Month: September 2024

Enlarge / Following the 2022 Hunga volcano eruption, a nearby hydrothermal vent was seen coated with a white mat of bacteria and surrounded by a thick layer of ash. The vent usually supports animal life that survives using chemical energy from the vent fluid, but those creatures were almost entirely wiped out. (credit: Beinart, et. al.)

In January 2022, a placid patch of the ocean’s surface near the islands of Tonga suddenly exploded with activity. After a month or so of activity, an underwater eruption of unprecedented scale from the Hunga volcano blasted ash up through the water column and more than 30 miles into the air, where it quickly spread out in a billowing plume spanning hundreds of miles.

The blast was so powerful that it rang Earth like a bell; it produced a shockwave that circled the globe multiple times and released a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska. The eruption also triggered a tsunami that affected coastlines across the Pacific Ocean and made waves recorded in Japan, North and South America, and Antarctica.

Quite by surprise, scientists discovered that the eruption also had an underwater aftermath, recently described in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Enlarge / There are different types of Space Marines. Some of them are traitors. All of them weigh as much as a Fiat 500.

If you had given me, at age 15 or so, a game in which you can fight seemingly hundreds of Tyranid bugs at once with two friends, alternately blasting them with bolt rifles or pulverizing them with a chainsword, then finishing the biggest of them by ripping off one of his claws and shoving it through his head, all of it happening to the sounds of action-movie orchestration and dialogue about stoic duty, would I have had any complaints?

No, I would not. But we're spoiled for choice now. How much you enjoy Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 (for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation and releasing on September 9) will depend on your ability to tap into the deep basement of your kill-'em-all mentality and fantasy lore engagement. You can enjoy it somewhat ironically, which I did at times, especially when playing co-op with friends who told me that they did not like the game's aesthetics at all. But strip away the grimdark trappings of zealotry, Chaos Marines, and skulls—so, so many skulls—and you have a competent, sometimes innovative third-person squad shooter. It feels like Gears of War, minus the cover, but with heavier characters, more melee combat, and somehow even fewer women.

Getting the most out of Space Marine 2 means suspending disbelief, feeling heavy metal, and wanting to kill a whole bunch of things with some very big dudes. In roughly a dozen hours of gameplay, I found the core gameplay loop relatively engaging, with enough mix-ups, upgrades, and challenges to keep it feeling more like the fun kind of endless war, not the real kind. It's pretty enjoyable to team up with friends, too, so long as they're cool with Warhammer 40K's vibes and some occasionally repetitive challenges.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Starlink said it is complying with Brazil's order to block Elon Musk's X platform, backtracking from its earlier position that it would not block X until Brazilian officials released Starlink's frozen assets. In an update on Tuesday afternoon, Starlink said it is blocking X while continuing to fight the asset freeze in court.

"Following last week's order from [Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes] that froze Starlink's finances and prevents Starlink from conducting financial transactions in Brazil, we immediately initiated legal proceedings in the Brazilian Supreme Court explaining the gross illegality of this order and asking the Court to unfreeze our assets," SpaceX's satellite broadband division said. "Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing of our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil. We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre's recent orders violate the Brazilian constitution."

Starlink previously said that a Brazilian court order froze its assets "based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X." An Associated Press article said that "de Moraes froze Starlink's accounts last week as a means to compel it to cover X's fines that already exceeded $3 million, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group."