Month: September 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In December 2004, my boyfriend showed up at my apartment door carrying a box. "I brought you a present!" he said, clearly excited. "Open it!"

'Tis the season, I thought, unwrapping it. I turned the box around. "A... Nintendo... DS? Is this, like... a Game Boy kind of thing?"

As I fought my way through layers of cardboard and plastic to open my new toy, he pulled a matching unit out of his own messenger bag, opened it up, and began to explain. I had never owned a portable console—I'd barely ever even owned a regular console, I was a lifelong PC gamer—and while I tried to greet the gift with good cheer, I bluntly had no idea why on Earth he had given it to me.

Enlarge / Ana (center) is the star of Spelunky 2, and she's on a search for her adventuring parents after they abandoned her to look for treasure on the Moon. (credit: Mossmouth)

My recent work at Ars Technica has mostly revolved around high-end gadgets like VR headsets, GPUs, and next-gen consoles. It's fun stuff.

But while swimming through embargoed hardware and frantic news announcements, I keep coming back to a single video game well outside the "next-generation" mold.

Spelunky 2 is likely the most "dated" game I'll slap the "Ars Approved" sticker onto in 2020. The adjective "dated" works in part because the game's success builds largely, and loudly, upon the foundation of 2012's 2D smash Spelunky HD... and that title builds upon the 16-bit genius of 2009's freeware original. (Which you can still download! For free! Right next to its source code!)

A certain class of gamer will hear that "Spelunky 2 is everything good about Spelunky HD, only better" and wish to hear nothing more. That's fair (especially for players who will hold out for the game's launch on PC in two weeks, after its timed PlayStation 4 exclusivity runs out). The charm of Spelunky 2, like its predecessor, comes from how it cleverly shakes a cup full of gameplay and level-construction elements, dumps them onto a table, and shouts "Yahtzee!" as it surprises you again and again. (To be clear, in this game's case, "Yahtzee" is a synonym for "You died!" You will die repeatedly in Spelunky 2.)

Enlarge / Luna Wedler (left) plays a young medical student with a secret in in the German drama Biohackers, and Cornelia Gröschel (right) stars as a diner waitress who discovers she has super strength in the German film, Freaks: You're One of Us. Both are currently streaming on Netflix. (credit: Netflix/Sean Carroll)

As someone who enjoys discovering lesser-known films and TV series from around the world, I applaud Netflix's continued commitment to bringing a wide range of international fare to its platform—whether it's South Korean zombie horror/period drama,   modern Norwegian reworkings of Norse mythology, Arabic supernatural YA dramas, or Belgian sci-fi thrillers. And the excellent sci-fi series Dark recently wrapped a mind-bending third and final season on Netflix.

If that's left you peckish for more German Netflix fare, you might check out two recent debuts: a sci-fi thriller series, Biohackers, about an ambitious young medical student seeking revenge on her mentor for the scientific sins of the past; and a film called Freaks: You're One of Us, about a fast food diner waitress who discovers she has a superpower—and she's not the only "freak" with a special gift. Neither even comes close to the multi-layered conceptual level of Dark, alas, but both provide well-executed, solid entertainment—and you won't need a chart of multiple timelines to follow the plot.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

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  Three Atlas crew members on the Moon: Ato essandoh as Dr. Kwesi Weisberg-Abban, Ray Panthaki as Ram Arya, and Vivian Wu as Lu Wang. [credit: Diyah Pera/Netflix ]

One evening in early November 2017, I met Andrew Hinderaker at a Houston restaurant named Nobi. Located just down the road from Johnson Space Center, Nobi offers a fantastic combination of Vietnamese food and a rich, rotating selection of draft beer. It’s a classic Houston joint, a fusion of cultures that is the better for it. As such, the restaurant serves as a popular watering hole for the space set.

Hinderaker and a friend of mine named Chris Jones were starting to write on a television show about a realistic human mission to Mars. “From the beginning, Chris and I have believed that this show should be neither naive nor pessimistic,” Hinderaker explained to me. “We believe that there is something aspirational about space exploration, even if the mechanisms that enable it are often bureaucratic.”

I loved the idea. Then, as now, I covered spaceflight, particularly the efforts of NASA, other space agencies, and private companies to expand humanity beyond low-Earth orbit. I had thought a lot about the politics and the technology that might one day enable a small band of humans to travel from Earth to Mars, land on the red planet for a while, and travel back. So Hinderaker and I talked through these issues.

The repeated light and dark pattern you can see down the side of this embryo is caused by the presence of somites. (credit: Flickr user Lunar Caustic)

There's a bit of a problem in biology that's so obvious that most biologists don't end up thinking of it as a problem. Humans and mice (and most other mammals) all make pretty much the same collection of stuff as they develop from a fertilized egg. And they do that using a near-identical set of genes. But mice do it all in 21 days; it takes humans over 10 times longer to do it.

You might try to ascribe that to the different number of cells, but as you move across the diversity of mammals, none of that really lines up. Things get even more confusing when you try to account for things like birds and reptiles, which also use the same genes to make many of the same things. The math just doesn't work out. How do developing organisms manage to consistently balance cell number, development time, and a static network of genes?

Biologists are just starting to figure that out, and two papers published this week mark some major progress in the field.

Enlarge / Juniper Hills, CA, Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020 - A fire engine drives into air thick with smoke along Juniper Hills Rd. as the Bobcat Fire advances North into the Antelope Valley. (credit: Robert Gauthier | Getty Images)

The West Coast’s wildfire crisis is no longer just the West Coast’s wildfire crisis: As massive blazes continue to burn across California, Oregon, and Washington, they’re spewing smoke high into the atmosphere. Winds pick the haze up and transport it clear across the country, tainting the skies above the East Coast.

But what are you breathing, exactly, when these forests combust and waft smoke near and far? Charred trees and shrubs, of course, but also the synthetic materials from homes and other structures lost in the blazes. Along with a variety of gases, these give off tiny particles, known as PM 2.5 (particulate matter 2.5 microns or smaller), that weasel their way deep into human lungs. All told, the mixture of solids and gases actually transforms chemically as it crosses the country, creating different consequences for the health of humans thousands of miles apart. In other words, what you breathe in, and how hazardous it remains, may depend on how far you live from the Pacific coast.