Month: June 2021

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Our warming planet is melting lots of ice and heating the waters of the oceans, creating a clear trend of rising oceans. In some areas of the US, this is starting to cause what's called nuisance flooding, where high tides cause coastal flooding even in the absence of storms. As the oceans continue to rise, figuring out what areas are likely to become vulnerable to coastal flooding and when is going to be critical to understanding how to manage coastal development.

Figuring out coastal development is complicated. The rate of sea level rise can vary from year to year, the local ocean levels can vary as the land settles or rises, and the pace of sea level rise is increasing. And now, a team of researchers has quantified an additional factor: regular variations in the Moon's orbit, which influence the levels reached by high tide. The team goes on to show that these changes can suppress the impact of rising seas for a time but can then contribute to a rapid increase in floods.

Cycling the Moon

The plane of the Moon's orbit isn't located exactly at the equator; instead, it's tilted slightly. That means, for part of its orbit, the Moon is orbiting above the Northern Hemisphere, and for the other part, it's over the Southern Hemisphere. The locations in its orbit where the Moon crosses between the two hemispheres are called nodes, and these shift over time. It takes a bit over 18 years for a node to complete an orbit around the Earth.

Enlarge / Xbox Game Streaming works on a wide variety of devices—and they all now benefit from Microsoft's upgraded servers. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Microsoft)

Microsoft's bullishness about Xbox as a cloud-gaming platform got a lot bolder on Tuesday with the surprise launch.of a previously teased change: an upgrade to the server farm that powers the cloud portion of Game Pass Ultimate. Long story short, it's now much more powerful, enough to make Xbox's $15/month Game Pass Ultimate an increasingly attractive subscription option.

Xbox Game Streaming, which was previously known as Project xCloud, works much like Google Stadia, Amazon Luna, and other cloud-streaming options. Pick a game, and a server farm will spin up a personal instance and beam its gameplay video to your preferred, Internet-connected device while tracking your local button taps. The concept is a downgrade from locally owned hardware for a few reasons, including button-tap latency and hits to any ISP bandwidth caps, but it's also arguably easier for some households than buying a new console.

The Xbox version has been quite attractive thanks to its value proposition. It includes over 260 games as part of a $15/month subscription, as opposed to a smaller Luna library, service-compatibility issues with Nvidia GeForce Now, and the a la carte pricing universe of Stadia. (Game Pass also comes in $10/month flavors, meant specifically for local hardware.) Up until now, however, the catch has been measly power on the server-farm side, since its cloud instances regressed to the "base" Xbox One console spec. Earlier this month, Xbox execs confirmed that its server fleet would begin upgrading to the Xbox Series X spec, which supports higher frame rates, higher pixel resolutions, faster loading times, and advanced rendering features.