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Comment Favorites 2018 (Score 1) 185

by hoagsObject (#57867384) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: Your Favorite Movies and TV Shows of 2018?

In terms of TV shows:
        - Godless (Netflix, Jeff Daniels is great as the villain)
        - Haunting of Hill House (Netflix)
        - Altered Carbon (Netflix)
        - Channel Zero: Dream Door (SyFy, Pretzel Jack is so creepy)
        - The Expanse (SyFy)
        - Counterpart (Starz, J.K. Simmons is great)
        - Doctor Who (BBC)
        - Killing Eve (BBC)
        - Snowfall (FX)
        - Cloak & Dagger (Freeform)
        - Travelers (Netflix)

Movies:
        - Black Panther
        - Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse (Visually amazing, with a great story)

Submission + - How Big Tech Is Going After Your Health Care (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Templer421
Templer421 writes: When Daniel Poston, a second-year medical student in Manhattan, opened the App Store on his iPhone a couple of weeks ago, he was astonished to see an app for a new heart study prominently featured.

People often learn about new research studies through in-person conversations with their doctors. But not only did this study, run by Stanford University, use a smartphone to recruit consumers, it was financed by Apple. And it involved using an app on the Apple Watch to try to identify irregular heart rhythms.

Intrigued, Mr. Poston, who already owned an Apple Watch, registered for the heart study right away. Then he took to Twitter to encourage others to do likewise — suggesting that it was part of a breakthrough in health care.

“It’s not inconceivable, by the time I graduate from medical school,” Mr. Poston said, “that the entire practice of medicine can be revolutionized by technology.”

Submission + - Google's Voice-Generating AI Is Now Indistinguishable From Humans (qz.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A research paper published by Google this month—which has not been peer reviewed—details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text. The system is Google’s second official generation of the technology, which consists of two deep neural networks. The first network translates the text into a spectrogram (pdf), a visual way to represent audio frequencies over time. That spectrogram is then fed into WaveNet, a system from Alphabet’s AI research lab DeepMind, which reads the chart and generates the corresponding audio elements accordingly. The Google researchers also demonstrate that Tacotron 2 can handle hard-to-pronounce words and names, as well as alter the way it enunciates based on punctuation. For instance, capitalized words are stressed, as someone would do when indicating that specific word is an important part of a sentence.

Submission + - SPAM: The Oldest Known Human Remains in the Americas Have Been Found in a Mexican Cave

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: An ice-free corridor between the Americas and Asia opened up about 12,500 years ago, allowing humans to cross over the Bering land bridge to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south. History books have conveyed that information for years to explain how the Americas were supposedly first settled by people, such as those from the Clovis culture.

At least one part of the Americas was already occupied by humans before that time, however, says new research on the skeleton of a male youth found in Chan Hol cave near Tulúm, Mexico. Dubbed the Young Man of Chan Hol, the remains date to 13,000 years ago, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.

How he arrived at the location remains a great mystery given the timing and the fact that Mexico is well over 4,000 miles away from the Bering land crossing.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - CBS delaying 'Star Trek: Discovery' to maintain quality (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Zorro
Zorro writes: LOS ANGELES – The premiere of "Star Trek: Discovery" on CBS' subscription streaming service, CBS All Access, was postponed nine months to maintain the quality of the brand.

Executive producer Alex Kurtzman told the Television Critics Association Tuesday that they "spent a lot of time" discussing how to create this new world for TV that felt authentic to the "Star Trek" universe.

Also during that time, executive producer Bryan Fuller decided to exit the series as showrunner to focus on other projects.

Kurtzman said "it became clearer and clearer" that the targeted January debut would "compromise the quality of the show," so it was pushed with the blessing of CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves.

Submission + - Alkaline Batteries Could Be Coming to a Laptop Near You (nytimes.com)

Submitted by cdreimer
cdreimer writes: According to a report by The New York Times, Ionic Materials is working on alkaline batteries that are cheaper, safer and more powerful than lithium-ion batteries for laptops and electric cars.

A start-up company is trying to turbocharge a type of battery that has been a mainstay for simple devices like flashlights and toys, but until now has been ignored as an energy source for computers and electric cars. Executives at Ionic Materials, in Woburn, Mass., plan to announce on Thursday a design breakthrough that could make solid-state alkaline batteries a viable alternative to lithium-ion and other high-energy storage technologies. Alkaline batteries can be made far more cheaply and safely than today’s lithium-ion batteries, but they are not rechargeable. That issue, along with the superior power of lithium-ion batteries, has meant that alkaline batteries are not used in personal computers, smartphones or electric vehicles. Ionic could change that equation with an alkaline battery the company said could be recharged hundreds of times. One additional benefit of the company’s breakthrough: An alkaline battery would not be as prone to the combustion issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries in a range of products, most notably some Samsung smartphones. Cheaper and more powerful batteries are also considered by many to be the driver needed to make the cost of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar competitive with the coal, gas and nuclear power that support the national energy grid.

Submission + - National Solar Observatory predicts shape of solar corona for august eclipse (phys.org)

Submitted by bsharma
bsharma writes: August 21st will bring a history-making opportunity for the entire United States. On that day, every person in the country, including Hawaii and Alaska, will have an opportunity to witness at least a partial solar eclipse as the moon moves in front of the Sun. If you have the good fortune to be along the path of totality, stretching from Oregon to South Carolina, you will get to witness one of the most awe-inspiring views in nature – the wispy wonders of the solar corona.

Submission + - Could diabetes spread like the flu? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, a new study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don’t indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread the disease.

The work is “very exciting” and “well-documented” for showing that the protein has some prionlike behavior, says prion biologist Witold Surewicz of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who wasn’t connected to the research. However, he cautions against jumping to the conclusion that diabetes spreads from person to person. The study raises that possibility, he says, but “it remains to be determined.”

Submission + - World's first floating wind farm emerges off coast of Scotland (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The world's first full-scale floating wind farm has started to take shape off the north-east coast of Scotland. The revolutionary technology will allow wind power to be harvested in waters too deep for the current conventional bottom-standing turbines. The manufacturer hopes to cash in on a boom in the technology, especially in Japan and the west coast of the US, where waters are deep. The tower, including the blades, stretches to 175m and weighs 11,500 tonnes.

The price of energy from bottom-standing offshore wind farms has plummeted 32% since 2012, and is now four years ahead of the government's expected target. Another big price drop is expected, taking offshore wind to a much lower price than new nuclear power.

Submission + - Tesla shocks Wall St. with huge earnings surprise and actual profits (bgr.com)

Submitted by anderzole
anderzole writes: Tesla on Wednesday posted its earnings report for the quarter gone by and investors will have a lot to cheer about. While analysts on Wall St. were expecting Tesla to post a loss, Tesla during its September quarter actually posted a profit, and an impressive profit at that. When the dust settled, Tesla posted a quarterly profit of $22 million and EPS of $0.71. Revenue for the quarter checked in at $2.3 billion.

Illustrating how impressive Tesla’s performance was this past quarter, Wall St. was anticipating Tesla to post a loss amid $1.9 billion in revenue for the quarter.

Submission + - This Was The Warmest US Winter On Record

Submitted by hondo77
hondo77 writes: "On Tuesday, NOAA released its official assessment of December, January, and February’s temperatures across the United States, and the results are striking: Not a single state in the U.S. had a cooler than average winter. (NOAA treats Alaska and Hawaii separately, due to shorter weather data records there—though both states were significantly warmer than normal this winter. Weather records for the contiguous United States go back to 1895.)" Cue the deniers!

Submission + - BMW Showcases Self-Driving Concept Car

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: We’ve just been given a glimpse of what the future of motoring could look like, with BMW showing off its latest concept car, and it’s self-driving. The Vision Next 100 was unveiled on Monday, at a ceremony celebrating BMW’s 100th birthday, at Munich’s Olympic Hall. This comes just a few days after BMW made official its intentions of competing with Google to build software for Self-Driving cars.

The Vision Next 100 has two driving modes, a driver mode and an autonomous mode, or ‘ease’ as its known. In driver mode the car operates mostly like cars do now, except the BMW indicates the ideal driving line and speed, but when the car is set to autonomous mode the steering wheel retracts and the two front seats turn to face each other. Perfect for two people to have a chat, and if it’s only you in the car, put your feet up and relax.

Submission + - Open source-happy Microsoft joins Eclipse Foundation (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A day after announcing it would be bringing SQL Server to Linux, Microsoft has announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community for developers launched more than 10 years ago. Microsoft, which notes that it has worked with the Eclipse Foundation for years "to improve the Java experience across our portfolio of application platform and development services," https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c... attending the EclipseCon gathering in Reston, Va., this week.

Submission + - Microsoft Open-Sources Its JavaScript Engine Chakra

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As promised, Microsoft has open-sourced the core components of Chakra, the company’s JavaScript engine used in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. The project, dubbed ChakraCore, has been released under the MIT License on GitHub.

Submission + - Physicists find new evidence for helium 'rain' on Saturn (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Using one of the world’s most powerful lasers, physicists have found experimental evidence for Saturn’s helium “rain,” a phenomenon in which a mixture of liquid hydrogen and helium separates like oil and water, sending droplets of helium deep in the planet’s atmosphere. The results show the range of blistering temperatures and crushing pressures at which this takes place. But they also suggest that a helium rain could also fall on Jupiter, where such behavior was almost completely unexpected.

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