Month: August 2016

It'd be cool to see this in a resolution higher than 640x480. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Are you one of the thousands of diehard real-time strategy gamers who has yet to abandon the 1998 version of StarCraft? Would you rather not deal with the sequel's altered soldiers and upgrade trees, yet also pine for a version of the original that runs at a higher resolution than 640x480 pixels?

The game's creators at Blizzard Software might have a treat in store for you: a remastered version of the original StarCraft. According to Korean news outlet iNews24—spotted by Kotaku on Friday—multiple sources are confident that Blizzard plans to announce StarCraft HD in September. The announcement would be followed by a deeper reveal at BlizzCon's November event in Anaheim.

The Korean report hints at "improved graphics resolution and user interface," but it doesn't confirm whether fans should expect redrawn 2D assets or a complete 3D overhaul of the game's Terran, Protoss, and Zerg races. The report doesn't mention whether or not the remaster will include single-player content, and it doesn't mention whether the multiplayer mode will hinge on the Brood War expansion pack (though, based on that version's dominance in international competitive play, we assume it will).

Reconstruction of a collision inside the CMS detector. (credit: Brookhaven National Lab)

Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC's two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn't produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics.

This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year's run. According to their data, the area of the apparent signal is filled by nothing but statistical noise.

The search for new particles in data from the LHC starts with a calculation of the sorts of things we should expect to see at a given energy. The Standard Model, which describes particles and forces, can be used to make predictions of the frequency at which specific particles will pop out of collisions, as well as what those particles will decay into. So, for example, the Standard Model might indicate that two electrons should appear in five percent of the collisions that occur at a specific energy. Looking for new particles involves looking for deviations from those predictions.

With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, aka Windows 10 version 1607, released earlier this week, it's time to look forward to what's next.

Windows 10 has multiple release tracks to address the needs of its various customer types. The mainstream consumer release, the one that received the Anniversary Update on Tuesday, is dubbed the Current Branch (CB). The Current Branch for Business (CBB) trails the CB by several months, giving it greater time to bed in and receive another few rounds of bug fixing. Currently the CBB is using last year's November Update, version 1511. In about four months, Microsoft plans to bump CBB up to version 1607, putting both CB and CBB on the same major version.

The Long Term Servicing Branch, an Enterprise-only version that will receive security and critical issue support for 10 years, will also be updated. Currently, Windows 10 LTSB is essentially the Windows 10 RTM release with certain features such as the Edge browser and Windows Store permanently removed. On October 1, a new Windows 10 LTSB build will be released, starting another 10-year support window.

The opening screen. It's real. (credit: Hello Games)

Update, 10:40 p.m. EDT: Sony has responded to today's influx of No Man's Sky gameplay videos by essentially describing the on-disc version of the game as unfinished. The company's statement confirms that "a significant pre-release patch" will go live on Monday, August 8, and it will represent "a culmination of the studio’s day-1 aspirations."

"Sending out early copies of the game prior to the patch would not be a fair depiction of the game as it’s intended for consumers," the statement noted. Sony confirmed that any progress in the current version will be erased for players who patch the game—and that the review embargo will lift at midnight EDT of Tuesday morning.

Original report: Anticipation has been building around the space-exploration video game No Man's Sky for years. The game will finally launch on PlayStation 4 consoles this Tuesday and Windows PCs a few days later. But game-review outlets complained about the issue, and one report on those complaints, posted by review-aggregation site OpenCritic, alleged that review copies would not arrive until the game's launch date of August 9.

Ancient Chinese legends tell of a catastrophic flood along the Yellow River that led to the founding of the Xia dynasty, roughly 4,000 years ago. A legendary hero named Yu is said to have established the Xia dynasty after figuring out how to stop the flood waters by dredging, thus marking the dawn of Chinese civilization with a feat of landscape engineering. Now, a group of geoscientists and archaeologists in China has discovered that this flood actually happened.

The group's recently published findings in Science magazine explain how they found traces of this historic deluge. For more than a century, archaeologists have looked for evidence that could shed light on historical accounts of early Chinese civilization, such as those in first century BCE book Shiji (史記, traditionally translated as Records of the Grand Historian). Many accounts in the Shiji have turned out to be fairly accurate, especially when it came to the Shang dynasty that followed the Xia. Because the Shang dynasty civilization had writing, scientists have been able to verify the Shiji's accuracy from written records as well as material remains.

Reconstructing a flood

Much about the Xia dynasty, however, remains mysterious. Although this Bronze Age civilization was highly sophisticated, it did not use writing, and the only accounts we have of it come from stories of the great flood that Yu controlled. Now, scientists are certain there was a megaflood on the Yellow River in roughly 1900 BCE. Ancient Chinese historiographers placed the rise of the Xia dynasty during the 2200s BCE, so their dates were about 300 years off. But whenever it happened, the flood was so devastating and enormous that the archaeologists who discovered it have no doubt that it would have left a lasting impression on any civilization that experienced it.