Month: February 2017

Game so hard that glowing cracks form in your keyboard and mouse.

Regardless of where you fall in the long-running debate between keyboard/mouse and analog stick controls, you could historically be relatively sure that everyone on a single platform would be playing with the same control scheme. Recently, though, third-party adapters have started allowing console players to use a mouse and keyboard effectively on dedicated consoles, throwing off the competitive balance in a way that Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan doesn't appreciate.

"The Overwatch team objects to the use of mouse and keyboard on console," Kaplan wrote on the Battle.net forums. "We have contacted both first-party console manufacturers and expressed our concern about the use of mouse and keyboard and input conversion devices.

"We have lobbied and will continue to lobby for first-party console manufacturers to either disallow mouse and keyboard and input conversion devices or openly and easily support mouse and keyboard for all players," he continued. "I encourage you to reach out to the hardware manufacturers and express your concerns (but please do so in a productive and respectful way)."

Enlarge / National Security Advisor Susan Rice, seen here in March 2016, was one of the former Obama Administration officials who have opposed the Trump executive order. (credit: Getty Images News)

Three former Secretaries of State, along with ex-CIA officials and Obama Administration intelligence officials, have penned a court filing in an ongoing case that is challenging the recent Trump Administration travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority nations.

In the six-page Monday filing, they write that the executive order has "no national security purpose" and that it is "of unprecedented scope."

Late Sunday night, nearly 100 tech companies also filed an amicus, or friend of the court, brief in support of the lawsuit brought by the State of Washington and the State of Minnesota, the two plaintiffs.

The Indus city of Dholavira in western India had impressive water infrastructure, such as this deep reservoir. The Indus people needed a way to conserve their water supply because rainy seasons were unpredictable. Each city came up with slightly different solutions to the water problem. (credit: Rama's Arrow)

The Indus civilization is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. An urban society, it was made up of hundreds of cities and towns that stretched across what are today northern India and Pakistan. Though its inhabitants left great art and elaborate water infrastructures behind, we know almost nothing about the Indus people who lived between 3,000 and 1300 BCE. In fact, we still haven't even deciphered their written language.

But now, the results of a new long-term study of the northwestern Indus region have given us a new understanding of how this civilization functioned. We've also gotten hints about how it coped with dramatic climate change from ever-changing weather patterns.

An international team with the Land, Water, and Settlement project in northwest India studied Indus settlements in that region between 2007 and 2014, looking at everything from water systems and plant remains, to art and pottery. What they found has overturned conventional wisdom about who the Indus people were, and how they lived. Now they've published a treasure trove of new findings about local centers in the Indus civilization in Current Anthropology.

Enlarge / NOAA's updated data shows more warming in part due to better coverage of the the rapidly melting Arctic. (credit: NASA)

On Sunday, the UK tabloid Mail on Sunday alleged a seemingly juicy (if unoriginal) climate science scandal. At its core, though, it’s not much more substantial than claiming the Apollo 11 astronauts failed to file some paperwork and pretending this casts doubt on the veracity of the Moon landing.

The story’s author, David Rose, has published a great many sensational articles over the years, falsely claiming to present evidence undermining the threat of climate change or the human cause behind it. But this latest article is noteworthy in that it appears to reveal the supposed “whistleblower” who has been cited by the US House Science Committee in its ongoing clash with climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The committee’s Twitter account, as well as the account of Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas), has gone hog-wild tweeting about the story. For example, the committee account tweeted, “@NOAA obstructed the committee's oversight at every turn. Now we know what they were hiding.”