Month: August 2016

Three days after its PlayStation 4 launch, the space-exploration game No Man's Sky is now live for Windows PC gamers (via either Steam or GoG). But if you've been anywhere near PC gaming for the past few years, you won't be surprised to find out that combining "small development team," "video game that promises 18 quintillion planets," and "worldwide simultaneous launch on all kinds of PCs" is a dangerous mix.

The game's Steam reviews, which have surpassed 5,700 as of press time, are sampling out as "mostly negative," with frequent complaints about framerate hitches and total system crashes. Though Steam's reports must be considered anecdotal, more than a few trustworthy voices are piping up online to report issues with No Man's Sky, despite using systems that far exceed the game's minimum spec, which calls for older cards like the GTX 480 and Radeon 7870. Even users with high-end solutions like the GTX 1080 or two GTX 980Ti cards in SLI mode are reporting major stutters—on a game that runs on a comparatively so-so PS4 console with a mostly consistent 30 FPS refresh.

Ars Technica is running two NMS test sessions on high-end PCs at the moment, and both of them are running GTX 980Ti cards with SSD drives, 16GB of RAM, and either a Skylake i5 or a Haswell i7 Intel chip. We're seeing inconsistent framerates, in spite of both computers in question having fully updated drivers on Windows 10. The game's PC version defaults to a 30 FPS cap, which can be disabled in the normal options menus. But with this setting turned on, the game can't help but hitch down to an apparent 20 FPS on a regular basis, not to mention throw up frequent display hitches of half a second at a time. Removing that framerate cap can get play up to a smooth 60 frames per second, and we enjoyed more consistent framerates without the cap. But even those framerates can bounce down to 30 or less at random intervals. The game also suffers from freezing hitches, even without apparent spikes in visible geometry like creatures or spaceships.

(credit: US Health and Human Services)

Physics researchers have a long history of sharing work they're preparing for publication in order to solicit suggestions and comments from their peers. Like so many things, this behavior migrated to the Internet: Cornell University's arXiv server hosts over 1.1 million documents, many of which later appeared in formal peer-reviewed literature.

The physics and astronomy communities see arXiv as beneficial, and biologists put together their own database called The BioRxiv. Now it appears that chemists are going to get their own equivalent. The American Chemical Society is asking for input from the research and publishing communities about what they'd like to see in a ChemRxiv.

The structure of the service will probably be the same as it is for other fields: manuscripts can be posted and shared prior to submission for peer review. The American Chemical Society's stated goal is to have information get circulated faster, which should accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. For individual researchers, the benefits may include having any errors or misinterpretations caught and fixed before hitting the peer review process.

(credit: Getty | CHRISTOPHE SIMON )

The outdoor Olympic diving pool, which turned a startling shade of green Tuesday, is now closed. It reportedly smells like farts and may be causing eye itchiness among athletes.

Since Tuesday, Olympic organizers have repeatedly assured athletes and fans that the pool is safe. Rio organizing committee spokesman Mario Andrada told reporters on Wednesday that “the pool should go back to its classic blue color during the day.”

The Maria Lenk Aquatics Stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 9, 2016. A diving event at the Rio 2016 Olympics (Women's Synchronized 10m Platform Final) is about to start. (credit: Getty | AFP / Odd ANDERSE)

That clearly didn’t happen. Instead, reports trickled in that the adjacent pool used for water polo and synchronized swimming also began to turn green.

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

Poor HTC. The company's flagship handset, the HTC 10, is apparently not selling well. T-Mobile has decided to dump the device after just two months on the market.

T-Mobile hasn't come out and ended sales officially, but the HTC 10 is no longer available from T-Mobile online. The phone used to live on T-Mobile's website at http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phones/htc-10.html, but that link now redirects to a generic HTC page that only shows the HTC Desire 530. A Reddit thread notes that the HTC 10 vanished from T-Mobile's site in July, which gives it a shelf life of just two months. TmoNews says it was originally told that the 10's disappearance was "a glitch" and that the phones would be back. But as Android Police points out, the 10 is still gone, and local stores don't have any plans to receive more units.

Too bad. We called the HTC 10 the "the best Android flagship of 2016." HTC finally cleaned up the huge front bezels, and we were won over by its metal body and a software package that was close to stock Android. None of that seems to be translating into sales, though. After a 35 percent year-over-year decline in revenue for 2015, HTC is on pace for a 50 percent year-over-year decline in 2016.

(credit: Julius Nielsen)

At four to five meters in length, the Greenland shark (Squaliformes, Somniosus microcephalus) is the largest fish native to the Arctic waters. Getting that big must take a while, and scientists have long known that these sharks grow less than one cm per year. So these sharks probably live a very long time, but little was known about their longevity and maturation.

In an investigation recently published in Science, a team of researchers used radiocarbon dating to put together a timeline of the Greenland shark's lifespan.

Because Greenland sharks lack bones—they’re cartilaginous fish—conventional methods of tracking growth, like carbon dating of bones, won't work. Instead, the team used a modified radiocarbon dating technique that has worked before on other boneless animals: tracking the chronology of the eye lens. The eye lens nucleus is composed of inert proteins. The central portion of the lens is formed during prenatal development, and during growth, the tissue retains the original proteins, which were largely made before birth.