Month: May 2021

Enlarge / Now you're playing with power.... portable power! (credit: Nintendo)

Here's an unavoidable fact: the original Nintendo Game Boy is reaching middle age. The world may have moved on to sleeker, less bulky technology since Nintendo's first portable landed in shopping malls and mom-and-pop electronics stores back in 1989. But a number of developers are returning to the green hue of Nintendo's flagship handheld to explore new ideas for the platform, using the classics as a template.

"Pokémon and Zelda are obvious, really surface level," Izma, creator of new Game Boy game Deadeus, says of his inspirations. "But then there's some that I would say are a little deeper. Lisa: The Painful, the vibe and tone of that game heavily influenced [Deadeus]. Things like Tower of Heaven, a flash Game Boy-style game—the narrative's not the emphasis of the game, but there are certain beats that I tried to match here."

Currently a full-time UI artist at Coatsink games, Izma began making Deadeus during a game jam with some friends from Magic Leap Studios. They used GB Studio, a free engine for building games to the specifications of a standard Game Boy. Izma had been toying with the Game Boy's art style in GameMaker and found using GB Studio to be compelling enough to flesh out a fuller version of what he'd started.

Enlarge / A Brazilian Tanager (Ramphocelus bresilius) with his cheating red feathers looking up at the sky. (credit: Rogerio Peccioli | Getty)

Female tanager birds dig flamboyant males. So to build plumage that really pops with orange or red or yellow, a male has to eat fruits and absorb their carotenoids. The fancy feathers he produces then serve as an honest signal, in the evolutionary sense, as his ability to consume a lot of carotenoids shows that he’s fit. And the female wants to pass those genes along to her offspring, please and thank you.

Except biologists just discovered that male tanagers seem to be cheating. They’re not necessarily harvesting more carotenoids to gussy up their appearance. Instead, they’re changing the very structure of their feathers to play with light, thus modifying their color. Depending on the species—and the preferences of its females—they can make an ordinary red really glow, or make it more muted and plush. The males can even dial up the contrast of these color patches by making their surrounding feathers ultra-black with a structure that basically eats light.

“They're making themselves essentially look brighter and more colorful without necessarily putting in these expensive pigments. So they're essentially dishonestly signaling their color to females,” says Allison Shultz, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, who coauthored a recent paper describing the findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

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  How to recover a Dragon after dark. [credit: NASA ]

After a little more than 167 days in space, and zipping through 2,688 orbits around the planet, Crew Dragon Resilience dropped into a darkened Gulf of Mexico early on Sunday morning off the coast of Panama City, Florida.

The flight back from the International Space Station went smoothly, with Dragon entering the atmosphere about 12 minutes before landing under four main parachutes. Shortly after entering the atmosphere, an infrared camera aboard a WB-57 aircraft was able to track the vehicle as it guided down to the surface. Sea states were remarkably calm as the vehicle, which resembled a toasted marshmallow following its rigorous reentry through Earth's atmosphere, was hoisted aboard the GO Navigator recovery boat.

Inside, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Vic Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, were healthy and happy after spending nearly six months living aboard the International Space Station, and feeling the effects of Earth's gravity again.