GIFs are fun , and if you’re an artist, it’s easy enough to turn your art into a short animation in Photoshop. This quick tutorial from Adobe shows you how it’s done. Read more…
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This One-Minute Video Shows You How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop
On Friday, the Dallas FBI confirmed to Gizmodo that it has made an arrest in a case involving Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who claims a man sent him a GIF over Twitter that triggered his epilepsy, causing him to have a seizure. A Dallas FBI spokesperson told Gizmodo that a press release with more details on… Read more…
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FBI Arrests Man For Allegedly Sending Journalist Seizure-Causing GIF
For obvious reasons, Google has a vested interest in reducing the time it takes to load websites and services. One method is reducing the file size of images on the internet, which they previously pulled off with the WebP format back in 2014, which shrunk photos by 10 percent. Their latest development in this vein is Guetzli , an open-source algorithm that encodes JPEGs that are 35 percent smaller than currently-produced images. As Google points out in its blog post, this reduction method is similar to their Zopfli algorithm that shrinks PNG and gzip files without needing to create a new format. RNN-based image compression like WebP, on the other hand, requires both client and ecosystem to change to see gains at internet scale. If you want to get technical, Guetzli (Swiss German for “cookie”) targets the quantization stage of image compression, wherein it trades visual quality for a smaller file size. Its particular psychovisual model (yes, that’s a thing ) “approximates color perception and visual masking in a more thorough and detailed way than what is achievable” in current methods. The only tradeoff: Guetzli takes a little longer to run than compression options like libjpeg. Despite the increased time, Google’s post assures that human raters preferred the images churned out by Guetzli. Per the example below, the uncompressed image is on the left, libjpeg-shrunk in the center and Guetzli-treated on the right. Source: Google Research Blog
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Google’s new algorithm shrinks JPEG files by 35 percent
Enlarge / What’s all this gaming blather about Ryzen? Let us explain. (credit: Mark Walton) The response to AMD’s Ryzen processors with their new Zen core has been more than a little uneven. Eight cores and 16 threads for under $500 means that they’re unambiguously strong across a wide range of workloads; compute-bound tasks like compiling software and compressing video cry out for cores, and AMD’s pricing makes Ryzen very compelling indeed. But gaming performance has caused more dissatisfaction. AMD promised a substantial improvement in instructions per cycle (IPC), and the general expectation was that Ryzen would be within striking distance of Intel’s Broadwell core. Although Broadwell is now several years old—it first hit the market way back in September 2014—the comparison was relevant. Intel’s high-core-count processors—both the High End Desktop parts, with six, eight, or 10 cores, and the various Xeon processors for multisocket servers—are all still using Broadwell cores. Realistically, nobody should have expected Ryzen to be king of the hill when it comes to gaming. We know that Broadwell isn’t, after all; Intel’s Skylake and Kaby Lake parts both beat Broadwell in a wide range of games. This is the case even though Skylake and Kaby Lake are limited to four cores and eight threads; for many or most games, high IPC and high clock speeds are the key to top performance, and that’s precisely what Kaby Lake delivers. Read 56 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Intel still beats Ryzen at games, but how much does it matter?
Enlarge / The image shows a scanning electron micrograph of 6 tardigrades in their tun state. When tardigrades dry out they retract their legs and heads within their cuticle, forming these little balls. (credit: Thomas Boothby) One of the great mysteries of the microscopic animals known as tardigrades is their uncanny ability survive almost anything: extreme heat, extreme cold, desiccation or drying out, and even the vacuum of space. Now, we are a little closer to understanding how they do it. The key, at least for surviving desiccation, is a special protein that tardigrades use to replace the water in their bodies with a form of glass. Tardigrades are also known as water bears, and they normally live in moist, mossy environments. But when those environments dry up, tardigrades go into a state known as “tun”—it’s a kind of suspended animation, which the animals can remain in for up to 10 years. When water begins to flow again, water bears absorb it and return to life. Tardigrades aren’t the only creatures who do this. Brine shrimp and certain kinds of worms can also dry up and come to life again. But what makes tardigrades different is that they use a special kind of disordered protein, unique to these animals, to literally suspend their cells in a glasslike matrix that prevents damage. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Water bears can replace all the fluid in their bodies with a glass matrix
During World War II, America cranked out some 640, 000 Jeeps produced by both Willys-Overland and Ford. Once assembled, they could be stacked for transport with the assistance of intermediary pallets: However, to get them onto ships for transport across the Atlantic and Pacific, they were broken down and crated for greater space efficiency. Look how small they were able to get these crates: Now you know why the windshields were designed to be folded down. The color photos are obviously of replicas. The giveaway is the American knock-off of the German “jerry-can” design , which would not appear until late into the war. Here’s a video that shows both original production footage from the 1940s, as well as two modern-day mechanics assembling one of the replicas: An even more impressive demonstration is below. Watch these fellows at a Jeep festival completely tear the car down— and put it back together— in under four minutes: I had a devil of a time tracking down where these replicas are produced, but it appears that they’re manufactured by Philippines-based fabrication firm MD Juan and distributed by the France-based Jeep Village company that produced the first video above.
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How WWII Jeeps Were Crated for Shipping
A Russian weapons company named after the inventor of the AK-47 has revealed that it’s building a new type of unmanned combat vehicle . The firm states that its upcoming drone tank will carry both machine guns and anti-tank missiles, weighing 20 tons. While it has yet to release a prototype, we can get a vague idea of what to expect from the company’s previous work – the BAS-01G Soratnik. Weighing a fraction of the proposed new tank at just 7 tons, the Soratnik is a machine gun mounted infantry support vehicle equipped with anti-tank missiles. With a top speed of 25 miles, the mini-tank can be operated from a range of up to six miles and is even able to carry out certain tasks autonomously. Unfortunately, the firm is remaining tight-lipped on exactly what the tank can do without human orders. As the zippy 7-ton Soratnik is already on the market carrying similar weaponry, it raises the question of how useful the proposed tank would be if it’s three times larger. Still, with Kalashnikov Concern being partly state-owned, the Russian government’s seal of approval might help encourage others to invest in the bulky behemoth. Source: Popular Mechanics
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A Russian military contractor is building huge drone tanks
When you stream VR video online, you usually have to sacrifice visual quality. There’s a lot more data, so something has to give. However, that isn’t stopping Google’s YouTube and Daydream groups from improving what you see. They’re introducing a new projection technique, the equi-angular cubemap (EAC), that promises to increase the practical level of detail for 360-degree footage. Where conventional methods produce pictures that are only sharp in certain areas, EAC is extremely consistent — it distributes an equal number of pixels across all angle changes. It may not be as theoretically sharp in certain areas, but there are no glaring weak points. Google wants to help others improve VR projections, too. To that end, it’s proposing a Projection Independent Mesh standard that would simply tell a video player how to project the raw VR info. The approach would use extremely small amounts of data (just 4KB for EAC), so it wouldn’t require gobs of bandwidth or new hardware. You can find a draft version of the standard on GitHub . At the moment, you’ll have to use an Android device to watch videos that use EAC. Desktop and iOS viewing is coming later, Google says. And unless it’s a specially optimized video, you probably won’t see it — YouTube still ingests clips based on a conventional projection format. This upgrade is more about the long-term future of VR rather than an immediate upgrade. Source: YouTube , Google
In the not-too distant future (April 14th, 2017 AD), a brand-new season of crowdfunded Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes will hit Netflix . Before then, however, 20 classic episodes of the show have been added to the streaming service globally both to whet appetites and create new fans of the cult classic. The episodes include fan favorites as Manos: The Hands of Fate , Time Chasers and Space Mutiny . It’s not the first time that Netflix has used such a strategy, offering a show across its global audience in time for a revival. For instance, while Gilmore Girls was available in the US since October 2014, Netflix released the show worldwide on July 1st. That paved the way for the Year in the Life revival series, which made its global debut the subsequent November. Similarly, a handful of MST3k episodes have appeared on US Netflix, but this could be its widest rollout since. Owing to the mishmash of varying rights holders, it’s never been easy to watch MST3k episodes outside the US. By releasing 20 of the show’s finest episodes, including Space Mutiny , the number of people who can recall that weird show with the puppets talking through movies should increase substantially. We’d pepper this closing line with in-jokes, but let’s be honest, it is just a show, and we should really just relax.
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Netflix offers 20 classic ‘MST3K’ episodes to the world
From 1945 until 1962, the United States conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests—the kind with the big mushroom cloud and all that jazz. Above-ground nuke testing was banned in 1963, but there are thousands of films from those tests that have just been rotting in secret vaults around the country. But starting today you… Read more…
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Rare Nuclear Test Films Saved, Declassified, and Uploaded to YouTube