Underneath the crust of spinning neutron stars, there's a material that is not only strong, but looks like pasta? Nuclear pasta to be exact. Here's what else scientists know.

Well, as the great (I think) v8.1 autopilot footage was released it was a bit marred by a quickly followed v9 update where Tesla improved their offering quite a bit (took away some of the new thingies since then). More importantly, they started using all the cameras and that created quite some problems in how to capture those esp. without Tesla actually cooperating. The solution I chose was to just limit framerate on all the cameras but main one (the storage driver on ape can handle only at most 80MB/sec). 9fps is used for the side cameras and 6 fps for fisheye (the car actually gets 36fps feeds from all cameras bu backup where it gets 30fps) and even that tends to overwhelm the drive from time to time and this is visible in still frames here and there. One of the problem is the backup camera is actually quite a bit unreliable and in many runs there's no output captured from it. As such I decided not to collect it at all for now. (you know it's not working on your cam when on a trip the cars come behind your car real close at a traffic light and nothing shows on the IC, surprisingly the CID backup cam display still works, so Tesla decided to just paper over the old "freeze frame" issue but not the autopilot problem of the same). It's also notable that different cameras get different detection rates it appears and since I cannot predict which ones are which sometimes detections seem to be a little bit off - know it's most likely a sampling artifact.

Apple today made iOS 12.1 beta 5 and watchOS 5.1 beta 5 available to developers. These new betas further tweak the code and clean up bugs. One of the biggest additions to iOS 12.1 and watchOS 5.1 will be support for more emoji. Apple is planning to add some 70 new characters, based on Unicode 11, to its platform. These emoji will brings new representation for people with options for red hair, gray hair, curly hair, and no hair, as well as more food, animals, sports, and other items. The new OS is also expected to enable the eSIM on the new iPhone Xs and Xs Max, as well as include real-time depth control for portrait photos. Apple will likely provide a new public beta within several days. Apple hasn't said when it will release iOS 12.1 and watchOS 5.1 to the public, but it is kicking off sales of the iPhone Xr on October 26, and has a media event planned in New York for October 30. It's possible iOS 12.1's arrival will coincide with one of these events.

Apple has discovered an esoteric bug that is causing many newer iPhone models, including iPhone XS, iPhone X, and iPhone 8, to repeatedly crash and respring (display a black loading spinner) when the GasBuddy app is installed. The issue was first publicized by MacRumors. An anonymous Apple retail employee posted the fix on Reddit earlier. GasBuddy has said it is working on a fix. Apple retail has been advised to uninstall the app in the meantime. It's not clear exactly what is causing the issue. It is very rare for a single iOS app to be able to overload a system like this. GasBuddy is likely exposing some bug in an Apple system API like background task management. Neither Apple nor GasBuddy has disclosed a full explanation of what is going on. At the present time, Apple has not even made a public comment on the matter; retail store support employees have been notified of the problem in an internal memo. If your own iPhone is afflicted by this problem, restart the phone by pressing volume up, volume down and then holding the power button until the device reboots. You can then promptly uninstall GasBuddy when you return to the Home Screen. You can re-download the app later when the fix is distributed. Until the bug is resolved, GasBuddy has temporarily pulled its app from the App Store.

Update: GasBuddy has now been updated that "resolves an issue that was causing some devices to crash". Get the new version from the App Store.

This Totally Clear Pixel 3 is one of the coolest transparent phones I have ever made. With the colorful wireless charger and NFC it makes an outstanding presence underneath that clouded glass. Its almost like google wanted to show off the internals of their newest flagship; the Pixel 3. The Pixel 3 XL is not as pretty inside. This whole project of taking apart and removing the color on the Pixel 3 from Google, took a little over an hour. Scraping away the color on the inside of the glass is tedious. Glass is glass, and might break during this process. So I do not recommend that you attempt to make your own Pixel 3 clear.

Data storage provider Backblaze, which recently got rid of all its 3TB drives and introduced 12TB HGST drives, is back with another round of insight on how different brands are working out for the company. In the last quarter, Western Digital's 6TB WD60EFRX had the worst annual failure rate (AFR) at 4.46%, although the sample size is negligible (5 bad drives out of 383 total). In the lifetime chart (April '13 onward), Seagate's 10TB is looking good with only a .48% AFR.

In Q3 we added 79 HGST 12TB drives (model: HUH721212ALN604) to the farm. While 79 may seem like an unusual number of drives to add, it represents 'stage 2' of our drive testing process. Stage 1 uses 20 drives, the number of hard drives in one Backblaze Vault tome. That is, there are are 20 Storage Pods in a Backblaze Vault, and there is one 'test' drive in each Storage Pod. This allows us to compare the performance, etc., of the test tome to the remaining 59 production tomes (which are running already-qualified drives). There are 60 tomes in each Backblaze Vault. In stage 2, we fill an entire Storage Pod with the test drives, adding 59 test drives to the one currently being tested in one of the 20 Storage Pods in a Backblaze Vault.

To date, none of the 79 HGST drives have failed, but as of September 30th, they were installed only 9 days. Let's see how they perform over the next few months.

A New Drive Count Leader

For the last 4 years, the drive model we've deployed the most has been the 4TB Seagate drive, model ST4000DM000. In Q3 we had 24,208 of this drive model, which is now only good enough for second place. The 12TB Seagate drive, model ST12000NM0007, became our new drive count leader with 25,101 drives in Q3.

Agony Unrated was announced recently, offering an even more graphic experience for fans of the controversial horror title. The unrated edition of the game acts as a paid update for people who already own it, though at 90% off the actual price of the title. The released trailer shows plenty of haunting and graphic images that really bring the shock and awe into the unrated version of Agony. It remains uncertain whether or not bug fixes and improvements to the gameplay have been added, but of course people will probably will want to keep an eye out for those changes.

The Windows 10 October 2018 Update appears to have another data-related anomaly: a number of posters on r/Windows10 are saying the built-in archiver is broken, in that it no longer prompts the user when conflicts arise (e.g., a file already exists in the destination). Some say the archiver will overwrite files silently, while others are reporting pre-existing files will be skipped with no notification. All three reports suggest that some zip-related behavior is broken in the operating system. The users did not reveal if they used the built-in zip functionality or a third-party application; it seems likely that the bug affects only Windows 10's built-in zip functionality and not third-party programs such as Bandizip, WinRar, or 7-Zip. Comments confirm the assumption: the issue affects only the built-in Zip functionality of Windows 10 version 1809 and not that of third-party application.

he young gorilla, Lope, has found the perfect way to wind up his poor dad, Oumbi. When Oumbi tries to lay down, Lope is not having it. Little punk! LOL.

When you look at the noise long enough, your eyes might just start to play tricks on you...

In the high-profile iPhone and Mac repair professional's latest video, Louis Rossmann explains how US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) seized $1,000 worth of laptop batteries coming from China to his repair shop simply because they featured the Apple logo: "It is assumed that if something has that Apple logo on it, it must be counterfeit." According to Rossmann and other right-to-repair advocates who have had their property seized, this is a clear attack on independent repair by Apple and the government.

Is the card cutting the money? Is the money cutting the card?

The more we watch these internet illusion videos, the more blindingly aware that our small human brains have a tenuous grip on reality.

Six strangers find themselves in circumstances beyond their control, and must use their wits to survive.

Alexa's new Whisper Mode is rolling out now, and it appears to be very well done.

Google is prepared to charge its hardware partners a steep price for access to Google Apps. The company is prepared to tack on a fee ranging between $2.50 and $40 for each device, reports Reuters, with the average hovering around $20. Device size, screen resolution, and the country in which the device is sold are determining factors. Google says it is doing this to make up for revenue it will lose from de-bundling Google Search and Chrome from the apps it pre-installs on phones. The European Commission fined Google $5 billion for what it sees as anticompetitive behavior with its search and browser apps on mobile devices. The new fees will go into effect October 29. The EU hasn't responded publicly to Google's change in tack, and phone makers have not said how they'll recoup the costs.

As it turns out, the 9900k's die is significantly taller than the 8700k. As the CPU sits at the bottom of the silicon "stack", there's more material for that heat to go through. Sanding some of that material off resulted in a significant temperature decrease under load. The full video is worth checking out, which you can see below:

Core i9-9900K takes the crown as the fastest gaming processor on the market, and it proves to be highly capable in the threaded workloads that AMD's Ryzen processors used to dominate. Pricing is still a problem for Intel, though. You pay dearly for the extra cores, while a majority of games don't fully utilize them. The Core i7-9700K, even at stock settings, is competitive with the -9900K in most titles, especially considering the $115 you save by stepping down a notch. We haven't overclocked our -9700K yet, though, so the small deltas observed between the two chips may shrink further.