Month: April 2023

Enlarge / En garde. (credit: Respawn)

2019's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was one of the rare Star Wars games to capture the thrills and the spirit of adventure that come with being a Jedi exploring the galaxy. With AAA production flair, the game blended a very '90s Star Wars expanded universe setup with the scale of a modern action-adventure game to great effect. The sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor significantly ups its predecessor’s scale, continuing Cal Kestis' story while expanding the suite of Jedi powers and worlds to explore.

In many ways, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the best of both worlds for classic and modern Star Wars. By blending the focus on a traditional galaxy-hopping adventure with the sprawling scope of a AAA adventure game, the follow-up to Fallen Order succeeds in offering a compelling and dense universe to explore. Although this sequel has some rough edges that can dull its main story, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a confident sequel that shows off the best of what a Star Wars game can aspire to be.

A Jedi knight story

As the second story of a Star Wars trilogy, Survivor keeps with the franchise's tradition of taking the characters and plot into darker territory. Picking up five years after the end of Fallen Order, Cal Kestis is now a full-fledged rebel and Jedi knight who has become one of the galaxy's most wanted. After a botched mission on Coruscant, Cal escapes to the frontier planet Koboh, leading to a new adventure where he unearths lost artifacts from the early days of the Jedi Order, builds new alliances, and reunites with old friends as he continues his fight against the Empire.

Enlarge / Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, alongside her partner Billy Evans, leaves a hearing at the Robert E. Peckham US Courthouse on March 17 in San Jose, California. (credit: Getty | Philip Pacheco)

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes just got a little more freedom—a delay of her 11-year prison sentence, which was previously scheduled to start Thursday, April 27.

In an unsurprising legal move, Holmes filed a last-ditch motion with the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, challenging a lower court's denial of bail as she appeals her conviction. Her motion in the appeals court triggered an automatic freeze of the bail denial until the appeals court issues a ruling.

On April 10, US District Judge Edward Davila denied her request to remain free as she pursued an appeal of her conviction. Davila ruled that her arguments for appealing the conviction did not raise a "substantial question of law or fact" and was unlikely to succeed. Thus, she was ordered to begin her prison term as scheduled.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Earlier this month, Montana passed the first bill to ban TikTok statewide, upsetting critics who claimed the law was unenforceable, both technically and legally. Now The Wall Street Journal reports that before the controversial bill could even officially reach Governor Greg Gianforte’s desk, he was already taking a pen to the bill and crossing out every mention of TikTok. Gianforte’s press secretary, Kaitlin Price, told Ars that his intent was to amend the bill to address critics’ technical and legal concerns with the original language.

“The amendment for consideration seeks to improve the bill by broadening Montanans' privacy protections beyond just TikTok and against all foreign adversaries, while also addressing the bill's technical and legal concerns,” Price told Ars.

Ars has since reviewed a draft of the governor’s proposed amendments, confirming that—rather than target TikTok specifically—the amended bill would instead take aim at all social media apps that “provide certain data to foreign adversaries.”

Enlarge / WASP-39b is much closer to its host star than any of our Solar System's planets are to the Sun. (credit: NASA)

Up until a few decades ago, the only planets we knew about were in our own Solar System, and that shaped the way we thought about planet formation and planetary chemistry. Now, with the identification of a large population of exoplanets, we have a lot of examples of things we've never seen before: mini Neptunes, super Earths, and hot Jupiters abound.

Figuring out what all these new things tell us is a bit of a mixed bag. It's relatively easy to figure out a planet's density and how much energy it will receive from its host star. But a given density is typically compatible with a range of materials—solid rock can work out to be the same as a large metal core and puffy atmosphere, for example. And the planet's temperature will depend heavily on things like the composition of its atmosphere and how much light its surface reflects.

So figuring out what we're looking at when we see data on an exoplanet is hard. But with the successful commissioning of the Webb Space Telescope, we're starting to get a bit further. In Wednesday's issue of Nature, scientists used data from the new telescope to infer the chemistry of a hot gas giant and find that there are things going on that we wouldn't see in our own Solar System.

Enlarge / WASP-39b is much closer to its host star than any of our Solar System's planets are to the Sun. (credit: NASA)

Up until a few decades ago, the only planets we knew about were in our own Solar System, and that shaped the way we thought about planet formation and planetary chemistry. Now, with the identification of a large population of exoplanets, we have a lot of examples of things we've never seen before: mini Neptunes, super Earths, and hot Jupiters abound.

Figuring out what all these new things tell us is a bit of a mixed bag. It's relatively easy to figure out a planet's density and how much energy it will receive from its host star. But a given density is typically compatible with a range of materials—solid rock can work out to be the same as a large metal core and puffy atmosphere, for example. And the planet's temperature will depend heavily on things like the composition of its atmosphere and how much light its surface reflects.

So figuring out what we're looking at when we see data on an exoplanet is hard. But with the successful commissioning of the Webb Space Telescope, we're starting to get a bit further. In Wednesday's issue of Nature, scientists used data from the new telescope to infer the chemistry of a hot gas giant and find that there are things going on that we wouldn't see in our own Solar System.

Enlarge / The wunderpus, one of the two species of octopus that we can now identify through the unique pattern of their stripes. (credit: Divelvanov)

Octopuses and other camouflaging cephalopods may be the literal embodiment of “now you see me, now you don’t.” Using both rapid color and texture changes, octopuses can blend into nearly every environment by mimicking things like fish on the sea floor or plants swaying with the waves. A cephalopod’s seamless camouflage makes it tricky for researchers to identify, track, and monitor these creatures in the wild, which has limited our ability to study them.

This may change for some species, thanks to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, published in PLOS ONE. The UC Berkeley researchers studying the lesser Pacific striped octopus (also called the zebra octopus, Octopus chierchiae), found that the animals’ striping patterns seemed to be individualized, similar to our fingerprint patterns. As this small cephalopod has previously been recommended as a new model organism for future studies, having these octopus “fingerprints” could help to solidify O. chierchiae’s place as the poster child for cephalopod research.

Cultivating laboratory octopuses

Studying octopuses in a laboratory is not for the faint-hearted. Most species usually live for one to three years and produce only one clutch of eggs during that time, making it difficult to track any sort of genetic lineage. Their intelligence and impish behavior make it tricky to keep them in an artificial habitat. Octopuses are predatory creatures, so they require the mental stimulation of hunting, along with special diets to maintain their well-being. Previous studies have shown that caged octopuses will cannibalize each other without proper nourishment.

Enlarge / The wunderpus, one of the two species of octopus that we can now identify through the unique pattern of their stripes. (credit: Divelvanov)

Octopuses and other camouflaging cephalopods may be the literal embodiment of “now you see me, now you don’t.” Using both rapid color and texture changes, octopuses can blend into nearly every environment by mimicking things like fish on the sea floor or plants swaying with the waves. A cephalopod’s seamless camouflage makes it tricky for researchers to identify, track, and monitor these creatures in the wild, which has limited our ability to study them.

This may change for some species, thanks to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, published in PLOS ONE. The UC Berkeley researchers studying the lesser Pacific striped octopus (also called the zebra octopus, Octopus chierchiae), found that the animals’ striping patterns seemed to be individualized, similar to our fingerprint patterns. As this small cephalopod has previously been recommended as a new model organism for future studies, having these octopus “fingerprints” could help to solidify O. chierchiae’s place as the poster child for cephalopod research.

Cultivating laboratory octopuses

Studying octopuses in a laboratory is not for the faint-hearted. Most species usually live for one to three years and produce only one clutch of eggs during that time, making it difficult to track any sort of genetic lineage. Their intelligence and impish behavior make it tricky to keep them in an artificial habitat. Octopuses are predatory creatures, so they require the mental stimulation of hunting, along with special diets to maintain their well-being. Previous studies have shown that caged octopuses will cannibalize each other without proper nourishment.