There’s a common gripe with the Amazon Echo, Google Home and other voice-guided helpers: You have to stand within their listening range to make use of them. Not quite the Star Trek future you were promised, is it? NVIDIA, however, might have a fix: It just introduced the Spot, a hybrid mic and speaker that brings Google Assistant to every nook and cranny in your home. You need the new Shield TV to serve as the central hub, but you’re otherwise free to turn on lights, ask questions and otherwise use Assistant knowing that you’ll be heard.
The catch: Spot costs $50 per unit, and NVIDIA will only say that it’s due to arrive sometime in the months ahead. It won’t be cheap to outfit every room. However, this still makes Shield decidedly more compelling. Spot is likely to be more affordable than getting multiple dedicated smart speakers, especially in apartments and other homes where those speakers could easily be considered overkill.
Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.
NVIDIA isn’t just content with making an artificial intelligence platform for cars and waiting for someone to use it. The company has unveiled a partnership with Audi that has the two working on AI-powered cars. You’ll first see the fruits of their labor in an experimental Q7 SUV that has learned to drive itself in three days (it’ll be putting around CES’ Gold Lot), but their plans are much bigger. Ultimately, their goal is to have Audis with Level 4 autonomy (that is, full autonomy outside of extreme situations) on roads by 2020. That’s only three years away, which is fairly aggressive compared to promises made by other German automakers.
There’s still a lot we don’t know. What’s the roadmap between now and then? Which streets, exactly? And will these be cars you can buy, or just test mules? Even if it’s not quite as earth-shattering as NVIDIA makes it out to be, though, it represents a milestone for the company’s ambitions in driverless tech. While Audi is an obvious partner given its history with NVIDIA (the companies have collaborated a few times before), it’s telling that the automaker is willing to stake the future of its autonomous vehicles on NVIDIA’s hardware.
Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.
In recent years, peanut allergies among kids have soared, creating life-long sensitivities that can be deadly and banishing beloved PB&Js from lunch boxes everywhere. While the cause is still unclear, health experts are confident they’ve found the solution to the plague of peanut allergies: peanuts.
Parents, pediatricians, and other healthcare providers are now firmly advised to start feeding infants peanut-laced foods to head off allergies before they develop. Based on mounting evidence, experts think there’s a “window of time in which the body is more likely to tolerate a food than react to it, and if you can educate the body during that window, you’re at much lower likelihood of developing an allergy to that food,†Matthew Greenhawt, a food allergy expert, told TheNew York Times.
As such, a National Institutes of Health panel of specialists, including Dr. Greenhawt, released today a new set of guidelines for tossing peanuts into that window.
The guidelines, published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (and co-published in several others), are divided into three sections, based on a child’s risk of developing a peanut allergy.
The infants in the high-risk category are those that suffer from severe eczema, an egg allergy, or both. For these little ones, the experts recommend they start trying peanut-containing foods around four to six months of age—after solid foods are introduced. This needs to be done with the consultation with a healthcare provider, and it may be necessary or prudent to have the infant go through an allergy test first, like a skin prick test or an oral food challenge, before the dietary introduction.
Infants at moderate risk of developing a peanut allergy are those with mild to moderate eczema. For these kids, experts say nutty foods should be introduced around six months.
And low-risk kids with no eczema or any other known food allergies should go about eating nuts at whatever age their parents deem appropriate, based on preferences and customs.
Experts note that giving kids this young whole peanuts or straight-up peanut butter creates a choking hazard and should always be avoided. Instead, parents should mix peanut butter into water, milk, or formula. They can also sprinkle peanut powder or stir nut paste into yogurt, apple sauce, or other easy-to-swallow foods. Experts recommend kids get around six to seven grams of peanuts, doled out over three feedings within a week. (Here are some instructions and recipes.)
The guidelines are based on several recent studies showing that early exposure reduces the risk of developing peanut allergies. This includes a landmark randomized trial from 2015 that involved more than 600 infants at high risk of developing peanut allergies.
Researchers in that study first divided the kids into two groups based on whether they showed a sensitivity to peanuts based on a skin-prick test—530 came up negative, 98 were positive. Then, they randomly assigned them to eat or avoid peanut-containing foods and followed up with them when they were five years old. Within the 530 initially non-sensitive kids, 13.7 percent of peanut-avoiding kids developed allergies by age five, but only 1.9 percent of peanut-eating kids developed them. Within the 98 initially sensitive kids, 35.3 percent of peanut-avoiding kids developed allergies by age five, while only 10.6 percent of peanut-eating kids had allergies.
That study spurred an interim guidance in August 2015 that introducing kids at risk of peanut allergies to peanuts was safe and could cut down risks.
In 2010, peanut allergies among kids hit 2.0 percent nationwide. In 1999, prevalence was at just 0.4 percent.
What do you do after you’ve launched one of the thinnest and lightest gaming laptops featuring the new NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU? Razer found itself in this situation after announcing the long anticipated update to their large gaming laptop last year, with the launch of the Razer Blade Pro. At 7.8 lbs and 0.88 inches thick, it’s one of the most interesting gaming laptops announced last year, and our full review is coming soon. Meanwhile, Razer decided to take their Razer Blade Pro, and add two more displays to it.
Today Razer is announcing Project Valerie, which is the world’s first portable laptop with three built-in displays. To do this, they didn’t make the main display smaller either. All three displays are 17.3-inch UHD (3840×2160) IGZO panels with 100% Adobe RGB coverage. I’ll leave the discussion on why 100% Adobe RGB isn’t a great experience for another day, but with the three displays, you get a 11,520 x 2160 resolution experience with Project Valerie. Since this is going to be a struggle to drive even with the best GPU, all three displays also support G-SYNC. The displays themselves have a motorized hinge to put them into position, and they slide back and slide under the main panel when stowed. It’s an interesting feat of engineering.
Just to be clear, this is currently just a prototype, but yesterday at CES Ryan Smith was able to visit Razer and check out this project. Razer has a couple of prototypes – ranging from proof-of-concept designs to the final industrial design – and not all of them have the movable displays, but they were functioning prototypes. One of the proof-of-concept prototypes was even playing Battlefield 1 in a full 180° NVIDIA Surround View gaming setup.
Razer is building this system as a mobile workhorse, and by starting with the Razer Blade Pro, they already have a thin and light system for the amount of compute available. Final specifications are not complete yet for the dimensions and weight, but Project Valerie with its triple monitors will be in the same aluminum CNC chassis format as the other Razer laptops, with a thickness of just 1.5-inches, and a final weight between 10 and 12 pounds, which is really not much different than many other 17.3-inch gaming notebooks.
This would be excellent for an office user, where the extra display real estate would make multitasking much easier, and any of us who leverage multiple monitors regularly, like I do, can see this being an amazingly portable office machine too. One of the things I hate most about using a laptop on the road is that it only has a single display, making it difficult to get work done. Often I have to resort to crazy things like bringing multiple devices on a road trip for proper workflow, as seen below.
What I need to do now to get three displays on the road
The basis of Project Valerie is the Razer Blade Pro, with a quad-core i7 mobile CPU, NVIDIA GTX 1080, and plenty of RAM, at least for the prototypes, and this may change later. For outright gaming, the single GTX 1080 is going to struggle with this kind of resolution of course, but if and when this comes to production we’ll see what Razer can do about that. It also features the ultra-low-profile mechanical keyboard from the Pro, with per-key RGB backlighting and Chroma support.
Although this is just a concept, it’s a very interesting concept, and if properly executed it could be a very exciting machine. For the time being, it is being shown at CES as a working prototype, which means it’s possible it may be put into production. Time will tell.
This is a Mario game, but it’s not a Mario video game. It’s a ball puzzle/game/thing I got for my kid for Christmas, and we haven’t been able to stop playing it since.
