Month: September 2021

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot / Getty Images)

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has warned that it will sue Coinbase if it launches a new digital asset lending product, and also issued subpoenas to the cryptocurrency trading platform to provide it with more information, according to executives.

Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post that the company, which in April became the first major US cryptocurrency exchange to list publicly, had received a Wells notice from the regulator saying it would pursue legal action if Coinbase introduced a yield product called Lend.

Lend is designed to allow users to earn interest on certain digital assets on the platform.

Enlarge / NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was placed in Johnson Space Center’s historic Chamber A for vacuum testing on June 20, 2017. (credit: NASA)

NASA announced in August that the James Webb Space Telescope had passed its final ground-based tests and was being prepared for shipment to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Now, the oft-delayed, $10 billion telescope has an official launch date: December 18, 2021.

The date was announced on Wednesday by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the launch provider, Arianespace. The space telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket.

Why is NASA's most expensive scientific instrument ever launching on a European rocket? Because the European Space Agency is conducting the launch for NASA in return for a share of observation time using the infrared telescope. Webb will observe wavelengths of light longer than those of the Hubble Space telescope, and this should allow the new instrument to see the earliest galaxies of the Universe.

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  Wario has returned to serve dozens of microgames, all in the name of amassing wealth. [credit: Nintendo ]

I've lost track of how many times I've looked at a formulaic Nintendo sequel and wished for something fresher. Remember, behind a pile of Mario and Zelda remakes, Nintendo has a considerable stash of irreverence and whimsy, as proven by franchises like Rhythm Heaven, Elite Beat Agents, and WarioWare.

That last series in the list is now up to its ninth entry: this week's WarioWare: Get It Together. I can't knock the 18-year-old franchise for sequelitis, and this latest title doesn't rest on its Wario-styled yellow-and-purple laurels. In fact, it may very well be Nintendo's most ambitious collection of "microgames" yet.

But ambition is nothing without execution. WW:GIT is hard to fault on a piece-by-piece basis, and when laid on a table like an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, its parts are up to the series' standard of humor, creativity, and polish. Yet the collection has not been put together quite right, and the result is a rare case of Nintendo putting a game out before it feels finished.