Month: October 2021

• 

  Daniel Craig returns one last time as 007.

Everyone has their favorite incarnation of James Bond, Ian Fleming's iconic British spy with an eye for the ladies, fast cars, cool gadgets, and a martini that's shaken, not stirred. Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan have all brought their own distinctive style to 007, with varying results. But Daniel Craig has been my #1 Bond since 2006's Casino Royale, aka one of the best Bond films yet made. So I was delighted to find that Craig's 007 is getting the action-packed, emotionally powerful sendoff he deserves with No Time to Die. The film brings the character arc that began with Casino Royale to a satisfying and fitting conclusion.

(Spoilers for prior films in the Craig/Bond series; only minor spoilers for No Time to Die.)

It's worth taking a moment to revisit why Casino Royale worked so well as a fresh take on a well-worn franchise. It brought 007 firmly into the 21st century while still remaining true to the character. Even Craig's physical appearance was markedly different from the tall, dark, and handsome incarnations that came before. This Bond was more of a rugged street tough who's learned to adopt the trappings of refinement. The cinematography, production design, and even the music reinforced that portrayal.

Enlarge

After months of rumors that Rockstar was cooking up revamped versions of the original Grand Theft Auto 3 trilogy for modern hardware, the publisher confirmed Friday its plans to do just that—and if you're interested in playing your own custom-tailored version of these classics on PC by installing mods, you have three days to buy the collection on Steam.

As has become standard practice for many publishers when updating older games for newer platforms, Rockstar is removing all previous versions and bundles of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas from every console and PC storefront effective "the week of October 11, 2021," the publisher said on its support page. While each entry received Windows ports in the early 2000s, PC players are currently limited to buying the games via Rockstar's game launcher or through Steam, and only the latter platform supports mods.

Modded no more

Steam is also noticeably absent from the new trilogy's list of confirmed platforms, which include the PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox platforms, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Rockstar's game launcher, with iOS and Android ports coming next year. As of press time, all three games and the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy bundle are still available on Steam. Current owners will also be able to download and access the games on their purchased platforms, Rockstar confirmed.

Enlarge / The rocks of Kodiak Butte record a lot of the history of Jezero Crater. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

Normally, it takes some time for NASA's Mars rovers to return scientific data. The instruments need to be calibrated and commissioned, and the rover needs to move off from the landing site toward a bit of the landscape that has clear scientific instruments. In the case of the Perseverance rover, there was an added delay as it tested out the Ingenuity drone over the course of several weeks.

But this week brought a pleasant surprise, as the first research paper from Perseverance was published in Science. It turns out that some of the early photographs from the rover revealed features in some near-vertical rock walls some distance from the landing site—details that tell us about the history of the flow of water into Jezero Crater.

Mars meets Kodiak

The Jezero Crater was chosen as Perseverance's landing site because images taken from orbit indicate it once hosted a lake. The photos revealed an exit channel that allowed water to flow through a gap in the crater walls, the site where rivers flowed in to feed the lake, and what appeared to be a river delta spreading into the crater from these sites. The rover's mission profile includes sampling material from that delta, which might once have been both an inviting environment for life and would have collected any living material that once existed upstream.

Enlarge / A fire engine drives into air thick with smoke along Juniper Hills Road as the Bobcat Fire advances North into the Antelope Valley in 2020. (credit: Robert Gauthier | Getty Images)

Late Thursday, Google announced that it is demonetizing content that makes misleading or false claims about climate change. As a result, content that calls into question or denies the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change will not have Google advertising alongside it. In addition, Google will no longer run any advertising that "contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

With a worldwide public-health crisis taking place in the midst of natural disasters that are fueled, at least in part, by human-caused climate change, the amount of misinformation and outright falsehoods is not only frustrating but dangerous. Google has been criticized for its role in the spread of misinformation, and lots of people are unhappy with it. People paying for ads don't want their ads appearing alongside misinformation-filled videos, and content producers don't want to see their product interrupted by error-filled ads.

Message received, says Google. "We've heard directly from a growing number of our advertising and publisher partners who have expressed concerns about ads that run alongside or promote inaccurate claims about climate change," Google said. "Advertisers simply don't want their ads to appear next to this content. And publishers and creators don't want ads promoting these claims to appear on their pages or videos."

• 

  The Moto G Pure. [credit: Motorola ]

The latest device in Lenovo's Moto G line is the Moto G Pure, a low-end $159.99 phone coming to the US and Canada.

Specs include a 6.5-inch, 1600×720 LCD; a MediaTek Helio G25 (that's eight Cortex A53 CPUs built on a 12 nm process); 3GB of RAM; 32GB of storage; and a 4000 mAh battery. There's a microSD slot—which will most likely be needed, as the phone has only 32GB of storage—and a headphone jack. The camera bump on the back is doing its best flagship impression, but in terms of hardware, you're getting one 13 MP camera, a 2 MP "depth sensor," and an LED flash. The front camera is 5 MP.

The body is all plastic. The front has a teardrop camera notch with a big chin at the button, but again, the phone is cheap. The Motorola logo on the back is also a fingerprint reader, which is a nice touch. The phone supports 2.4 and 5 GHz 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5, but sadly, there's no NFC. The USB-C port supports 10 W charging, and the phone comes with Android 11.

Enlarge / Tesla is not completely abandoning California, but it has moved its HQ to Austin, Texas. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors that the US's largest electric carmaker has moved its headquarters from California to Texas. In 2020, Musk personally relocated to Texas, which is home to SpaceX facilities and a new Tesla factory outside Austin. Now the Texas state capital will be the new official home of Tesla, too.

In 2020, Musk was at loggerheads with the California government in response to public health measures enacted to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 700,000 Americans. Musk was dismissive about the threat of COVID-19, predicting that infections would fizzle out by April 2020, and he was infuriated at having to temporarily close Tesla's factory in Fremont, California—an act he described as "frankly... the final straw."

Tesla filed and then dropped a lawsuit against Alameda County and then declared that the company would leave the state. Within days, Musk revealed that he had picked Texas for the site of Tesla's next American factory. This week's announcement finalizes that decision.

Enlarge / The US Department of Energy uses two Bell 412 helicopters to survey background radiation in advance of major events. (credit: Grandbrothers / iStock Editorial)

This morning, a Department of Energy helicopter buzzed above cities and suburbs in eastern Massachusetts, scanning for radiation in advance of the 125^th Boston Marathon. The sweep is part of security preparations to help first responders pinpoint possible “dirty bombs” and other terrorist activities before they claim any lives.

The flight started with a thorough scan of the starting line in the western suburb of Hopkinton before flying along the 26.2-mile route to the finish line in Boston, where the helicopter performed another comprehensive survey. The craft flew at low altitude the entire time, dipping below 100 feet on several occasions, according to FlightAware.

Flight path for N412DE on the morning of October 8, 2021. (credit: FlightAware)

The twin-engine Bell 412 (tail number N412DE) is operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration, a division of the Department of Energy that is responsible for everything from nonproliferation to maintaining the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The helicopter is part of the agency’s Aerial Measuring System, which routinely performs radiological surveys before major events, including presidential inaugurations, Super Bowls, and New Year’s Eve celebrations in Las Vegas.