Month: December 2022

Enlarge / Hello, gorgeous.

In the survival-horror genre, building tension and ramping up a sense of dread is the backbone of the experience. As a new sci-fi horror IP coming from the creators of Dead Space, The Callisto Protocol homes in on that creeping sense of unease as it forces you to confront its many grotesque threats head-on. When playing The Callisto Protocol, I always felt on edge, even during moments when I could have let my guard down.

The game takes some strong influences from its spiritual predecessor Dead Space and puts its own spin on a more visceral type of horror experience. That said, The Callisto Protocol's influences and genre are abundantly clear, and it occasionally falls back on familiar tropes and some frustrating combat encounters. Still, it maintains its solid, relentless poise as an unnerving yet still thrilling survival-horror game.

Welcome to Black Iron Prison

You play as Jacob Lee (Transformers’ Josh Duhamel), a far-future freelance cargo hauler with a murky past who crash lands on Jupiter’s titular frozen moon. After getting abducted by the ruthless head of security, Captain Ferris (Days Gone’s Sam Witwer), Jacob finds himself trapped in the mysterious and inhumane Black Iron Prison.

Enlarge / Laboratory technicians in France prepare stool to treat patients with serious colon infections by fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), also known as gut flora transplant (GFT) in 2019. (credit: Getty | THIERRY ZOCCOLAN )

For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has granted approval for a feces-based microbial treatment, which is used to prevent a recurring diarrheal infection that can become life-threatening.

The approval, announced Wednesday, is years in the making. Researchers have strained to harness the protective qualities of the complex, diverse, yet variable microbial communities found in healthy people's intestines and stool. Early on, rich fecal matter proved useful for restoring balance and blocking infection in those whose microbiomes have been disturbed—a state called dysbiosis, which can occur from disease and/or use of antibiotic drugs. But, our understanding of what makes a microbiome healthy, functional, and protective remains incomplete.

Doctors, meanwhile, pushed ahead, informally trying an array of methods to transplant fecal microbiota from healthy donors to the guts of patients—via enemas, tubes through the nose, and oral poop-packed capsules. Fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) have been used to treat various ailments, from obesity to irritable bowel syndrome, to mixed success. But it quickly became apparent that FMTs were most readily effective at preventing recurrent infection from Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile or just C. diff).

Enlarge / A promotional image for the third season of The Mandalorian.

After months of silence about it, Disney has finally revealed the premiere date of the third season of its first live-action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian. The new season will premiere on March 1, 2023.

That's just a little bit later than what Disney said to expect the last time it made an announcement; the release window was announced to be February 2023 in a tweet in May.

Minor premiere date slipping aside, it's been quite a time since the previous season in either case. The second season premiered back in October 2020. That said, it wouldn't be accurate to say that it's been more than two years since we last spent time with the show's two central characters, Mando and Grogu.

Enlarge / The on-stage demo of the surgical robot practically extended into the audience. (credit: Neuralink)

On Wednesday night, Elon Musk hosted an update from his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink. Most of the update involved various researchers at the company providing overviews of the specific areas of technology development they were working on. But there wasn't anything dramatically new in the tech compared to last year's update, and it was difficult to piece the presentations together into a coherent picture of what the company plans to do with its hardware.

But probably the most striking thing is that last year's update indicated that Neuralink was getting close to human testing. Over a year later, those tests remain about six months out, according to Musk.

Lots of tech

Neuralink involves a large series of overlapping technical efforts. The interface itself requires electrodes implanted into the brain. To connect those electrodes with the outside world, Neuralink is using a small bit of hardware implanted in the skull. This contains a battery that can be recharged wirelessly, and a low-power chip that gathers data from the electrodes, performs some simple processing on it, and then transmits that data wirelessly.