Yuzu emulates Nintendo’s Switch

Yuzu is an experimental emulator for Nintendo’s Switch console. No, it does not run commercial games. It is written in C++ with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux and macOS. The emulator is currently only useful for homebrew development and research purposes. yuzu only emulates a subset of Switch hardware and therefore is generally only useful for running/debugging homebrew applications. At this time, yuzu does not run any commercial Switch games. yuzu can boot some games, to varying degrees of success, but does not implement any of the necessary GPU features to render 3D graphics.

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Yuzu emulates Nintendo’s Switch

Gut bacteria linked to cataclysmic epidemic that wiped out 16th-century Mexico

Enlarge / Entrance of Hernan Cortes into Mexico (credit: Kurz & Allison ) In the wake of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, waves of epidemics slammed Mexico. By 1576, the population, which had been more than 20 million before the Spanish arrived, had crashed to two million. One brutal outbreak in 1545 was estimated to have killed between five and 15 million alone—or up to 80 percent of the population . But, like the other epidemics, the disease behind the 1545 outbreak was a complete mystery—until now. Genetic evidence pulled from the teeth of 10 victims suggests that the particularly nasty bacterium Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Paratyphi C contributed to the scourge of fever, bleeding, dysentery, and red rashes recorded at the time. The genetic data, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution , offers the first molecular evidence to try to explain what’s “regarded as one of the most devastating epidemics in New World history,” the authors conclude. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gut bacteria linked to cataclysmic epidemic that wiped out 16th-century Mexico

Google’s museum app finds your fine art doppelgänger

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s a museum portrait somewhere that looks like you and you’re ready to have your ego crushed, there’s now an app for that. Google Arts & Culture’s latest update now lets you take a selfie, and using image recognition, finds someone in its vast art collection that most resembles you. It will then present you and your fine art twin side-by-side, along with a percentage match, and let you share the results on social media, if you dare. My Google Arts & Culture match is with a guy literally named Bourgeois A post shared by Steve Dent (@stevetdent) on Jan 15, 2018 at 1:43am PST The app is like an automated version of an article that circulated recently showing folks standing in front of portraits at museums. In many cases, the old-timey people in the paintings resemble them uncannily, but, other than in rare cases, that’s not the case at all with Google’s app. Google matched me with someone who doesn’t look like me in the slightest, a certain Sir Peter Francois Bourgeois, based on a painting hanging in Dulwich Picture Gallery. Taking a buzz around the internet, other folks were satisfied with their matches, some took them as a personal insult, and many were just plain baffled, in that order, as presented below. From all that, it’s pretty clear that deep learning systems like those from Google are great at matching individual details, but painfully miss the big picture. The left is from “Children Begging, ” from the second half of the 17th century. Anonymous painter, Italy. I can kind of see it #googleartsandculture A post shared by Avren Keating (@mxavren) on Jan 12, 2018 at 7:59am PST Nothing like a little self esteem boost from google arts and culture on a Saturday night pic.twitter.com/hYYtdNN308 — Amy Stone (@amyhannumstone) January 14, 2018 Cool 🙂 #googleartsandculture A post shared by BoyWonder (@boywonderrocks) on Jan 14, 2018 at 5:12am PST Via: GQ Source: Google Arts & Culture (Play Store)

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Google’s museum app finds your fine art doppelgänger

Ford teases ‘Mach 1’ electric performance SUV for 2020

At its NAIAS 2018 preview event, Ford just dropped a few details about an electric vehicle it plans to release in 2020. The “Mach 1” (cribbing its name from the famous Mustang model ) is an all-electric performance SUV under development by Team Edison in Ford’s recently-opened Corktown facility . That group’s stated mission is to “accelerate both the development and adoption of electric vehicles, ” but this is the first project we’re getting any information about. Appropriately, its reveal comes at an event where Ford also showed off a performance gas SUV with the Edge ST and a “Bullitt” edition of the Mustang. Whatever Mach 1 is, it appears the Tesla Model X will have some competition… eventually. Source: Ford (Twitter)

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Ford teases ‘Mach 1’ electric performance SUV for 2020

Watch this timelapse of a guy single-handedly building a log cabin the woods

Well, this is damn impressive. Outdoorsman Shawn James built a log cabin in the Canadian woods all by himself — without power tools — and created this timelapse video to prove it. He writes : At the beginning of the video, I show a winter drone photo of the cabin in the snow in December. Then I flashback to the first balsam fir tree I cut down with a saw and axe near the cabin. I drag the trees into place and clear the cabin site. All summer, I cut the notches in the logs as I built the cabin up, offsite. Once I was finished notching the logs with a log scribe, saw, axe, adze and wood carving gouge, I loaded up the entire cabin of logs and moved them to my land near Algonquin Park, Ontario Canada… Because the cabin is offgrid, I have used handtools for most of the build and without power, I have no options on site regardless. The tiny house will continue to be operated with power, not even renewable energy for now, so I’m heating the cabin with a woodstove fire place, which I also cook on. ( digg )

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Watch this timelapse of a guy single-handedly building a log cabin the woods

How do you play this boardgame from 375 C.E.

This board game was found in Poprad, Slovakia inside a German prince’s tomb that dates to 375 C.E. Now, researchers at Switzerland’s Museum of Games are trying to figure out how to play it. From Smithsonian: It’s likely the board is designed to play Latrunculi or Ludus latrunculorum, which translates as “Mercenaries” or the “Game of Brigands” or some variant. That game was originally derived from an ancient Greek game called petteia which is referenced in the works of Homer. There are a handful of vague descriptions of how the game was played in ancient sources, but researchers have not successfully figured out the complete set of rules so far, though many gamers have come up with their own guesses. “There were plenty of board games in ancient times with many variants, but reconstructing the playing technique is a very complicated process that only top experts can solve,” Karol Pieta, the archaeologist in charge of the dig, tells the Spectator. ” Researchers Are Trying to Figure Out How to Play This Ancient Roman Board Game ” (Smithsonian)

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How do you play this boardgame from 375 C.E.

AMD Is Releasing Spectre Firmware Updates To Fix CPU Vulnerabilities

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AMD’s initial response to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws made it clear “there is a near zero risk to AMD processors.” That zero risk doesn’t mean zero impact, as we’re starting to discover today. “We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat, ” says Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer. AMD is making firmware updates available for Ryzen and EPYC owners this week, and the company is planning to update older processors “over the coming weeks.” Like Intel, these firmware updates will be provided to PC makers, and it will be up to suppliers to ensure customers receive these. AMD isn’t saying whether there will be any performance impacts from applying these firmware updates, nor whether servers using EPYC processors will be greatly impacted or not. AMD is also revealing that its Radeon GPU architecture isn’t impacted by Meltdown or Spectre, simply because those GPUs “do not use speculative execution and thus are not susceptible to these threats.” AMD says it plans to issue further statements as it continues to develop security updates for its processors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Is Releasing Spectre Firmware Updates To Fix CPU Vulnerabilities

Ocean waves can hurl boulders 2.5X the weight of the Statue of Liberty

That rock you see above? It’s 620 tons, over 2.5 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty. Yet some powerful wave in the North Atlantic was mighty enough to lift it out of the sea and plop it onto land. Everyday ocean waves are way more powerful than we ever thought: This is the conclusion of a fascinating paper by geoscientist Ronadh Cox and her research group . Scientists long knew there were unusually huge rocks hurled ashore around the world, but generally they assumed they’d been tossed up by tsunamis, rare tectonic events. Nope. It looks like regular ‘ol storm-waves can manage these sorts of feats. Cox and her group took a bunch of before-and-after photos of the northwest coast of Ireland around the time of a 2013-2014 storm cluster, and identified several boulders that the storms had thrown ashore. They were huuuuuuuge! No wonder Homer called Poseidon the “earth-shaker” . The paper is here online in full , and is both layperson-parsable and seriously gripping. Given that global warming is pouring evermore energy into the oceans, we’re going to need to reassess just how powerful coastal waves can get, as Cox points out in this story about her work: “Why bother with this study?” Cox knew members of the audience might be asking. If these deposits are formed by storms, then we can better understand storm dynamics and coastal processes. This information will be important as global climate changes cause storms to become more frequent and intense. The research could also help to constrain tsunami models elsewhere. “But from my perspective, it’s just cool. It’s just fun,” added Cox.

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Ocean waves can hurl boulders 2.5X the weight of the Statue of Liberty

Federal prosecutors say that Ohio man used MacOS malware that covertly operated cameras and mics and exfiltrated porn searches for 13 years

An indictment in the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio’s Eastern Division alleges that Phillip R Durachinsky created a strain of MacOS “creepware” called Fruitfly, which was able to covertly operate the cameras and microphones of infected computers as well as capturing and sharing porn searches from the infected machines; the indictment alleges that Durachinsky used the software for 13 years, targeting individuals, schools, and federal agencies including the Department of Energy. (more…)

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Federal prosecutors say that Ohio man used MacOS malware that covertly operated cameras and mics and exfiltrated porn searches for 13 years

Skype is adding an option for encrypted conversations

Soon, your chats on Skype can be just as secure as conversations on Signal, the service used by US Senators. Microsoft is integrating the open source Signal protocol, used by WhatsApp, Google, Facebook and Signal itself, into test versions of Skype as ‘ Private Conversations ‘ for end-to-end encrypted communications. There are a few restrictions: You can’t turn an existing chat into a Private Conversation, and must start each one by sending a request to one of your contacts. They don’t carry over between devices, so if you switch platforms, you’ll have to send a whole new request. And finally, Private Conversations are currently available in preview only for Skype Insiders, the service’s beta tester community. Via: Windows Central Source: Signal blog , Skype: Private Conversations

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Skype is adding an option for encrypted conversations