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Here’s a can’t-lose way to get the most useful rental car: Ask for a Chevy. Chevrolet in particular and GM in general have been out front delivering useful technology that can’t be taken away from you, no matter how cheap the rental company is when it comes to buying its fleet of cars. If you rent a Chevrolet, you’ll get a car with a color LCD in the center stack, and compatibility with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Most importantly, through Android Auto or CarPlay, you’ve got access to a navigation system you already know how to use — Apple Maps or Google Maps — that displays up high on the car’s 7- or 8-inch center stack LCD.
We’ve known for a long time that Microsoft’s HoloLens relied on a custom “HPU,” or Holographic Processing Unit, to provide the headset’s mixed-reality mode and augmented reality capabilities. At Hot Chips this week, the company actually released some details on how the chip works and what it’s capable of. According to Microsoft, the HPU can handle a trillion pixel operations per second. While a variety of designs were floated, including a partnership with Movidius, Microsoft ultimately went with a custom design that packs 24 Tensilica DSP cores and 8MB of cache into a single package, alongside 1GB of DDR3.
Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have announced the discovery of a new exoplanet, or a planet orbiting another star besides our own. What’s the big deal? Scientists have found thousands of those already, after all. But this time it’s different — and historic. The newly discovered exoplanet is at least somewhat Earth-like, and more importantly, it orbits the star closest to our own, known as Proxima Centauri. It’s a mere 4.2 light years away, which is really in our own astronomical backyard. For , it doesn’t get any closer. The Centauri system consists of three stars. There is the Alpha Centauri binary made up of two stars similar to our sun, and then the much smaller Proxima Centauri that orbits them.
Science has more than its fair share of odd stories leading to conspiracy theories — was Tycho Brahe really poisoned by his apprentice Kepler? Naw. What was Werner Von Braun doing in the arctic? Devil science?! Unfortunately not. But the story of Piltdown Man, which scandalized the scientific community and set back the study of evolution by years, if not decades, unquestionably involves a real conspiracy, and real conspirators. The public has spent more than a century speculating about just who was to blame for history’s most famous example of scientific fakery, but now a team of researchers across England has a new theory: a conspiracy of one.
The big story ended up a sort of non-story. In 2012, scientists working at the LHC were surprised to see the same statistical anomaly in two separate experiments: a fluctuation in the data implied a new particle whose energy level, some 750 GeV, would have meant it was six times heavier than the . ATLAS and the CMS experiment both reported , leaving physicists alternately puzzled and excited. “Every explanation of the 750 GeV excess needs a new particle,” commented Kansas University physicist Kyoungchul Kong, and a new particle in that range would require a departure from the Standard Model.
Flash was an integral part of the internet in years past, but it has also been a drag on performance and the source of a great many security vulnerabilities. Today, HTML5 is a better way to get the same sort of interactive content running on the web, and it works on mobile devices. The next phase in Adobe Flash’s agonizingly slow demise starts next month when Google Chrome begins blocking all Flash content. This will come , which should be available in early September. Chrome 53 will block all the small, non-visible Flash elements on web pages. These are usually tacking platforms and page analytics, but they can slow down page loads just like larger Flash content.
The rate at which Apple refreshes its hardware has come under fire in recent weeks. While that the company’s laptops are mostly reasonably new, there are some old MacBook Pros in need of a refresh and the Mac Pro desktop is now nearly three years’ old. A new from Bloomberg claims that Apple will refresh its entire line this fall, with a new design and a number of new features. The company is supposedly working on a new programmable strip of OLED-based function keys that can be switched to perform different functions depending on which application you’re using. Apple’s goal is to simplify shortcuts and allow it to reprogram hardware buttons to add capabilities with software updates, rather than refreshing internal hardware.
SpaceX is going to fly humans to the International Space Station — twice. NASA has confirmed that it is to the space station from the private space firm headed by Elon Musk. This brings to four the total number of planned launches carrying astronauts to the ISS under the (CCtCap) program. It’s easy to forget with all the hype over SpaceX and its , but the long-time government contractor Boeing actually got the lion’s share of funding under the CCtCap thus far. It has already secured two manned launches to the ISS. Now with the new order, SpaceX is on equal footing.
