Month: June 2024

Enlarge / Looking more like a refrigerator than ever before. (credit: Microsoft)

A new version of Microsoft's top-end Xbox Series X will launch without a disc drive for the first time this holiday season.

The new "Digital Edition" console option—which sports 1 TB of storage and an Xbox Series S-like "Robot White" color scheme—will be available "in select markets" for an estimated retail price of $449 (or €499.99). That price is just $50 less than the MSRP for the current, disc-drive-equipped Xbox Series X, which is currently on sale for $449 from the Microsoft Store.

Word of Microsoft's plans for a disc-drive free Xbox Series X first leaked last September, as part of the FTC's case against the Microsoft/Activision merger. But the new disc-free Series X bears little resemblance to the cylindrical "Brooklin" refresh shown in those leaked promo materials, which also touted redesigned internals and improved power usage. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said at the time that "so much has changed" from the "old emails and documents" in those leaks.

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Tesla shareholders will vote on Thursday on whether to restore the mammoth pay package for chief executive Elon Musk that was struck down by a Delaware judge this year. But that is not expected to close the book on a legal saga that has consumed the electric-car maker and the leading US business law court that dared to defy Musk and his overseers on the company’s board.

In asking shareholders to approve of the same 2018 pay package that was nullified by the Delaware Court of Chancery in January, Tesla is relying on a legal principle known as “ratification,” in which the validity of a corporate action can be cemented by a shareholder vote. Ratification, the company told shareholders in a proxy note earlier this year, “will restore Tesla’s stockholder democracy.”

This instance, however, is the first time a company has tried to leverage that principle after its board was found to have breached its fiduciary duty to approve the deal in the first place.

Enlarge / NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

In a feat of galactic archeology, astronomers are using ever more detailed information to trace the origin of our galaxy—and to learn about how other galaxies formed in the early stages of the Universe. Using powerful space telescopes like Gaia and James Webb, astronomers are able to peer back in time and look at some of the oldest stars and galaxies. Between Gaia’s data on the position and movements of stars within our Milky Way and Webb’s observations of early galaxies that formed when the Universe was still young, astronomers are learning how galaxies come together and have made surprising discoveries that suggest the early Universe was busier and brighter than anyone previously imagined.

The Milky Way’s earliest pieces

In a recent paper, researchers using the Gaia space telescope identified two streams of stars, named Shakti and Shiva, each of which contains a total mass of around 10 million Suns and which are thought to have merged into the Milky Way around 12 billion years ago.

These streams were present even before the Milky Way had features like a disk or its spiral arms, and researchers think they could be some of the earliest building blocks of the galaxy as it developed.