Month: January 2022

Enlarge (credit: Robin Utrecht | Abaca Press | Alamy)

When Susan Schaap, 61, travels from her Dutch hometown of Zeewolde to the nearest city of Leylystad, the 30-minute drive takes her through vast tulip fields, interrupted only by wind turbines and sometimes sheep. But if Facebook parent company Meta’s plans are approved, her view would be replaced by the Netherlands’ largest ever data center.

Meta’s data center is “too big for a small town like Zeewolde,” says Schaap, who has become one of the project’s most vocal opponents. “There are 200 data centers in the Netherlands already,” she argues, and the move would give huge swathes of farmland to just one company, “which is not fair.”

A scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope. (credit: NASA)

For much of the world, Saturday was just another weekend day filled with all of this planet’s problems and perils. The Omicron-fueled pandemic raged around the globe. New York emerged from its first snowstorm of the season. Turmoil continued in Kazakhstan and elsewhere

But in space. In space. On Saturday, in space, there was a great triumph.

After a quarter century of effort by tens of thousands of people, more than $10 billion in taxpayer funding, and some 350 deployment mechanisms that had to go just so, the James Webb Space Telescope fully unfurled its wings. The massive spacecraft completed its final deployments and, by God, the process went smoothly.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Happy weekend, and welcome back to another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals we can find is headed up by a range of deals on digital Nintendo Switch games. The Mario maker is running a sweeping “New Year Sale” over at its online eShop, with many of the more notable discounts duplicated at third-party retailers such as Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Walmart, and Humble. While the sales don’t include price cuts on some of the most popular Switch games—there’s nothing for Zelda, Smash Bros., Animal Crossing, or Mario Kart here—the discounts still cover a variety of games we like and have previously recommended here at Ars.

We’ve curated a list of standout deals from the sale below, but among the particular highlights, the delightfully mischievous Untitled Goose Game is down to $10, while the Switch port of the breezy and charming puzzler Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is down to $28. Clubhouse Games, which collects 51 innocently fun mini-games that span various methods of play, is also on sale for $28. Several ports of easy recommendations are discounted as well, including near-universally acclaimed RPGs in Disco Elysium, The Witcher 3, and Divinity: Original Sin 2, the gorgeous Tetris Effect, and the chaotic first-person shooter Doom Eternal. Plus, there are a handful of deals on smaller-scale indies we’ve highlighted in past guides, including the moody action-adventure game Olija, the comedic and genre-shifting side-scroller The Messenger, and the satisfying roguelite Dead Cells.

Now, many of the multi-platform games on sale here can often be had for less on other devices, and Nintendo still charges a bit more than we’d like for years-old first party games in particular. (Games like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Super Mario Maker 2 would ideally be available for $40 by default these days, not just when they’re on sale.) Nevertheless, if you’re willing to pay the usual Nintendo premium for the Switch’s portability, all of the deals we’ve curated are well below their typical street prices, and the majority of them are either at the lowest price we’ve tracked for the Switch or at least very close.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

My favorite gaming discovery from the end of 2021 is probably Wordle—even though I had to decipher a cryptic social media puzzle to figure out what this popular new game actually was.

As 2021 came to a close and I bundled up beneath blankets due to an apparent omicron infection, I sought out simple entertainment that I could share with friends. Because of my fatigue and unease, breaking down plot threads in TV series like The Book of Boba Fett or Succession felt like too much.

An outburst of green, yellow, and gray squares on friends’ daily feeds got what little attention I could spare. What were these patterns? Why were fewer rows of boxes apparently better? And how come my favorite smart people were obsessed with it?

Enlarge / Astronomers mapped out the stars (shown here in blue) and gas (green) of the strange galaxy known as AGC 114905. (credit: Javier Román and Pavel Mancera Piña)

Three years ago, Filippo Fraternali and his colleagues spotted a half dozen mysteriously diffuse galaxies, which looked like sprawling cities of stars and gas. But unlike almost every other galaxy ever seen—including our own Milky Way—they didn’t seem to be enshrouded in huge masses of dark matter, which would normally hold those stellar metropolises together with their gravity. The scientists picked one to zoom in on, a modest-sized galaxy about 250,000 light-years away, and they pointed the 27 radio telescope antennas of the Very Large Array in New Mexico at it.

After gathering 40 hours’ worth of data, they mapped out the stars and gas and confirmed what the earlier snapshots had hinted at: “The dark matter content that we infer in this galaxy is much, much smaller than what you would expect,” says Fraternali, an astronomer at Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. If the team or their competitors find other such galaxies, it could pose a challenge for scientists’ view of dark matter, the dominant perspective in the field for at least 20 years. Fraternali and his team published their findings in December in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Enlarge /  LG DualUp Monitor (28MQ780). (credit: LG)

Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show previews a massive amount of products planned for release during the year. 2022’s show revealed the latest in PC monitors targeting better image quality, faster refresh rates, and features that help facilitate increasingly virtual workplaces.

There was a lot to see, so we’ve broken down seven of the most interesting monitors announced at CES 2022 below. We’ve included no concepts, no gag releases, and no gimmicks (OK, maybe a few gimmicks). Regardless, none of these products should end up as vaporware.

Here’s a look at some of the most unique monitors expected to come out over the next 12 months.