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Our week or so with the Oculus Rift hasn't provided enough time to do full, deep-dive reviews of all 30 games that launched alongside the hardware (though we did find the time for a full VR playthrough of space station float-em-up Adr1ft). For those early adopters getting their shipments now, here are our early impressions of some of the games that have been filling out Rift's eye holes the most over the last few days.

Eve: Valkyrie

Developer: CCP Games
Price: $59.99 (free for pre-orders)

Definitely the most impressive Rift exclusive we've played so far, Eve Valkyrie has the potential to be a long-lasting killer app for the headset. Dogfighting in space planes is far from new in video games, but the same old genre manages to feel entirely new in VR.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bunch of great deals today, including huge savings on one of Dell's premium laptops. Now you can get a Dell XPS 15 laptop with a Core i7 processor, 3200x1800-pixel touchscreen, 512GB SSD, and 16GB of RAM for just $1,450. This loaded laptop is originally priced at $2,400, so it's worth snatching it up now while this deal can save you 40 percent.

Check out the rest of the deals listed below, especially a today-only deal that will save you $25 off $125+ eBay purchases.

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Scientists have just discovered a bizarre pattern in global weather. Extreme heat waves like the one that hit the eastern US in 2012, leaving at least 82 dead, don't just come out of nowhere. A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, reveals that heat waves arise in a predictable pattern roughly 40-50 days after an event called the Pacific Extreme Pattern.

During a Pacific Extreme Pattern, a large area of the Pacific north of Hawaii experiences unusual temperatures both at the water's surface and far above it in the atmosphere. Specifically, the southern part of the region gets far hotter than is typical, and the northeastern part of the region gets much colder. These unusual temperature patterns create a wave of weather effects that sweep over most of the US, then stop over the humid inland eastern region, creating a high pressure zone that brings clear skies and oppressive heat. The effect is intensified if there has been little rain in the east as well.

The researchers examined weather data from sensors in both the Pacific and throughout the eastern US between 1982-2015, finding that the Pacific Extreme Pattern was a strong predictor of heat waves. When the pattern emerges, there is a 1 in 4 chance that the eastern US will experience extreme heat in 50 days. There's a 1 in 2 chance that they'll experience it in 40 days. Given that the eastern US has a high population as well as many agricultural regions that are breadbaskets for the nation, this kind of long-range prediction could be lifesaving.

(credit: Matthew Kenwrick)

The perils of "distracted driving," particularly sending text messages while driving, has been well-reported. Now the New Jersey state legislature may soon consider a new threat—texting while walking.

New Jersey Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt has introduced a bill that would ban pedestrians from walking while texting, and the proposed legislation would bar the use of cell phones while walking altogether unless they're hands-free. For those who violate the walking-and-texting rule, Lampitt's bill allows fines of up to $50 or imprisonment of up to 15 days (the same penalties that the state imposes for jaywalkers).

If the bill passes, then New Jersey's rules for cell phone use would be the same for walkers and drivers. A total of 14 states, including New Jersey, bar hand-held cell phones while driving, and 46 states prohibit texting while driving, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.

(credit: Public Domain)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about half of outpatient antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary. Most of those unneeded drugs are given to treat viral colds despite the fact that antibiotics only treat bacterial infections—and not even all of those infections require an antibiotic.

The consequence of such overzealous prescribing is that more bacteria get exposed to drugs, giving them the opportunity to develop resistance. And subsequent drug-resistant bacteria can trigger difficult- or impossible-to-treat infections, which are now a critical public health threat. As many as two million people are sickened with antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year in the US, and 23,000 of those die from the infection.

Getting doctors to simply stop overprescribing sounds pretty easy. But as data on failed public health campaigns shows, it is not. Simply reaching out and informing doctors of the ills of overprescribing don’t work, largely because doctors are already aware of the problem. Yet, due to other factors, they keep overprescribing. Those other factors may be lack of time to accurately diagnose an infection or pressure from patients who may see an antibiotic as a cure-all and demand a prescription.

Enlarge / The good news is that not all iOS 9 users are affected by this bug! The bad news is that if you are affected, you might be stuck waiting on a fix. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Since iOS 9.3 was released last week, we've seen several complaints from users about links to external webpages in Safari or any iOS app—try to tap them, and instead of opening, they just sit there without doing anything. We weren't able to replicate the issue on our iDevices initially, but some extra sleuthing was able to track down a couple of potential sources for the issue.

Ben Collier probably has the most comprehensive description of what is going on. In iOS 9, developers can take advantage of a feature called "Universal Links" to associate their apps with their websites. When their app is installed on your phone or tablet, links to those sites open up in their apps instead of in Safari as they normally would.

It turns out that the app for travel site Booking.com crammed every single URL from its site into the list of associated links in its app rather than using wildcard characters to do the same thing. The list was 2.3MB in size, well beyond what iOS is apparently willing to tolerate. Instead of failing over gracefully, iOS chokes on either the size of this file or an associated bug in the system process for the Shared Web Credentials feature and simply refuses to work at all. Tapping the link does nothing, and long-pressing the link crashes your app entirely.

(credit: Ravedave)

For decades, farmers have known that the quickest way to fatten up young, healthy livestock is to feed them antibiotics—the drugs will even plump animals on a diet. It’s unclear why the practice, called growth promotion, works. Scientists have a range of hypotheses, including that the drugs may kill off gut microbes that compete for calories or knock back mild infections that would otherwise take energy to fight off. Whatever the answer, one thing is certain: growth promotion spurs drug-resistance in bacteria. And with the rise of infections from such superbugs in people—a major threat to public health—the practice is now squarely discouraged.

Yet, despite the long-held practice in farms, researchers are just beginning to harvest data on whether the drugs have the same effect on human babies in clinics. So far, much of the data—but not all—shows some concerning similarities.

Looking at a population-representative sample of nearly 22,000 children in the United Kingdom, researchers found that giving children three or more courses of antibiotics within the first two years of life modestly increased the likelihood that they would be obese at age four. The study, being published in Gastroenterology, follows several smaller studies that hinted at such a connection, particularly for antibiotics used in the first six months of life.

(credit: Flickr user: Steve Rhodes)

More than 50 advocacy groups today asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop zero-rating systems implemented by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T­-Mobile USA.

Zero-rating plans, which exempt certain content from monthly data caps, "enable ISPs to pick winners and losers online or create new tolls for websites and applications," said a letter sent to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. "As a result, they present a serious threat to the Open Internet: they distort competition, thwart innovation, threaten free speech, and restrict consumer choice—all harms the rules were meant to prevent."

Letter signers included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, MoveOn.org, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the New America’s Open Technology Institute, and the Rural Broadband Policy Group.