Month: December 2019

Publisher 2K announced today that development has started on the first new BioShock game since 2013's BioShock Infinite. But Ken Levine, who served as creative director on Infinite and 2007's original BioShock (and as lead designer on System Shock 2), will not be involved with the new project.

Instead, the new game "will be in development for the next several years" with Cloud Chamber, a 2K-subsidiary studio based in both Novato, California, and Montreal. Veteran Firaxis game producer Kelley Gilmore will be heading up the new studio and confirmed to GamesRadar that the BioShock project will be moving forward without Levine.

"Ken and his team at Ghost Story Games are fully engaged in developing a new experience that will surely be another incredible game for all of us to enjoy," Gilmore told the site. "He is not affiliated with Cloud Chamber or the development of our BioShock title."

Enlarge / Display in a 2019 Jaguar I-Pace displaying remaining battery charge level. (credit: Marlowe Bangeman)

If there's one thing I like writing about more than electric vehicles, it's the topic of how motorsport improves the cars that normal people drive. Sometimes that's an intangible thing, like the motivating esprit de corps that the pressure of racing can instill, but sometimes it's more concrete. The evolution of the Corvette through generations five to seven is an example of a race program that led to successively better and better road cars, but today I've got an example of a racing program that's actually bringing improvements to cars that already belong to their owners. On Monday, Jaguar revealed that it's applying stuff learned from the I-Pace eTrophy series to push out an update for the I-Pace battery electric vehicle that will boost range by up to 12 miles, among other improvements.

"The Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy has generated a huge amount of data for us to analyze and those marginal gains, derived from competition on the track, are now being applied to customers' cars to further enhance their driving experience," said Stephen Boulter, I-Pace Vehicle Engineering Manager. "The new software updates optimize the powertrain control systems to improve efficiency and allow I-Pace drivers to travel even further on a single charge without any hardware changes—it really is a case of the vehicle getting better with age.”

What’s changing?

Jaguar says that the changes to the I-Pace include: tweaks to the way Eco mode sends energy (and therefore torque) to the front and rear motors for better range efficiency, better thermal management, and the ability of the battery pack to run to a lower state of charge (SoC) "without affecting drivability, durability or performance." (The battery is rated at a nominal capacity of 90kWh but until this update has only had a useable capacity of 84.7kWh.)

Enlarge (credit: flickr user: mcfarlandmo)

In the 2016 film Arrival, a linguist must figure out how to communicate with enormous seven-limbed aliens, starting with no shared language at all. Her first trembling, breathless attempt to bridge the communicative gap sees her pointing at herself, trying to convey the meaning of the word “human.”

The aliens seem to understand. This sets them apart from every non-human species on our planet: there’s currently no evidence that even our closest primate relatives can figure out what a new communicative signal means just from context. It’s an ability we humans take for granted, but it’s clearly not trivial at all. This ability intrigues evolutionary linguists, who are trying to piece together a picture of how language may have arisen.

A paper in PNAS this week reports a new part of that picture: four- and six-year-old children are capable of communicating with each other even when they can’t rely on language. What’s more, their communication quickly develops some of the core properties that define language. It’s a finding that fits in well with other research on language evolution, and it helps to explain a little bit more about how humans may have developed our wild and wonderful communication system.