Month: January 2022

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Microsoft announced plans on Tuesday morning to purchase gaming mega-publisher Activision Blizzard for a record-setting $68.7 billion. When finalized, the acquisition would bring franchises like Call of Duty, Overwatch, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and many more under the umbrella of the Xbox maker.

Today’s announcement follows Microsoft’s $7.8 billion acquisition of Bethesda, announced just 15 months ago. After some initial confusion about what that purchase meant for Bethesda’s multi-platform titles, it has since become clear that most of Bethesda’s biggest franchises, such as The Elder Scrolls, will not appear on competing consoles like the PlayStation 5.

In an encouraging sign for fans of Activision Blizzard’s multi-platform games, Microsoft said in its announcement that “Activision Blizzard games are enjoyed on a variety of platforms, and we plan to continue to support those communities moving forward.” Bloomberg also cites “a person familiar with the company’s thinking” in reporting that “Microsoft plans to keep making some of Activision’s games for PlayStation consoles but will also keep some content exclusive to Xbox.”

Enlarge / A Russian 3-stage Proton rocket blasts into the sky in 2000. (credit: NASA)

Russia’s main space corporation, Roscosmos, said it is in the process of building four more Proton rockets before it shuts down production of the venerable booster.

In a news release, Roscosmos said the four rockets are on an assembly line at the Khrunichev State Space Research and Design Center’s factory in Moscow’s Fili district. After their production is complete, these four rockets will be added to its present inventory of 10 flight-ready Proton-M rockets. (The news release was translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell.)

Russia said it plans to launch these remaining 14 Proton rockets over the next four or five years. During this time frame Russia plans to transition payloads, such as military communications satellites, that would have launched on the Proton booster to the new Angara-A5 rocket.

Enlarge / A Starlink track running across the Andromeda galaxy. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories/IPAC)

SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. It already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has already received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there’s no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations.

How bad is it? A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images effected rose by a factor of 35, and the researchers estimate that, by the time the planned Starlink constellation is complete, pretty much every image from their hardware will have at least one track in it.

Looking widely

The hardware used for the analysis is called the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory. The ZTF is designed to pick up rare events, such as supernovae. It does so by scanning the entire sky repeatedly, with software scanning the resulting images to look for objects that were absent in early images but appeared in later ones. The ZTF’s high sensitivity makes it good for picking out dim objects, like asteroids, in our own Solar System.

Wordle! may have no real relation to the viral hit Wordle, but it’s enjoying a spike of popularity just the same.

Last week, we wrote about the legal status of a spate of shameless Wordle clones that briefly clogged the iOS App Store with attempts to cash in on the trend. Today, we get to focus on a story that’s almost the complete opposite of that—the developer behind a pre-existing app named Wordle! is donating the proceeds from an unexpected windfall driven by the unrelated viral hit.

Developer Steven Cravotta writes about how he created a game called Wordle! five years ago, at the age of 18, “mostly for fun, to sharpen my coding skillz, and maybe make a quick buck.” That game—which asks players to build as many words as they can from a set of letters in a strict time limit—drew about 100,000 free downloads in a matter of months before Cravotta “stopped updating and promoting the app,” he writes on Twitter.

Imagine Cravotta’s surprise when the usual pace of one or two legacy downloads a day suddenly increased to a reported 200,000 downloads a week. That popularity spike was, of course, the result of the viral popularity of the other Wordle, a daily in-browser word-guessing game created by Josh Wardle that happens to share the same name (and no other relationship).