Month: June 2016

We've been hearing for years how mobile gaming has been growing at nearly inconceivable rates and will soon become the dominant force in the gaming business. Today's $10-billion purchase of Clash of Clans maker Supercell by Chinese gaming giant Tencent drives home just how big that shift is—or at least how big the market thinks it is.

Tencent paid $8.57 billion for about 84 percent of the Finnish Supercell (which is owned by Japanese parent Softbank), valuing the mobile game studio at about $10.2 billion. That means a mobile game company with four titles is now worth more than twice as much as both Minecraft-maker Mojang (acquired by Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion) and VR company Oculus (acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion) combined. Looking outside of gaming, Supercell sold for nearly twice as much as the combined purchase price of both YouTube and LucasFilm.

The only gaming acquisition that even comes close to the size of the Supercell deal is Activision's purchase of Candy Crush Saga maker King, another mobile-focused studio. That move represented a $5.9-billion bet that franchises like Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Destiny aren't going to be enough to sustain growth for the megapublisher going forward. But King is largely a one-trick pony at this point, relying heavily on the Candy Crush games for the vast majority of its players and revenue. Supercell's success runs a bit deeper, with mega-hit Clash of Clans backed up by smaller-but-still-big hits like Clash Royale, Boom Beach, and Hay Day.

One of the most fascinating sci-fi horror novels of 2014 was The Girl with All the Gifts, M.R. Carey's tale of a girl who goes to a very special school where every student gets a classical education by day—and is locked into a cage like a wild animal at night. This fall, the movie version comes out in the UK, and it promises to be just as original and compelling as the novel.

It seems pretty much impossible to reinvent the zombie genre, but then a story like this comes along. In Girl with All the Gifts, we've got a scenario vaguely reminiscent of The Last of Us. A mind-altering fungus is infecting people and turning them into violent "hungries" without higher reason. Our young hero Melanie is part of a second generation of hungries, who carry the fungal invaders but are otherwise completely normal humans. Well, except for the part where they have the urge to eat human flesh. In a remote part of the British countryside, the military has gathered several of these second generation children together for study. While the creepy Dr. Caldwell does terrifying experiments on the kids, their kindly teacher Miss Justineau tries to rear them to be ordinary children. Out of the entire class, Melanie is the only one who is completely in control of her violent urges. She won't munch on humans except in self-defense.

As you can see in this trailer, the school doesn't last long. It's attacked by zombies, and Melanie is forced to flee with Caldwell and Justineau. In the book, this leads to a seriously gripping tale that involves evolutionary theory as well as philosophical questions about what it means to be human in the first place. While it's not entirely clear where the movie is taking this scenario, it's obviously exploring the infected as a scientific phenomenon, and Melanie is at the heart of it. Unlike many zombie stories, The Girl with All the Gifts doesn't offer us a post-apocalyptic world of humans vs. zombies. Things are much more complicated than that, and the fate of the zombies seems inextricably tied to humanity's future. Possibly the best comparison might be with In the Flesh, a British TV series about zombies whose violent urges can be controlled with drugs, and who are now struggling to rejoin the communities where they once rampaged.

When it comes to men making decisions on condom use for casual sex, there may not be more to it than meets the eye.

In a survey of 51 heterosexual men between the ages of 19 and 61 published in BMJ Open, researchers found that men’s intentions to use a condom during casual sex varied based on the perceived attractiveness of their potential partner. Specifically, the more attractive a woman seemed to each participant, the lower their intention to use a condom during sex—even if the woman seemed to have a relatively higher risk of having a sexually transmitted infection.

Though the study was small, the finding backs up several others that have found that perceived hotness of a potential sex partner is a key determinant in people’s decisions on whether to have sex and have safe sex. And together, the studies suggest that discussions about people’s biases on particularly steamy flings could improve sex education.

On Tuesday, Tesla announced it intends to acquire the solar power business Solar City, provided shareholders of both companies approve the purchase. In a conference call with reporters, Elon Musk said that Tesla "thinks this is a huge opportunity to have a highly integrated sustainable energy company, from generation to storage to transport." It's a move Musk said he's been thinking about for many years, and that the timing seemed right with Tesla's recent activities in energy storage.

Assuming the shareholders agree, this will add a third product line to Tesla's retail stores, which will be literal one-stop-shops for sustainable energy, from power generation (via solar panels), energy storage (Powerwalls—the battery packs the company announced earlier this year), and electric vehicles. Integrating Tesla's Powerwall storage systems with Solar City's solar panels also promises to remove some duplication—currently both storage and generation systems have to have their own control computers and modems, connecting to different clouds.

"Tesla's goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. You need energy generation, storage, and electric transport," Musk said. "We need those three ingredients to have a good future. I don't think of us an automotive company; the world doesn't lack automotive companies, it lacks sustainable energy companies. That's the fundamental good Tesla will achieve."