Month: May 2016

Modern first-person shooter design can be a real drag. So many shooters these days layer on RPG-style character development or optional stealth abilities to let you take down enemies without firing a single shot. When a firefight does happen, you're too often hiding like a turtle, nigh-unhittable behind a corner or a bit of cover, waiting for a break in the fire to pop up and spray a few quick shots at the opposition before reloading. And don't get me started on the selective devotion to "realism" that often lets players hide and "catch their breath" to recover from dozens of bullets to the torso yet forces those same players to slow down when they run out of breath after sprinting for a few seconds.

Those elements can all be fine in their own way. But the new Doom says nuts to all that. Like the early '90s ur-shooter it draws its name from, Doom is about nonstop dodge-and-fire action. You're constantly running at full speed while relatively out in the open, sidestepping bullets and enemies that you can actually see coming at you and shuffling between overpowered weapons to fire back at the enemies. Sneaking around or hiding behind a pillar won't help you here, and your health and armor meters don't recharge unless you actually run over items sitting on the ground—a once-standard shooter feature that feels practically archaic these days.

There are just enough modern shooter touches here to keep Doom from feeling entirely dated, but the basic gameplay doesn't feel like it's changed much since the days of Quake. It's as if the makers of the new Doom saw a shooter genre weighed down by decades of complex and often unnecessary cruft and said, "Nah, that's OK, we think we got it right the first time." (even if the current id Software "we" no longer actually includes any of the company founders that worked on the first Doom).

Demons, demons everywhere

Unfortunately, taking inspiration from the original Doom means taking inspiration from its general aesthetic as well. The second half of the game in particular looks like it uses a disturbed 7th grader's idle doodles as concept art, full of the kind of occult symbols, flames, and blood-drenched surfaces that seemed a lot edgier when you were a teenager. You could argue that it's all intentionally over the top, but I found the ruddy, red and brown gore-fest to be more than a bit numbing after a while.

While still a primarily online store, Amazon isn't turning its back on physical retail establishments. After opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Seattle last year, the company's CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed at Amazon's shareholder meeting that more stores are coming.

"We’re definitely going to open additional stores; how many we don’t know yet,” Bezos said at the meeting according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. “In these early days, it’s all about learning rather than trying to earn a lot of revenue."

Currently Amazon's Seattle location is mostly a bookstore, and the company is already building another location in San Diego. Amazon has also said it would build smaller kiosks in cities like San Francisco and Sacramento, but there's no indication if those locations will sell only books or other items as well. Back in February, General Growth Properties, Inc. CEO Sandeep Mathrani said in an earnings call that he estimated 400 more Amazon Books locations to open in the future.

Nokia phones are making a comeback thanks to a licensing deal struck between Microsoft, FIH Mobile—a subsidiary of Foxconn—and HMD global Oy.

Microsoft is selling its feature phone business to the two companies for £242 million (~$350 million), and will include some 4,500 employees, as well brands, software and services, care network, and its Vietnam-based manufacturing facility Microsoft Mobile Vietnam.

Those facilities, as well as Microsoft's feature phone technology, will be used to create new Nokia phones as part of an "exclusive global" licensing agreement between HMD global Oy and Nokia Technologies. The deal will allow HMD to produce phones and tablets bearing the Nokia brand name for the next 10 years. While no devices have been announced just yet, HMD plans to invest $500 million into the venture.

Jupiter's moon Io is notable for being the most volcanically active body in our Solar System. But Io also has some of the highest mountains we've seen yet, as well, the tallest rising about 17km above the surrounding terrain—Boösaule Montes is roughly twice the height of Mount Everest. And, unlike Mars' Olympus Mons, it isn't volcanic. In fact, many of the moon's tallest peaks aren't associated with volcanoes. They don't form in chains, either, instead rising as isolated blocks roughly 100km across.

Since Io doesn't seem to have plate tectonics, it's not obvious what could build these sorts of peaks. But a new study suggests they're created as a result of volcanism, but only very indirectly. Io's volcanism, it seems, is emptying its interior out fast enough to create intense stresses on its crust.

The researchers involved (Michael Bland and William McKinnon) suggest that Io's mountains do have some earthly analogs. "Their morphology, which varies from peaks and ridges to massifs, plateaux and mesas, is consistent with thrusted or tilted fault blocks," they suggest. These are cases where pieces of the crust are fractured and pushed up relative to their surroundings (though obviously not to the same extent as on Io). So what could be creating the excessive strain that pushes them so high?

One of the iconic weapons of the Paleolithic is the fire-hardened spear, its wooden tip carbonized by fire to a wicked point. Unfortunately, it turns out that our hunter ancestors were wrong about fire-hardening. Yes, the charring can make wood slightly harder, but it becomes so much more brittle and weak that there's little overall improvement of the weapon. After experimenting with their own fire-hardened spears, a group of British biomechanics researchers now believe our ancestors used fire not so much to make a more deadly weapon but to speed up the process of cutting wood into a point.

The oldest spear ever discovered, the Clacton spear (named after the region in England where it was discovered), dates back 450,000 years. Made by some unidentified ancestors of modern humans, its sharp wooden point was snapped off and buried in soil. There it was sealed away from the elements and preserved far longer than wood ordinarily can be. When the Clacton spear was discovered in the early twentieth century, archaeologists noticed that its tip had been fire-hardened, using a technique that some hunter gatherer groups still use. It has long been believed that the practice of heating a pointed spear tip in the fire was a way of making it sharper and harder. But a new paper published in Royal Society Biology Letters suggests otherwise.

Two bioscientists at the University of Hull, Roland Ennos and Tak Lok Chan, decided to find out for themselves whether fire really makes spears harder. So they harvested 20 rods from local hazel trees and spent weeks abusing them inside machines of very precise, codified destruction. First, each rod was divided in half. One half dried naturally over two weeks in the laboratory, and the other half were given a simulated fire-hardening treatment with an experimental rig known technically as a "disposable barbecue."