Month: June 2016

If you're a fan of DRM-free gaming service GOG, but have a large library of games locked away on Steam, you're in luck. GOG has launched GOG Connect, a program that allows users to add DRM-free versions of some previously purchased Steam games to their GOG libraries at no extra cost.

To transfer games, you have to install GOG Connect, connect your Steam account, and let the app do the rest. You'll even be given the choice of using standalone installer for your games, or downloading them via the GOG Galaxy Client.

If the service sounds too good to be true, there is one slight catch: not all games will work. Currently, just over 20 games are part of GOG Connect—including The Witness, FTL: Faster Than Light, and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. The company promises more games will be added to the service at a later date.

(credit: Mashable)

On Wednesday night Elon Musk grandly told audiences at the Code 2016 conference that we might be living in a simulated universe. That comment has certainly sparked attention, but he said something else that's still got us scratching our collective head: when asked about self-driving cars, Musk said that he considers it a "solved problem," and that "we are probably less than two years away" from safe autonomous driving.

This timeline is consistent with one that he gave Ars in 2015, but the head-scratchy bit is that every other expert we've spoken to thinks true self-driving cars (Level 4 autonomy according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) are at least a decade out. NHTSA defines a level 4 autonomous car as one that "is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip. Such a design anticipates that the driver will provide destination or navigation input, but is not expected to be available for control at any time during the trip. This includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles." Even Google's experimental self-driving cars are classed as Level 3 by the agency.

Autonomous driving experts we've consulted at Audi, BMW, Ford, Mercedes, and Volvo (all of which have extremely active self-driving research programs) have consistently told us the same thing: it's comparatively easy to make a car drive itself on a highway where every car is going the same direction and there's no pedestrian traffic. But a car that can drive itself through a busy urban interchange—think Manhattan or Mumbai at rush hour—is closer to 2030 than 2020. Even sensor OEM Mobileye, which supplies Tesla with some of its autopilot hardware, won't have its Level 3-ready EyeQ5 system on a chip ready until 2020.

Some of the strange features in Sputnik Planum. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)

The stunning images returned from New Horizons' flyby of Pluto revealed a tremendous amount of information about the dwarf planet's features. That's been followed with the long, hard slog of trying to figure out how these features got there. One of the most striking things that needs an explanation is the apparent youth of Pluto's surface, as some areas appear to be crater-free, including the huge area called Sputnik Planum.

Now, researchers are offering an explanation for Sputnik Planum's apparent youth. Two papers in this week's edition of Nature indicate that radioactivity from Pluto's core would be sufficient to power convection of nitrogen ice. But the huge volume of ice involved creates another mystery, as it appears that almost all of Pluto's inventory of this element somehow ended up in Sputnik Planum.

Sputnik Planum, the white plains to the left of center in this view. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

Here on Earth, nitrogen is a gas making up the majority of our atmosphere. Those who have spent some time in a lab may be familiar with its liquid form, used for things that have to be cooled well below environmental temperatures. But on Pluto, it's typically cold enough—about 35K—that the majority of the dwarf planet's nitrogen is in solid form. This nitrogen ice has a couple of unusual properties. One is that it's much denser than water ice, which would allow the equivalent of icebergs to float on its surface. The other is that, since it's not held together by strong interactions among nitrogen molecules, it's relatively easy to deform.