firehose

In 2001, several million cows and sheep were slaughtered following a massive outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK. The illness' spread was eventually contained, but not after stoking international fears of a widespread livestock pandemic.

Should a more severe incident occur in the future, however, scientists will be prepared: the USDA has for more than a decade been stockpiling sperm, preserved using liquid nitrogen, from 18 different livestock species. All told, according to Modern Farmer, the agency's semen storehouse now boasts more than 700,000 samples. The intent of the storehouse is to protect both rare and common animal breeds from full-scale wipeout, and dole out semen to scientists, breeders, and farmers who need a particular strain.

Apparently Londoners aren't fond of being tracked by public trash cans. Less than a month after Renew began anonymously collecting information about people walking past their Wi-Fi-enabled trash bins, the City of London has put a stop to the practice. “We have already asked the firm concerned to stop this data collection immediately, and we have also taken the issue to the Information Commissioner’s Office,” the City of London said in a statement. ”Irrespective of what’s technically possible, anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public.”

Renew collected details on the speed and proximity of passersby using 12 of its 100 "smart" bomb-proof trash receptacles that were installed throughout the city ahead of 2012's Summer Olympics. The manufacturer of each smartphone within tracking distance was also logged, with Renew claiming that all of this data was simply being used to assist its partners produce better targeted advertising.

That did little to quell public concern, leading CEO Kaveh Memari to issue a public letter explaining Renew's intent. "At this stage, we are only running a pilot with extremely limited, encrypted, anonymous/aggregated data," he writes. "It is very much like a website, you can tell how many hits you have had and how many repeat visitors, but we cannot tell who, or anything personal about any of the visitors on the website." Nonetheless, Renew has already pulled the plug on the controversial experiment, confirming to Quartz that all trials have ceased.

Libraries that provide video games for cardholders to check out, as well as venues for members to play games within the library, increase the circulation of literature and create havens for younger patrons, according to a report from NPR.

The report surveys a handful of library systems that offer video games to its members. The Houston Public Library, which houses more than a dozen consoles and handheld systems for members to use — including seven PlayStation 3 and four Xbox 360 consoles hooked up to large screen TVs — says people who come in to play games often check out more books as well.

"It's a primary part of our service that we offer, and it results in a 15 to 20 percent increase in the circulation of books," Sandy Farmer, manager of Central Youth Services for the library, told NPR. "The kids and the teens spend more time here. Families come — their parents have things to do on the computers, because a lot of the families don't have computer access at home, so the kids have some things to do and while they're here. They find out, 'There's Superman. I can read Superman.'"

The New York Public Library's NYPLarcade program is similar to a book club, encouraging members who play the library's games to gather and discuss them.

"Gamers can come in, they can play games and they can also talk about them and engage in an analytical discussion: talk about strategic methods for winning and really sharing ideas and thoughts about how the games work, their structure and so forth," said Kevin Winkler, director of Library Sites and Services.

Hackensack, New Jersey's Johnson Public Library uses video games to create a safe space for teenagers, although with a few rules: no games rated M or above are allowed.

"[Video games are] fun, and I think there's a value to kids coming to the library and having fun and having a place where they can hang out with each other," said librarian Keri Adams. "There aren't a lot of safe places teenagers can go, so it's important to give them that, even if it isn't the most educational experience."

By Craig Pearson on August 12th, 2013 at 3:00 pm.

The mod news ticker is all tick-tick-tick-tack-tack-tack-i-will-kill-you-in-your-sleep. I usually don’t pay it that much attention, because it’s not plugged in and doesn’t actually exist, but now it’s clacking away and demanding that we should pay more attention to Mount & Blade’s mod scene. While I don’t imagine the High School Of The Dead mod it prints out is in anyway representative of the scene’s usual output, it’s silly enough to make me want to investigate more. I shall. Meanwhile, H.O.T.D. is a mod that brings high school pupils, zombies, cities, and civil unrest into the base game’s feudal war nonsense. There is some footage below. Also, can someone recommend an exorcist who deals in imaginary electronics? The news ticker is now spewing blood and doing something horrible with a crucifix.

Like I say, I’m more interested in the extremes it adds to the base game than anything else. I don’t know the lore of this particular piece of Japanese literature, so I can’t tell you what’s going on, why there’s a unit in the game called “Right-Wing Activist”, or even why there’s a gorilla in the screenshot. I do know that there’s free-roaming city-hub for you to explore, where multiple factions clash swinging makeshift weapons of brooms and what I think are hat-stands. It is strange, and I’m glad it exists. One man’s labour of love.

So now I have to find more polished mods for any game of the series. Or maybe you can tell me all about them, instead? There was one that popped up this weekend: the now obligatory Game Of Thrones mod that PC Gamer covered, and looks like it might be fun. Anything else? It can be really good, or really strange. Either are fine by me.

By RPS on August 12th, 2013 at 4:00 pm.

Jim and John have been playing the incredible top-down sci-fi roguelike, Teleglitch. They really do like it. Read on why below.

Jim: Let’s have a chat about Teleglitch in this window.
John: Okay. I haven’t gotten very far though.
Jim: Nor has anyone! Probably.
John: Have you gotten far enough to have a save point?
Jim: Yes, I have the first two save points.
John: Man!
Jim: That took some doing. And I haven’t been able to repeat the feat on my Steam install of it.
John: I’m very much a beginner, still learning to run and stab without getting hurt.
Jim: Stabbing is crucial to success, I believe. And in the game! Because it’s saves valuable gun resources.
John: Indeed. I was all bullet happy the first few times. Now I am bullet unhappy.
Jim: I think the most striking things about it, aside from the brutal difficulty, is how atmospheric it is – do you agree?
John: Yes. And I think so much of that is thanks to the top-down line-of-sight thing. It makes everything much more intense. Also, it’s the first rogue-like I’ve seen that tries to tell a consistent story. What was it about it that grabbed you? Why this game?

Jim: I was eating food with Quinns and he said “it’s a phenomenon!” He wouldn’t say much else. So I had a play and was immediately grabbed. It could have been made for me, actually. I love hammy sci-fi, and top-down games, and difficulty.
John: And teleporting.
Jim: I like that it’s even more lo-fi than 16-bit games of the same ilk.
John: I like that I’m ignorant enough that the super-sciency descriptions of the technology make me go, “Gosh, that’s interesting.”
Jim: Yeah, the sci-fi is sold really well, I think. It’s just sort of weird enough to be plausible, like reading stories about quantum physics in New Scientist.
John:Yes.
Jim: It’s really threatening, too, with the big droning areas of void and so on.
John: Yeah – the sound effects cannot be underrated. Especially the madness of the train noises.
Jim: All the effects, really. Visually it does some startling things with stuff like the weapon distortion blasts. It’s just beautifully made, in a way that a lot of games just miss. What I thought was odd, actually, was that I loved this but didn’t enjoy Hotline Miami, and I wondered if it was because in Teleglitch your death takes longer. You will die, but it’s seldom without a tooth-and-claw scrap. And there’s a lot of brutal improvisation with bombs and things to get past.
John: I’m exactly the same. I bounced off Hotline Miami as if it were made of spaceballoons. But was instantly hooked by Teleglitch. I feel like Teleglitch wants to be played.
Jim: There was an element of mystery on first play of it, too. I had no idea what to expect. And the game keeps that up.
John: Yes – I’m loving that the crafting is so smoothly implemented, not a fiddly distraction, and then allows me to be better equipped for my mad, scrambling panics.
Jim: Yes, even 3D games struggle to get across such a solid system of exploring, scavenging, and then piecing things together. I suppose it’s partly because it’s so simple, but it feels like a perfectly conceived system in a way that so few other games manage.
John: As you progress, do you ever get a greater feeling of stability? Even if it’s just enough ammo to feel calm for a bit?
Jim: Occasionally. It goes up and down, depending on if you waste resources by screwing up an encounter. But the game’s baddies escalate monstrously, and you have to do stuff like build a scanner that shows where ambushes will be, so you can avoid them. I’d say it just gets more and more tense. I can’t imagine what the final levels must be like.
John: Excellent!

Jim: It makes me feel weird that I will almost certainly never see those levels, no matter how much I might grind onwards with it. I can’t quite understand why I have spent so much time on it, either.
John: That’s what I wanted to find out from you. So you’ve no inkling?
Jim: I think it’s a skill mastery thing. I can detect myself getting better at it, and getting a little further each time. But only with sustained play. If I step away for a few weeks I have to relearn much of it. Often these days I have no patience for games that are wantonly difficult, so there must be something about the specific experience of the ones that grab me, some sweet spot of challenge and atmosphere. A challenge I want to best, an atmosphere I want to soak in.
John: For me, it masters something that so few games ever get right: when I fail, it’s all on me. And that, for me, is the incentive to keep going. When a game unfairly kills me I tend to think, “Right, I’m done.” But when I know it was my floundering fingers, I want to better that.
Jim: Yes, I think that’s down to the devs getting randomised content just right. They can’t rely on the player learning “this is where the ninja ambuses me” to get past a difficulty spike, so the fights have to be manageable with the tools the player has.
John: I really do wish that could be the case for more games – to take away the option for developers to think that we can rehearse a sequence before passing it.

Jim: Yeah, it’s bizarre, but I suppose inevitable given how people have ended up designing game as a necessary series of events. Blame Half-Life! Returning to Teleglitch, though, I think this proves yet again that games made with incredibly limited assets and resources can be just as compelling as anything made by giant studios. The realism wars are long over, I suppose, but games like this are just kicking the perfectly textured corpse As much as I think a lot of people will be put off by the roguelike brutality of Teleglitch, i can’t help but recommend everyone play it
John: It’s so odd, switching out of Papers Please to have this chat, wanting to go back to Teleglitch, and really not having considered that the graphics are lofi in the first place. I’m a massive gamewimp, but the brutality has only made me like it more. So I’d say the same, emphasising that if you’re usually put off by such things, this is the one to give a go anyway.

Teleglitch has been out for absolutely ages.

StarCraft Universe, the Blizzard-sanctioned StarCraft 2 mod that turns the real-time strategy title in a massively multiplayer online game, has turned to Kickstarter for development funding.

The mod, which has been in development for two years and will be released through Battle.net, takes place 11 years after the end of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. Developer Upheaval Arts is looking for $80,000 to finish the game's first act and get it into public beta. The first act will include two playable races, the Terran and Protoss, with the ability to play as Zerg a possible stretch goal.

Upheaval Arts notes that while Blizzard is not affiliated with the production of StarCraft Universe, the company has given the project its blessing.

"While Blizzard is not directly affiliated with this project's production, we do communicate with them to submit bug reports and make technical request," reads the post. "They have given their blessing/permission for us to launch this Kickstarter, and they are supporting our efforts by featuring SCU as an Arcade Highlight."

According to the Kickstarter page, funding will be used to expand the team, gain the resources to polish the mod and get it into players' hands "faster, better and sexier."

StarCraft Universe follows the "Utter Darkness" scenario and depicts a world in which Kerrigan dies and the remaining survivors struggle in the face of a hybrid onslaught. Players will need a copy of StarCraft 2 and access to Battle.net to play the free-to-pay mod. The prologue was released through Battle.net in February.

Jennifer Rouse

Researchers in Uppsala, Sweden, accidentally left a reaction running over the weekend and ended up solving a century-old chemistry problem. Their work has led to the development of new material, dubbed Upsalite, with remarkable water-binding properties. Upsalite promises to find applications in everything from humidity control at home to chemical manufacturing in industry.

Maria Strømme and colleagues at Uppsala University, whose work appears in the journal PLoS one, have modified a procedure dating back to 1908 to make a powdered and dry form of magnesium carbonate (MgCO₃). The reaction ingredients are all cheaply available: magnesium oxide (MgO) and carbon dioxide (CO₂), dissolved in methanol, a common industrial solvent. The result is pure, dry MgCO₃.

Dry in this case means very dry. In the chemical sense, it means void of almost any water molecules at all.

By Russ Frushtick
on August 12, 2013 at 3:01a

DuckTales: Remastered accomplishes a mighty feat, killing a small but cherished portion of my childhood in a matter of hours.

Wrap Up:

Ducktales would've been better left to 1980s nostalgia

If WayForward and Capcom's end goal was to recreate DuckTales while modernizing the presentation, they've accomplished just that. But other modern updates to classic NES titles have found more accessible, appealing ground, paying homage while improving the weaknesses of the source material. Instead, DuckTales: Remastered is full of miserably dull and frustrating mechanics behind its updated presentation — and no visual overhaul can hide that.

Ducktales Remastered was reviewed using code provided by Capcom. You can read more about Polygon's ethics policy here.

Gallery: DuckTales Remastered