Month: November 2020

Enlarge / In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Eivor reps the Raven Clan while storming 9th-century England the only way a Viking knows how: By swinging axes, making pals, and drinking mead. (credit: Ubisoft)

Before I go into everything about Assassin's Creed Valhalla—the writing, the action, the open-world jank—I want to offer an unusual preface. Basically: Gosh, I like this game.

It's a rare earnest turn for me, especially when I'm talking about open-world Ubisoft games. I try to find a fair-and-balanced way to talk about their hours of gameplay, and I respect the heck out of how their multi-studio teams slam together so many moving parts into a giant, playable romp. But personally, I can get bored with them—same fetch quests, same ho-hum mechanics and checklists, year after year. After playing only a few hours of these games, I feel less like an adventurer and more like an errand boy or girl. None of their high-end rendering or historical references can change that feeling.

Yet the Assassin's Creed series has been evolving into AC Valhalla's shape for some time, which we last saw from the character-driven surprise of 2018's AC Odyssey. This year's model is undeniably messy and imperfect, and it doesn't surpass Ghost of Tsushima as my favorite open-world romp so far this year. But it earns my recommendation for getting enough things right—and doing so with more nuance than a phrase like "a more RPG-like Assassin's Creed" implies.

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  The 2020 iPad Air. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

For a long, long time, most of Apple's iPads looked fundamentally the same. They all had a home button, they all had a similar aesthetic, and they all had similar screen-to-body ratios, with some minor variation over time. All of that changed in 2018 with the overhauled iPad Pro, and that design has since carried over across the majority of Apple's recently released mobile devices, from the iPhone 12 to the iPad Air.

Today, we're going to give the new iPad Air a quick review.

The Air incorporates Apple's latest processor (the A14), which is also seen in the iPhone 12. And it adopts the general aesthetic and language of the iPad Pro, sans Face ID. The base price of the iPad Air is up from that of its predecessor, but you're arguably getting a much more modern device for it.

Enlarge (credit: Puamelia/ Flickr)

Foaming is nature’s way of making beer even more delicious. Yet not all foams are understood because they don’t seem to obey the model that explains most of the rest. Understanding these atypical foams is important, because they often apply in the food-processing and petrochemical industries. So having a new paper that tells us what allows these foams to survive may be of more than academic interest.

Foaming with cause

Foams and froths form when two different liquids are mixed with a gas such as air. But not all liquid combinations will allow a foam to form, no matter how much hard you beat it—I’m looking at you, experimental dark chocolate meringues. While a foam is actually a rather complex beast, the basic physics is not too difficult.

A foam is basically a set of air bubbles, enclosed by thin films that form a self-supporting network. The thin films are subject to two competing forces. The liquid trapped in the interface slowly drains away due to gravity. This causes the layer enclosing the air to thin, which will lead to the eventual collapse of the foam. But the loss of fluid is often slowed (or even entirely prevented) by two factors.