Month: October 2021

The countdown continues for the premiere next month of Cowboy Bebop, the Netflix live action adaptation of the popular anime series. The streaming giant just dropped the full official trailer for the ten-episode series.  As we've reported previously, the original anime series premiered in 1998. It's a space western about a group of bounty hunters on a spaceship called the Bebop. Cowboy Bebop drew critical acclaim and became a cult hit thanks in part to its striking visual style and its strong thematic elements.

André Nemec is the showrunner for the Netflix series, having previously worked as a writer and producer on Alias, as well as the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The director of the original anime series, Shinichirō Watanabe, is a consultant for the new show. Production was delayed in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also because star John Cho (Star Trek, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) suffered an injury on-set, which required him to fly from the show's shooting location in New Zealand to Los Angeles for surgery.

Cho plays lead character, Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter born on Mars with a history of violent gang activity who is partial to fist-fights. Alex Hassell (Suburbicon) plays Spike's former partner, Vicious, who is now a power-hungry Capo gangster from the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate. Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) plays Faye Valentine, a bounty hunter and con artist in debt from excessive gambling fees who spent 54 years in suspended animation after a space shuttle accident. Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage) plays Jet Black, captain of the Bebop, and Spike's ex-cop bounty hunter partner who has a cybernetic arm. And Elena Satine (Revenge) plays Julia, a stunning femme fatale who haas captivated both Spike and Vicious as rivals for her affection.

Enlarge / We wish we had better news to report about Nintendo's first easy-to-access N64 collection in a long time. Alas. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Nintendo)

On Monday, Nintendo released its latest collection of emulated N64 games—and its first since the Wii U's Virtual Console—as a package of games exclusively available on its Switch consoles. Unfortunately, the result isn't exactly the Super Mario 64-styled "wa-hoo!" we'd been hoping for.

After years of "N64 mini" rumors (which have yet to come to fruition), Nintendo announced plans to honor its first fully 3D gaming system late last month in the form of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. Pay a bit extra, the company said, and you'd get a select library of N64 classics, emulated by the company that made them, on Switch consoles as part of an active NSO subscription.

One month later, however, Nintendo's sales proposition grew more sour. That "bit extra" ballooned to $30 more per year, on top of the existing $20/year fee—a 150 percent jump in annual price. Never mind that the price also included an Animal Crossing expansion pack (which retro gaming fans may not want) and Sega Genesis games (which have been mostly released ad nauseam on every gaming system of the past decade). For many interested fans, that price jump was about the N64 collection.

Enlarge / Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth aside from the Sun. (credit: ESA, Hubble, and NASA)

Modern human society has been making it ever more challenging for astronomers to get their job done. While we've designated radio-quiet areas and dark skies initiatives, tensions have been heightened recently by the launch of broadband-Internet satellites, which are present in rapidly growing numbers.

Recent weeks have seen the reasons for these concerns come to the fore. In early October, researchers published papers suggesting that an observation assigned to one of the most distant galaxies known was actually the product of space junk orbiting Earth. And on Monday, the Breakthrough Listen project described just how hard it worked to determine that a promising-looking SETI signal was actually the product of Earth-bound electronics.

Junk or not?

The first observation at issue was potentially the most distant supernova ever observed. The paper describing it observed a flash in the near-infrared that coincided with the location of one of the Universe's first galaxies. If the flash originated there, the red shift caused by the intervening distance would mean that the original burst was in the UV range, suggesting it was the product of a supernova. That would mean we had observed the death of one of the first stars formed in the Universe, a potentially significant finding.

Enlarge / A nurse gives a boy a dose of the Pfizer vaccine at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Florida on the day before classes begin for the 2021-22 school year. (credit: Getty | Paul Hennessy)

A panel of independent medical experts advising the Food and Drug Administration voted 17 to 0 (with one abstention) this afternoon in favor of authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use in children ages 5 to 11 years old.

The vote is a key step toward the first pediatric COVID-19 vaccine in the US. Next, the FDA will need to sign off on the recommendation from the advisory panel—the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC)—and issue an emergency use authorization for the 5-to-11 age group. That FDA's authorization is expected within days. Once that occurs, the federal government will begin shipping pediatric doses of the vaccine to states for distribution at clinics, pharmacies, and pediatricians' offices.

But before doses can go into any little arms, a panel of independent experts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also need to weigh in. That panel—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—is scheduled to meet November 2 and 3. If ACIP votes in favor of recommending use of the vaccine in children ages 5 to 11, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will need to sign off on the committee's recommendation. That would likely happen quickly, and after that, vaccinations can begin.

Enlarge / A Warcraft-themed statue sits in front of the Blizzard employee campus. (credit: Flickr / gordontarpley)

Following an online-only BlizzCon earlier this year, Blizzard announced in May that its annual, announcement-packed convention for 2022 would be "combining an online show along the lines of our recent BlizzConline with smaller in-person gatherings." Today, though, the company says it is "tak[ing] a step back and paus[ing] the planning" for that event.

In a post titled Reimagining BlizzCon, the company says that the all-hands-on-deck focus needed to pull off a show on the magnitude of BlizzCon just wasn't the right fit for the company at this point:

Any BlizzCon event takes every single one of us to make happen, an entire-company effort, fueled by our desire to share what we create with the community we care about so much. At this time, we feel the energy it would take to put on a show like this is best directed towards supporting our teams and progressing development of our games and experiences.

Unaddressed in the announcement (but present as a heavy subtext throughout) are the multiple lawsuits Activision Blizzard is facing in the wake of a California investigation into allegations of widespread workplace harassment and sexual misconduct at the company going back years. That still-roiling scandal comes after a flurry of high-profile departures in recent years, including Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan in April.