Month: February 2022

Enlarge / A Roku streaming box. (credit: Ars Technica)

TV-streaming platform Roku is looking to expand beyond dongles and software deals to make its own TV hardware, according to a report in Insider.

The story appears to be based on two sources with different levels of familiarity with Roku’s plans. The first is someone who participated in a Roku focus group. “They showed different models, feature sets, and names, sizes, price points,” the participant said.

Second, the article cites an executive who says that making TVs has been on Roku’s roadmap for over a year. The executive is quoted briefly and provides a little more detail, saying, “The analysis has been done. They recognized that owning the last bit of branding made a lot of sense, particularly if you are going into content.”

Enlarge (credit: Slimak et al. 2022)

According to a recent study, a child’s tooth unearthed from an old layer of a cave floor in Southern France belonged to a member of our species. If so, the tooth is now the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens living in Europe, and its presence means that our species shared Europe (or parts of it) with Neanderthals for at least 10,000 years. But other fossils from the site suggest that the Pleistocene tale of two species was more complex than we’ve realized.

Finding the first Homo sapiens in Europe

People lived at Grotte Mandrin, a rock shelter in Southern France’s Rhone Valley, for tens of thousands of years. Until roughly 54,000 years ago, those people were Neanderthals. In the oldest layers of cave floor sediment, archaeologists unearthed a child’s molar. Based on its shape and dimensions, the tooth once belonged to a Neanderthal child, which was exactly what paleoanthropologists would expect in a layer of sediment between 79,000 and 62,000 years old.

An adult Neanderthal molar from the next layer up, dated to between 69,000 and 56,000 years old, was also not startling to anthropologist Ludovic Slimak, of Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and his colleagues. But a child’s molar unearthed from the next layer—somewhere between 56,800 and 51,700 years old—was a real surprise. The tooth’s size and shape was clearly not Neanderthal; when Slimak and his colleagues compared it to other upper second molars, they found that it fit best with very early members of our own species.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Protocol reports that Qualcomm will finally jump on the AV1 video codec bandwagon next year. AV1 is the web’s next open, royalty-free video codec, and widespread adoption will require hardware support from the world’s chip vendors.

Qualcomm’s 2022 flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, doesn’t support AV1. Samsung’s Exynos 2200 managed to ship the video codec this year in international versions of the Galaxy S22, while the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 SoC has been shipping in phones for over a year now with AV1 support. Apple is a founding member of the AV1 Alliance, but its devices also don’t support the codec yet.

The report says Qualcomm’s “upcoming flagship Snapdragon mobile processor”—model number “SM8550″—will support AV1. That would probably be called the “Snapdragon 8 Gen 2” SoC, due out in 2023.

Enlarge / The Cruise Origin. (credit: Cruise)

GM’s Cruise subsidiary has petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for permission to put the driverless Cruise Origin into commercial service. Cruise announced the filing of its petition for approval on Friday, saying the car is “a zero-emission, shared, electric vehicle that has been purposefully designed from the ground up to operate without a human driver. This means it does not rely on certain human-centered features, like a steering wheel or a sun visor, to operate safely.”

Cruise said its petition, filed together with parent company GM, “demonstrates how the Origin achieves safety objectives of existing standards and helps enable future AV [autonomous vehicle] regulations.” The vehicles will be manufactured at GM’s “Factory ZERO” in Michigan, Cruise’s announcement said. “Production is expected to begin in late 2022 in Detroit at a GM factory with vehicles delivered in 2023, Cruise said Friday,” according to Reuters.

The Cruise Origin interior. (credit: Cruise)

US law allows companies to seek temporary exemptions from safety rules to deploy up to 2,500 vehicles. GM previously sought an exemption for an earlier design based on the Chevy Bolt; the NHTSA took public comment on the request for an exemption in early 2019, and GM withdrew the petition in 2020.