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‘Donkey Kong 64’ player finds rare collectible 17 years later

The 3D platformer Donkey Kong 64 was lauded for its expansive worlds and multitude of well-hidden collectibles when it launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1999. Like many games of the era, it has enjoyed a peculiar afterlife as speedrunners blitz through it in record time under various conditions, like picking up each of the 976 banana coins found within. Unfortunately, all those completionist runs now seem to be invalid: 17 years after the game came out, streamer Isotarge has found a 977th coin. Turns out the collectible was hidden underground in the game’s fifth level, Fungi Forest, but the telltale patch of dirt indicating buried treasure in the game was hidden by a patch of tall grass. Isotarge was examining save data for that stage and discovered that the information for a particular pickup, rainbow coins, was incomplete. Using analysis tools, they pinpointed its location and unearthed it. While Isotarge is no stranger to using glitches to find out-of-bounds items likely leftover by developers, this particular coin is in fair territory and can be plucked from the ground using an ordinary character move. @Znernicus yes, times have been removed in All Collectables, 949 banana coins (now 974), Fungi coins, DK coins, All Rainbow Coins — Bismuth

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‘Donkey Kong 64’ player finds rare collectible 17 years later

Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

We may be decades away from the flying warehouses Amazon wants to build, but the e-commerce giant is growing its shipping and distribution network in different ways. The company has just announced that it plans to build its first air cargo hub at Northern Kentucky Airport to house its current and future fleet of planes. It’s expected to cost Amazon over $1.5 billion in investment and might eventually have buildings and material-handling equipment. According to The Wall Street Journal , this move signifies that Amazon is “ramping up its expansion into transporting, sorting and delivering its own packages.” When the 2-million-square-foot hub opens, it will certainly reduce the e-retailer’s dependence on UPS and FedEx in the area. It will initially employ 2, 000 people, but it could end up having more personnel. WSJ says Amazon’s end goal is to deliver packages for itself and other retailers — to ultimately become a legit courier and direct competitor to bigger companies like UPS. It helps that the cargo hub’s location is apparently within a couple of days’ drive from a densely populated area. While Amazon doesn’t have a timeline for the air cargo hub yet, it has already begun working on its shipping freight endeavor. A WSJ report from a few days ago revealed that the company has been coordinating shipments of containers from China since October as a freight forwarder. Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

New brain-computer interface breaks through locked-in syndrome

Researchers have been using brain-computer interfaces to interact with patients suffering from locked-in syndrome for a few years now. But a new system from the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Switzerland may finally allow even the most immobile patients communicate with the outside world. There are degrees to locked-in syndrome. The lesser variety only allows those suffering from it to raise or lower their eyes and blink, they’re fully paralyzed otherwise. Fully locked-in syndrome prohibits even that degree of movement. So rather than rely on optical keyboards as previous studies have, the Wyss team developed a means of reading patient’s minds directly by measuring the flow of oxygenated blood flowing through their brains. The study was published Tuesday on the journal PLOS . The team relied on the help of four patients who suffer from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease), a motor neuron disorder that progressively destroys the nervous system’s ability to control the body’s muscles. The Wyss researchers first used near-infrared spectroscopy and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain’s blood oxygenation and electrical activity levels. The patients were then asked basic yes or no questions while the machines recorded changes in those metrics. “The machine records the blood flow… and calculates how (it) changes during “yes” and during “no”, and the computer develops an idea, a pattern, ” Wyss neuroscientist, Niels Birbaumer, told Reuters . “And after a while, we know what the patient is thinking, when he thinks “yes”, or when he thinks “no”, and from that we calculate the answer.” After enough training, the system managed a 70 percent accuracy rate for standard Y/N questions like, “Is this your husband?” More interestingly, when asked “Are you happy?” all four respondents, 100 percent of the time, answered “yes”. The team hopes to leverage this data into future research in hopes that people paralyzed by disease or injury can lead fuller lives. Via: Reuters Source: PLOS

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New brain-computer interface breaks through locked-in syndrome

Civilization ported to 8-bit Commodore 64

Civilization was one of the classic games of the 16-bit age, when computers with speedy processors and hundreds of kilobytes of RAM made it possible to model and memorize complex, culture-bound simulations of human history. Twenty years on, though, it’s been ported back to a humble 8-bit system that predated it by years. The genius behind the conversion is Fabian Hertel, and it’s not just a mockup: a fully playable demo is available to enjoy . 8-bit Civ runs on Commodore 64 and, while reduced in scope, features cities, units, AI opponents, scientific advances and wonders of the world. 8 Bit Civilizations (working title) has understandably been reduced in scope from the original PC and Amiga versions. For example you can play against a maximum of 3 AI opponents (or 2 if barbarians are enabled), and the world map is not as large. However even in its current state, the game is every bit as fun as the original, and even includes some innovative new features. Such as you may chose the gender of your nation’s leader, so if you choose to play the English nation, you be Henry VIII as well as Elizabeth I. The game board is played from an isometric perspective, a feature which wasn’t added in the original line of games until Civilization II (1996). It clearly doesn’t shy much from the game’s complexity. Check out the traditionally numbing endgame going on in the screenshot below!

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Civilization ported to 8-bit Commodore 64

Dial-a-Grue: play Zork with nothing but an old phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=cJzgiDgBpcw The first iteration of Dial-a-Grue , in 2011, was to kit out an old rotary dial phone with an embedded computer and text-to-speech engine so that you could play Zork with nothing but the handset. The new, 2.0 version of the project, is “to port Zork I (via a z-code interpreter) to an embedded platform, and enclose that and an old modem inside a telephone, so that the game can be played from a teletype, TDD, or old computer with an acoustically coupled modem.” ( via JWZ )

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Dial-a-Grue: play Zork with nothing but an old phone

Pandora’s radio data now included in Billboard Hot 100

Despite recent layoffs and the fact that it only launched a streaming service last month , Pandora is a giant player in the internet radio market. Billboard unveiled a partnership with the service for its Hot 100 chart, and says it immediately impacted 35 songs. It pushed nine of those up by five or more spots in the rankings, including Sex With Me from Rihanna and Rob $tone’s Chill Bill , which leaped 10 places. Lady Gaga’s Million Reasons , meanwhile, is now on the Hot 100 thanks to Pandora, Billboard says. Though Pandora recently launched a $10 Premium streaming service based on its Rdio acquisition , it won’t be available to the public until later this year. Still, it has a very consequential 78 million users and 4.3 million subscribers to its $5 Pandora Plus (not-on-demand) radio service. “Pandora is now the number one radio station in 87 US markets and represents roughly 10 percent of all radio listening, ” says Pandora CEO Tim Westergren. That’s why Pandora had such an immediate impact, even services with many more subscribers like Spotify and Apple Music already affect the chart. Pandora data will also be included in Billboard’s streaming and formula-based charts, including country, rock, R&B/Hip-Hop, Rap and Dance/Electronica. Despite the boost, Pandora announced earlier this month that it had laid off 7 percent of its workforce, due to a big increase in competition from Apple Music, Spotify and other services. On top of the $75 million spent on Rdio, it also completely revamped its site late last year and is no doubt spending big to launch Pandora Premium streaming. The company is reportedly looking for a buyer, with Sirius XM rumored to be the leading candidate so far. It may be able to take some hope from Tidal, which just sold a big chunk of itself to Sprint for a reported $200 million. Source: Billboard

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Pandora’s radio data now included in Billboard Hot 100

Keck Observatory’s exoplanet imager captures its first photos

The W.M. Keck Observatory’s near infrared camera has a new instrument that gives it the power to capture images of Jupiter-sized exoplanets near their stars. That instrument is a vortex coronagraph , and it has recently taken its first two photos. One of them (top left) is a photo of the innermost of three dust discs surrounding a young star 380 light-years away. When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory team who published the study about the image combined the coronagraph’s data with Spitzer telescope’s and NASA’s WISE mission’s , they were able to conclude that the disc is made up of pebble-sized grains of olivine. That’s one of the most common silicates on Earth. The other (top right) is a brown dwarf — a celestial body bigger than the biggest gas giants but smaller than the smallest stars — that’s 23 times as far from its host star than the Earth is from the sun. Keck’s instrument was able to spot the brown dwarf despite its star’s brilliance, because coronagraphs are designed to filter out starlight. This particular one is special, though: it doesn’t block starlight with “masks” like other coronagraphs do. Instead, it redirects light by combining and cancelling out light waves. Now that JPL scientists have proven that the instrument works, they plan to continue using it to observe young stars that could have exoplanets in the future. Dmitri Mawet, the JPL scientist who led the study about the brown dwarf image, explains: “The vortex coronagraph allows us to peer into the regions around stars where giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn supposedly form. Before now, we were only able to image gas giants that are born much farther out. With the vortex, we will be able to see planets orbiting as close to their stars as Jupiter is to our sun, or about two to three times closer than what was possible before.” Source: NASA

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Keck Observatory’s exoplanet imager captures its first photos

AT&T’s multi-gigabit wireless over power lines heading to trials this year

Enlarge / Preliminary version of AT&T’s Project AirGig antennas. (credit: AT&T) AT&T says it is “in advanced discussions” with power companies to start trials of a new broadband technology in at least two locations by this fall. This is an update on the Project AirGig that AT&T announced in September 2016 . AirGig is a wireless technology even though it depends on the presence of power lines. Antennas that are placed on utility poles send wireless signals to each other; AT&T says the power lines “serve as a guide for the signals,” ensuring they reach their destination. AT&T says the wireless signals could be used to deliver multi-gigabit Internet speeds for either smartphone data or home Internet service. Trial locations have not yet been announced, but  today’s announcement  says, “One location will be in the United States with others to be determined in the coming months.” There’s also no word on when commercial deployment might begin, but AT&T seems to be excited about the project. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T’s multi-gigabit wireless over power lines heading to trials this year

Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials

schwit1 quotes a report from Digital Trends: In this generation of self-starters and self-made women and men, do-it-yourself isn’t just an option, it’s a way of life. And if there’s not an app for that, chances are there’s a YouTube video for it. That was certainly the case for a woman named Cara Brookins, who is living proof that if you’re willing to learn, you absolutely can. In 2008, Brookins was in the midst of a family struggle, having left a husband she called “violent and abusive.” Looking to make a fresh start for herself, she took the idea of rebuilding quite literally, perhaps using the physical experience of constructing a house as an extension of her emotional and mental journey. Though she had no previous experience in construction or architecture, Brookins found a series of YouTube tutorials on building a home and got to work. Over the course of nine months, Brookins worked tirelessly with the help of her four children to build a new home for themselves. “I had rented this cabin for a Thanksgiving getaway, ” the mother of four told CBS News. “And driving there, we passed this house that had been ravaged by a tornado. It was this beautiful dream house and it was sort of wide open. You don’t often get the opportunity to see the interior workings of a house, but looking at these 2x4s and these nails, it just looked so simple. I thought, “I could put this wall back up if I really tried. Maybe I should just start from scratch.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials

Almost half a million bucks worth of cocaine stuffed up nose of American Airlines plane from Colombia

Authorities say Tulsa maintenance base workers workers for American Airlines found seven bricks of cocaine weighing 31 pounds with a street value of about a half a million dollars hidden in the nose of an AA aircraft. (more…)

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Almost half a million bucks worth of cocaine stuffed up nose of American Airlines plane from Colombia