Month: March 2019

BOSTON—It's been nearly 20 years now since swinging space reporter Ulala made her stylish, retro-futuristic, musical-theater melodrama debut in Space Channel 5 for the Dreamcast. In the years since, we've only seen her and her crew in an underpromoted sequel and a handful of Sega-centric cameos.

That long absence will finally end later this year with Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash for PlayStation VR. I was one of the first people to try the game out at PAX East this morning and the demo was a welcoming, familiar, and all-encompassing jump back into the series' unique world.

First things first—no, you don't get to play as Ulala. Instead, you're a similarly outfitted, silent cub reporter shadowing her for a day on the job (as a 36-year-old man, looking down at that provocative outfit from my first-person VR perspective is... interesting, to say the least). Ulala's voice is noticeably different from the original games—her original voice actress has been notoriously hard to track down—but the sound-alike is close enough to not be distracting.

Enlarge / The kind of image that makes us immediately ask, "What you wan'me kill?" (credit: Blizzard / GOG)

When we last spoke with Blizzard Entertainment about one of its biggest classics, the original Diablo, the chat came with a surprise announcement: the original PC game was now for sale online for the first time, and not on Battle.net. The game's launch on GOG prompted many technical and logistical questions, and after answering those, Blizzard confirmed an intriguing "one more thing" about the first two WarCraft RTS games also coming to GOG. At the time, these had no release date.

Turns out, the wait was surprisingly brief.

GOG and Blizzard have officially opened a veritable Dark Portal to the first-ever digital-download version of its first two PC RTS games, WarCraft: Orcs & Humans and WarCraft II: Battle.net Edition (which includes that sequel's awesome expansion pack). Right now, you can buy both as a combo pack for $15, or buy them separately for $6 and $10, respectively. And we've played them!

Enlarge / The Arctic is the fastest-warming region of the planet. (credit: NASA)

The thing about a global climate change is that it isn’t as simple as shifting the temperatures everywhere by a set number of degrees. The temperature change isn’t uniform around the globe, and these regional differences can drive considerable knock-on effects on weather patterns.

The Arctic, for example, will warm more than the equatorial region. For our current global warming venture, there will be consequences of this fact beyond the Arctic itself. One juicy hypothesis is that the greater Arctic warming affects the behavior of the polar jet stream, driving significant changes on extreme weather patterns in the mid-latitudes. This idea is the subject of ongoing research, as well as genuine scientific debate and uncertainty.

Lessons from the past

One way to study patterns like this is to look to past climate changes. That’s what a team led by Northern Arizona University’s Cody Routson did, compiling paleoclimate records of rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere over the last 10,000 years.