Month: June 2019

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  I thought LA had its smog problem under better control. [credit: Larian Studios ]

After the game's existence was hinted at months ago and all but confirmed via website source scouring last week, Larian Studios officially announced it is working on Baldur's Gate III today, nearly 19 years after the release of BioWare's Baldur's Gate II.

If you recognize the Belgian Larian Studios name, it's probably because of the Divinity series of computer RPGs, reborn in recent years as the critically and commercially successful Divinity: Original Sin series.

The Larian team is also working "in close collaboration with the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast," according to a press release.

Enlarge / The 2018 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. (credit: Samuel Axon)

When Apple executive Craig Federighi described a new location-tracking feature for Apple devices at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on Monday, it sounded—to the sufficiently paranoid, at least—like both a physical security innovation and a potential privacy disaster. But while security experts immediately wondered whether Find My would also offer a new opportunity to track unwitting users, Apple says it built the feature on a unique encryption system carefully designed to prevent exactly that sort of tracking—even by Apple itself.

In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, the new Find My feature will broadcast Bluetooth signals from Apple devices even when they're offline, allowing nearby Apple devices to relay their location to the cloud. That should help you locate your stolen laptop even when it's sleeping in a thief's bag. And it turns out that Apple's elaborate encryption scheme is also designed not only to prevent interlopers from identifying or tracking an iDevice from its Bluetooth signal, but also to keep Apple itself from learning device locations, even as it allows you to pinpoint yours.

"Now what’s amazing is that this whole interaction is end-to-end encrypted and anonymous," Federighi said at the WWDC keynote. "It uses just tiny bits of data that piggyback on existing network traffic so there’s no need to worry about your battery life, your data usage, or your privacy."

Enlarge / The 2018 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. (credit: Samuel Axon)

When Apple executive Craig Federighi described a new location-tracking feature for Apple devices at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on Monday, it sounded—to the sufficiently paranoid, at least—like both a physical security innovation and a potential privacy disaster. But while security experts immediately wondered whether Find My would also offer a new opportunity to track unwitting users, Apple says it built the feature on a unique encryption system carefully designed to prevent exactly that sort of tracking—even by Apple itself.

In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, the new Find My feature will broadcast Bluetooth signals from Apple devices even when they're offline, allowing nearby Apple devices to relay their location to the cloud. That should help you locate your stolen laptop even when it's sleeping in a thief's bag. And it turns out that Apple's elaborate encryption scheme is also designed not only to prevent interlopers from identifying or tracking an iDevice from its Bluetooth signal, but also to keep Apple itself from learning device locations, even as it allows you to pinpoint yours.

"Now what’s amazing is that this whole interaction is end-to-end encrypted and anonymous," Federighi said at the WWDC keynote. "It uses just tiny bits of data that piggyback on existing network traffic so there’s no need to worry about your battery life, your data usage, or your privacy."

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  At least one new baddie in Destiny 2: Shadowkeep. [credit: Bungie ]

Shortly after Google's Stadia reveal presentation on Thursday, the Destiny 2 handlers at Bungie kicked off their own whopper of a livestream. While the broadcast revolved around the game's upcoming paid expansion—Shadowkeep, out September 17—it arguably made a bigger splash with a free-to-play and cross-play announcement.

Once Shadowkeep goes live this September on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows 10, and Google Stadia, Destiny 2's base version will become wholly free to download, boot, and play on Bungie's live servers. The "New Light" version may be better described as "Destiny 2 Year One," which includes the overworld and campaign content from the 2016 SKU and the game's first pair of paid expansions, Warmind and Curse of Osiris.

From there, the rest of the game's existing and future content—meaning, full expansion packs and paid "season" content bumps—will be sold "a la carte" without requiring other purchases. "None of the existing content is required to access Shadowkeep," one Bungie staffer said when explaining this retail model. "All expansions going forward will be simple and a la carte." (The staffers also admitted that "pre-purchasing content wasn't as cool as it could be," referring specifically to the "season" content bumps being sold before their contents were advertised.)

Enlarge / A seal that reads "US Public Health Service" adorns a building on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. (credit: Getty | Mark Wilson)

President Trump personally made the call to impose new restrictions on the use of fetal tissue in medical research, according to reporting by The Washington Post. The decision, announced Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services, pleased anti-abortion advocates while horrifying medical researchers, who say the move will cripple lifesaving research that helps millions of patients.

In a statement made Wednesday, June 5, the HHS explained the new restrictions, which primarily include discontinuing research projects conducted within the National Institutes of Health by government scientists that involves the use of tissue collected from aborted fetuses. According to HHS, that applies to only three active research projects out of more than 3,000 in progress by NIH researchers.

HHS also said it would not continue a multi-year NIH contract with a laboratory at University of California, San Francisco, which was using fetal tissue to study HIV treatments. The contract had been limping along on 90-day extensions while HHS conducted an audit of NIH-funded research involving fetal tissue. The latest extension expired on Wednesday, June 5. HHS did not specify the reasons for letting the funding expire or reveal the results of the audit.

Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Empty space isn't actually empty. Even if you somehow managed to suck every single atom out of it, the Universe is filled with various fields that dictate the behavior of particles and forces. These fields even create pairs of "virtual particles" that pop into existence briefly before annihilating each other.

This counterintuitive view of the nature of the Universe is an outgrowth of quantum field theory, but it was difficult to figure out any obvious consequences. That changed in 1948, when Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir figured out a specific situation where the contents of empty space matter. Now called the Casimir effect, it creates a tiny force when two conductive metal plates are placed in close proximity.

In a new paper published in today's edition of Science, researchers show that the Casimir effect can also be repulsive and use the balance between attractive and repulsive forces to cause a tiny flake of metal to levitate above a surface.

Enlarge / Artist's rendering of solar methanol islands. (credit: Novaton)

Imagine an open ocean, Sun beating down overhead, with 70 islands of solar panels, each 100 meters (328 feet) in diameter, bobbing silently out toward the horizon.

The cluster of islands is churning out electricity and sending it to a hard-hulled ship that acts as an oceanic factory. This factory uses desalinization and electrolysis equipment to extract hydrogen gas (H₂) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the surrounding ocean water. It then uses these products to create methanol, a liquid fuel that can be added into, or substituted for, transportation fuels. Every so often, a ship comes to offload the methanol and take it to a supply center on land.

This plan was outlined in a PNAS paper published this week, which suggests it's an option for addressing the global economy's over-reliance on liquid fossil fuels. Removing excess carbon dioxide from our environment is crucial to mitigating the effects of climate change. But electrifying trucks and planes has proved intractable in the near-term, so finding a "greener" option for liquid fuel is seen as a helpful half-step.