The day after Texas experienced weirdly warm temperatures and tornadoes on Christmas Day, a blizzard slammed across the western part of the state. A dozen people were killed by the storms, and now, another tragic death toll has been reported: More than 35, 000 dairy cows lost their lives. Read more…
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35,000 Dairy Cows Were Buried Alive By a Freak Blizzard in Texas
Over the past year, Dolby’s worked hard to convince many of the major movie studios and streaming services that its HDR imaging technology is the one worth backing. Netflix, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures are already on board, but today they’ve been joined by MGM Studios and Universal Pictures, after the studios confirmed they’ll deliver “new release and catalog titles” that have been mastered in Dolby Vision. High dynamic range (HDR), if you’re not already aware, transforms the way you see HD and 4K media. The technology doesn’t change the number of pixels your TV works with, it just makes them do more. Dolby Vision, for example, delivers increased brightness, better light-to-dark contrast and colors that the company says have been seen before on a TV. As with many new digital technologies, the uptake of HDR could be impacted by a battle over competing standards. The UHD Alliance is tackling the issue, though, and has issued specifications for what it considers to be a ‘premium’ 4K TV . Any set that meets the required resolution, color depth and brightness and black levels will be issued with a sticker that proves it can deliver the best possible experience from your Ultra HD Blu-rays or 4K streams from Netflix and Amazon. Dolby is also working to get TV makers on board, recently announcing that it will feature on Vizio’s latest range of 4K TVs. The company is also working with Roku to incorporate the technology into future 4K Roku TVs, regardless of who they’re made by. Source: Dolby
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MGM and Universal commit to Dolby’s HDR imaging tech
An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10, 000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. “Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can’t see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you’re a gamer, you don’t have it easy when buying laptops: you may want a sleek, lightweight Ultrabook when you’re traveling, but you also want the big, powerful desktop replacement when you’re home. What to do? Razer thinks you can have both. It’s launching the Blade Stealth , a 12.5-inch ultraportable with some proper gaming cred. Its centerpiece is an optional Thunderbolt 3 -powered dock, the Core (below), that lets you use most any modern desktop graphics card when integrated video won’t cut it — if you just have to play Battlefront at max detail with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti , you can. It has Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports, too, so you only need to plug in one cable to get all your usual peripherals. It’s still a solid machine even if you’re more interested in Facebook than Far Cry . The base $999 Blade Stealth begins with a dual-core 2.5GHz Core i7, 8GB of RAM, a 128GB solid-state drive and a quad HD (2, 560 x 1, 440) screen. It’s light at 2.75 pounds, and you’ll even see Razer’s multi-hued Chroma lighting on the keyboard. Spring for higher-end models (which top out at $1, 599) and you’ll score up to a 4K display and 512GB of flash storage. The Blade Stealth ships this month, and you can get it at Microsoft Stores in February if you need to see it in person. However, the Core doesn’t have either a ship date or a price. That makes it a real wildcard: if it’s expensive or takes forever to ship, the combo won’t be quite so alluring. Nonetheless, this may be your best shot at a best-of-both-worlds laptop. Source: Razer
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Razer’s gaming Ultrabook lets you bring your own video card
Using a weighing scale to keep track of your weight is tricky. Your body can lose water, muscle or fat but the scale simply picks up your overall weight. It doesn’t reflect your gym obsession or fat loss with any accuracy. LEVL is a new portable device that analyses your breath to tell you if your body is in fat-burning mode. A white box holds a proprietary nano sensor that checks your breath for the level of acetone, a molecule that your body releases when it goes into fat burning mode or ketosis. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen tech like this: in 2013, NTT DoCoMo demonstrated something remarkably similar. The process is simple: breathe in, breathe out into the inhaler and place it in a white device for an instant reading of the acetone concentration. There is an accompanying app that tracks your analysis to help you maintain a record of your readings over time. The app provides analysis of the amount of calories (and, by extension, pounds) burned off during the day. In many ways, the only thing that LEVL provides is a vague indication that your weight-loss regime is working, or not. But is that really something you would, or need to monitor to such an obsessive level? We’re not entirely sure. Daniel Cooper contributed to this report.
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See how much fat you’re burning just by breathing out
Sony announced the addition of more than 40 PS3 games to its Now service, bringing the total number of available PS3 games to 300, 100 of which are PS3 exclusives . Additionally, Sony’s offering a pretty steep discount on the Now service itself for the holidays — $100 for a full year’s subscription . That’s more than half off what they normally charge. The discount offer runs through Monday, January 11th. [Image Credit: Getty]
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PlayStation Now just got 40-plus new PS3 games
Trailrunner7 writes: Few, if any, companies or government agencies store more sensitive personal information than the IRS, and consumers have virtually no insight into how that data is used and secured. But, as the results of a recent Justice Department investigation show, when you start poking around in those dark corners, you sometimes find very ugly things. Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. The scheme relied upon one key ingredient for its success: access to taxpayers’ personal information. And it brought the alleged perpetrators more than $1 million. What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers
A company called Polysis specializes in producing polyurethane resins, and with their secret recipe of herbs and spices they’ve produced a peculiar plastic called “haplafreely.” What’s unique about the stuff is that simply dropping it into a glass of hot water turns it into a clay-like substance that can be freely molded by hand; once it cools back to room temperature, it hardens again, while maintaining its new shape. Check this out: I wonder how well the stuff “molds.” For example, let’s say you needed to take an impression of something, like a stamped tin ceiling in an old building. It would be neat if you could capture the impression of a tile, then bring the haplafreely back to the 3D scanner in your office and capture the pattern in software, for later reproduction. I could also see survivalists taking a shine to the stuff, particularly those folks who improvise their own tools; haplafreely could provide an instant ergonomic handle as long as you had access to water and flame. It’s also bound to have some applications for modelmaking and prototyping, and I like that it can be reused again and again. If you had access to the stuff, what would you use it for?
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Plastic That Turns Into Clay and Back Again
On Monday, General Motors and ride-sharing company Lyft announced a new partnership to develop a network of driverless taxis. GM has invested $500 million in Lyft as part of a $1 billion funding round. The partnership includes a seat for GM on Lyft’s board of directors. Neither Lyft nor GM mentioned how soon they expect to realize their driverless taxi dream. In a press release , GM said it would work with Lyft to “leverage GM’s deep knowledge of autonomous technology.” Lyft promised “to build a network of on demand autonomous vehicles that will make getting around more affordable, accessible and enjoyable.” GM’s labs have been testing the waters with autonomous concept cars , even hinting in October that the company’s strategy in 2016 would be “aggressive” and would include a fleet of self driving Chevrolet Volts . Lyft declined to comment publicly on how a fleet of driverless taxis would impact current Lyft drivers. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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General Motors pledges $500 million to Lyft for driverless taxi research
(credit: Krzysztof Lasoń ) Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said. The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure . The report went on to say that the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations. On Monday, researchers from security firm iSIGHT Partners said they had obtained samples of the malicious code that infected at least three regional operators. They said the malware led to “destructive events” that in turn caused the blackout. If confirmed it would be the first known instance of someone using malware to generate a power outage. “It’s a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before—oil firms, for instance—but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT’s cyber espionage intelligence practice, told Ars. “It’s the major scenario we’ve all been concerned about for so long.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation