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Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ theme park is taking shape

Universal Studios Japan recently released the first trailer for its in-construction Super Nintendo World attraction, and now Disney has gone one better by building an actual physical model showing off its upcoming Star Wars Land (unofficial title). Due to open in 2019 at both Disneyland in California and Disney World in Florida, the new area “will transport guests to a never-before-seen planet” — which just happens to look like every weathered, forgettable world characters from the films briefly touch down on to get a ship part or intel or what have you. There should be plenty to do at the “remote trading port” once you’ve filled your boots with expensive merchandise and your bellies with Yoda burgers. Ride specifics are pretty hazy, but Disney has revealed that visitors will control the Millennium Falcon on a secret mission as part of one signature attraction, while the other main draw will drop guests “in the middle of a climactic battle between the First Order and the Resistance.” Star Tours, a Star Wars -inspired flight simulator, and several other attractions were up and running at various Disney parks long before the company waved a check in front of George Lucas he couldn’t pass up. Now Disney owns the rights to the extremely popular franchise, it makes sense to create a more elaborate live experience for fans to visit — especially after the shot-in-the-arm that was the last two movies. Though a few years off completion, anyone visiting Disney World in the future will be able to kill two film-inspired birds with one stone, diving into the mind of James Cameron through the new World Of Avatar experience. Via: TechCrunch Source: Disney

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Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ theme park is taking shape

Scrap dealer finds Apollo-era NASA computers in dead engineer’s basement

NASA A pair of Apollo-era NASA computers and hundreds of mysterious tape reels have been discovered in a deceased engineer’s basement in Pittsburgh, according to a NASA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Most of the tapes are unmarked, but the majority of the rest appear to be instrumentation reels for Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 , NASA’s fly-by missions to Jupiter and Saturn. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scrap dealer finds Apollo-era NASA computers in dead engineer’s basement

Samsung made a giant 34-foot LED TV for movie theaters

So you just spent $120, 000 on a 120-inch 4K HDR screen and think you’ve got the biggest, baddest TV around? Nope! Samsung has unveiled the Cinema LED Screen that’s an epic 10.3 meters (33.8 feet, or 406 inches). It runs at full 4K (4, 096 x 2, 160) resolution, features an (unnamed) HDR and peaks out at 146 fL of brighntess, “ten times greater than that offered by standard projector technologies, ” Samsung said in a news release. The set offers a “distortion-free” presentation with deep blacks, accurate whites and bright colors “at a nearly infinite contrast ratio, ” Samsung says. While it didn’t say so, the extra brightness might improve 3D films, which normally look dim with projection systems due to the polarized glasses. To complement the image quality, Samsung worked with JBL by Harman on the sound tech. That system features speakers around the screen, proprietary audio processing tech, and “Sculpted Surround Sound” from JBL to provide dramatic and faithful audio. Samsung Electronics unveiled the model at the Lotte Cinema in Korea, saying it’s the “first ever commercial Cinema LED Screen” it has installed. The average cinema screen size is around 50 feet, but the 33.8-foot Cinema Screen would be a good fit in smallish multiplex rooms. Samsung says it adapts to a wider range of dark and ambient lighting situations, making it work well for corporate events, sports viewing and gaming competitions. For films, it would certainly offer a very different experience than a projector, but might feel too much like you’re watching TV in public for some cinephiles. Samsung is obviously one of the few companies out there, perhaps along with LG, that could even create such a giant LED screen. The model was certified by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), meaning it can showcase films in theaters with unaltered color spectrum accuracy. As for the price, unless you’ve got an 80-foot yacht parked in the harbor, it’s probably best not to ask. Source: Samsung

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Samsung made a giant 34-foot LED TV for movie theaters

SoundCloud Has Enough Money To Survive Only 80 Days, Report Claims

Last week, SoundCloud announced it is cutting about 40 percent of its staff and closing two offices. Now, a report from TechCrunch claims “the layoffs only saved the company enough money to have runway ‘until Q4’ — which begins in just 80 days.” From the report: That seems to conflict with the statement Ljung released alongside the layoffs, which noted that, “With more focus and a need to think about the long term, comes tough decisions.” The company never mentioned how short its cash would still last. We reached out to Ljung and SoundCloud for this story and PR responded to the request reiterating Ljung blog post. After being presented with the leaked information from the all-hands, SoundCloud PR admitted that, “We are fully funded into Q4, ” though it says it’s in talks with potential investors. But further funding would require faith in SoundCloud that its own staff lacks. When asked about morale of the remaining team, one employee who asked to remain anonymous told TechCrunch “it’s pretty shitty. Pretty somber. I know people who didn’t get the axe are actually quitting. The people saved from this are jumping ship. The morale is really low.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AlphaBay taken down by law enforcement across 3 countries, WSJ says

Enlarge / A bitcoin token stands in this arranged photograph in London, U.K., on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images ) AlphaBay, one of the largest Tor-hidden drug websites that sprung up in the wake of Silk Road, has been shuttered for good after a series of law enforcement raids and arrests. The site mysteriously went dark earlier this month. Some users on Reddit suspected an “exit scam,” in which AlphaBay’s founders had shuttered the site and absconded with piles of bitcoins. According to the Wall Street Journal , which reported the news on Thursday, police in the United States, Canada, and Thailand collaborated to arrest Alexandre Cazes, who allegedly was the head of the online operation. The Canadian citizen was arrested on July 5 in Thailand, the same day that two raids on residences in Quebec, Canada, were executed. On Wednesday, Cazes was found dead, hanged in his Thai jail cell. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AlphaBay taken down by law enforcement across 3 countries, WSJ says

How to super clean your vehicle’s engine bay

Whenever I’ve gone to a vintage car show, I’ve often wondered how they get their engines so sparkling clean. Now I know! This comprehensive how-to video from YouTuber ChrisFix shows exactly how to wash, and then detail, your vehicle’s engine bay. It takes about two hours, from start to finish, to get your engine super-shiny clean. I think his “before and after” engine bay photos are particularly satisfying. Note to self: Keep this video handy for your post-Burning Man engine-cleaning needs. ( digg )

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AT&T’s ‘next-gen’ TV platform rollout will start on DirecTV Now

Later this year, AT&T’s launching an ambitious plan to revamp and unify its disparate video services. In a move that chief marketing officer David Christopher called “going from a hardware-centric model to a software-centric model.” Similar to Comcast’s X1 platform launch a few years ago , the plan is to have a single base for how its video services — whether internet-served like DirecTV Now , satellite-provided DirecTV , U-verse IPTV or NFL Sunday Ticket — look and feel across every device. Where AT&T pushes things further is that it already offers a national internet TV platform, and that’s where customers will see the new technology first when beta tests start later this year. AT&T executive VP & CTO Enrique Rodriguez spoke to Engadget about the rollout, saying that “if you look at the work we’ve done on DirecTV Now, it’s been very successful on Apple TV and so you can think of this as a continuation of that transition.” Invited DirecTV Now customers will be the first ones using the new technology, as shown above running on iOS, when the beta testing starts ahead of a rollout across more services and hardware over the “coming years.” The next-generation platform will bring everything we’ve seen from modernized TV setups over the last few years, with recommendations and profiles, backed by all the content AT&T/DirecTV provides subscribers. When the beta starts, there will be a cloud DVR feature and other new features already up and running. Features on deck for later this year include live TV pausing and parental controls, while other key elements like profiles, download-and-go and 4K Ultra HD with HDR are scheduled to launch in 2018. It won’t come all at once, but AT&T is turning its various video services, both “monolithic” as Christopher called them, and streaming into something built for the modern era. So far, the rollout of DirecTV Now has weathered some glitches and criticism that it hasn’t offered much new . But now that it’s had some time to roll out and expand its content offerings , the time is right for an upgrade. A frustrating aspect of the TV business since the dawn of high definition has been the slow pace of upgrades — digital TV, DVR, video-on-demand, internet streaming and cloud recordings have taken so many years to roll out — but maybe this transition can pull everything together. Of course, since AT&T owns so many pathways to customers including wireless, it has more incentive to push new technology, as reports suggested it expects to have a primarily streaming video service within the next few years. Source: AT&T

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Asus ROG GX800VH review: A ludicrous liquid-cooled $6,000-plus laptop

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton) The Asus ROG GX800VH, a liquid cooled monstrosity of a gaming laptop, is one of those things that, like 4K phones or the Apple Watch , is wholly unnecessary yet awfully desirable. Beneath its fully mechanical, RBG-lit keyboard is Intel’s top-of-the-line mobile i7-7820HK processor, which is based on the same Kaby Lake architecture as the i7-7700K and is similarly overclockable. There are two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards paired in SLI, 64GB of DDR4 memory, and an 18.4-inch 4K display with G-Sync. Buying one costs £6,600 /$6,300, which is an astonishing amount of money even considering the tech that’s included. Specs at a glance: Asus ROG GX800VH Screen 3840×2160 18.4-inch IPS G-Sync display 100 percent RGB OS Windows 10 Home x64 CPU 4C/8T 2.9GHz Core i7-7820HK (OC to 4.4GHz) RAM 64GB 2800MHz DDR4 GPU 2x Nvidia GTX 1080 HDD 2x 512GB NVMe SSD in RAID 0 Networking 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1, Gigabit Ethernet Ports 1 x Microphone-in jack 1 x Headphone-out jack (SPDIF) 1 x Type C USB3.1 (GEN2) Thunderbolt 3 x Type A USB3.0 (USB3.1 GEN1) 1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert 1 x HDMI 1 x Docking port (HOT swap) 1 x mini Display Port 1 x SD card reader Size Laptop: 45.8 x 33.8 x 4.54 cm (WxDxH) Dock: (Thermal Dock) 35.9 x 41.8 x 13.3 cm (WxDxH) Other perks 8 Cells 71 Whrs Battery, HD Web Camera, Mechanical Keyboard Warranty 1 year Price £6,600 /$6,300 The GX800VH certainly isn’t for everyone, then, not least those that want the most bang-for-the-buck. But as an example of what’s possible on the bleeding edge when money is no object, it’s one of the finest pieces of technological willy-waving that we’ve ever seen. Buying a GX800VH requires a commitment from both your credit card and your ego. Not only is the laptop itself physically large and covered in orange highlights, but it comes with both a backpack and a suitcase to carry the accompanying liquid cooling unit around—and the graphics on the suitcase are hardly what you’d call subtle. Still, the suitcase—which is filled a pre-cut foam insert for the liquid cooling unit and extra power supply—and bag do make carrying the whole setup around that much easier, should you want to lug it around to a friend’s house or, if you’re seriously committed to gaming, on holiday. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Researchers encode a movie onto living bacteria

Forget USB drives and the cloud — what if you could carry every bit of data you’ve ever used on your skin? That’s the long-term goal of researchers at Harvard Medical School, who have stored a video in the DNA of bacteria. It’s the first time a video has been recorded into living cells, as opposed to synthetic material. The team inserted a short animated image of ‘The Horse in Motion’ (one of the earliest moving images ever created) into E. coli, using gene-editing system CRISPR. The movie was split into five frames, and each frame chopped into single-colored pixels. They then created DNA codes corresponding to each color and strung them together. Each bacterium carried snippets of the video stored in their DNA, and when taken together, the scientists were able to retrieve and reconstruct the pieces to play the video. It’s not the first time we’ve seen data stored in this fashion. Back in 2003 a small message was encoded into DNA, and more recently we’ve seen a full operating system written into DNA strands. One team is even trying to store poetry in DNA. But this is the first time it’s been attempted with living bacteria, rather than synthetic material, which presents a unique set of challenges. Live cells are constantly moving and changing, and are liable to interpret the addition of data to their DNA as an invading virus, and subsequently destroy it. That’s why, shaky and blurred as it is, this movie breaks new ground. The world is generating huge amounts of digital data, and scientists see DNA as an effective way of not only dealing with the volumes produced, but as a secure method of preservation. In the face of nuclear explosions, radiation exposure or extreme temperature fluctuation some bacteria can continue to exist — data centers will not. It’ll be some time before you can use this technology to upload data into your body, but in the meantime it has valuable research applications. The scientists behind the study hope the breakthrough will eventually lead to the creation of “living sensors” that can record what is happening inside a cell or in its environment. Via: Stat News Source: Nature (PDF)

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In NASA simulation, people tote hardy, allergy-inducing molds to Mars

Enlarge / The inflatable lunar/Mars analog habitat, or ILMAH. (credit: Microbiome, 2017 ) For many Earthlings, our planet is teeming with airborne pollens, spores, and toxins that clog schnozes and turn windpipes wheezy. Sadly, jumping to space rocks may not help , a new NASA study suggests. In a 30-day simulation of living life on another planet, NASA researchers found that fungi followed artificial astronauts and set up their own colonies. Many of those small space explorers excel at surviving in extremely harsh conditions, such as those in the salty, acidic high-altitude soils of the Indian Himalaya or the radioactive remains at Chernobyl. And several of the fungi that piggybacked off-world in the simulation are associated with allergies and asthma indoors, the researchers report this week in the journal Microbiome . “The statement ‘wherever humans go, microbes hitchhike along with them’ is true for fungi also,” Kasthuri Venkateswaran, lead study author, told Ars. He works in the Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “At present, most of our studies have been conducted to know the dynamic changes regarding bacteria , not fungi,” he notes. “This is the first study that examined the fungal changes in a confined environment for at least 30 days of human habitation in isolation using molecular methods.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

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