Looking ahead to the “spiritual, social, and psychological needs” of lunar colonists, Jorge Mañes Rubio, the ESA’s artist in residence, wants to build a temple near the south pole of the moon. Rubio’s vision for a temple entails building a dome on the rim of the 21-km-wide Shackleton Crater. Such an effort would be an international affair, and NASA experts have already been eyeing Shackleton as a potential site for a moon base for quite some time. While the basin of the crater is in near permanent shadow, it’s rich with water ice, and the rim of the crater enjoys nearly permanent sunlight because it’s right there near the pole.
LastPass bills itself as a way to simplify your life by storing all your and account details in one place. However, it’s looking a little less convenient now, as the service deals with its second major security flaw in as many weeks. LastPass is in the process of patching a security hole that could allow an attacker to execute remote code on your machine and access your passwords. Really, the worst possible scenario you can imagine. For the uninitiated, LastPass exists as a browser extension and mobile app. When you set up an account, LastPass helps you generate strong passwords and store your logins with its encrypted vault.
When AMD launched its Ryzen 7 family, it delivered a chip that exceeded our expectations in just about every category, but fell down somewhat in gaming. Exactly how much of a problem this is depends on whether you tune your testing for CPU-centric or GPU-centric results, and to some extent, what GPU you use. But there was a clear gap at 1080p in both our and our GTX 1080 Ti testing. AMD’s explanation for this phenomena was to claim that games required to work effectively with Ryzen. This was met with a raised eyebrow from much of the enthusiast community. It’s not that these claims are always unfounded — we’ve long known that game updates could improve performance on specific CPU architectures — but that the performance hit AMD took in gaming in our CPU review occurred across a wide range of titles.
The Trump administration wants to back down from the 54.5 mpg fuel economy mandate for automobiles and back away from the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. Businesses in general like the new plan, as do automakers and coal miners specifically. They say fewer rules lowers manufacturing costs and makes American factories competitive. There are problems with the plans. US automakers have global operations. They still must design world cars to meet economy and pollution rules in countries that aren’t hitting the pause button. If the US retreats from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, China might also, leading to a domino effect taking out India and Brazil.
Elon Musk has had another bright idea. Nobody can accuse Mr. Musk of a lack of intellectual diversity in his pursuits; his interests have ranged from glitzy solar roof tiles to cartoonishly fast cars, colonizing other planets, and domestic energy infrastructure. He’s playing a long game. Someone who thinks in the future tense. And he clearly believes that AI is the future. As AI advances, humans will have to find a comfortable coexistence with machines that learn, or risk winding up as a “house cat” to . Toward that goal, and with a happy side effect of therapeutic benefits for certain brain disorders, Elon Musk has been funding a company called Neuralink that wants to implant an AI interface in your brain.
Amazon announced its intention to put the nation’s cashiers out of work a few months ago, but it looks like they’ll be getting a reprieve for now. Amazon’s automated grocery store was supposed to open to the public this month, but the retailer has postponed the launch. The alleged reason is that its shopper tracking technology is not yet able to reliably track shoppers. That’s kind of a big problem. The idea behind Amazon Go is that shoppers can simply walk in and scan their phone to begin a virtual cart. Once inside the store, you simply pick up whatever you want, and walk out.
Razer’s Razer Blade Pro has been the company’s go-to high-end machine for gamers wanting a desktop replacement, and the company has tweaked its high-end configuration for 2017. The jumps aren’t huge, but the new system will offer a Core i7-7820HQ (2.9GHz base, 3.9GHz Turbo) as opposed to the older i7-6820HQ (2.7GHz base, 3.6GHz Turbo). It also ships with DDR4-2667 instead of DDR4-2133. The other major claim to fame for this laptop is its support for THX. To achieve that, the had to meet certain standards for color resolution, color accuracy, and video playback (on the video side). The audio jack on the Razer Blade Pro also had to be certified for , which means conforming to that standard’s guidelines for crosstalk, distortion, frequency response, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
Anyone who follows Android news knows Andy Rubin as the man who founded . His startup was acquired by Google, and Android grew into the dominant mobile platform within a few years. Rubin left Google a while back to pursue other projects, and that eventually led him to create a smartphone startup called Essential. The company has been toiling in secret since its inception, but Rubin teased its first phone the other day. If there was any doubt 2017 was the year of rounded corners, there isn’t now. We don’t know much more about this mysterious Android phone today than we did last week.
If you’re in the market for a powerful laptop that’s priced reasonably, this 15.6-inch model from Acer is definitely worth checking out. With a full HD screen, a new Kaby Lake CPU, and zippy flash memory, it’s a real bargain at just $550. • So, what specs are we looking at with this laptop? This model sports a seventh generation dual-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-7200U CPU, a discrete Nvidia GeForce 940MX graphics card with 2GB of memory, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, Bluetooth 4.1, and 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi support. And the 15.6-inch display? It benefits from LED lighting, a 1920×1080 resolution, and Acer’s own Color Blast technology.
