Microsoft-Activision Blizzard Deal: U.K. Agency Signals Approval and New Price

Today's Technology News


The History of Syphilis is Being Rewritten by a Medieval Skeleton

Illustration of bone

In the last days of the 1400s, a terrible epidemic swept through Europe. Men and women spiked sudden fevers. Their joints ached, and they broke out in rashes that ripened into bursting boils. Ulcers ate away at their faces, collapsing their noses and jaws, working down their throats and airways, making it impossible to eat or drink. Survivors were grossly disfigured. Unluckier victims died.

The infection sped across the borders of a politically fractured landscape, from France into Italy, on to Switzerland and Germany, and north to the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Russia. The Holy Roman Emperor declared it a punishment from God. "Nothing could be more serious than this curse, this barbarian poison," an Italian historian wrote in 1495.

Source: Ars Technica

Microsoft-Activision Blizzard Deal: U.K. Agency Signals Approval

Illustration of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard

Britain's antitrust regulator said the companies had addressed its main concerns about the $69 billion deal, though final approval is yet to come.

Source: The New York Times

The iPhone 15 Pro is Teaching Me to Embrace Digital Zoom

Hand holding iPhone 15 Pro showing camera preview on screen.

If you want to hear a love story, ask any photographer about their favorite lens. They'll probably get a little glimmer in their eye as they tell you about the fast 35mm they carry everywhere or the long portrait lens with the bokeh that hits just right. Camera bodies come and go, but your favorite lens is a lifelong relationship.

Phone camera lenses are a different story. They're built like a regular camera lens — only, you know, tiny — and they're with us literally everywhere we go. But I don't know anyone who would wax poetic about the 24mm equivalent wide angle on their iPhone or the 5x telephoto lens on their Pixel. Our relationships with them are much more transactional, and the results have as much to do with the image processing...

Source: The Verge

An Interview with Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the second-most-popular cryptocurrency, sat down with CNBC's MacKenzie Sigalos in Prague, one of the new crypto hotbeds in Europe.

Source: CNBC

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