Month: July 2020

Enlarge / Halo Infinite is still slated to launch close to Xbox Series X's "holiday 2020" launch window. (credit: Xbox)

Our next look at new games for the Xbox Series X will be coming on July 23. That's when Microsoft will be holding its next Xbox Games Showcase, the company announced today, streaming on multiple digital platforms starting at 9am Pacific Time.

Unlike Microsoft's May promotional event, which focused on third-party launch titles for the upcoming console, the July 23 event is expected to discuss first-party exclusives from Microsoft's own Xbox Game Studios. That likely includes new footage of Halo Infinite, which saw a new teaser trailer a few weeks ago.

"Xbox Series X is now in the hands of our 15 Xbox Game Studios teams and the biggest names from our network of game development and publishing studios worldwide, ensuring Xbox Series X will power a new generation of blockbuster games, like Halo Infinite," Microsoft said in a blog post last month.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a gas giant planetary system. Unlike TOI-849b, this one still has its enormous gassy envelope. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In 2018, scientists monitoring TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite—discovered a giant planet in close orbit around the star TOI-849, roughly 735 light years away. Nature recently published a paper from scientists at the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability that describes this planet in detail.

TOI-849b is roughly 40 times the mass of Earth, which would normally indicate a gas giant, weighing in somewhere between Saturn and Neptune. Yet its radius is smaller than Neptune's, although it has more than double Neptune's mass. Since it's hard to see how that can happen in a gaseous world, the scientists suggest that the planet may once have been a gas giant, stripped now nearly to its solid core. The alternative is that it might have formed in a highly unusual way that allowed it to avoid accumulating much gas in the first place.

TOI-849b's host star is a late G-class yellow dwarf, a little cooler and approximately 2 billion years older than our Sun, with about nine-tenths its mass and radius. TOI-849b is very close to its host—its orbital period is a little over 18 hours. That means the farthest distance from its star is only 0.02 Astronomical Units (the typical distance between Earth and our Sun). For reference, our own Mercury orbits the Sun nearly 20 times more distantly, at almost 0.4 AU.

• 

  In the real world, F1 is having a truncated, socially distanced season that only just started in July. But in F1 2020 you get to pretend the pandemic never happened. [credit: Codemasters ]

In the before times, pre-pandemic, the annual installment of the officially licensed Formula 1 game would arrive about midway through the championship. But we're not in the long-long ago anymore, and in our 2020, F1 started an abbreviated, socially distanced season at the Red Bull Ring in Austria. So when F1 2020 launches this week—tomorrow for the Deluxe Schumacher Edition, Friday for the standard edition—it takes players to an alternate universe where there was no COVID-19 and where F1 racing started as usual in Australia, in March.

The team at Codemasters probably didn't intend for a multiverse angle for F1 2020, but if this year has taught us anything, it's to make the best of the cards we're dealt. The upside to this digital release is it means you can race wheel-to-wheel at new tracks in Hanoi in Vietnam and Zandvoort in the Netherlands almost a year before they'll host their first F1 events in meatspace. But the addition of a couple of new circuits isn't the only way that Codies have kept things from getting stale—no mean feat for an official franchise for a sport that doesn't really change a huge amount year-to-year.

Whose team? My team

Probably the biggest new addition to F1 2020's gameplay is a new career mode. This one is called My Team, because instead of joining one of the existing 10 teams, it puts you in the role of a new team owner (as well as F1 racing driver). You get to pick the team name, design a livery and logo, find a title sponsor, and choose a second driver for the team. Then, in between races, you'll manage the team, which (hopefully) involves bringing in more money than you spend, all the while keeping each department happy.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Olivier Le Moal)

The US Supreme Court today struck down a provision in US law that let debt collectors make robocalls to cell phones, ruling that the law violates the First Amendment by favoring debt-collection speech over other speech.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 prohibits "almost all robocalls to cell phones," but Congress in 2015 amended the law to add "a new government-debt exception that allows robocalls made solely to collect a debt owed to or guaranteed by the United States," the Supreme Court noted in today's ruling. The opinion was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

"As the Government concedes, the robocall restriction with the government-debt exception cannot satisfy strict scrutiny," the ruling said. "The Government has not sufficiently justified the differentiation between government-debt collection speech and other important categories of robocall speech, such as political speech, issue advocacy, and the like." Government-backed loans affected by the ruling include student loans, home mortgages, veterans' loans, farm loans, and business loans.

We're just a week or so away from the official release of The Sandman, a multi-part audio drama adaptation of Nail Gaiman's seminal graphic novel series, via Audible Original. And we also have a new teaser for the drama, directed by Dirk Maggs. Maggs also directed the audio drama adaptations of Good Omens and Gaiman's novel Anansi Boys.

For the uninitiated, the titular "sandman" is Dream, also called Morpheus, among other names. He is one of seven entities known as the Endless, and he is seeking to set right his past mistakes. The other Endless are Destiny, Destruction, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Death, portrayed as a perky punk/goth young woman—they became almost as popular as Dream himself and were featured in several spinoff comics. 

The audio drama will cover the first three of the series' ten volumes: Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House, and Dream Country. The series opens when Morpheus, the King of Dreams, escapes from a 70-year imprisonment by an occultist (who actually wanted to capture Dream's sibling Death but trapped the Sandman by mistake). From there, per the official synopsis:

(credit: By unknown seamsters, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17141779)

When William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings, he became King of England in 1066. This changed the political landscape of Europe and the course of world history. For the English aristocracy and religious leaders, the world turned upside down as William replaced them with his handpicked Normans. But what was it like for ordinary people in England? A recent study suggests that, for them, not much changed under the new regime.

We usually see the Norman Conquest from the lofty and often perilous view of nobility and clergy. The roughly 2 million (based on a 1086 census) ordinary people who lived through the upheaval left behind no written records to tell us how they felt or what they experienced. To understand what their lives were like during the Norman Conquest and the years of political, economic, and social upheaval in its wake, archaeologists have to turn to other kinds of evidence.

For the new study, Elizabeth Craig-Atkins (University of Sheffield), Richard Madgwick (Cardiff University), and their colleagues cobbled together part of the story from the bones and teeth of medieval Britons, as well as animal remains and microscopic residues left behind in cooking pottery. Together, those lines of evidence revealed what—and how well—people ate in the years on either side of the Norman Conquest. The results suggest that food supplies got a bit scarce during the conquest and the sporadic fighting that followed, but some aspects of life didn’t change much in its wake.