The first trailer for Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is finally here and it’s got everything you could want in a big science-fiction movie. Read more…
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Luc Besson’s Valerian Looks Like All Your Scifi Dreams Come True
Enlarge (credit: Peter Bright) Most of the PC OEMs have refreshed their Skylake systems to include Intel’s new Kaby Lake chips. Kaby Lake parts are for the most part drop-in replacements for Skylake parts—same chipsets, same power envelopes and cooling requirements—and some manufacturers have taken advantage of this fact. Dell’s new XPS 13 is in most regards identical to the old XPS 13, for example, except for the processor swap. Some manufacturers have been a little more ambitious; HP’s updated Spectre x360 adds Thunderbolt 3 and Windows Hello support as well as slashing the size and weight. Microsoft, however, has gone for none of these routes. The Surface Pro 4 with its Skylake processor remains the current iteration of the company’s productivity-oriented tablet and hasn’t changed since its introduction. The Surface Book, the laptop that can do double duty as a tablet, also remains a Skylake system. But Microsoft has made an upgrade of sorts to the Surface Book range in the form of an even more expensive version that sits at the very top of the range: the Surface Book with Performance Base. Specs at a glance: Microsoft Surface Book with Performance Base Base Best As reviewed Screen 3000×2000 13.5″ (267 PPI), 10-point capacitive PixelSense touchscreen OS Windows 10 Pro CPU Intel 6th generation Core i7 RAM 8GB 16GB 16GB GPU Intel HD Graphics 520 + Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M 2GB SSD 256GB 1TB 1TB Networking 802.11ac/a/b/g/n with 2×2 MIMO antennas, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports Mini-DisplayPort, headphones, SD, 2 USB 3.0 Cameras Rear: 8MP autofocus, 1080p video Front: 5MP, 1080p video, infrared facial recognition Size 12.30×9.14×0.59-0.90″ (312×232×14.9-23 mm) Weight 3.68 lb (1.647 kg) Battery 18 Wh (tablet) + 62 Wh (base) Warranty 1 year Price $2,399 $3,299 $3,299 Sensors Ambient light sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer Charger 65W Other features Surface Pen, TPM 2.0 The Surface Book’s big party trick is that the screen portion is the part that contains the computer; it has batteries, a processor, RAM, storage, and everything else. The keyboard base, the part that in a regular laptop houses the computer parts, contains only the keyboard, touchpad, and battery. On higher-end models the keyboard base also contains a discrete Nvidia GPU. This GPU is non-standard; it doesn’t neatly line up with any of Nvidia’s usual mobile parts, and while it’s faster than the Intel integrated graphics, it’s not as quick as the more mainstream numbered parts. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Surface Book with Performance Base: A lot more graphics in a little more weight
These four early Kirby games will now have their ROMs preserved, thanks to the efforts of a group of preservationists. (credit: Frank Cifaldi / Twitter ) A group of dedicated game preservationists has obtained a set of obscure Japanese Kirby games from the Super Famicom era in order to archive them for future generations. But the uncertain fate of such early games presages a much bigger problem facing digital game preservation going forward. Even die-hard Kirby fans would be forgiven for not knowing much about Kirby’s Toy Box , a collection of six mini games that was only available through Japan’s Satellaview , an early satellite-based distribution service for the Super Famicom (the Super NES in the West). That system only let you download one game at a time to a special 8-megabit cartridge, though, and you could only download when that specific game was being broadcast across the narrow satellite feed. Thus, existing copies of most Satellaview games are available only if they happen to be the last game downloaded to individual cartridges (Satellaview broadcasts ended in the late ’90s). While some of these games have been publicly dumped and preserved as ROM files, many exist only in the hands of Japanese collectors. Sometimes, those individuals are reluctant to release the digital code widely. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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These SNES-era Kirby games were considered lost until this week
People suffering from spinal cord injuries could soon have another treatment option at their disposal — one that doesn’t involve strapping themselves into a mechanical exosuit . Rather than hardwiring an electronic bridge into a patient’s back, a new neural interface bypasses the damaged spine’s air gap and transmits motor signals from the brain to the legs wirelessly. Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (EPFL) collaborated with others from Brown University, Medtronic and Fraunhofer ICT-IMM to develop the system. “The system we have developed uses signals recorded from the motor cortex of the brain to trigger coordinated electrical stimulation of nerves in the spine that are responsible for locomotion, ” David Borton, assistant professor of engineering at Brown, said in a press statement. “With the system turned on, the animals in our study had nearly normal locomotion.” The research teams managed this by first implanting a pill-sized electrode array in the monkeys’ brains which recorded the signals generated by the motor cortex. These signals are then bounced by a wireless neurotransmitter to an external computer which translates the electrical impulses to mechanical commands. The computer then retransmits these commands to an electrical spinal stimulator implanted in the lower back, below the injury. While the damage inflicted on the two test monkeys wasn’t permanent, it would have taken the primates over a month to recover full use of their legs. But with the neural interface active, they regained control nearly instantly. This is heartening news to spinal injury sufferers but the research is still quite a ways away from human trials. The researchers must first determine how well test animals can use their restored appendages — in terms of balance and how much weight can be borne — before moving on to larger primates and, eventually, humans.
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New neural interface restores severed spinal connections without wires
Lyon, France-based tattoo artist JC Sheitan Tenet has no right arm. In place of his right hand, he wears custom tattoo machine prostheses he developed with biomechanical sculptor Jean-Louis Gonzal. According to Great Big Story, “the device can pivot 360 degrees and allows Tenet to create abstract designs unlike anyone else.”
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Tattoo artist with missing arm wears tattoo machine prosthesis