Month: November 2022

Enlarge (credit: Michael Schamis/Flickr/CC)

Spider monkeys don’t live anywhere near the central Mexican highlands, including the area around what’s now Mexico City, once the home of Teotihuacan. So when University of California, Riverside, archaeologist Nawa Sugiyama and her colleagues found the 1,700-year-old skeleton of one buried alongside other offerings in a pyramid in the city’s ceremonial center, they knew it must have come from far afield—such as somewhere in the territory of what was then a neighboring political power, the Maya. And the little primate hints at a previously unsuspected history of diplomatic links between Teotihuacan’s rulers and Maya kingdoms further south.

A diplomatic gift

Sugiyama and her colleagues found the skeleton interred as part of a ritual offering deep inside one of the three pyramids that make up the Plaza of the Columns complex in the ceremonial district of ancient Teotihuacan. It was found alongside a trove of jade figurines that were traced by their chemical makeup to the Motagua Valley in what’s now central Guatemala. There were also finely worked obsidian blades and shell ornaments, along with the remains of other animal sacrifices, including an eagle, a puma, and several rattlesnakes.

No primates (other than humans) live in the region around what’s now Mexico City, and a spider monkey would have been “an exotic curiosity, alien to the high elevations of Teotihuacan,” as Sugiyama and her colleagues describe it in their paper.

Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript. (video link)

A couple of weeks back, we joined up with Glen Schofield of Striking Distance Studios to have him walk us through some behind-the-scenes previews of his studio's upcoming game, The Callisto Protocol. In our series so far, we've explored Callisto's gameplay and its audio design, and this week we're continuing our sneak peek with a look at the look of the game—the lighting and visuals.

Humans are primarily visual creatures, and clever game designers take advantage of that by using a game's visuals as not just a way to show the player what's happening, but also as an opportunity to extend and express the game's style—games, like so many other forms of art, can communicate themes and emotions to a player through constrained use of color or through the emphasis of specific imagery or through the use of light and shadow to emphasize and hide aspects of a scene. And Glen and his crew at Striking Distance—folks like art director Demetrius Leal and lighting director and Dead Space veteran Atsushi Seo—are definitely clever game designers. During the preproduction phase of the game, the team deluged Glen with images showing both visual examples of how they wanted the game's architecture and monsters to look, and also of interesting and effective lighting techniques.

Enlarge / An astronomical clock in Prague, Czech Republic. (credit: Getty Images)

There are not many things you can get Facebook, Google, the United States, France, and Linus Torvalds to agree on, but one of them has come to pass.

A near-unanimous vote on Friday in Versailles, France, by parties to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM in its native French) on Resolution 4 means that starting in 2035, the leap second, the remarkably complicated way of aligning the earth's inconsistent rotation with atomic-precision timekeeping, will see its use discontinued. Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, will run without them until 2135. It was unclear whether any leap seconds might occur before then, though it seems unlikely.

The assumption is that within those 100 years, time-focused scientists (metrologists) will have found a way to synchronize time as measured by humans to time as experienced by our planet orbiting the Sun. But most people will not notice any difference at all, even as the time difference could reach up to one minute by the end of that 100 years.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Valve watching the return of Ubisoft games to its Steam platform.

Since early 2019, Ubisoft has made a point of moving its PC releases away from Steam and toward the Epic Games Store and its own Ubisoft connect platform. That years-long experiment now seems to be ending, as Ubisoft has confirmed at least three recent PC releases will be getting Steam versions in the near future.

A page for 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla was officially added to Steam Monday, listing a December 6 launch date on the platform. Ubisoft has also told Eurogamer that 2019's Anno 1800 and Roller Champions will be coming to Steam, confirming earlier rumors to that effect.

The coming Steam versions are Ubisoft's first non-DLC releases on the platform since 2019, when Trials Rising and Starlink: Battle for Atlas launched on Steam. Since then, releases from Far Cry 6 and Watch Dogs Legion to Immortals: Fenyx Rising and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint have all been unavailable on Valve's industry-dominating PC storefront.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

When Elon Musk first launched his Twitter Blue subscription service, the whole point was to make it possible to buy the blue checkmark as a coveted status symbol. Now, the billionaire is backtracking (for now, at least), announcing in a tweet that the relaunch of Blue Verified checkmarks will be delayed, and likely when it does roll out, checkmarks distinguishing between Blue Verified subscribers and official verified accounts will be different colors.

“Holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation,” Musk tweeted. “Will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals.”

Many Twitter users suggested this obvious solution before the fake-account scandal found the platform sprinkled with popular but chaotic brand impersonations. That ultimately led Musk to revoke the option to pay $8 for a Blue Verified subscription.

Enlarge / The Cupra Born is a sporty alternative to the Volkswagen ID.3. (credit: Cupra)

Recently, we reviewed Audi's RS e-tron GT, a handsome four-door electric vehicle that, while closely related to the Porsche Taycan, still manages to feel quite distinctive to drive. As I detailed in that article, the practice of sharing common platforms or architectures has been a fact of life in the automotive industry for decades.

That's particularly true at Volkswagen Group, which uses a handful of platforms as the starting point for its collection of 10 brands. One of the newest of these platforms is known as MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit), and so far Ars has sampled MEB-based EVs in the form of the Volkswagen ID.4 crossover and then, more recently, the ID. Buzz minivan and the Audi Q4 e-tron crossover.

Not every MEB-based EV is destined for America, however. Volkswagen isn't bringing the Golf-sized ID.3 hatchback over to this side of the Atlantic, although based on European colleagues' takes on that car I'm not so sure we're missing out heavily. It is more unfortunate that US roads may also never see the Cupra Born, an electric hot hatch from a brand that got spun out of Seat in 2018 as a more performance-focused OEM. Friend of Ars Jonny Smith recently drove the Born and came away impressed, particularly since he was one of those reviewers underwhelmed by the ID.3.