Month: October 2018

The Universe abounds with things that we think we might understand but aren’t really sure about. What it often comes down to is our ability to compute: to answer the question of whether models based on the physics we know about generate the behavior we see around us. In response to that question, researchers have turned their computation gun on a long-standing problem: why do luminous blue variable stars exist? 

Luminous blue variables are very big, very bright stars, but their temperature (color) varies quite a bit. Scientists were pretty sure that the variability came down, somehow, to a combination of radiation pressure, shock waves, and convection. But until now, no one could confirm that.

Emotional stars lose their equilibrium

In particular, luminous blue variables go from brightness and temperature ranges that are in equilibrium to brightnesses that are far out of equilibrium. 

Enlarge / I'm glad I got to see this with you.

After Bethesda revealed the "entirely online" Fallout 76 at E3 earlier this year, some franchise fans worried the new game would feel uncomfortably different from the story-driven, single-player post-apocalyptic action they know and love. After playing the game for about three hours at a preview event last week, I came away feeling like I was playing an elaborate Fallout 4 mod with some basic online features grafted on top.

Our preview experience started inside Vault 76 itself, an extremely messy space still reeling from a party celebrating the residents' impending departure into the post-nuclear wasteland of West Virginia. In the vault itself I could only see and talk to my three fellow team members as we all got our gear and viewed some basic tutorial content.

Once we stepped out of the vault, though, there were dozens of other survivors, all on their own teams, milling about and throwing built-in gestures to each other before setting off. Those gestures turn out to be the only way to directly communicate with players that aren't on my team, making the presence of so many other survivors feel like more of a nuisance than a meaningful addition off the bat (Bethesda developers on hand said voice chat with nearby non-team members was being worked on for post-launch).

Teamwork makes the dream work

To start, our team mostly ignored our fellow survivors and hiked into the West Virginia wilderness on our own. While the entire world was wide open to us, we generally hewed to the breadcrumb trail of a main quest line, which focused on finding a mysterious "overseer" leaving cryptic clues to her location. On the way, there was a lot of the usual foraging for survival materials, battling with mutated animal and zombie-like human antagonists, and discovering distracting side-quests.

Enlarge / An illustration of what will become the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park (Phase III). (credit: Acciona)

In recent years, massive solar projects proposed for the Middle East have grabbed headlines with extremely low prices. Developers have announced agreements to sell their solar energy for as low as 2.34¢ per kilowatt-hour (kWh)—lower than the US' lowest prices and much lower than the average 6¢ per kilowatt-hour that the US lauded last September.

A team of researchers from Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and the Arctic Renewable Energy Center in Tromsø, Norway, attempted to find out whether these prices were real, simply heavily subsidized by local governments, or loss-leaders for developers looking to make splashy headlines and secure more valuable contracts down the road.

What they learned was that the numbers posted in four of the most recent Middle East solar projects were likely real, with some reasonable help from favorable government policies. Still, the numbers seem real for the region; not all cost reductions are likely to transfer to other parts of the world.

Facebook

Just as Amazon's newest Echo Show comes out, Facebook enters the smart display space with two devices of its own. The company announced the Portal and Portal+ smart displays today, both of which are voice-controlled speakers with touchscreens that focus on video chatting with Facebook Messenger.

The $199 Portal looks similar to the new Echo Show with its 10-inch, 1280×800 touchscreen, but its speaker sits at the bottom edge, facing the user. The $349 Portal+ has a mammoth 15-inch, 1920×1080 display that can rotate into portrait and landscape orientations. The speaker sits at the bottom of the display, while a camera, more noticeable than that on the regular Portal, sits at the top.