Month: May 2021

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  A familiar franchise logo appears...

A PC port of 2016 PS4 exclusive Uncharted 4: A Thief's End will be coming sometime in the future. That's according to a Game & Network Services presentation made as part of Sony's Investor Relations Day 2021. Uncharted 4 is listed in that presentation deck under the heading "more PC releases planned" alongside Days Gone, which launched on PC this month.

On the very same slide, Sony trumpeted the success of another recent PC port of a former PlayStation exclusive, Horizon: Zero Dawn. Despite some iffy performance issues at launch, that port had a 250 percent return on investment through March 2021, according to the presentation (i.e. it earned back its porting budget and an additional 2.5 times that amount). That's not too surprising, considering previous reports that the PC port sold over 700,000 units in its launch month last August.

Last year, Sony said in a corporate report that it "will explore expanding our first-party titles to the PC platform, in order to promote further growth in our profitability." And PlayStation boss Jim Ryan told GQ in February that more games would be coming to PC "to expose those great games to a wider audience and recognize the economics of game development... also, our ease of making [games] available to non-console owners has grown. So it’s a fairly straightforward decision for us to make."

Enlarge / A computer game that induces mice to experience hallucination-like events could be a key to understanding the neurobiological roots of psychosis, according to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. (credit: J. Kuhl)

People suffering from psychotic episodes often experience both visual and aural hallucinations, due in part to the neurochemical dopamine; antipsychotics block dopamine receptors in the brain. But little is known about precisely how brain circuits change in response to elevated dopamine levels. The humble mouse might be able to help. An increase in dopamine in the brain can trigger auditory hallucinations in mice, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science—a surprising link between how human and mouse minds malfunction.

While the very notion of hallucinating mice might strike some as amusing, co-author Adam Kepecs of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis emphasizes that it is not a joke and that mouse studies really can shed light on human psychosis. "It's so easy to accept the argument that psychosis is a fundamentally human thing and say, 'Forget about mice'," he said. "But right now, the prognosis for psychotic patients has not substantially improved over the past decades, and that's because we don't really understand the neurobiology of the disease."

Kepecs' lab has focused largely on developing a more complete understanding of confidence in rats by studying their neurocircuitry, with a long-term goal of shedding light on self-reported confidence in humans. Lead author Katharina Schmack is a psychiatrist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York who studies psychosis and schizophrenia. They saw an opportunity for an interdisciplinary study of psychotic disorders in animals.

Enlarge / Not all users will see 21H1 show up in Windows Update yet—but if you're the itchy type, you can force the issue by downloading the Windows media installation tool directly. (credit: Jim Salter)

The May 2021 update to Windows 10 is here—although most users likely won't notice. The new version of Windows 10 is delivered via Windows Update, just like the October 2020 version was, and it's being rolled out in staggered intervals to groups of users. (We saw it available immediately while manually checking Windows Update in a Windows 10 Pro VM today.)

The new update offers three new user-facing features—improved Windows Hello support for systems with multiple cameras, an improved version of Windows Defender Application Guard, and improvements to the Group Policy Service which allow faster group policy updates for remote workers.

Windows Hello

Windows Hello is Microsoft's facial-recognition biometric authentication system—on machines with cameras, it allows the user to unlock the system by looking into the camera rather than typing in a password or swiping a fingerprint. Facial recognition isn't a particularly secure unlock method—a moderately knowledgeable attacker can frequently defeat it with a photograph—but for most users in relatively low-security environments, it's good enough.