Month: May 2021

Enlarge / NASA's proposed Mars Sample Return mission received funding in the budget request to support a 2026 launch. (credit: NASA)

As part of the federal budget rollout on Friday, NASA released details of the funding it hopes to receive from Congress in fiscal year 2022.

The president's budget request seeks $24.8 billion for the coming fiscal year, a nearly 7 percent increase over the $23.3 billion in funding NASA received for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30. Congress will ultimately decide funding levels, of course, but this budget request is indicative of White House priorities.

The Biden Administration has placed a strong emphasis on science during its first four months, and that focus is reflected in this budget request. The White House is seeking $7.9 billion for NASA's science programs, including Earth science and missions to explore the Moon and other planets. This represents a nearly 9 percent increase over last year's budget for science programs, with Earth science and planetary science receiving the most significant increases.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | spxChrome)

US government data shows that home-Internet customers pay more each year and that average broadband expenditures are rising faster than inflation, but cable and telecom lobbies keep claiming that broadband prices are getting lower.

The latest example came Wednesday from USTelecom, which represents AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink/Lumen, Frontier, and other DSL and fiber Internet providers. In a post titled "No Fluke: American Broadband Prices Continue Decline in 2021," the group unveiled the latest version of its Broadband Pricing Index [BPI] that measures prices for residential Internet service.

But instead of measuring the average or median price that all home-Internet customers pay, the group reports the prices of a couple service tiers that it claims are representative of American consumers at large.

Enlarge / A thrown-away surgical mask lays on the ground. (credit: Getty | David Gannon)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stunned health officials and experts May 13 with the abrupt announcement that people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 could forgo masking in most settings—indoor, outdoor, uncrowded, and crowded alike. The guidance was a stark reversal from the health agency’s previous stance, issued just two weeks earlier, that still recommended vaccinated people wear masks among crowds and in many indoor, uncrowded settings.

The CDC said at the time that it was merely following the science for masking. The agency and its director, Rochelle Walensky, highlighted fresh, real-world studies demonstrating COVID-19 vaccines’ high efficacy and ability to lower transmission risks. But the update was also part of an overt effort to encourage vaccination among the vaccine hesitant by emphasizing the perks of being vaccinated—like not needing to wear masks anymore and reclaiming other bits of normal life.

That messaging shift came as states across the country started to see their pace of vaccination slow despite a glut of vaccine doses. Numerous polls have indicated that most of the people eager to get vaccinated already have. Now, with just 62 percent of the US adult population vaccinated, much of the remaining unvaccinated portion is either hesitant or resistant to being vaccinated. It’s that group of people the CDC was trying to reach with the new mask guidance.

It's been a long road for Paramount's A Quiet Place Part 2, the much-anticipated sequel to 2018's surprise sci-fi/horror hit A Quiet Place. Originally slated to hit theaters last March, the sequel even had an official premiere, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced shutdowns all over the country mere days before the planned theatrical release. Paramount and director John Krasinski opted to shelve the movie until theaters reopened rather than releasing it on demand.

A Quiet Place Part 2 is finally here, and it was well worth the wait. It's less of a sequel and more of a continuation of the original story. It retains all the aspects that worked in its predecessor while exploring new themes and character development.

(Spoilers for 2018's A Quiet Place below; mild spoilers for Part 2, but no major reveals.)

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  Giancarlo Esposito stars as the villain Anton Castillo, president of the very Cuba-like fictional nation Yara, in Ubisoft's Far Cry 6. [credit: Ubisoft ]

After a delay from its original March 2021 release date, Ubisoft's Far Cry 6 finally has a bonafide gameplay reveal ahead of its newly confirmed October 7 launch on PCs and consoles.

The Far Cry series continues to ask players to face off against "shades of gray" villains in wide-open, semi-lawless territories. After a brief detour to the United States in 2018's Far Cry 5, the series returns to its jungles-and-islands roots with the fictional Caribbean nation of Yara. (Let's be real—this is pretty much Cuba.) Instead of relying on cut scenes to showcase the striking voice and appearance of new series villain Anton Castillo, portrayed by famed actor Giancarlo Epsosito (Breaking Bad), this trailer goes to great lengths to look like an actual video game.

At first glance, the revealed footage looks like it's from a current-gen console game as played on a PC at max settings. If ray-traced light-bounce models are being used to create an expensive global illumination system, this trailer didn't make that apparent. Light sources look pre-baked, and reflections appear to rely on computationally mild screen-space techniques. Still, wide-open vistas full of lush wildlife and massive explosions seem like they've been cranked to "ultra" levels, so I wonder how this cross-gen game will scale down to run on the PS4 and Xbox One generation.

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  Apple's AirPods (left) and AirPods Pro. [credit: Jeff Dunn ]

Apple will release redesigned AirPods in 2021 and follow up with a new version of AirPods Pro in 2022, according to a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Debby Wu, citing people "with knowledge of the matter."

The new AirPods would have shorter stems on each ear, bringing them closer to the look of AirPods Pro. And Apple has been testing an AirPods Pro design that completely lacks the stems. Bloomberg's sources claim that the stem-less design will first appear in Beats headphones that will be announced in June.

The non-Pro AirPods would also have a new case design, and the AirPods Pro would include new motion-sensing technology that would be used for fitness tracking.

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  Welcome to a blank, empty world that you get to fill.

The idea of a video game that lets you build other video games is nearly as old as the medium itself, dating back at least to 1983's Pinball Construction Set. More recently, series like Little Big Planet and Dreams have shown just how powerful simple controller-based game creation tools can be, while experiments like Kodu and Project Spark have failed to find the necessary audience to sustain themselves.

Nintendo isn't new to this concept, either—the Mario Maker series and games like WarioWare DIY have given players robust creation tools to play with. But Game Builder Garage is Nintendo's most ambitious effort yet to let its users make games, using a coding-free environment built for the Nintendo Switch.

Meet the Nodons

The basic layout of Game Builder Garage will be familiar to anyone who has used visual programming tools Scratch or the Unreal Engine's Kismet environment. Instead of being built with lines of code, Garage games are made by placing and connecting little colored square beings called Nodons, which sit in the design space and distractingly blink their eyes at you every few seconds.

Enlarge / The Google Photos storage management tool. (credit: Google)

Google Photos would like some of your money.

The service is turning six years old and will kick off its quest for monetization next week, when Google will start getting more restrictive about photo storage limits. The goal is to push users over the 15GB free limit that comes with every Google account so they'll buy more storage via the "Google One" program.

Google Photos launched with two photo storage tiers: uncompressed "Original" quality, which counted toward your storage usage, and compressed "High Quality" photos, which did not count toward the limit. Starting on June 1, all newly uploaded photos—even the compressed ones—will count toward the storage limit. Images uploaded before that date that didn't count toward the limit still won't count. But with automatic upload, it's only a matter of time before shutterbugs fill up their online storage.