Month: February 2021

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  The Goldeneye 007remake project, made for Xbox 360 consoles and then canceled, is now in our hands. Yes, that's a higher-res version of N64-era Pierce Brosnan, aiming and shooting at us in much higher resolution than in 1996.

As it turns out, we didn't have to track down a stolen gunship, nor enter the password "knockers" into any computer systems, to get our hands on one of the rarest and most elusive video games ever made. We just had to wait a few days.

This past weekend, the long-rumored Goldeneye 007 remake project, as helmed officially by Microsoft and Rare before being summarily canceled, finally landed in a fan's hands. This Spanish game-streamer's video of the gameplay made the rounds, and four days after his YouTube upload, someone decided to go one further and upload the full, working ROM for public consumption.

And Ars Technica has it.

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  Liftoff of SN9 sure looked fine on Tuesday afternoon. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

Once again, on Tuesday afternoon, a Starship prototype soared into the clear skies above South Texas like something out of the pages of a science fiction novel. Once again, after reaching a high altitude, the spaceship leaned into a "belly flop" maneuver, making a controlled descent back toward the planet.

And then, once again, a problem within the last few seconds caused the Starship prototype to spectacularly crash near its launch platform.

Seven weeks have passed since the first full-scale Starship prototype, SN8, performed its high-altitude flight. Now, SN9 has met a similar fate. It appeared that one of the two Raptor rocket engines intended to power the final, controlled descent failed to relight (see a great, slow-motion view). As a result, when the vehicle began reorienting itself into a vertical position, it never stopped swinging. Then, BOOM!

Enlarge / Foods will sometimes get stuck to a heated surface, even if oil or a nonstick frying pan is used. Scientists have concluded that convection may be to blame. (credit: Dan Tentler/via Getty Images)

Home cooks around the world have relied on nonstick cookware for decades for quick and easy cleanup after preparing meals. But sometimes food will get stuck to the center of nonstick pans anyway. A new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids offers a likely explanation—food sticks because of the same underlying mechanism that gives rise to the coffee ring effect and so-called "wine tears."

The first nonstick frying pans were made possible by the invention of Teflon in 1938 by a chemist named Roy Plunkett, who was researching possible new chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants as part of a joint venture with DuPont. In April of that year, Plunkett later recalled, his assistant selected one of the cylinders they were using to store tetrafluoroethylene gas (TFE) at dry-ice temperatures until the canisters were ready to be chlorinated for their experiments. When the assistant opened the valve, the gas did not flow under its own pressure from the container, as expected.

Puzzled, the researchers opened the container only to find the gas was gone. In its stead, they found a white powder. The TFE had polymerized into a waxy solid called polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), which proved to have some interesting properties: it was chemically inert and heat-resistant, and it had very low surface friction. Perhaps it wasn't useful as a refrigerant, but it proved to be a terrific nonstick coating.

Enlarge / Aerial view showing a tractor digging graves in a new area of the Nossa Senhora Aparecida, where COVID-19 victims are buried, in Manaus, Brazil. (credit: Marcio James / Getty Images)

While attention has been focused on the worrying new variants of SARS-CoV-2, there has been some good news: despite the evolution of a number of strains that appear to spread more readily, total COVID-19 cases have been dropping, both in the United States and globally. While there are a number of nations that are still seeing an increase in infections, a combination of reduced post-holiday spread and increased social interventions appear to be getting the surges seen in January under control.

That said, there are worrying signs that, at least in the US, a number of states are making the same mistakes that ensured that the virus never really went away after the first surge in cases. And the spread of many new variants drives home the need to avoid complacency.

Going down

The general fall in cases came up at a recent press briefing from the World Health Organization. "For the third week in a row, the number of new cases of COVID-19 reported globally fell last week," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "There are still many countries with increasing numbers of cases, but at the global level, this is encouraging news."

Enlarge (credit: CDC.gov)

As the world races to get vaccines into arms, one of the most concerning coronavirus variants appears to be getting a little more concerning.

Researchers in the UK have detected at least 15 cases of B.1.1.7 variants carrying an additional mutation: E484K, a mutation already seen in other concerning variants and one that may make current vaccines less effective at preventing infection. The B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the United Kingdom, is already known to spread more easily among people than earlier strains of the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. And according to some preliminary evidence, it may cause more severe disease.

So far, B.1.1.7 variants carrying E484K appear rare. On Monday, Public Health England reported in a technical briefing that it had detected E484K in just 11 B.1.1.7 variants among more than 200,000 viruses examined. For now, it’s unclear if the augmented mutants will take off and become dominant in the population or fizzle out. It’s also not entirely clear what the addition of E484K means for B.1.1.7 in people. Preliminary laboratory experiments suggest the mutation alone, and its presence in B.1.1.7 specifically, may help the virus evade immune responses. But more studies and clinical data are necessary to understand the full effect of the new addition.

Enlarge / College Football is coming back... but the NCAA trademarks and actual college football players are not. (credit: EA / Twitter)

EA is diving back into the world of college football for the first time since 2013, the publisher announced today. But EA Sports College Football, which is currently in the early stages of development, will be making its return without licenses from the NCAA or the rights to the names and likenesses of actual current college players.

Instead, EA says the new game "will include the rights to more than 100 institutions featuring the logos, stadiums, uniforms, gameday traditions, and more that fans have come to know and love."

The NCAA and many major college football conferences decided not to renew their exclusive contracts with EA Sports back in July 2013, amid legal disputes over whether players could share in the profits from the use of various NCAA trademarks. At the same time, EA was facing a direct lawsuit over the unauthorized use of player names and likenesses in the franchise, eventually leading to a multimillion-dollar settlement.