Month: August 2022

Enlarge / NYC Monkeypox Vaccine Clinic sign is displayed on August 2 in The Bronx borough of New York. Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency because of Monkeypox, allowing him to suspend certain laws and regulations to enact rules and policies aimed at combatting the fast-spreading virus. (credit: Getty | View press)

As global monkeypox cases continue to climb, health officials are investigating reports of several new deaths, which includes the first batch of deaths reported from countries outside where the virus is endemic in animals.

The global case count is now over 25,000, with more than 6,000 in the US. The global death toll is now at least 10. Previously, officials reported three deaths from Nigeria and two from the Central African Republic, both of which have historically reported monkeypox spillover cases. On Monday, Ghana, which has also historically had cases, reported its first death. At the same time, four new deaths have been reported in Spain (2), Brazil (1), and India (1). Officials at the World Health Organization are still waiting for more clinical information on the cases.

Initial media reports suggest that the death in Brazil was a 41-year-old man who had lymphoma and was immunocompromised and was therefore at higher risk of severe disease.

Enlarge / NYC Monkeypox Vaccine Clinic sign is displayed on August 2 in The Bronx borough of New York. Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency because of Monkeypox, allowing him to suspend certain laws and regulations to enact rules and policies aimed at combatting the fast-spreading virus. (credit: Getty | View press)

As global monkeypox cases continue to climb, health officials are investigating reports of several new deaths, which includes the first batch of deaths reported from countries outside where the virus is endemic in animals.

The global case count is now over 25,000, with more than 6,000 in the US. The global death toll is now at least 10. Previously, officials reported three deaths from Nigeria and two from the Central African Republic, both of which have historically reported monkeypox spillover cases. On Monday, Ghana, which has also historically had cases, reported its first death. At the same time, four new deaths have been reported in Spain (2), Brazil (1), and India (1). Officials at the World Health Organization are still waiting for more clinical information on the cases.

Initial media reports suggest that the death in Brazil was a 41-year-old man who had lymphoma and was immunocompromised and was therefore at higher risk of severe disease.

The bright iridescent colors in butterfly wings or beetle shells don't come from any pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured—a naturally occurring example of what physicists call photonic crystals. Scientists can make their own structural colored materials in the lab, but it can be challenging to scale up the process for commercial applications without sacrificing optical precision.

Now MIT scientists have adapted a 19th-century holographic photography technique to develop chameleon-like films that change color when stretched. The method can be easily scaled while preserving nanoscale optical precision. They described their work in a new paper published in the journal Nature Materials.  

In nature, scales of chitin (a polysaccharide common to insects) are arranged like roof tiles. Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce specific colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism. Also known as photonic band gap materials, photonic crystals are "tunable," which means they are precisely ordered to block certain wavelengths of light while letting others through. Alter the structure by changing the size of the tiles, and the crystals become sensitive to a different wavelength.

Enlarge / Art from Various Daylife, one of the games that left Apple Arcade in August 2022. (credit: https://variousdaylife.square-enix-games.com)

Several games that were previously available as part of the Apple Arcade subscription service have been removed.

Fifteen titles have been dropped, and all of them are games that were introduced in the early days of the service. Since mid-July, these games had appeared in a "Leaving Arcade Soon" section of the Apple Arcade tab in the App Store. That section is now gone, suggesting that these are the only games that will be removed in the immediate future.

Apple revealed that these games would be leaving Arcade within that section, so subscribers had a little over two weeks' notice. But there's a little more time for those currently playing the games.

Enlarge / Look, we had to see this shot from a Sims 4 "male pregnancy" mod while researching this story, so now you do, too!

Last month, EA published an update formalizing its policy that mods for The Sims 4 "cannot be sold, licensed, or rented for a fee." But the publisher tells Ars that there is still one important exception that should ensure many Sims modders can continue to make significant income from their game-expanding creations.

EA's new modding policy, first published July 21, is pretty direct in saying that Sims 4 mods "must be non-commercial and distributed free-of-charge" and that they can't "contain features that would support monetary transactions of any type." According to the published policy, those who want to monetize their Sims modding work are limited to indirect methods like "passive advertisements and requests for donations" on their own websites (but not within the mods themselves).

Despite this recent formalization, this policy isn't entirely new. In late 2017, former EA Community Manager Amanda Drake wrote on the game's forums that mod creators "cannot lock content they make using our game behind a paywall." But that post also carved out a specific loophole for creators who wanted to offer an incentive to encourage donations via sites like Patreon: