ArduinoMania

Sure enough, Marvel's outgoing Netflix shows are coming to Disney+... but only for some viewers. Engadget has confirmed a MobileSyrupreport that Daredevil, Jessica Jones and other productions will be available on Disney+ starting March 16th, but only in Canada. If you're fortunate enough to live in the country, you'll only have to wait a couple of weeks to keep watching after the superhero shows leave Netflix on March 1st.

It's not clear when these shows will be available in other countries, but Engadget understands it's just a matter of time before you can watch elsewhere.

You could see this transition coming for a while. Disney said in 2017 that it would ditch Netflix in favor of an in-house service, and Netflix had cancelled all its Marvel originals by 2019. Beyond this, Disney has been dropping not-so-subtle clues about its control of the former Netflix characters, with appearances from a couple of them in Hawkeye and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

If there's a looming question, it's whether or not the shows will make their way to Disney+ in other countries or to Disney-owned services like Hulu, where their not-so-family-friendly content might be a better fit. With that said, Disney risks a further split in its Marvel catalog (MODOK is on Hulu, for instance) if it hosts the Netflix shows anywhere besides its main service — it may have to accept that mature and PG fare will sit side by side.

Twitch has launched an incentive program that will guarantee select streamers a certain amount of ad revenue per month. Many creators have spoken out about the difficulties of earning a consistent living from the livestreaming platform for all but the top-tier of streamers. Unless you have a consistent base of followers, the income you earn from Twitch can vary widely from month to month.

“Having a reliable floor of ad revenue should enable you to better plan for the future, whatever that may look like. We hope it’s an important step towards empowering creators,” wrote Twitch on its site.

The new payment model, which Twitch is calling the Ad Incentives Program or AIP, offers a select group of partners and affiliates a flat payout every month. In exchange, creators agree to stream for a minimum amount of hours per month while running ads. Twitch already has tapped a select group of streamers to participate in AIP for the time being. Selected streamers will see a message on top of their Ads Manager dashboard inviting them to join the program.

Twitch streamers typically earn money from a variety of different sources, including ads, subscriptions, Bits (virtual goods that viewers buy to cheer you on) and donations from followers. Not every streamer can earn money on Twitch. The platform requires a certain number of followers and broadcast hours before inviting streamers to its Affiliate program, which offers the ability for creators to monetize their streamers. Affiliates who attain enough followers and views can then take part in the more lucrative Partner program. But maintaining a consistent fan following is incredibly hard, and many creators burn out due to the many hours required. Twitch typically collects 50/50 of the revenue that streamers earn from subscriptions, a significantly worse deal than YouTube, Facebook and other platforms.

Streamers will get the option to pick from different payment models, and the amount Twitch is offering each streamer will vary. In the examples Twitch laid out on its site, a user who agrees to stream for 40 hours per month can select the option of either a $100 payout to run 2 minutes of ads per hour, a $300 payout to run 3 minutes of ads per hour, or a $500 payout to run 4 minutes of ads per hour. Streamers will earn this guaranteed amount of money regardless of how many people watch. After they stream the minimum amount of hours required, they’ll continue to earn revenue at their normal rate.

While an earnings floor may provide some stability for a select group of Twitch streamers, a number of streamers on Twitter have already pointed out that smaller streamers (the most likely to need a source of guaranteed income) won’t benefit in the least. The streamers who qualify for Twitch’s new AIP program already have a medium to large fanbase who already watch their streams. But for that select group, AIP may eliminate some of the guesswork when it comes to deciding which ad strategy will work best.

Astell & Kern is still best known for keeping high-end MP3 players alive, but it's now branching out into Bluetooth speakers — and there might be reason to take notice. The Iriver (now Dreamus) brand's new Acro BE100 includes a 32-bit DAC to preserve the audio quality regardless of the source. Accordingly, it's also billed as the first Bluetooth speaker to support both the aptX HD and LDAC 24-bit codecs — you might not have to lose audio fidelity or limit your collection to one audio format.

The BE100 centers on a 55W class-D amp and boasts both a four-inch Kevlar woofer as well as two silk dome tweeters. A 3.5mm aux input jack provides wired audio if wireless just isn't pristine enough.

Not surprisingly, you can expect to pay for the extra quality. Astell & Kern will ship the Acro BE100 for $499 in black and white models when it ships on March 7th, with pre-orders starting February 25th. That's a huge outlay, but the BE100 also exists in a relatively niche space. Most wireless speakers approaching this price range are either party-oriented models like UE's Hyperboom or convenience-focused smart speakers like the Sonos Five. This might do the job if you're more interested in appreciating the subtle nuances of a classical piece than blasting audio around the house.

The USPS is moving forward with plans to spend $11.3 billion on a fleet of next-generation mail trucks that mostly run on gas, despite requests from the EPA and Biden administration to electrify its new vehicles instead. The new trucks, which were revealed last year, feature modern amenities like air conditioning, 360-degree cameras, and collision detection. While they can be powered by either gas or electric engines, the initial order from the USPS only included 5,000 electric trucks, or around 10 percent of the entire order.

"Our commitment to an electric fleet remains ambitious given the pressing vehicle and safety needs of our aging fleet as well as our fragile financial condition," Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said in a statement. He went on to say that the agency would try buy more EVs as additional funding became available, but added that "the process needs to keep moving forward" to give postal workers more modern vehicles. 

Today's postal trucks, which include the Grumman Long Life Vehicle (LLV), have been in service since the 1980s, have few safety features and abysmal single-digit fuel economy. Practically any modern truck would be an improvement, but the EPA argued earlier this month that investing in more gas vehicles would ultimately accelerate climate change and hurt American health. The USPS ultimately decided to ignore the EPA's request for supplemental environmental impact statements, and it refused to hold a public hearing about the next-gen vehicle plan. 

Sony is gradually rolling out an option to let PS5 players access captured screenshots and clips from the PS App on iOS and Android. The company started testing the feature in Canada and Japan in October.

At the outset, players in the Americas will be able to view and share their PS5 captures on the mobile app. Folks in the US, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay should gain access in the coming days.

Sony will expand the feature to more territories next month. Some people outside of Canada and Japan had access to the feature as of late January, according to reports, which hinted that a broader rollout was imminent.

To use the feature, you'll need to switch it on manually on PS5 by going to the Captures tab of the settings menu and enabling Auto-Upload. On the PS App, you'll need to enable the Captures option under Library. You'll then be able to download the clips and screenshots to your phone or tablet.

Your PS5 will upload all clips lasting under three minutes, as long as they're not in 4K. All screenshots taken with the Create button or Create Menu shortcuts will be uploaded too. Your screenshots and clips will only only stay on Sony's servers for 14 days after you capture them, though they'll remain on your console's storage.

While that's a bit of an odd limitation, this is a useful way to get your screenshots and clips on your phone. You'll be able to share them on social media and with your friends without using the PS5's limited sharing options or transferring captures to a computer using a USB drive.

One of the more popular VR apps you can download through Steam and Meta’s Oculus Quest Store has a child safety problem. If you’re unfamiliar with VRChat, the app styles as “the future” of social virtual reality. “Our vision for VRChat is to enable anybody to create and share their own social virtual worlds,” the game’s developer says on its Steam store page. With some understanding of Unity, players can create their own social spaces and avatars. That means you can see a lot of creativity on display in VRChat, but there’s also a dark side to it as the BBC found out.

Posing as a 13-year-old girl, BBC researcher Jess Sherwood said she entered a virtual strip club where she saw adult men chase a child while telling them to remove their clothes. In many of the rooms Sherwood visited, she frequently saw condoms and sex toys on display, and on one occasion even saw a group of adult men and minors simulating group sex. She also saw instances of grooming. 

"It's very uncomfortable, and your options are to stay and watch, move on to another room where you might see something similar, or join in — which, on many occasions, I was instructed to do," she said.

"Predatory and toxic behavior has no place on the platform,” VRChat told the BBC. The developer added it was “working hard to make itself a safe and welcoming place for everyone.” We’ve reached out to the company for additional comment. Part of the problem stems from the fact nearly anyone can download and play VRChat. For instance, to download the app from the Oculus Quest Store, all you need is a Facebook account. Sherwood created a fake profile to set up her account and access VRChat.  

She isn’t the first person to notice VRChat has a child safety problem. While the game has a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, the presence of predatory adults is something you see referenced frequently in both positive and negative reviews. “Enjoyable social VR slowly being ruined by horny degenerates and ddosers,” said one player with more than 2,300 hours spent in the game.

“The amount of ‘people’ around the age of 30 attempting to do stuff like flirting all the way to trying to have e-sex with clearly underage users is alarming,” said another player.

VRChat isn’t the only metaverse app dealing with what amounts to a harassment problem. At the start of February, Meta added a Personal Boundary feature to Horizon Worlds to give users the ability to prevent people from entering their personal space. More recently, Microsoft took the dramatic step of removing Altspace VR’s social hubs. 

Acer isn't wasting any time in making use of Intel's 12th-gen ultraportable processors. The PC maker has unveiled new versions of its Swift 5 and Swift 3 laptops that not only make use of new 12th-gen Core chips, but include a handful of upgrades of their own. Most notably, the new Swift 5 (pictured above) has switched to a 16:10 2,560 x 1,600 display whose taller ratio not only helps with vertical content like documents and websites, but helps eliminate the "chin" present on its 16:9 predecessor. The two-tone aluminum shell gives it a more premium look, too, for those moments when you want to impress executives.

The revamped Swift 5 includes up to a 12-core CPU, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. It also meets Intel's Evo specs for 10 hours of real battery life and fast charging that delivers four hours of use from a 30-minute top-up. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and HDMI 2.1 offer solid connectivity, too. The system is heavier than its predecessor at 2.65lbs, but you might not mind given the upgraded cooling (improved twin fans and D6 heat pipes), a low-noise 1080p webcam and a trackpad made from ocean-bound plastic waste.

Acer

The Swift 3 (shown at middle) is a more modest upgrade. You'll have to make do with a 16:9 display (1080p or 1440p) in this 14-inch system, but you can have up to 2TB of SSD space, 30-minute fast charging and a mix of USB-C, USB-A and HDMI 2.1 ports. The 1080p low-noise webcam also makes the leap to this lower-priced model, and you'll have your choice of more colorful bodies.

Be ready to wait. Acer ships both systems in June, with the Swift 5 starting at $1,499 and the Swift 3 at $850. The Swift 5's price is a steep hike from the $1,000 you would have paid for the late 2020 model, but Acer also appears to be targeting a more upscale audience — there don't appear to be many compromises.

A study by MIT scientists on a group of epilepsy patients discovered that a specific group of neurons in their brains respond only to singing — and not to instrumental music or any other type of sound. The findings of the study were published today in the science journal Current Biology. Scientists are still working to nail down the implications of the study for epilepsy patients, some of whom rely on music as a form of therapy to reduce seizures.

“The work provides evidence for relatively fine-grained segregation of function within the auditory cortex, in a way that aligns with an intuitive distinction within music,” says Sam Norman-Haignere, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Given how small and specific the study's sample size is (fifteen people), there's not much we can conclude from this single study alone. But it will likely advance further studies on the link between neuroscience, epilepsy and music in the future.

The study’s participants were a group of fifteen epilepsy patients, all whom consented to have electrodes implanted in their skull. They were then asked to listen to hundreds of different sounds, both natural and synthesized. Scientists, assisted by fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, observed how neurons in the auditory cortex of participants reacted to each sound.

Back in 2015, the same researchers used fMRI imaging to identify what they believe are a group of neurons that respond only to music. 

The neurons only elicited mild reactions when hearing the sound of human voices, but fired up at the sound of instrumental or vocal music. In the new study, the researchers found that there was a special subset of neurons right next to the original group that specifically lights up when the brain hears human singing.

"There's one population of neurons that responds to singing, and then very nearby is another population of neurons that responds broadly to lots of music. At the scale of fMRI, they're so close that you can't disentangle them, but with intracranial recordings, we get additional resolution, and that's what we believe allowed us to pick them apart," says Norman-Haignere.

The research could also advance our understanding of the link between music and epilepsy. While certain kinds of music can reduce the number of seizures that epilepsy patients suffer from, some rare cases of epilepsy can also be provoked by music. One recent study published in Scientific Reports last year found that listening to 30 seconds of Mozart’s “Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major” helped drive down the neuron activity that causes seizures in epilepsy patients.

Target claims that its free, app-powered Drive Up curbside pickups is one of its customers' favorite services, and the company plans to test more features this fall. In select markets, customers will be able to pick up a Starbucks order or make a return without having to enter the store.

The option to place a Starbucks order has been a frequent request from customers, according to Target. When you're on the way to a store, you'll be able to order items from the Starbucks menu through the Target app. A Target employee will bring your order to your car when you arrive. You can set up a return through the Target app as well and complete the process in the Drive Up lane.

On top of those features, Target plans to expand its backup item program with categories like beauty products and household essentials. Customers will be able to select a wider range of secondary items in case their first choice isn't available. The company claims that, since it started offering backup options for grocery orders, its employees have been able to substitute backup items 98 percent of the time. So, even if you don't get your preferred item, it's highly likely you'll get something pretty close.

During an Inside the Lab: Building for the metaverse with AI livestream event on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't just expound on his company's unblinking vision for the future, dubbed the Metaverse. He also revealed that Meta's research division is working on a universal speech translation system that could streamline users' interactions with AI within the company's digital universe.   

"The big goal here is to build a universal model that can incorporate knowledge across all modalities... all the information that is captured through rich sensors," Zuckerberg said. "This will enable a vast scale of predictions, decisions, and generation as well as whole new architectures training methods and algorithms that can learn from a vast and diverse range of different inputs."

Zuckerberg noted that Facebook has continually striven to develop technologies that enable more people worldwide to access the internet and is confident that those efforts will translate to the Metaverse as well. 

"This is going to be especially important when people begin teleporting across virtual worlds and experiencing things with people from different backgrounds," he continued. "Now, we have the chance to improve the internet and set a new standard where we can all communicate with one another, no matter what language we speak, or where we come from. And if we get this right, this is just one example of how AI can help bring people together on a global scale." 

Meta's plan is two-fold. First, Meta is developing No Language Left Behind, a translation system capable of learning "every language, even if there isn't a lot of text available to learn from," according to Zuckerberg. "We are creating a single model that can translate hundreds of languages with state-of-the-art results and most of the language pairs — everything from Austrian to Uganda to Urdu."

Second, Meta wants to create an AI Babelfish. "The goal here is instantaneous speech-to-speech translation across all languages, even those that are mostly spoken; the ability to communicate with anyone in any language," Zuckerberg promised. "That's a superpower that people dreamed of forever and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes."

These are big claims from a company whose machine-generated domain doesn't extend below the belt line, however, Facebook-cum-Meta has a long and broad record of AI development. In the last year alone, the company has announced advances in self-supervised learning techniques, natural language processing, multimodal learning, text-based generation, AI's understanding of social norms, and even built a supercomputer to aid in its machine learning research. 

The company still faces the major hurdle of data scarcity. "Machine translation (MT) systems for text translations typically rely on learning from millions of sentences of annotated data," Facebook AI Research wrote in a Wednesday blog post. "Because of this, MT systems capable of high-quality translations have been developed for only the handful of languages that dominate the web."

Translating between two languages that aren't English is even more challenging, according to the FAIR team. Most MT systems will first convert one language to text then translate that over to the second language before converting the text back to speech. This lags the translation process and creates and outsized dependence on the written word, limiting the effectiveness of these systems for primarily oral languages. Direct speech-to-speech systems, like what Meta is working on, would not be hindered in that way resulting in a faster, more efficient translation process.