Month: February 2023

Enlarge / The Switch Online Game Boy Advance emulator will look and feel familiar if you've used the NES, SNES, Genesis, or N64 emulators. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nearly a year after apparently-Nintendo-developed Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch leaked online, Nintendo has finally made those emulators available to Switch Online subscribers. All subscribers can download the Game Boy emulator, which includes a combination of classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Game Boy Advance emulation, like Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis emulation, is exclusive to the more expensive "expansion pack" tier of the service.

Nintendo's first-party emulation efforts don't have an amazing reputation, and the N64 emulation, in particular, has suffered from accuracy issues and other bugs in the past (though Nintendo has addressed many of the problems that existed at launch). But the emulators for older and less-taxing-to-emulate 2D systems have generally been pretty good, and both Game Boy emulators fall into that group.

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  A selection of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Game Boy Color games always play in color, even if the original games were playable in the standard Game Boy. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

The user interfaces for both apps will be familiar to you if you've used any of these other first-party emulation apps on the Switch: a screen full of games (not very full at this point; per usual, the selection is limited at launch and will slowly expand over time) in a customizable grid. Zip over to the menu on the left to switch between single-player and offline and online multiplayer modes. But it's the Settings menu that we're most interested in.

Enlarge / People queue for clean water on February 9, 2023, in Hatay, Turkey. (credit: Getty | Burak Kara)

Deaths from the massive earthquake and aftershocks that violently struck parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday have now surpassed 20,000—a staggering toll of devastation.

As of Thursday, Turkey’s national emergency management agency reported more than 17,000 deaths, as well as over 70,000 injured. Syrian Ministry of Health, meanwhile, reported 1,347 deaths and 2,295 injured. Rescuers in rebel-held northwest areas of the country reported at least 2,030 deaths and at least 2,950 injured.

As heroic rescue crews continue sifting through the rubble of collapsed structures, concern is growing for those tens of thousands injured and countless others made more vulnerable by the crisis.

(credit: Valve)

Researchers have unearthed four game modes that could successfully exploit a critical vulnerability that remained unpatched in the popular Dota 2 video game for 15 months after a fix had become available.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-38003, resided in the open source JavaScript engine from Google known as V8, which is incorporated into Dota 2. Although Google patched the vulnerability in October 2021, Dota 2 developer Valve didn’t update its software to use the patched V8 engine until last month after researchers privately alerted the company that the critical vulnerability was being targeted.

Unclear intentions

A hacker took advantage of the delay by publishing a custom game mode last March that exploited the vulnerability, researchers from security firm Avast said. That same month, the same hacker published three additional game modes that very likely also exploited the vulnerability. Besides patching the vulnerability last month, Valve also removed all four modes.

Enlarge / Mexican jumping beans are actually seed pods from a shrub native to Mexico with moth larvae living inside. (credit: Devon McKee and A. Pasha Tabatabai/APS 2023)

Mexican jumping beans have been a curiosity for many an inquisitive child, and yes, they really do "jump," thanks to the presence of tiny moth larvae inside the seed pods. According to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review E by physicists at Seattle University, those jumps can help the moth larvae inside find shade to survive on hot days. And the jumping movements seem to follow a random walk strategy in order to do so.

The notion of a random walk is based in part on the physics concept of Brownian motion. Even though this technically describes random collisions between particles, it's a useful model that can easily be adapted to lots of different systems, biological, physical, or otherwise. The concept dates back to 1827, when a scientist named Robert Brown was studying pollen particles floating in water under a microscope. He noted a strange jittery motion and thought the pollen might perhaps be alive. But when he repeated the experiment using particles of dust, which he knew were not "alive," he still saw the jittery motion.

Brown never determined what caused the motion, but Albert Einstein did, in a 1905 paper in which he sought to confirm the existence of atoms and molecules. Einstein's relevant insight was that molecules in a fluid like water would randomly move about and collide with other small particles suspended in the fluid, like pollen or dust, giving rise to the "jittering" Brown had observed some 80 years earlier.