Month: April 2019

Enlarge / This "javelin" suit could have starred in a game titled Beyond, but at the last minute, its name was swapped to Anthem. Find out about this story, and many more, in today's lengthy Kotaku report. (credit: EA / BioWare)

In what has become a regular occurrence in recent years, a major story about game-development woes—full of insider sources and years of production hell—has emerged courtesy of Kotaku news editor Jason Schreier. In what has also become a regular occurrence in recent years, the article in question is about an EA game.

BioWare's Anthem is the latest subject of a wide-ranging, years-spanning report that comes to a few conclusions, all trying to explain why the game shipped as such a critical flop. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that BioWare staffers allege that the game's production process didn't truly begin in earnest until "12 or 16 months" before the game shipped.

The Kotaku report explains this timeline by chronicling how the game's pre-production process was marked by indecision and technical headaches. The project was jolted from this morass after EA executive Patrick Söderlund played an early Anthem demo in December 2016. "This is not what you had promised to me as a game," Söderlund allegedly told BioWare, and the article talks at length about how the game's original design documents described something a little more like a cross between the likes of Dark Souls and Shadow of the Colossus—where co-op players would focus less on collecting loot and more on teaming up to "see how long you could survive" in brutally difficult, dynamically changing worlds.

Enlarge / Portions of the debris field created by the March 27 anti-satellite weapons test by India could reach the International Space Station, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told NASA employees. (credit: NASA)

During a meeting with NASA employees on April 1, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine delivered sharply critical remarks about India’s March 27 anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) test. Bridenstine said that some of the larger debris from the collision of the ground-launched missile and the Microsat-R satellite had been thrown into orbits that could pose a danger to the International Space Station (ISS).

The “Mission Shakti” ASAT shot hit the Microsat-R Earth observation satellite at an altitude of about 300 kilometers—an altitude Indian officials said would pose little risk to other spacecraft. But Bridenstine said that some of the debris created by the test had been thrown into orbits with a much higher apogee. In some cases, he said, those orbits could cross the track of the ISS, which orbits at an altitude of 410 kilometers.

Of the 400 pieces of debris that had been identified by NASA, Bridenstine said, 60 were large enough to be tracked by the US Air Force’s Space Surveillance Network and US Strategic Command’s Combined Space Operations Center. ”Of those 60, we know that 24 of them are going above the apogee of the International Space Station,” he continued. Calculations by NASA and DOD after the test found that the risk of debris striking the space station went up by 44 percent over a ten-day period following the test, Bridenstine told NASA employees.

Enlarge / White lightning distilled alcohol streams out of a still. It must be filtered through charcoal before barrel aging to be legally branded "Tennessee whiskey." (credit: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Scientists are beginning to unlock the scientific secrets of what makes so-called "Tennessee whiskey" so distinct from other whiskeys, bourbons, and similar spirits, according to a presentation last weekend at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Orlando, Florida. Specifically, they've identified many of the key aroma-active compounds responsible for the beverage's distinctive flavor profiles.

"We're aiming to create a methodology, a practical tool, to reproducibly measure the changes that happen to guide distillers," said lead investigator John Munafo of the University of Tennessee. "By mapping out all the different compounds, we can better understand what each one contributes, and in what concentrations, so distillers can tweak [those parameters] to get the flavor profile they want. That variety is what makes whiskey so interesting."

Munafo spent 12 years as director of flavor science and plant chemistry at Mars Incorporated, working primarily with chocolate (naturally). He's doing similar chemistry research at the University of Tennessee, frequently partnering with local agriculture and industry, like Sugarlands Distilling Company in Gatlinburg. Sugarlands makes an award-winning whiskey called Roaming Man, and it's keen on gaining a better understanding of the underlying science of their distillation process.

Enlarge / A pile of fish trapped in the flood deposits. (credit: UC Berkeley)

The Chicxulub impact is famed for having killed the dinosaurs and most other species alive on Earth at the time, and it left behind a thin layer of dust rich in rare elements. Modeling of the impact has suggested almost too many ways it could have killed: massive tsunamis, a magnitude 11 earthquake, global wildfires and searing heat, months of frigid darkness, acid rain, a massive surge of carbon dioxide, and more. While we've had confirmation that some of these events occurred, we don't have a strong sense of their impact because we haven't found fossils that tell us much about what happened to the ecosystems of the time.

That may have changed, according to a report in PNAS. The paper describes a large deposit residing just under the iridium-rich dust that marks the impact, apparently formed while heavier debris was still falling from the sky. The site, in western North Dakota, contains a mix of fresh and saltwater species, and it seems to have formed when water rushed ashore from what was then a nearby ocean.

On the edge of your sea

At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the Earth looked very different. A long-running hothouse period had likely left the planet without any significant polar ice, meaning extremely high ocean levels. A large area of the US Midwest was underwater as an arm of the oceans formed the Western Interior Seaway, extending from the antecedent of the Gulf of Mexico up to roughly the Canadian border. Its western shores were dotted with valleys cut by rivers that flowed to the nearby ocean.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Mario Gutiérrez.)

Internet service providers in the United Kingdom now automatically refund customers for outages in landline phone and broadband service, and also for missed appointments or delays in starting new service.

When a customer's landline or Internet service goes out and is not fully fixed within two business days, an ISP will issue £8-per-day refunds, according to UK telecom regulator Ofcom.

"You will receive an initial £8 if the service is not fixed two full working days after you report it, and then £8 for each full day it is still not fixed after that," Ofcom said.

Enlarge / An Eastern diamondback rattlesnake milked for venom. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

In an ongoing crackdown on dubious homeopathic products, the US Food and Drug Administration posted warning letters on Monday to four homeopathic companies the agency said committed violations that put consumers at risk, including lacking quality controls for products containing snake venom as well as skipping safety testing for products intended for children.

“We’re committed to continue taking appropriate actions when we believe patients are being put at risk by products that contain potentially harmful ingredients or have significant quality issues,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement.

One of the chided companies, Red Mountain Incorporated, based in Florida, was found to lack all quality controls for its homeopathic product said to contain components of snake venom. “Without an adequate QU [Quality Unit], you lack the ability to ensure the safety, identity, strength, quality, and purity of your drug product,” the agency wrote in its letter.