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Quantum Break is a triumph in sci-fi gaming. Humanity, mystery, and scientific wizardry round out the plot’s best beats, and a jaw-dropping visual engine powers a few truly iconic sequences—ones that may even be cited for the next few years of the “games as cinema” conversation.

Quantum Break is also a mess. There’s not a ton of game to be found here, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why that’s the case. Worse, the developers’ focus on player choice and live-action TV segments offers way too little payoff—and threatens to derail new players before they can sink their teeth into the game’s best bits.

Only in a game like Quantum Break does that type of duality make sense. This is a universe where timelines criss-cross and where player decisions can create plot schisms. The Quantum Break we finally got, after years of teases and delays, floats in a time-frozen world where its two sides stare menacingly at each other: overblown corporate slop on one side of the time divide, and a big universe with a big heart on the other.

HAWTHORNE, CA—Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk took the stage at the Tesla Design Studio to reveal the Tesla Model 3. "It's very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport," Musk said. "The last time there was this level of carbon concentration in the atmosphere was 11 million years ago."

"Beyond global warming there are 53,000 deaths per year from auto emissions,"Musk added.

Tonight, Musk released the first official details on the company’s most important car to date, the Tesla Model 3. The base version of the all-electric vehicle will have a range of 215 miles, a continuous pane of glass on the rear roof, and front and rear trunks. Musk added that the car could comfortably fit a 7ft surfboard.

(credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Reddit has removed the warrant canary posted on its website, suggesting that the company may have been served with some sort of secret court order or document for user information.

At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed."

That language was conspicuously missing from the 2015 transparency report that was published Thursday morning. (Disclaimer: Ars and Reddit are owned by the same parent company, Advance Publications.)

Hospital-Associated Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Bacteria (credit: NIAID)

WASHINGTON—The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that trek between farms and clinics and across international boarders is unquestionably one of the most serious public health threats of our time. They currently sicken around two million people in the US each year, killing at least 23,000. To tackle the issue, the Obama Administration last year released a National Action Plan and established a panel of diverse experts to research and guide the government’s efforts to squash those deadly superbugs.

That 15-person panel, called the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria or PACCARB, convened this week in Washington, DC to discuss and vote on its first progress report and key recommendations, which now head to the president’s desk. Thursday, the council unanimously voted for six recommendations, which spanned calls for funding and collaboration. But chief among them is the call for the president to establish a White House-level leader that could coordinate all of the government agencies’ efforts to fight drug resistance.

Such a leader would be critical, several panel members as well as panel chair Martin Blaser, told Ars. Currently, efforts to fight off drug resistant germs are scattered among several agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Defense, and several others—all of which have different priorities and budgets. The piece-meal approaches even made it difficult for the panel to assess what government agencies were up to and how they overlapped.

Forget what J.R.R. Tolkien taught you about hobbits for a moment. In real life, Homo floresiensis, affectionately dubbed “the hobbit,” is a diminutive hominin species defined by skeletons discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. Since then, its status and identity have been the subject of much speculation, mystery, and controversy. That's partly because the hobbits were thought to have lived startlingly recently—just 12,000 years ago.

The idea of another hominin species living as recently as 12 kya (12 thousand years ago) had been both exciting and incredibly confusing. “We know that modern humans had got to Australia ... probably by 50 kya,” Richard Roberts, one of the researchers involved in the work, told Ars. Modern humans had passed through Southeast Asia on their way there, which means that they must have existed alongside any species living in their path at the time. Flores is not too far off that path.

In fact, many originally argued that the Flores skeletons were those of modern humans. Rather than a new species, some researchers suggested a variety of ailments that could create skeletons with a similar set of features to those of the hobbits. This would have cleared up another mystery—where modern humans go, related species go extinct. “We could never work out how you could have hobbits surviving so long after modern humans had [arrived],” says Roberts.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (credit: FCC)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted for two broadband-related proposals. One is designed to give Internet users more control over how Internet service providers monitor and monetize their Web usage. The second proposal will update the 31-year-old Lifeline phone subsidy program so that it can also be used to buy Internet service.

Both votes were 3-2, with Democrats approving and Republicans dissenting. The Lifeline vote was particularly contentious, as commissioners had worked on a bipartisan compromise last night and early this morning. The compromise fell apart at the last minute, delaying the meeting’s start by three-and-a-half hours.

The Lifeline proposal that was approved today will let poor people use a $9.25 monthly household subsidy to purchase home Internet or mobile broadband, or bundles including both voice and Internet. The vote set the Lifeline budget at $2.25 billion a year, indexed to inflation, while creating an independent entity to verify subscriber eligibility in order to reduce fraud.