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Alt-week 3.23.13: Universal snapshots, cosmic world records and print your ride
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. If you are a fan of absolutes, then you are in the right place. We have a first, a fastest and a biggest in this week's round-up of all things sci-tech. We'll try to add one more to that -- a quickest. The quickest intro for this feature ever. Did we manage it? This is alt-week.
Bungie confirms leak of story info, concept art for Destiny
An IGN reader has provided the site with a bundle of Destiny art and story materials that it says were compiled by an ad agency. Destiny is the long-rumored secret project that will serve as Bungie's followup to the Halo series. The art shows an Earth in a future "littered with the ruins of man's Golden Age," according to the materials, with a huge alien ship sitting above the planet. There are also shots of various soldiers and war vehicles, along with a more final logo similar to the one we've seen before.And now Bungie has added to the collection with its own official piece of concept art above. On the official Bungie blog, the company vaguely confirms the leaks, saying, "Go ahead. Take a peek. It's alright. We weren't quite ready, but we will be soon, and we can't wait to finally show you what we've really been up to."The leaked documents describe Destiny as "fun and accessible to all," and say the property's goal is "to create a universe as deep, tangible and relatable as that of the Star Wars franchise." That leaked contract between Bungie and publisher Activision about the project suggests that this title will involve four games, as many DLC releases, and stretch across the next console generation, so it's possible that this art reveals the very first step in what might be a long journey forward.
Alt-week 10.13.12: is the Universe a simulation, cloning dinosaurs and singing mice
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Are you reading this? Seriously, are you? Sure, we know you think you are, but what if you're just a sub-feature of a complex computer program. A sprite, nothing more than the creation of software. The problem with this question is, how would you ever know? You wouldn't, right? Well, not so fast there. Turns out, maybe there is a way to unravel the matrix (if there is one). It'll come as no surprise, that this is one of the topics in this week's collection of alternative stories. Think that's all we got? Not even close. We'll explore the truth behind cloning dinosaurs, as well a rare performance by singing mice -- all before dinner. Or is it really dinner? This is alt-week.
Here's a look at the whole universe of Angry Birds games (so far)
Bad Piggies is the latest title added to Rovio's growing universe of Angry Birds games, and the latest word is that it's the fastest-selling game in the company's history, hitting number one on the App Store just a few hours after it launched. Given all of the various Angry Birds properties that have hit the App Store (and elsewhere), you might not have heard about everything Angry Birds out there. But worry not -- we've put together a quick guide here to the entire universe of Angry Birds. Here's a list of every single Angry Birds game Rovio has released so far, from the first title released back in December of 2009, all the way up until Bad Piggies' release about a week ago. Keep in mind that we're just talking about the games here -- this list doesn't include the countless bits and bobs of Angry Birds merchandise out there, and other partnerships like the upcoming Angry Birds TV show and maybe even a movie. Angry Birds (December 11, 2009): This is Rovio's original hit and its first iOS title (published by Chillingo, which is now part of EA) after a string of uninteresting J2ME releases and games for Nokia's N-Gage phone console. Since its original iOS release, the first version of Angry Birds has also shown up on a number of other mobile operating systems, including Android (as a freemium title), Windows Phone, Blackberry Tablet OS and Symbian. The original game has also seen about nine different free updates, as well as a number of promotional add-ons and content as well. Angry Birds HD (April 2, 2010): The iPad version of the game arrived about six months after the iPhone version, just as the first iPad appeared. The game wasn't fundamentally different, but the larger screen made for a larger audience, and the higher price point ($4.99) definitely made Rovio more money. The standard and HD games also got free versions at some point as well, with eight mini-episodes released for free. Angry Birds Seasons (October 21, 2010): Rovio introduced this first official spinoff just under a year after the original launch, featuring tons of new levels, and a regular holiday-based structure for updates (an HD version was released right around the same time). The game originally started out as Angry Birds Halloween, but as more holidays came around, it was updated to its current "Seasons" status. There have been 13 different updates to the game so far, with the latest being a "Back to School" update back in August of 2012. Angry Birds Magic (October 2010): This game, also called "Angry Birds in Florida" in some places, was made specifically for Nokia's NFC (near field communication) smartphones, and had a feature where when two smartphones with the game installed on them came near each other, different levels would be unlocked. The title was announced to great fanfare at a Nokia conference in mid-2010, and presumably it released on the smartphones later that year, though since we're all iPhone owners here, we have no idea how it turned out. Angry Birds Rio (March 22, 2011): This version of the game was created in conjunction with the animated movie Rio and featured a Rovio-built storyline that had the movie's birds crossing paths with the Angry ones. It premiered on the movie's release date with two sets of levels, and a series of updates provided more and more levels to go along with the film's storyline. This is arguably the least popular version of Angry Birds, although there's no doubt that both the game and the movie benefited from the shared marketing. And given that there's an Angry Birds TV show on the way, Hollywood paid close attention to this release. Angry Birds Chrome (May 11, 2011): Rovio designed a special browser-based version of the game for Google's Chrome browser, completely free to play and supported by in-app purchases. The game featured "Chrome bombs" which were special items that players had to find and hit with the frustrated fowl, in order to unlock "Chrome dimension" levels. Angry Birds Space (March 22, 2012): This game was billed as a full Angry Birds sequel, with all new levels and new gravity-based gameplay, as the birds were tossed off of actual planets and out into the upper reaches of space. But since the app's release, Rovio has spun it more as just another part of the current universe, with new twists on the game's tried-and-true method of throwing birds into pigs. Space spawned both HD and free versions on the App Store as well, and has been ported off to Android, Windows and Mac. Angry Birds Friends (May 23, 2012): Angry Birds Friends is the Facebook version of the game, which has been running online for a while now. The game features weekly tournaments and lots of competition between Facebookers and their friends. (There are also a number of other browser-based versions of the game that have been live at different times over the years, including promotions with Samsung, Formula 1 racing driver Heikki Kovalainen, Wonderful Pistachios, Pepsi, Fuji TV and a Finnish candy company. These games have all featured new levels and themed content, but have been live only during certain promotional times.) Angry Birds Trilogy (September 25, 2012): Rovio teamed up just a little while ago with console publisher Activision to bring the content from Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio to consoles as a downloadable title, including the Nintendo 3DS, the Xbox 360 (with Kinect integration) and the PlayStation 3. Sales only just started, so we'll have to wait and see how Rovio's birds do in the larger traditional gaming market after they have dominated so much in the mobile markets. Bad Piggies (September 27, 2012): Which brings us back to Bad Piggies, Rovio's current hit, and the first game in the series that is build around the Pigs, specifically the task of building them vehicles to try and find a map to the birds' eggs. There will likely be a whole slew of updates for this title as well, and then ... who knows? Rovio has certainly grown its Angry Birds franchise by capitalizing on the initial game, so as big as this universe is already, there's no doubt that the company still has lots of other ideas on how to make it even bigger.
IBM's Mira supercomputer tasked with simulating an entire universe in a fortnight
A universe that only exists in the mind of a supercomputer sounds a little far fetched, but one is going to come to live at the Argonne National Laboratory in October. A team of cosmologists is using IBM's Blue Gene/Q "Mira" supercomputer, the third fastest in the world, to run a simulation through the first 13 billion years after the big bang. It'll work by tracking the movement of trillions of particles as they collide and interact with each other, forming structures that could then transform into galaxies. As the project's only scheduled to last a fortnight, we're hoping it doesn't create any sentient characters clamoring for extra life, we've seen Blade Runner enough times to know it won't end well.
Scientists create simulation of the universe, reenact 14 billion years in a few months (video)
Are animations of Curiosity's Mars landing not enough to feed your space exploration appetite? Try this on for size: a group of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have generated what's billed as a full-fledged simulation of the universe. Arepo, the software behind the sim, took the observed afterglow of the big bang as its only input and sped things up by 14 billion years. The result was a model of the cosmos peppered with realistically depicted galaxies that look like our own and those around us. Previous programs created unseemly blobs of stars instead of the spiral galaxies that were hoped for because they divided space into cubes of fixed size and shape. Arepo's secret to producing accurate visualizations is its geometry; a grid that moves and flexes to mirror the motions of dark energy, dark matter, gasses and stars. Video playback of the celestial recreation clocks in at just over a minute, but it took Harvard's 1,024-core Odyssey super computer months to churn out. Next on the group's docket is tackling larger portions of the universe at a higher resolution. Head past the jump for the video and full press release, or hit the source links below for the nitty-gritty details in the team's trio of scholarly papers.
EVE Evolved: Four things MMOs can learn from EVE
New MMOs are released every year, and we often see them repeating the same mistakes as previous games or releasing without tried-and-tested mechanics. It just seems like common sense to learn from the years of mistakes and successes of other companies and previous titles, but it isn't always clear how to apply game mechanics or lessons from dissimilar types of game. EVE Online is as dissimilar from the typical MMO as you can get, but there are lessons to be learned from its turbulent nine-year history that can be applied to all MMO development. EVE has helped prove that you can start small and grow rather than raking in huge launch sales and then fading away. The past year has also shown conclusively that iteration on existing features can trump big expansions. EVE's market system and single-shard server have both been commended countless times over the game's nine-year history, and yet in all that time, few games have tried to replicate those features. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at four lessons learned from EVE Online that could easily be applied to other MMOs.
Storyboard: There are no bathrooms on Coruscant
A couple of weeks ago, someone raised a very reasonable question about characters in EVE Online -- do they date? They're all clones, they're born pretty much just to pilot ships, and they have a culture that keeps them in some variety of ship pretty much all the time. So do they date? Do they even know what differentiated genders are all about? Would they be capable of having a child in the conventional sense? Would the concept even occur to them to try? The problem is that we look at these characters and see human beings because they are human beings. They behave, by and large, in ways that we understand human beings to behave. And yet there are some pretty huge obstacles in the path of their natural behaviors, things that the developers don't seem to address. When you start to think about it hard enough, not only does it seem like they shouldn't date, but it seems like they wouldn't even know where to start dating. And if the idea of dating doesn't exist, a lot of our assumptions fall apart.
WildStar unveils world information page
The world of WildStar is one of adventure, intrigue, and of course, treasure. But many players are curious as to what kind of environs they'll be visiting, what grand sights they'll be seeing, and what unfortunate natives they'll be mercilessly slaughtering. Well, the folks at Carbine Studios are looking to relieve some of that curiosity with the freshly launched World page. The first planet up for review is one of the game's main hubs, Nexus. Originally the planet of the mysterious and technologically advanced Eldan, Nexus has since been claimed by the galactic empire known as The Dominion. As The Dominion declares war upon the planet's new settlers (known as the Exiles), treasure-hunters, pirates, and intergalactic corporations alike have come to Nexus in an attempt to find valuable and powerful Eldan artifacts and to uncover the secret of the Eldan's mysterious disappearance. For the full details, head on over to the WildStar official site.
Scientists capture birth of new planet on camera, mother and child doing just fine
After all the pushing, squeezing and screaming, the universe has finally given birth to a new planet, in an eruption that two scientists managed to capture on film. The newborn pile of planetary pudge, named LkCa 15 b, was discovered by Drs. Michael Ireland and Adam Kraus, who, over the course of 12 months, successfully documented the event using Keck telescopes and a technique called aperture mask interferometry. Their findings, published in Astrophysical Journal describe a Jupiter-like gaseous planet that likely began forming some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Located about 450 light years from Earth, it's also the youngest planet ever observed, having dethroned the previous record-holder, which was about five times older. According to Ireland and Kraus, the LkCa 15 b is still being formed out of a circle of dust and gas (pictured above) surrounding a 2-million-year-old star. By observing a "young gas giant in the process of formation," the researchers hope to find answers to fundamental questions that have long eluded them. "These very basic questions of when and where are best answered when you can actually see the planet forming, as the process is happening right now," Kraus explained to the AP. Head past the break to see an artist's rendering of the newborn, and if you get the chance, be sure to send flowers.
Giant body of water found in space, black hole claims it was just hydrating
Is that an intergalactic wave pool, or just a hungry, hungry quasar? Turns out it's a bit of both -- well, not the wave pool bit, but it's watery. A NASA-funded peep into the farthest reaches of the cosmos has uncovered this "feeding black hole" 12 billion light years away. APM 08279+5255, as this compacted mass of inescapable doom is affectionately known, has been gorging on water vapor and spewing out energy. How much H2O exactly? It's only the "largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe," and it weighs in at 140 trillion times the amount in our oceans. Located via the cooperation of two teams of astronomers and their star-gazing equipment -- the Z-Space instrument at California Institute of Technology's Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps -- this aqueous discovery proves the wet stuff is more universally omnipresent than we once thought. Also, surfing aliens, right?
Chicago's Adler Planetarium to start projecting 8K by 8K images from this July, put cinema screens to shame
Okay, so it's not quite 8K video, we're not there yet, but the Adler Planetarium and its brand new Grainger Sky Theater are about to show us what 64 megapixel images look like on a big screen. Described as the "largest single seamless digital image in the world," the picture inside the planetarium will come from 20 projectors hooked up to 45 computers processing data, and should provide the most lucid and captivating view unto our universe that one can get without actually exiting the Earth's atmosphere. The new show kicks off on July 8th, having been put together with aid from NASA and IBM among others. Jump past the break for the full press release.
Large Hadron Collider wants to make mini Big Bangs, Sheldon and Leonard disapprove
The Large Hadron Collider has been busily colliding protons since it opened last year, but a new set of experiments starting later this month could tell us more about the beginnings of the universe than we've ever known before. At CERN, where the LHC is housed in Geneva, scientists will attempt to create mini Big Bangs (the full-sized one is generally accepted as having created the actual universe about 13.7 billion years ago). The process will involve shooting lead ions through the 17-mile long collider, and accelerating them to relativistic speeds before colliding them head-on with protons. According to popular wisdom this should cause an explosion resulting in the creation of brand spanking new particles. Although similar experiments have been conducted on a much smaller scale at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, this will be the first time scientists have attempted to accurately recreate conditions exactly like the Big Bang. Hit the source link for the full story.
Motorola Flipout coming to AT&T this weekend, Windows Phone 7 gear on October 17?
We've just taken delivery of a fascinating (as opposed to Fascinating, we suppose) list of rumored upcoming launches on AT&T, so let's flesh 'em out. First up, we're apparently getting the Motorola Flipout and the LG Neon II this Sunday; the Flipout has been rumored for AT&T delivery and the Neon II is an obvious replacement (which Rogers has already launched) for the aging Neon, so that all makes good sense. Next up, RIM should contribute the BlackBerry Pearl 3G and Curve 3G on October 3rd alongside a device called the Laser from Pantech. October 17 is where things really heat up, though: we've got the Motorola "Bravo" and "Flipside" (we don't know what either of these are, but we can pretty safely assume they're Android offerings) along with the "Patek" and "Universe" from Samsung. Given the date's proximity to the presumed Windows Phone 7 launch, we'd argue that at least one of these is likely the Cetus or another Microsoft-powered handset to kick off AT&T's dive into the platform. So, who's lining up for the Flipout this weekend? [Thanks, Nawaid]
Galaxy shocker: laws of physics may vary throughout the universe
Oh, brother. Just when you thought you had everything figured out, along comes a team of astrophysicists based in Australia and England to turn your world upside-down. As the story goes, a new "report describes how one of the supposed fundamental constants of nature appears not to be constant after all," with the fine-structure constant actually varying throughout testing. The crew measured the number, dubbed "alpha," in about 300 faraway galaxies, and they consistently found that it measured differently than on Earth. Professor John Webb from the University of New South Wales even stated that it "seemed to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe," which effectively means we're back to square one on figuring just about everything out. Burn the books, kids.
New biggest star discovered, is not Justin Bieber
You know how sometimes you're just sitting out in a field with your homies, looking up at the stars and thinking man, the universe is so BIG... and I'm just so small! Thanks to the Very Large Telescope in Chile, Professor Paul Crowther at Sheffield University, and some good old-fashioned Hubble data, you can feel just a little bit smaller. Crowther and his team have measured the giant known as R136a1 to be 265 times the size of the sun. That's a pretty cool size, but not quite as cool as the 320 solar masses it was at birth -- nothing to sneeze at, since previous discoveries had the largest stars somewhere around 150 solar masses. It's also the most luminous star ever found, at 10 million times brighter than the sun. Even so, don't get your hopes up trying to see this with your telescope (unless it's, you know, Very Large) because it's a good 165,000 light years away. Doesn't mean you can't look in its direction and smile, though. [Image: ESO / M. Kornmesser]
Has the Higgs Boson been discovered by LHC rival? Are we still here? (Update: No Higgs discovery, and we're still here)
The Large Hadron Collider isn't the only bad boy on the block looking for the so-called God particle -- technically known as the Higgs Boson. A lesser known facility, the Tevatron -- located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois -- has also been furiously searching for the particle which would help to explain the origins of mass in the universe -- and it looks like they might have found it. A rumor has been swirling about recently that the found particle is a "three-sigma," meaning that it's got a 99.7 percent statistical likelihood of being correct -- but the lab itself has yet to confirm or deny. The Tevatron, which was completed 27 years ago, is the second largest accelerator in the world (after the LHC) and it's expected to be retired once the CERN facility is fully operational. Update: Well, that was fun for the few hours that it lasted. New Scientist has published a piece confirming that Tevatron is in fact denying the rumor, and no Higgs Boson discovery has gone down.
Planck telescope maps the universe in search of primordial light
Yep, that innocuous-looking picture above is the whole freaking universe, as perceived by the Planck telescope -- a long-wave light detector that's been catapulted into space to search for Big Bang clues. The European Space Agency is using it in order to get the most precise information to date on Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (apparent in the image as the magenta and yellow mush in the, ahem, background), which could in turn enlighten us on the conditions that gave rise to all of us omnivores prowling a gravity-assisted, ozone-protected, floating rock. The first mapping run took just over six months to complete, but the plan is to produce four such images using the Planck's super-cold (nearly at absolute zero) sensors before retiring the thing. Results are expected no sooner than 2013, so please do slide back from the edge of your seat.
GDC 2010: Hands-on with Faraway
Steph Thirion's first iPhone game was Eliss, a touchscreen-based arcade game that had you combining and maneuvering planets around one another, and trying to size-match them up with black holes to earn points. As he told us (stay tuned for an exclusive interview with the indie developer), it was pretty hard -- even more so than he actually intended it to be. So, for his second iPhone game, Faraway, he's gone much simpler. Inspired by the iPhone game Canabalt, Thirion has created a one-button game in which the goal is nothing less than to explore the universe. He has it running on a Mac at the show (so he can project the video onto a bigger screen), and we got to have some hands-on time with the new game. You control a comet that flies around an inky black void speckled with dots and circles; the pixelated space aesthetic from Eliss is back. This time, however, there's only one control, and it's a tap anywhere on the screen. Doing so will cause your comet to gravitate towards the nearest static dot, which will then slingshot you around the star until you let go, and the comet flings off in a new direction. There's an arrow pointing off of the screen, and by timing slingshots correctly, you will face the comet in the direction of the arrow.
Gary Whitta worked on a Warcraft screenplay
You'll notice that I surreptitiously left the question of "screenwriter" out of the other day's Breakfast Topic. That's because, quite frankly, I have no idea who I want writing the Warcraft movie. The folks I really like in Hollywood are probably too quirky to write an epic movie like this, and the folks who usually write these epic movies are too lame to handle a world like Warcraft. In my mind, only someone like Metzen should wield the pen for this one, and even then, his strengths lie in creating universes, not dialog. So I have no idea.But apparently there's already a screenplay being worked on: with the news that Sam Raimi is taking the helm, screenwriter Gary Whitta (who's written both for games and movies) says he'd been working with both Legendary and Blizzard on crafting a screenplay that included both the sprawling world and a story that would resonate with non-players. But he says that since Raimi took over, it's likely the whole thing will go in another direction, as "his own pretty specific vision of what he wanted to do story-wise." Whitta does say, however, that, from what he's heard, "Raimi is the best possible director for this." Sounds good to us.It'll be quite a tightrope to walk: depending on what Legendary actually wants out of the film, they've got to make the story interesting and pressing enough that even non-WoW players will get into it without ruining and/or ignoring the reason why there are so many players in the first place: the lush and intriguing universe we've all enjoyed playing in. Anyone tasked with putting together a script that uses all of those blocks to build something great will have quite a job ahead of them.[via Blue's News]
