Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin Jr. are seen in quarantine, after the Apollo 11 mission. (credit: NASA)

Michael Collins—a two-time astronaut who piloted the command module during the historic Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the Moon—died on Wednesday after battling cancer, his family said. He was 90 years old.

"He spent his final days peacefully, with his family by his side," the family said in a statement. "Mike always faced the challenges of life with grace and humility, and faced this, his final challenge, in the same way. We will miss him terribly."

With Collins' death, only 10 of the 24 humans who have flown into deep space remain alive: Collins' colleague on the Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin, as well as Bill Anders, Frank Borman, Charlie Duke, Fred Haise, Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly, Harrison Schmitt, David Scott, and Tom Stafford.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

A new deposition (first spotted by The Verge) in the Epic Games v. Apple case reveals Apple's inner deliberations over possibly bringing iMessage to Android, including worries from Apple executives that if Google bought WhatsApp, the search giant could win the messaging wars.

Once upon a time, Google was facing a major messaging decision as it was considering buying WhatsApp. The rumors first started in April 2013, when Digital Trends reported that Google was negotiating a $1 billion buyout of the company. WhatsApp officially shot the rumor down just a few days later, but between the start and end of this rumor, Apple's executives started talking.

Eddy Cue, Apple's SVP of Internet Software and Services, started making the case that the company should fight Google+WhatsApp with iMessage on Android, writing in an email, "We really need to bring iMessage to Android. I have had a couple of people investigating this but we should go full speed and make this an official project."

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  Run, Sonia, run! [credit: YouTube / Dreamcast Sega Info ]

Back in 1999, journalists and industry insiders attending that year's E3 got to try an early demo version of Castlevania: Resurrection for the Sega Dreamcast. When the game was canceled in March of 2000, those lucky few became the only people outside of Konami to ever experience a Castlevania game on the system.

Today, you can join them, as a playable version of the Resurrection demo has been uploaded to the Internet.

The long-lost demo comes to the wider world thanks to French Dreamcast preservationist Comby Laurent, who has documented a number of unreleased Dreamcast prototypes on his website. Laurent said he first became aware of a working copy of the Resurrection demo earlier this month through an acquaintance who had provided the first new video evidence of the demo in action.