye by the hugely popular TV show of the same name, caused thousands of cancers, turned a once populous area into a ghost city, and resulted in the setting up of an exclusion zone 1,000 mi² in size.
Humans and other mammals and birds would have been killed many times over by the radiation that plants in the most contaminated areas received. So why is plant life so resilient to radiation and nuclear disaster?
To answer this question, we first need to understand how radiation from nuclear reactors affects living cells. Chernobyl’s radioactive material is "unstable" because it is constantly firing out high energy particles and waves that smash cellular structures or produce reactive chemicals which attack the cells’ machinery.
Most parts of the cell are replaceable if damaged, but DNA is a crucial exception. At higher radiation doses, DNA becomes garbled and cells die quickly. Lower doses can cause subtler damage in the form of mutations altering the way that the cell functions—for example, causing it to become cancerous, multiply uncontrollably, and spread to other parts of the body.
In animals, this is often fatal, because their cells and systems are highly specialized and inflexible. Think of animal biology as an intricate machine in which each cell and organ has a place and purpose, and all parts must work and cooperate for the individual to survive. A human cannot manage without a brain, heart, or lungs.
Plants, however, develop in a much more flexible and organic way. Because they can’t move, they have no choice but to adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Rather than having a defined structure as an animal does, plants make it up as they go along. Whether they grow deeper roots or a taller stem depends on the balance of chemical signals from other parts of the plant and the "wood wide web," as well as light, temperature, water, and nutrient conditions.
Trees have reclaimed the area surrounding the old nuclear power station. (Fotokon/Shutterstock/)
All of this means that plants can replace dead cells or tissues much more easily than animals, whether the damage is due to being attacked by an animal or to radiation.
And while radiation and other types of DNA damage can cause tumors in plants, mutated cells are generally not able to spread from one part of the plant to another as cancers do, thanks to the rigid, interconnecting walls surrounding plant cells. Nor are such tumors fatal in the vast majority of cases, because the plant can find ways to work around the malfunctioning tissue.
The rigid and interconnecting walls of plant cells make them resistant to cancer. (Rattiya Thongdumhyu/Shutterstock/)
Interestingly, in addition to this innate resilience to radiation, some plants in the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem to be using extra mechanisms to protect their DNA, changing its chemistry to make it more resistant to damage, and turning on systems to repair it if this doesn’t work. Levels of natural radiation on the Earth’s surface were much higher in the distant past when early plants were evolving, so plants in the exclusion zone may be drawing upon adaptations dating back to this time in order to survive.
A new lease of life
Life is now thriving around Chernobyl. Populations of many plant and animal species are actually greater than they were before the disaster.
Given the tragic loss and shortening of human lives associated with Chernobyl, this resurgence of nature may surprise you. Radiation does have demonstrably harmful effects on plant life, and may shorten the lives of individual plants and animals. But if life-sustaining resources are in abundant enough supply and burdens are not fatal, then life will flourish.
Crucially, the burden brought by radiation at Chernobyl is less severe than the benefits reaped from humans leaving the area. Now essentially one of Europe’s largest nature preserves, the ecosystem supports more life than before, even if each individual cycle of that life lasts a little less.
In a way, the Chernobyl disaster reveals the true extent of our environmental impact on the planet. Harmful as it was, the nuclear accident was far less destructive to the local ecosystem than we were. In driving ourselves away from the area, we have created space for nature to return.
Stuart Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in Plant Biochemistry, University of Westminster. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com
This morning the Raspberry Pi Foundation took the wraps off of their next generation hobbyist project computer, the Raspberry Pi 4. The eagerly anticipated update to the Raspberry Pi lineup – which is actually arriving a bit ahead of schedule due to some good fortunes in SoC development – offers a significant upgrade to the family thanks to its new 28nm Broadcom SoC, which among other things incorporates a more powerful quad Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cluster. The single-board computer is available now, and like its predecessors, prices start at $35.
Long a favorite for tinkers, makers, and anyone else looking for a project board or a simple computer, the Raspberry Pi family has been around since 2012. Its last full update was in 2016, when the Foundation released the Raspberry Pi 3. In the intervening three years the technology landscape has changed a fair bit, and so has the underlying hardware of the Pi. While still based on Broadcom SoCs, the new Pi incorporates Broadcom’s BCM2711, a 28nm SoC with a quad Cortex-A72 setup along with the company’s VideoCore VI GPU. While the GPU remains nothing to write home about – the Raspberry Pi Foundation prioritizes an open GPU first and foremost – the CPU upgrade is far more interesting. This update replaces the old Cortex-A53 CPU cores with cores from Arm’s much faster high-performance line of out-of-order execution cores. As a result, even with a clockspeed of just 1.5GHz, the Pi 4 is a good deal faster than the Pi 3, not to mention faster than even some mid-range smartphones.
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi 4
SoC
Broadcom BCM2711
4x Cortex-A72
@ 1.5GHz
VideoCore VI
@ 500Mhz
DRAM
1/2/4GB LPDDR4
Storage
microSD
Networking
1x Gigabit Ethernet
802.11ac
BT 5.0
USB
2x USB-A 3.0
2x USB-A 2.0
Video Output
2x HDMI 2.0 Type-D
GPIO
17 Pins
Power
USB-C (Suggested: 15W, 5.1V/3A)
Dimensions
85.6mm x 56.5mm x 17mm
Price
1GB: $35
2GB: $45
4GB: $55
I/O has also received a much-needed upgrade for the latest Pi. The new SoC brings with it USB 3 support, giving the platform access to SuperSpeed USB data rates for the first time. HDMI support has been similarly bumped to 2.0 (meaning 4K output support), and fittingly, the board can now decode H.264 and H.265 video (another first) at resolutions up to 4K. Networking performance has been upgraded as well with the addition of a full-speed Gigabit Ethernet port, and joining the 802.11ac radio is support for Bluetooth 5.0.
All told, the Foundation is selling 3 different versions of the Raspberry Pi 4, depending on the memory configuration. The $35 model comes with 1GB of LPDDR4, while 2GB and 4GB models are available for $45 and $55 respectively. Which in the case of the latter two models is a significant shot in the arm for the board, as now they have two to four times the memory to play with.
Meanwhile, our sister site Tom’s Hardware already has an early review out, confirming much of what you’d expect from the Raspberry Pi 4 based on the specifications. CPU, memory, and storage performance are all greatly improved over past models, though power consumption has gone up a bit in the process.
