Month: October 2016

Nintendo of Japan

Just ahead of Nintendo's Switch reveal last week, the game maker posted a small update to its official Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild site, complete with video snippets of more gameplay elements. Those previews took on a fuller shape on Monday after Nintendo of Japan posted a whopping 40-minute preview video, and this trailer shows the game in the most complete state since we tried an early preview version in June.

The video's text and speech are entirely in Japanese, but it's not hard to make out what's going on. The sequence opens in the same way as the demo Ars Technica played at this June's E3 conference. The latest incarnation of Link wakes up in a mysterious pool of water while a voice propels him onward. After clothing his nearly nude body and grabbing makeshift weapons on the ground (from giant leaves and tree branches to discarded axes), Link makes his way across a giant landscape.

Enlarge / Initial stages of a fatal V. vulnificus wound infection, with images A and B taken just four hours apart. (credit: IDCases, C. Baker-Austin and J.D. Oliver)

“It’s like something out of a horror movie,” Marcia Funk told the Daily Times of Salisbury, Maryland last week. In September, Funk watched helplessly as her husband of 46 years succumbed to an infection of flesh-eating bacteria in a mere four days.

Michael Funk, her husband, became infected on September 11 while cleaning crab traps in the Assawoman Bay outside their Ocean City, Maryland condominium. The deadly bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, had slipped into a small cut on his leg as he waded into the bay’s still, warm, and brackish waters—ideal breeding grounds for the bacteria. Within hours, Funk fell ill and went to a nearby hospital where a surgeon removed infected, rotting skin from his leg. But with the flesh-eating bacteria circulating in his bloodstream, his condition quickly worsened. He was flown to a trauma hospital in Baltimore where surgeons amputated his leg. Still, the lesions spread and, on September 15, he died.

Funk’s case is among the more severe examples of V. vulnificus infections—but it still could have been worse. In July, scientists reported that a 59-year-old man showed up at a hospital with a painful ankle lesion that expanded before their eyes (see photo above). His V. vulnificus infection, caught from warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, turned deadly even faster. Within hours, his whole body was covered in lesions. A little more than 48 hours later, he was dead.

Enlarge (credit: NOAA)

Academics do not agree on the relationship between climate change and armed conflicts. Weather events driven by climate change, like droughts and extreme precipitation, might be societally destabilizing. But attempts to determine whether this connection is happening in the real world have produced ambiguous and sometimes contradictory results.

A new study published in PNAS looks at up-to-date conflict data from 1989-2014 in Asia and Africa, examining the relationship between these events and droughts. The study finds that droughts affect the level of conflict, but only in poor societies that are dependent on agriculture.

Drought can incite conflict because it can cause food scarcity, but is that actually happening today? To probe this relationship, the authors used geo-referenced data on armed conflict events between ethnic groups. The procedure used to link the ethnic groups to conflict behavior included consideration of how localized drought affected groups’ behavior regardless of the physical location of the fighting relative to the drought. In other words, if the group suffered a drought but ended up fighting in a region that received sufficient rain, that still counted. For this analysis, "ethnic group" was defined as discrete groups of humans with a shared culture and language living in the same geographic space.

The actual Nintendo Switch will not have the M.C. Escher-esque screen-hovering technology shown in the trailer. (credit: RealShigeruM / Twitter)

Amid all the excitement over the actual hardware features (both obvious and not-so-obvious) shown in last week's Nintendo Switch trailer, the small glimpses of new Nintendo software generated a fair bit of interest themselves. That interest was so intense, in fact, that GameXplain felt the need to create an 11-minute analysis video based on six total seconds of Super Mario footage in the trailer. (As the kind of guy who made his own Mario fansite as a teenager, I found it fascinating.)

Maybe we all shouldn't have gotten too excited about those games, however. Nintendo is now clarifying that users "shouldn't assume what you saw on the video represents actual game footage and further specifics on first-party games will be provided later."

That statement comes from a Nintendo UK spokesperson speaking to Eurogamer about the trailer's production. The trailer itself did warn at the end that "game footage not final; graphics and features subject to change." Still, the spokesperson's statement is a much more direct suggestion that the pre-rendered footage in the trailer is more a proof of concept than a direct demonstrations of the Switch's hardware power (or software design).

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter J Fox)

My friends, we need to have a talk about Formula 1 in the US. And while I've been down on the quality of racing in F1 lately—as many of you have been—we have a bigger problem: NBC's broadcasts suck.

In fact, the terrible job turned in by Leigh Diffey and his crew has done more to turn me off on the series in recent years than any problems with the actual racing itself, which is odd because NBC (and even Diffey) actually do a decent job with IndyCar. The real problem starts with how much of each race we don't get to see thanks to interminable commercial breaks and pre-recorded videos that should have been saved for the pre- or post-race show.

Motor races are unlike most other forms of televised sports in that there are no scheduled stoppages like football, baseball, soccer, or basketball. Even domestic racing series like NASCAR and IndyCar don't quite suffer in the same way; those two series have evolved to work better with US broadcasters' love for commercials, frequently breaking up the action with full-course caution periods where the racing stops and the cars follow a pace car while whatever accident or incident that caused the caution is dealt with. (By contrast, Formula 1 will often use a local caution, where just a single part of the track is at reduced speed.)