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Halo: MCC – August Update | Halo

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Welcome back to an update on all things MCC, we’ve got a lot to talk about!

When last we met, we provided an update on some of the new features, functionality, and content in the pipeline for Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which included further mod support, campaign collectibles, new armor customization, quality-of-life improvements, and more.

Our next MCC content update is coming soon (very soon!), so let’s dive into the details of what’s coming your way…

OVERVIEW

A good content update is prepared much like avocado on toast for breakfast. You cut the avocado in half and remove the stone, scoop out the flesh, squeeze in some lemon juice and mash what you’ve got with a fork until you’ve got the texture you want. Add some desired seasoning, toast your sourdough bread, throw on a splash of oil, apply the avocado spread, and voila!

That’s game development, folks.

We’re cutting the avocado in half, taking a look inside in much the same way that you’ll be doing with the mod tools we’re giving you for Halo: Reach in this update. (And yes, we’ve got Halo 2 Anniversary and Halo 4 mod tools coming further down the line.)

Think of the stone like the seasonal naming conventions we’ve hitherto had in MCC. We’re getting rid of it, as we are (like we’ve previously said) no longer releasing “seasons.”

Then we’re scooping out the flesh, which means that when the time of the week comes for the game to update—refreshing the playlist hopper data—you won’t have to relaunch the title, you’ll always be up to date with the latest event playlist.

Lemon juice. That’s a yellowy color, right? What’s another kind of yellowy color? You guessed it, gold! The Golden Moa collectibles that you’ve been searching for in Halo 3 as part of your regular campaign challenges are also coming to Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach.

Next, you want to mash up that avocado into the desired texture, much like you want to customize your Spartan or Elite so their appearance fits your preferences. On that front, we’ve got five new armor sets coming to Halo 2: Anniversary for you to play with!

And then comes the seasoning. Well, not seasoning, we just said we’re getting rid of that, but we are giving you the ability to change the main menu background video and set it to any one of your favorites from the past.

Don’t forget to toast your sourdough bread just like you toasted the enemy team in that last match! In the post-game carnage report, you’ll be seeing an updated screen which features the addition of poses, which are themselves also new customization items for you to acquire. All games (with the exception of ODST, which obviously doesn’t have PvP) will have poses implemented for both Spartans and Elites.

Throw on a splash of oil, giving that extra bit of flavor—much like how in-game dialogue (such as key mission dialogue outside of cutscenes and Sangheili dialogue in Spartan Ops) will now be largely subtitled.

Finally, spread that avocado onto your toast. Speaking of which, the Bandana and Acrophobia Skulls are spreading across titles, coming to Halo: Reach in this update so you can take to the skies and rain down an infinite amount of fire from your weapon of choice.

And there you have it. Avocado on toast, game development—how different are they, really?

(Note: do not let this writer’s ability to run with a silly little simile fool you into thinking that these processes are at all similar!)

MODDING

With this new content update, there are not only fixes and improvements to the existing mod tools for Halo: CE, Halo 2, Halo 3, and ODST, but mod tools for Halo: Reach are coming as well!

To be clear out of the gate here, mod tools for Reach are still in the process of being locked down. Our intent is to release this alongside the August update when it goes live next week, but there is a possibility that these will come just a little bit later to ensure it is up to the highest possible standard for public release.

While Halo 3‘s content workflow was mostly an iteration on Halo 2‘s, Reach‘s workflow has some notable differences.

This is a C#/WPF-based tool which replaces the functionality found in the C++/MFC-based “Guerilla” tool found in the previous games. It is a much richer development environment than what Guerilla has provided users thus far, making it much more than just a tag editor.

Reach was the first game to introduce a multiplayer game engine which could be driven by scripts, called “Megalo” scripts.

Included with the tools is not only this basic editor (with syntax highlighting and a few other bells ‘n’ whistles), but many of the in-production and old prototype Megalo scripts for game variants you’re familiar with. This includes things like CTF, Chess, Invasion, etc.

MegaloEdit compiles scripts into an intermediary .mglo file format. To play them normally, you’ll need to use the megalo-convert-variant-files tool command to convert them into .bin files. However, rapid iteration is a big focus of megalo variant development, and to that end we’ve added a “hot reload” feature to the MCC pause menu. This feature is currently present for Halo: Reach in custom games on PC and will be enabled for H4 and H2A once their mod tools are released.

This feature allows the party leader to directly load a .mglo file and instantly restart the match on it. This allows you to tweak your variant on the fly while playtesting and immediately test out your changes.

The new “hot reload” button for loading variants exported by MegaloEdit (one of the Halo: Reach mod tools) directly from the pause menu.
The dialog for specifying a Megalo variant to load from the pause menu. The match will restart with the specified variant for rapid iteration and playtesting.

ARMORY AMORE

The multiplayer component of Halo 2: Anniversary is getting some love in this content update with the addition of not one, nor two, nor even three, but five new Spartan armor sets and a slew of weapon skins.

Let’s take a closer look at ‘em!

You’ll further be able to customize your weapons (assault rifle, battle rifle, sniper, shotgun, and rocket launcher) with the Tie Die, Sandstorm, Blueing, and Black Tiger skins.

HALO: CUSTOM EDITION MAPS

Something that we wanted to inform players in advance is that we are looking to make changes and improvements to modding in Halo: Combat Evolved, which means that MCC’s support for playing Custom Edition map files will be removed in the future, as these changes are not compatible with Custom Edition’s map data format.

As a result, players will need to use the MCC’s Halo: CE mod tools to fix up and rebuild any old Custom Edition levels for use in MCC, as attempting to play old Custom Edition maps once this change takes place may either crash the game or simply cause it to fail to load.

Is this happening with the August update? No. This is intended to be an FYI to let players know that this will be happening in a future update, which—at the earliest—is likely to be the next major MCC update.

THE FUTURE OF SPARTAN POINTS

Due to the vast amount of customization content released in MCC over the years (armor, attachments, nameplates, skins, armor effects, voices, and more), we shared that we are exploring the addition of purchasable Spartan Points for players who found that particular mountain an intimidating one to climb, or who just wanted to button up the last of their items they need to get.

As expected, a lively conversation ensued across the community as well as within the MCC team. In addition to some frustrations at the prospects of purchasing SP, much of the feedback focused on general frustrations with the current SP earn rates in MCC (particularly once players have hit level 100).

No decision has been made around the potential for purchasable SP being added as a secondary vector in the future, but with regards to SP earn rate complaints and the current wall that exists upon hitting level 100—we agree with you and are working on designs now to address this feedback in a future update.

When we designed the progression system for MCC, the intent was always that Challenges would be the primary means of earning points. The stars didn’t align, and we weren’t able to ship the Challenge system alongside the original PC launch where we introduced the progression system (we held it back so we could meet our goals of supporting real-time Challenge progress, PvE Challenges, and general flexibility).

As a stopgap, we loaded 100 points (the total number needed to complete the Noble season track) into the first 100 progression levels. What we’ve seen since is a lot of understandable confusion about why the gravy train stops after Tour 4, Level 10. After all, what good is continued XP earning if it doesn’t feed back into Spartan Points?

We’ve evaluated this feedback for a while, but there was a key constraint which quickly shut things down each time we considered acting on it. Out of the box, progression level rewards are not retroactive. In other words, if we added a Spartan Point reward to every level, you would not retroactively receive points for any of the levels you’d already reached. This would punish our most engaged players as they would miss out on a lot of SP opportunities from levels they’d already reached.

We are working on a solution to this constraint and are happy to announce that, in a future content update, players will earn a Spartan Point from every level (from Tour 1 through Tour 11 for 329 points total) and players will retroactively receive points from levels they’ve already reached.

For example, I am currently Tour 7, Level 21, so I will instantly receive 101 Spartan points for the 101 levels beyond Tour 4, Level 10 that I’ve reached the first time I sign into MCC after this update.

The addition of SP rewards for all level-ups has the added benefit of making XP-only Challenges more worthwhile to complete. Speaking of Challenges, we’re looking to make continued adjustments to ensure they feel even more rewarding and further align with achievable, positive play behaviors. This means we will be looking in depth at challenge feedback, completion rates, and how they fit with current play patterns to consider additions, removals, and updates to challenge requirements. And we will also be looking to bring back Double XP Weekends.

Having this open dialog with our community is important to us as we navigate this path together. Your feedback has already directly helped drive upcoming changes to our current earnable Spartan Points model. We look forward to your thoughts on these changes and your continued feedback on MCC.

WHACHA GOT COOKIN’?

Let’s throw it over to a couple of members of the team to talk a bit more about some of the additional things they’ve been working on which are coming in this upcoming August update!

SKULLTACULAR!
Sean Cooper, Senior Software Engineer:
During the development of this CU, there was a moment in time where I was able to get QA to spend some cycles testing a side project of mine: adding new skulls to Reach!

The two most important skulls I wanted to focus on in terms of simplicity and fun value were Bandana and Acrophobia. These will show up in the campaign lobby only at this time, as adding support for new skulls to Firefight would require new binary versioning handling in the game variant which was beyond the scope of this side project.

I recommend checking them out, as astute players may find one of these new skulls helps them engage certain prey.

FORGE AHEAD
Dana Jerpbak, Software Engineer:
With our April CU, we made a few key additions to our Forge tools (the inclusion of team-based kill volumes and a handful of bug fixes). Our Forge friends seemed to appreciate these additions, but also seemed to want some more!

Well, as Noble Six once said, “I aim to please.”

Here are the Forge additions and improvements coming in our August CU.

  • Object Duplication (Reach): This feature was introduced in the original Halo 4 release and lets Forgers duplicate an object, retaining all of its properties—color, team assignment, boundary shape and size, etc.—at the press of a button. It’s a super handy feature, so we’ve added support for it to Reach where it now works exactly as it does in H4 and H2A.
  • Reset Orientation (Reach): This feature was always available in Reach from the Forge menu, but got its own handy hotkey in Halo 4. We’ve added this to Reach as well where it maps to right on the D-Pad on controller and has a customizable keybind on mouse & keyboard.
  • Delete By Palette / Delete Everything (Reach): This is another convenience feature which was introduced in Halo 4 and is now available in Reach. From the Forge menu, you can now delete all objects within a given palette, or all objects, at the push of a button.
  • Location Name Markers (Reach): This is a feature which was originally introduced in Halo 5’s Forge, which we’ve added a version of in Reach. Historically, Forge map variants have been subject to the named locations on the base map (on Forge World that’s Quarry, Coastline, Island, etc.) Now, you can set up your own with 256 names (curated from across Reach’s suite of MP and Firefight maps) to choose from. These are currently available on Forge World and Tempest (our “primary” Forge canvas maps).
The new Location Name Marker feature in Halo: Reach which allows Forgers to customize the names of areas on their map variants.
  • “Hold to Bake Lighting” (H4, H2A): Historically, swapping from Monitor mode to Player mode would automatically bake lighting on all dynamically lit objects on the map. This process is pretty fast on modern hardware, but it can still become an annoyance when repeatedly switching. In H4 and H2A, you can now choose to hold the button to bake lighting, or tap the button to switch modes instantly without baking. This will also be familiar to fans of Halo 5’s Forge tools.
  • Bug fixes and other additions: Aside from the items above, there were a number of bug fixes and smaller additions to Forge and Forge-adjacent features. To name a few, Elites can now pilot Sabers in Reach and the orientation of space fighters now appear correct for hosts and non-hosts alike in Reach and H4. A few missing vehicles have been added to Tempest’s Forge palettes. A timing issue with toggling rotation axes at high framerates in H4 and H2A has been resolved. Check out the patch notes when they drop for a full list of fixes!

We hope that all of these Forge improvements, alongside the release of Reach mod tools, will empower our creator community to keep making awesome things.

NO TIME TO DIE
Another long-standing issue we’ve fixed in this CU is the inconsistent time-to-kill of the Reach Magnum across matchmaking game variants.

This actually dates back to a quirk from Reach’s “TU1” Title Update back in 2011. This TU added the ability for designers to tune the Magnum’s damage multiplier (to enable things like the three-shot-kill Magnum in the Halo: CE Anniversary “CEX” variants). Modders can now play with this tuning in MegaloEdit!

The TU1 Magnum damage multiplier is a quantized floating point value. In this case, it is quantized such that there are 256 possible values between 0 and 10. This results in a step of 0.039370064. This means that any TU1 variant (that is, any variant created for or after CEX in 2011) can have a damage multiplier of 0.964566946 or 1.00393701, but never 1.0. Pre-TU1 variants default to a value of 1.0.

When spillover “bleedthrough” is enabled, any value in excess of 1.0 results in the fourth shot punching through shields, spilling over, and causing a headshot kill. If spillover is disabled, any value below 1.0 requires a fifth shot to break shields and a sixth to kill.

Legacy TU1 variants had a damage multiplier of 0.964566946 and MCC variants ended up with a multiplier of 1.00393701. For MCC, the team slayer variants used in matchmaking generally used legacy variants as the base whereas the FFA variants were generally re-exported. New variants like Escalation Slayer were also exported on MCC and ended up with MCC’s damage multiplier of 1.00393701. This was originally presumed to be due to floating point precision differences between x86 (Xenon / legacy) and x64 (Durango / MCC), but that was debunked by recreating the quantization on a standalone x86 application.

The fix retains the incorrect 0.964566946 multiplier from legacy for variants with spillover enabled. The correct behavior would be to set a multiplier of 1.0, but that would remove the legacy TU1 behavior of the fourth shot leaving a sliver of shields and would change the teamshooting meta so it corrects to the unintended legacy value. For variants without spillover, it corrects the multiplier to 1.0 to avoid the 6-shot-kill issue described above.

HALO 3 UNIFIED MEDALS
Dana Jerpbak, Software Engineer:
Back in our April update, we released a feature which added 51 multiplayer medals to Halo 3. This was something we’d been wanting to do ever since we designed our medal-driven progression system back in 2019.

Here’s a quick recap on the feature: We identified 51 medals from later Halo games (from Reach to Halo 2: Anniversary) which we wanted to include in Halo 3. Under the hood, these work exactly like the existing medals that Halo 3 shipped with. Players can customize how/if they are displayed in game by choosing from the following medal display options, but they are always tracked and visible in the post-game carnage report (and award XP in matchmaking as a result).

  • Unified: Medals are displayed in MCC’s unified medal flasher, using the unified art style. All medals, old and new, are displayed. This was intended for anyone who wanted more feedback for their actions in the game.
  • Original: Medals are displayed in Halo 3’s HUD, using their original art style. Only the medals which existed in the original Halo 3 release are displayed. This was intended for purists who wanted the original experience. There was one area where this did not meet the goal of matching the legacy experience which we’ll touch on below. Spoiler: it’s fixed with our upcoming MCC update!
  • Original+: Medals are displayed in Halo 3’s HUD, using their original art style. Only the medals which existed in the original Halo 3 release, as well as a small selection of new ones, are displayed. The new medals included are Headshot, Assist, and Supercombine and they all use their original Halo 3 art from the campaign metagame feature set. This was intended for purists who wanted the original experience, but with a small handful of targeted additions.
  • Off: No medals are displayed. This was an added bonus for anyone who wanted to minimize visual noise on their HUD.

Medals are a great way of tracking and rewarding a wide range of player actions across all of the Halo games in MCC. The problem was, Halo 3 supported significantly fewer medals than any of the other games (Halo: CE and Halo 2 had already received unified medal additions when MCC launched in 2014).

To mitigate this, we substantially increased the per-medal payout in Halo 3 when we introduced the progression system. This helped to even the playing field but was far from perfect, as it wasn’t uncommon to finish a Halo 3 match earning only one or two medals.

Back in 2019, we defined a list of medals we wanted to add to Halo 3. These included a variety of medals ranging from very common (easy) to very rare (difficult) and rewarding different kinds of playstyles. These medals would not only feed into the XP system, but also provide additional real-time feedback to players.

In the years since Halo 3 released (can you believe it’s going on 15 years?), there has been a trend towards games providing more and more feedback for things like kills, assists, and objective play (you can even observe this trend across the Halo titles within MCC). As a result of the changing times, new players may find the relative lack of feedback for these actions in Halo 3 confusing or unrewarding. Adding many of these medals required a lot of attention to detail, from defining specific precedence for overlapping medals, to subtle nuances in their criteria.

Whenever we add a feature to a legacy Halo engine in MCC, we strive to make it a natural extension of the engine’s systems. Adding these medals the right way required some detailed work across a fairly broad surface area. Because of this, our initial plans to add them got pushed out of 2019. We were excited to finally have time to implement these towards the end of 2021. It was a fun bit of archaeology to dig up some of the nuances of these medals from the games they were introduced in (which ranged from Reach to Halo 2: Anniversary) and to reconcile these details with how Halo 3’s medal systems work.

Over the course of implementing and playtesting these medals, we made a few emergent changes as well such as adding to our original list of medals to add and including the aforementioned “Original+” setting. At one point during a playtest, someone got a cheeky kill with a Fusion Coil which prompted us to include the Environmentalist medal which hadn’t otherwise been on our list.

Above, we mentioned that there was one case where the Original medal display setting didn’t live up to its name. To explain this, we need to explain the concept of precedence in more detail.

Some medals with overlapping criteria supersede one another. For example, defeating an opponent with a headshot will award the Headshot medal and not the generic Kill medal. Similarly, a Beatdown supersedes a Pummel, a Wheelman supersedes an Assist, and a Gravity Hammer Kill or Energy Sword Kill supersedes a Pummel.

In the original Halo 3 release, if you defeated an opponent with an Energy Sword, you would simply receive a Pummel (technically a Beatdown but these were renamed with the introduction of fancy assassinations in Halo: Reach) medal. In MCC, the Energy Sword Kill medal now takes precedence, but it’s only displayed in the Unified medal flasher.

As a result, players using the Original setting actually got less feedback than they did previously. This was not our intention, and we heard your feedback loud and clear. In the upcoming MCC update, you’ll see the legacy Pummel medal in the HUD when earning melee weapon kills exactly as you did before. Under the hood, these are still mapped to the Energy Sword Kill and Gravity Hammer Kill medals for the sake of the PGCR and XP rewards.

MENU À LA CARTE

With this CU, we’ve made a number of quality-of-life additions and improvements to our season—now “series”—UI. Grinding for and equipping cool cosmetics across MCC is something we want players to be able to do without too much hassle.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the improvements we’ve made…

  • New Options & Career screen: The Options & Career screen is the hub from which players access unlocks, customization, settings, and more. This screen hadn’t seen too many changes (excepting the addition of new sub-menus) since MCC’s original release in 2014, and it was due for an upgrade. We’ve rebuilt this screen from scratch with a new vertical layout, a preview panel providing contextual information about its sub-menus, and access to the roster. The Exchange is also now accessed from this screen, meaning that it’s available without backing all the way out to the main menu (which required leaving your squad if you were in one).
MCC’s new and improved Options & Career screen, a hub where players can access various menus for unlocking rewards, tracking progress, and customizing their experience.
  • Bulk unlocks: Unlocking items individually can be tedious, especially if you’ve got a lot of Spartan Points to spend. We’ve added two ways to expedite this process. You can now select a tier on any future page of a Series and unlock it and all preceding items in bulk. In MCC, you only need to unlock all tiers on the preceding page to get access to a given item, so the bulk unlock behavior will unlock only the bare minimum number of items to reach the target item. Alternatively, there is an Unlock All button to unlock the entire Series. In addition to this, we’ve made some backend optimizations which make unlocks (whether for a single item or in bulk) about 30% faster than before.
New bulk unlock functionality allows players to unlock a range of Series tiers (or even an entire Series) at once without manually unlocking each tier individually.
  • Series pinning: Now that there isn’t a “current” Series with new unlocks being added to the Exchange instead, we needed to make a few UI changes. First, the preview widget in the Main Menu will now display information about the Exchange by default as opposed to progress towards the current Series. Players can now choose to “pin” a Series of their choice to automatically land on it when opening the Catalog and to see its progress featured in this preview widget.
  • Customization menu improvements: There are a lot of unlockable items in MCC (roughly 2,000, in fact). Historically, if you found a locked item in the Customization menu that you were interested in, you’d have to scour the Season Overview (now “Catalog”), Exchange, and Challenge Hub to try to find where to unlock it. With this CU, we’ve categorized items by their unlock source to save you the trouble.
New customization menu categorization allows players to understand how and where to unlock items.

If you read the summary on the server incident we experienced back in April, you may recall that our ability to propagate our server-side fix out to users was hampered by a requirement for the MCC game client to be restarted in order to download new configuration data. This is true of all of the data in our Content Management System (such as matchmaking hopper config, message of the day, server pairing info, and more), or rather it was.

With the August CU, that limitation is a thing of the past. Whenever a new CMS change is pushed, players will receive it automatically without needing to relaunch. If matchmaking hoppers change (as they typically do each Wednesday at 10 AM Pacific), you’ll simply receive a notification that new data is available and be briefly popped out of matchmaking to retrieve it upon completion of your next match. This works seamlessly across squads and will solve those pesky cases where someone joins with incompatible data or where you can’t find a match because you’re on outdated data.

And so, that brings us to the end of this update on what’s coming in the August update for MCC. 

We are targeting release on August 31 (next Wednesday) for this content update, which means you’ll be able to get hands-on with it very soon. We can’t wait to see what you make of all the new additions, tweaks, and improvements, so keep that feedback coming! 

See you out there on the virtual battlefield!

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Entertainment

Jennifer Lopez flashes her abs in white crop top while holding hands with new husband Ben Affleck

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Jennifer Lopez and new husband Ben Affleck delight fans with a romantic sidewalk KISS as they lovingly hold hands while shopping in Milan during romantic honeymoon tour

By Alesia Stanford For Dailymail.Com

Published: | Updated:

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Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck were the picture of newlywed bliss during a shopping trip in Milan, Italy on Thursday. 

The newlyweds are enjoying a second honeymoon in the global fashion capital after walking down the aisle, again, in a lavish wedding for family and friends at the Oscar winner’s home in Riceboro, Georgia August 20.

The Marry Me star, 53, looked chic in a white pant suit with a crew neck crop top and high waist pants that allowed her to showcase her trim tummy and toned arms. 

Honeymoon: Jennifer Lopez, 53, and Ben Affleck, 50, were the picture of newlywed bliss in Milan, Italy when then went on a shopping trip in the global fashion capital Thursday while on their second honeymoon

The new bride accented her ensemble with a white fedora, gold necklace, neutral toned high heels and a multicolored purse. 

The Grammy winner’s hair was styled in long, loose waves and she wore daytime makeup for the romp through the city which has been around for more than two thousand years.

Ben, 50, donned more casual attire for the shopping excursion. 

The Clerks III star chose distressed jean, a white t-shirt and teal camp shirt as he held hands with his wife. 

Photo frenzy: The glamorous couple created a photographic frenzy at the Brunello Cucinelli store as fans pulled out their cell phones to record their brief encounter with the celebrity couple, who seemed to take the attention in stride

PDA: The pair stayed close to each other in the store and The Last Duel actor could be seen placing his hand on the Hustlers star’s bottom as they stood looking at items in a display case

Purchase: The shopping trip was successful, as Ben could be seen carrying a white shopping bag with a new purchase hidden inside. After the shopping trip, bodyguards helped the captivating couple made a quick getaway with help from security guards

His salt and pepper beard was closely cropped and he wore white sneakers and aviator style sunglasses.

The glamorous couple created a photographic frenzy at the Brunello Cucinelli store as fans pulled out their cell phones to record their brief encounter with the celebrity couple, who seemed to take the attention in stride. 

The Let It Be Me singer flashed a brilliant smile as Ben lead her though the crowd. 

Chic: The Marry Me star looked chic in a white pant suit with a crew neck crop top and high waist pants that allowed her to showcase her trim tummy and toned arms. 

Casual: Ben donned more casual attire for the shopping excursion. chose distressed jean, a white t-shirt and teal camp shirt. The new bride accented her ensemble with a white fedora, gold necklace, neutral toned high heels and a multicolored purse

The pair stayed close to each other in the store and The Last Duel actor could be seen placing his hand on the Hustlers star’s bottom as they stood looking at items in a display case. 

The shopping trip was successful, as Ben could be seen carrying a white shopping bag with a new purchase hidden inside. 

After the shopping trip, bodyguards helped the captivating couple made a quick getaway with help from security guards. 

Eloped: Ben and Jen eloped to Las Vegas July 17 and took their kids to Paris. They later spent part of their first honeymoon in Capri, Italy, where the multi-talented singer and dancer performed in the LuisaViaRoma Gala for UNICEF

Ben and Jen eloped to Las Vegas July 17 and took their kids to Paris.

They later spent  part of their first honeymoon in Capri, Italy, where the multi-talented singer and dancer performed in the LuisaViaRoma Gala for UNICEF. 

The famous pair seem to be child-free and focusing on themselves this time around. Before heading to Milan, they were been spotted canoodling while enjoying dinner in Lake Como.  

Alone: The famous pair seem to be child-free and focusing on themselves this time around. Before heading to Milan, they were been spotted canoodling while enjoying dinner in Lake Como

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Entertainment

‘Britney was broken. I’ve been broken and it’s horrible’: Elton John on helping Britney Spears sing again | Elton John

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This July, in a small basement studio in Beverly Hills surrounded by candles, coloured lights, keyboards and her new husband, Britney Spears rebooted her music career. Six years since her last album, and nine months since she was freed from the conservatorship that had ruled her life for 13 years, she was at the home studio of producer Andrew Watt, recording her parts for Hold Me Closer – a duet with Elton John which mashes up perhaps his defining hit, 1971’s Tiny Dancer, with his 1992 song The One (and a dash of 1976’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart).

Spears arrived with her vocals warmed up and determined ideas about her contribution, and nailed the performance in less than two hours. “She sang fantastically,” says John from his house in the south of France. “Everyone was saying they don’t think she can sing any more. But I said, she was brilliant when she started so I think she can. And she did it, and I was so thrilled with what she did.”

Released today, the euphoric Hold Me Closer follows Cold Heart, John’s 2021 duet with Dua Lipa, which combined his hits Rocket Man, Sacrifice, Kiss the Bride and Where’s the Shoorah? and made him the first solo artist to score a UK Top 10 single in six different decades. “I want to do one every year for a fun, happy summer record,” says John. After he and Watt created the new Tiny Dancer remix, they weren’t sure who to invite in as guest vocalist. Then John’s husband, David Furnish, had an idea. “He said it would be wonderful for Britney Spears to do it,” John says, as the pair sit side by side the day after he surprised diners in a Cannes restaurant with an impromptu performance of the song. “I said, that’s a pretty amazing idea. She hadn’t done anything for so long. I’d been following what’s been happening to her for a long time.”

The single Hold Me Closer.

John had been an admirer since day one. “She just put out incredibly brilliant records,” he says. “She sang and danced so beautifully.” They first met at his Aids foundation Oscars viewing party in 2013, and she was “lovely – adorable”. And they had their respective Las Vegas residencies at the same time, her at Planet Hollywood, him at Caesars Palace. But even though they often stayed in the same apartment block, “we didn’t really see each other”, says John.

Given what we now know, it’s hard to imagine many people saw Spears at that time. In her fearsome testimony to a court hearing on her conservatorship in June 2021, Spears said she was punished and put on lithium for rejecting some new choreography during the residency, and likened herself to a slave, earning millions for the controllers of the arrangement, including her father, Jamie Spears, while being allocated a $2,000 weekly allowance herself.

Elton John during his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour in New Orleans in January. Photograph: Derick Hingle/AP

In January 2019, she cancelled the residency and announced an “indefinite work hiatus”. Soon after, the #FreeBritney movement went mainstream, convinced – accurately, it would transpire – that Spears was being exploited and abused. In September 2021, the New York Times released the documentary Framing Britney Spears, detailing her fight with her father. John watched it. “You forget she was the biggest star in the whole world at that time. And to see what happened to her makes me so angry. What happened to her shouldn’t have happened to anybody.”

Spears was freed from her conservatorship by a judge in November 2021. The following month, she said that her experiences had left her scared of the music industry, with no intention of picking up her career. “Not doing my music any more is a way of saying ‘fuck you’,” she wrote on Instagram. But she didn’t need any convincing to join John for the duet, he says.

Spears was going to fly to London to record with John, but she was in the middle of her honeymoon after her wedding to the Iranian American model and actor Sam Asghari – having been restricted from marrying or managing her own birth control under the conservatorship – and so recorded with Watt at his studio in Los Angeles. He had never met her before. When she arrived, they talked about music they loved. “She asked me who my favourite artists were – Prince – and I asked her who hers was. She said Elton John,” says Watt. “The song meant so much to her, and you can hear it in her vocal performance. She’s singing her ass off.”

It was as if no time had passed since Spears last stepped inside a studio, Watt adds. “She was so prepared. She had spent time with the record and knew how she wanted to do it.” To construct the song, he explains meticulously, he took the guitar from Tiny Dancer, originally buried so low in the mix you could hardly hear it, and fiddled with the tempo. Extracting the original bass and strings and speeding them up gave it a disco feel. To amplify that sense of transcendence, he punctuated the song with a scale-climbing, heaven-bound sample of “hold me closer”. And John played new Rhodes piano (those are his original vocals).

Music producer Andrew Watt in his home studio in Los Angeles. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Watt is 31, the prime age to have been a huge childhood Spears fan with her posters on his wall. He was now faced with one of the biggest pop stars of all time recording her instantly identifiable, strobing, rasping vocals in the same room. “She’s unbelievable at layering her voice and doubling, which is one of the hardest things to do. She really pushed herself, vocally. Sometimes when you produce, the greatest thing in the world you can do is say nothing, so I just let her do her thing. She’s so good at knowing when she got the right take. She took complete control.”

Spears recorded the falsetto parts first, then the lines where she belts. Watt never had to ask her to do anything, and watched as she exacted her own high standards. “She kept going: ‘Nope, again, again, again.’” Then she had an “amazing idea”, he says. “She wanted to listen to the music a bunch of times and she started doing all her incredible ad libs that make the record so her. Tiny Dancer with her voice is special enough, but then she went through and did all these amazing runs.”

Once they had recorded, Spears was “incredibly specific” about how she wanted her vocals and levels mixed, he says. “She was really collaborative and had really good ideas about the production. She’s an expert in music to make you dance.” (Spears’s primary form of performance in recent years has been posting self-choreographed dance videos to Instagram.) “So many of her records are pop perfection, she worked with the greatest of all time and made timeless pop. We experimented with speeding the record up and turning certain elements of the sound up to get it pumping and make you wanna dance.”

Britney Spears performing in San Jose, California in 2016. Photograph: Steve Jennings/WireImage

Given how disempowered Spears has said she was in the process of making her own music during the conservatorship, she must have felt liberated to wield her expertise in the studio, I suggest. “We didn’t really get into that,” says Watt. “She came there to sing and record. She’s so pro. And if that was something that she was thinking about, she put it all into the record.”

It was afterwards, John admits, that Spears needed some convincing that releasing the track was the right thing to do. (On 25 August, she tweeted about being “kinda overwhelmed … it’s a big deal to me !!!”) “We had to get her to approve what she did,” he says. “She’s been away so long – there’s a lot of fear there because she’s been betrayed so many times and she hasn’t really been in the public eye officially for so long. We’ve been holding her hand through the whole process, reassuring her that everything’s gonna be alright.”

“I’m so excited to be able to do it with her because if it is a big hit, and I think it may be, it will give her so much more confidence than she’s got already and she will realise that people actually love her and care for her and want her to be happy. That’s all anybody in their right mind would want after she went through such a traumatic time.”

John is no stranger to helping musicians experiencing difficulties whether in their personal or professional lives, from George Michael, Robbie Williams and Geri Horner (Halliwell) in the 90s to contemporary artists such as Lewis Capaldi, the xx’s Oliver Sim and Sam Fender. He’s motivated by his memories of his own struggles, he says. “It’s hard when you’re young. Britney was broken. I was broken when I got sober. I was in a terrible place. I’ve been through that broken feeling and it’s horrible. And luckily enough, I’ve been sober for 32 years and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been. Now I’ve got the experience to be able to advise people and help them because I don’t want to see any artists in a dark place. A lot of artists, you’d think they’d have a lot of self-esteem but they don’t, and that’s why we go onstage and we get the applause, and then we come offstage and we’re back to square one.”

He wants musicians to “enjoy what they’re doing and feel that they’re worthwhile”, he says. “They deserve to be happy and to be loved and to have an affirmation from someone like me. When I first went to America, I had affirmations from Leon Russell, George Harrison, the Band, Neil Diamond – it made me so happy. It makes you realise they cared and it gave me validation that what I was doing was OK.”

The artists as children on the Hold Me Closer artwork.

Peer support is one thing: should the industry be better regulated to support musicians and prevent exploitation? “It’s down to having a good manager for a start,” says John. “Someone who’s with you 24/7, who believes in you. It’s all about reaching out. I never reached out and asked for help because I thought, I’m too proud – it will make me feel weak. A lot of these artists don’t reach out for help, so I found out and ring up and then we get together.

“I don’t really know about the music industry. Everyone’s got a different case. It’s very hard for young musicians today to jumpstart a career. Sam Fender has done it with his second record. Little Simz has been fantastic, but she couldn’t go to America because she didn’t have the money to do her tour, which is a disaster for her because the record is doing quite well in America. So there’s a lot of pressure. It is what it is. But I’m Uncle Elton. They can phone me.”

As for Spears, she tweeted before the release that she’s learning “every day is a clean slate to try and be a better person and do what makes me happy … I want to be fearless like when I was younger.”

“Rehabilitation is such a wonderful thing for anybody,” says John. “And I’m just crossing my fingers that this will restore her confidence in herself to get back into the studio, make more records, and realise that she is bloody good.”

Hold Me Closer is out now.

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Health

Exposure to Sun, Heat and Humidity Can Exacerbate Symptoms of Mental Disorders

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Summary: Researchers report exposure to hot, humid weather can trigger mental health symptoms that require emergency care.

Source: University at Albany

Exposure to sunny, hot and humid weather can trigger severe symptoms of mental disorders, requiring emergency care. So reports a recent study, led by researchers at the University at Albany, which used data on New York State weather and hospital emergency visits to assess how features of summer weather affect people with mental disorders.

The research was the first to evaluate combined effects of multiple meteorological factors across all classes of mental disorders designated by the World Health Organization.

These findings, published in Environment International, could inform strategies to improve patient care.

Lead author Xinlei Deng, who completed his Ph.D. in May in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UAlbany, says, “We know that weather affects mood. But while a warm, bright day is a boost for some, others can become more easily agitated or quicker to anger. For people with mental disorders, changes in multiple weather factors can provoke symptoms that pose serious health risks.”

“By examining local weather conditions together with information on emergency department visits, we found clear trends connecting high heat, humidity and sun exposure with increased emergency admissions due to mental disorders, especially among patients suffering symptoms linked to psychoactive substance use, mood disorders, stress disorders and adult behavior disorders, which can include forms of violence like pyromania.

” Understanding these connections can help care providers shape interventions to protect patient well-being.”

The statewide analysis included two six-month study periods, focusing on the warmer months: May-October, in 2017 and 2018.

The team leveraged meteorological data from NYS Mesonet––a UAlbany-operated network of 126 weather stations in every county and borough in New York, which record atmospheric and soil conditions at 5-minute intervals. Their study looked at data on temperature, solar radiation, relative humidity, heat index and rainfall.

Emergency department visits due to mental disorders were identified using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). Disorders are coded by subtype, which include categories like stress-related disorders, intellectual disabilities and intentional self-harm.

Over the study periods, 547,540 emergency department visits attributed to mental disorders were recorded in New York State. To link local weather conditions and emergency department visits, the residential address of each case was geocoded and paired with the nearest Mesonet station. Information on patient diagnoses and demographics was obtained from the New York Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System, a mandatory hospital discharge database covering ~95% of hospitals in the state.

Results showed that the combination of high temperature, solar radiation and relative humidity posed the greatest risk of severe mental disorder symptoms. Effects were strongest in the summer transition months of September and October. Populations impacted most acutely included: males, Hispanic and African American individuals, people aged 46-65, Medicaid or Medicare subscribers, and people without insurance.

Several mental disorder classes were distinctly responsive to certain combinations of weather conditions. For example, hospitals saw increased emergency department visits due to psychoactive substance use (e.g., consuming alcohol or opioids) when solar radiation, temperature, heat index and humidity were high.

Severe symptoms of mood disorders, which include depression and bipolar disorders, coincided with less sun and high heat.

“As extreme heat becomes increasingly intense and more frequent due to climate change, we can expect these changes to have adverse physiological effects on people,” said Shao Lin, senior author of the study and a professor at UAlbany’s School of Public Health.

“Individuals with mental disorders are especially vulnerable to these changes, and our findings suggest that multiple, simultaneous weather stressors may compound health risk. Efforts to hone targeted care must take combined factors into account.”

Exposure to sunny, hot and humid weather can trigger severe symptoms of mental disorders, requiring emergency care. Image is in the public domain

Since mental health symptoms associated with weather can take time to manifest, the team measured “lag days” –– time between the onset of a particular weather condition and the date of hospital admittance –– to account for this delay. They found that high temperature alone presented the most immediate short-term risk, while heat index increased risk over a two-week period.

Deng, now doing postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, explains, “As we learn more about the ways that weather affects mental health, putting a finer point on symptom emergence timing is critical.

Understanding lag effects could help hospital caregivers know when to prepare to receive a higher number of patients in the wake of prolonged weather conditions known to exacerbate certain mental disorders.”

Public health agencies like the CDC could use these findings to establish early-warning systems to preempt mental health-related violence and syndromes. Proactive measures could include facilitating access to cooling centers and encouraging patients with relevant mental disorders to pay attention to heatwaves and sun exposure, and take shelter as appropriate.

“Knowing that transition months see the highest risk of severe symptoms tells us that early warning systems and related education should start in May and continue through September-October,” Lin said. “Policymakers can plan preparedness efforts using health risk thresholds connected to weather factors.”

See also

“Weather and climate have profound impacts on health –– directly from severe and hazardous weather to more indirect impacts from allergens and mental health,” said Jerry Brotzge, a coauthor of the paper and the New York State Mesonet’s long-time program manager who was recently hired as state climatologist in his home state of Kentucky.

“Recent advances in weather observations collected at high temporal and spatial scales, like those recorded by Mesonet, have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of how changes in weather cause changes in health. Once we understand these relationships better, we can respond to patients’ needs more effectively.”

About this climate change and mental health research news

Author: Press Office
Source: University at Albany
Contact: Press Office – University at Albany
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.
“Identifying joint impacts of sun radiation, temperature, humidity, and rain duration on triggering mental disorders using a high-resolution weather monitoring system” by Xinlei Deng et al. Environment International

Abstract

Identifying joint impacts of sun radiation, temperature, humidity, and rain duration on triggering mental disorders using a high-resolution weather monitoring system

Background

Mental disorders (MDs) are behavioral or mental patterns that cause significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Previously, temperature has been linked to MDs, but most studies suffered from exposure misclassification due to limited monitoring sites. We aimed to assess whether multiple meteorological factors could jointly trigger MD-related emergency department (ED) visits in warm season, using a highly dense weather monitoring system.

Methods

We conducted a time-stratified, case-crossover study. MDs-related ED visits (primary diagnosis) from May-October 2017–2018 were obtained from New York State (NYS) discharge database. We obtained solar radiation (SR), relative humidity (RH), temperature, heat index (HI), and rainfall from Mesonet, a real-time monitoring system spaced about 17 miles (126 stations) across NYS. We used conditional logistic regression to assess the weather-MD associations.

Results

For each interquartile range (IQR) increase, both SR (excess risk (ER): 4.9%, 95% CI: 3.2–6.7%) and RH (ER: 4.0%, 95% CI: 2.6–5.4%) showed the largest risk for MD-related ED visits at lag 0–9 days. While temperature presented a short-term risk (highest ER at lag 0–2 days: 3.7%, 95% CI: 2.5–4.9%), HI increased risk over a two-week period (ER range: 3.7–4.5%), and rainfall hours showed an inverse association with MDs (ER: −0.5%, 95% CI: 0.9-(-0.1)%). Additionally, we observed stronger association of SR, RH, temperature, and HI in September and October. Combination of high SR, RH, and temperature displayed the largest increase in MDs (ER: 7.49%, 95% CI: 3.95–11.15%). The weather-MD association was stronger for psychoactive substance usage, mood disorders, adult behavior disorders, males, Hispanics, African Americans, individuals aged 46–65, or Medicare patients.

Conclusions

Hot and humid weather, especially the joint effect of high sun radiation, temperature and relative humidity showed the highest risk of MD diseases. We found stronger weather-MD associations in summer transitional months, males, and minority groups. These findings also need further confirmation.

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Sports

2022 Tour Championship leaderboard breakdown: Scottie Scheffler goes low to increase lead in Round 1

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The PGA Tour’s final event of the season kicked off Thursday, and Scottie Scheffler ended the day just as he began it: on top of the leaderboard. Scheffler shot a 5-under 65, tied for the third-lowest round of the day, to increase his advantage on the field and sit five strokes clear of the other 28 golfers at the 2022 Tour Championship.

Already a four-time winner on the PGA Tour this year, Scheffler started at 10 under with everyone else chasing. He is aiming to become the first golfer since Justin Thomas in 2017 to win five times on the PGA Tour in a single season, and with $18 million at stake for first place, he’s already one quarter of the way there.

Patrick Cantlay, who opened the day two shots back of Scheffler, shot an even-par 70 to slide back to T4. Xander Schauffele boosted himself into second at 10 under with a 66, while Matthew Fitzpatrick and Joaquin Niemann — both of whom shot Round 1 lows with matching 64s — slid into the top five.

Keep it locked here as CBS Sports will be keeping track of everything going down at the Tour Championship over the remaining 54 holes. This story will be updated shortly with a more detailed leaderboard breakdown from East Lake.

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Business

Judge orders Twitter to turn over to Elon Musk data from 2021 users audit | Twitter

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Elon Musk may get access to Twitter data used in a 2021 audit of active users but other information the billionaire seeks in a bid to end his $44bn deal to buy the company were rejected as “absurdly broad”, a judge said on Thursday.

Twitter must turn over data from the 9,000 accounts sampled in the fourth quarter as part of its process to estimate the number of spam accounts.

Twitter had said that data did not exist and it would be burdensome to collect it. Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick gave the company two weeks to produce the data.

Musk has claimed the company defrauded him by misrepresenting the number of real users in its financial disclosures that he relied on to make his takeover offer and he wanted the data to confirm Twitter’s spam estimates.

“We look forward to reviewing the data Twitter has been hiding for many months,” said Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, in an emailed statement.

Twitter declined to comment.

A five-day trial has been scheduled for 17 October.

McCormick also rejected many of Musk’s other data demands.

“Defendants’ data requests are absurdly broad. Read literally, defendants’ documents request would require plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points,” she wrote.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has said he wants to test that audit’s accuracy because he believes the company fraudulently misrepresented that only 5% of its accounts were spam. He wants McCormick to rule he can walk away from the deal.

Twitter wants McCormick to order Musk to close the deal at the agreed price of $54.20 per share. The shares briefly rose about 1% after the ruling and ended up 0.6% at $41.05.

Twitter said at a Wednesday court hearing that Musk’s focus on spam was “legally irrelevant” because the company has described the spam count in regulatory filings as an estimate, not a representation. It also said the real level of spam could be higher.

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Entertainment

Dan Lin to Lead – The Hollywood Reporter

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Has the new head of DC has been found?

Dan Lin, the executive-turned-producer who counts hits such as the live-action Aladdin, The Lego Movie, and the It horror movies, is in talks to take the role of DC chief, multiple sources tell THR.

The role encompasses not just overseeing film but television as well, with Lin reporting directly to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, according to sources.

The structure bypasses three separate division heads  — Warner Bros. Pictures’ Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, HBO/HBO Max chief Casey Bloys and Warner Bros. TV chair Channing Dungey — and puts control of DC in the hands of one person.

Walter Hamada, the current head of DC Films, would transition out of the role, according to sources. A Warners insider says that no negotiations are taking place and no official offer has been made although other sources say the talks are discussing salary, reporting structure, and the future of Lin’s expansive production company, Rideback.

If any deal does close, it would cap off months of one of the most intense executive searches in recent memory, one that faced scrutiny by rival Hollywood producers and executives, as well as DC fans.

Zaslav has said he was searching for Warners’ own version of Kevin Feige, the famed Marvel executive who has steered the rival comic book company’s movies, and then later its TV portfolio, into a multi-billion dollar pop culture juggernaut.

That is a nigh-impossible ask, but it didn’t stop executives’ names from surfacing. Emma Watts proved to be an early contender while in recent months, names such as Amy Pascal, Matt Tolmach, Sean Bailey, and Greg Berlanti were rumored to be meeting or pushed by canny agency heads.

Lin’s name rose late in the game, but he has a champion in Warners advisor Alan Horn, the former Disney chair who ran Warners as president and COO in the aughts. It was during that latter tenure that Lin worked for Horn, starting as a junior exec and rising to senior VP of production. He struck on his own as a producer in 2008, but not before shepherding movies such as The Departed and 10,000 B.C. He also oversaw the infamous and aborted Justice League feature that was to have been directed by George Miller. (The 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike and tax credit complications were factors in its derailing.)

Lin is a respected producer known for his smarts and, in a town full of hype and egos, his willingness to find experts on the fields that are not his forte. He has worked on franchises — the Robert Downey Jr.-starring Sherlock Holmes moves, the four Lego movies — as well as wildly successful two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s It. His resume ranges from big offerings, such as the billion dollar-grossing bright-colored Aladdin, to intimate dramas, such as the Oscar-nominated The Two Popes. He is coming off of the early August release of Universal’s Jo Koy comedy, Easter Sunday.

And he also has TV experience, a key factor for the new position. Lin and his company executive produced the Lethal Weapon show that aired for three seasons on Fox and Walker, the reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger that will begin its third season on the CW this fall. He and his company are in post-production on the ambitious, big-budget live-action series take on Avatar: The Last Airbender for Netflix.

Lin has also shown ambitions beyond the Hollywood screen. His banner, Rideback, has a non-profit arm and several initiatives and fellowships that aid BIPOC and rising entrepreneurs. It is unclear what would happen to Rideback, but one scenario, according to sources, is that Warner Bros. Discovery would take some sort of stake in the company. Rideback would also continue to operate as a production entity and be run by current president Jonathan Eirich.

If Lin takes over, he will replace Hamada, who joined DC in 2018, a time when the brand was looking to reset after Justice League (2017) bombed. Hamada, who had a reputation as an amiable collaborator, kept a much lower profile than Marvel’s Feige, who is very much the face of the franchise. Though rival Marvel Studios has a closely connected universe, DC under Hamada explored some stories that took place in separate universes, including the $1 billion grossing, Oscar winning Joker (2019) and Matt Reeves’ The Batman (2022), which brought in $769.2 million globally. Sequels to both are in the works.

Hamada built relationships with talent such as Marvel favorite James Gunn, who directed The Suicide Squad (2021) and created the HBO Max spinoff Peacemaker, and has other projects in development at DC.

However, Hamada’s tenure also underscored the public pressures that come with leading DC. For the past two years, Hamada has found himself the subject of critical tweets from Justice League actor Ray Fisher, which put the executive in the unusual position of running a film division while being publicly criticized by one of its stars. In the summer of 2020, Fisher accused filmmaker Joss Whedon of abusive and unprofessional behavior on the set of 2017 reshoots for Justice League, which Whedon oversaw after director Zack Snyder departed. Though Hamada was not at DC during the production of Justice League, Fisher accused the executive of attempting to throw Whedon as well as producer Jon Berg, “under the bus” in order to protect Geoff Johns, another Justice League producer Fisher said enabled Whedon. Hamada was cleared in the studio’s investigations of any Justice League interference.

Hamada was gearing up to release three or four films a year between theaters and HBO Max when the Warner Bros. Discovery merger occurred. Some see his exit as coming only partway through his DC course correct, while other observers believe he did not get enough internal support from the previous AT&T regime.

Lin would join DC at a time in which Zaslav has vowed to reshape DC with a ten-year plan he hopes will allow the brand to compete with Disney-owned Marvel Studios, which has built the biggest film franchise in history. 

“We’ve done a reset … We think we can build a much stronger, sustainable growth business out of DC,” said Zaslav in an earnings call Aug. 4, just two days after he scrapped the $90 million HBO Max Batgirl film that Hamada presided over. “As part of that, we are going to focus on quality. We are not going to release any film before it’s ready … DC is something we can make better.”

—Aaron Couch contributed to this story.



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Science

Skeleton of an 82-foot-long dinosaur was found in a man’s backyard in Portugal. It could be the largest ever found in Europe.

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The skeleton of a massive dinosaur was discovered in a man’s backyard in Pombal, Portugal, and it could be the largest ever found in Europe, according to a news release published Wednesday. 

The property owner noticed fragments of fossilized bones in his yard when carrying out construction in 2017, and contacted a research team, which launched an initial excavation campaign the same year, the news release said.  

Earlier this month, paleontologists from Spain and Portugal worked at the site for over a week and they believe they have unearthed remains of the largest sauropod dinosaur to ever be found on the continent, according to the release. Sauropods are plant-eating, four-legged dinosaurs with long necks and tails. This dinosaur measured about 39 feet tall and 82 feet long. 

Dinosaur bones were found in a man’s backyard in Portugal. It could be the largest one ever found in Europe. 

Photo courtesy of Instituto Dom Luiz (Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon) (Portugal).


“It is not usual to find all the ribs of an animal like this, let alone in this position, maintaining their original anatomical position. This mode of preservation is relatively uncommon in the fossil record of dinosaurs, in particular sauropods, from the Portuguese Upper Jurassic,” Elisabete Malafaia, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, said in a statement. 

The most important elements of the skeleton have been collected from the site, which includes the vertebrae and ribs of a possible brachiosaurid sauropod, or brachiosaurus, the news release said. The dinosaur species roamed the Earth 160 to 100 million years ago. 

Due to the dinosaur’s preservation characteristics, researchers believe other parts of its skeleton will also be found. 

Remains of a possible brachiosaurus were found in a man’s backyard in Portugal.

Encyclopaedia Britannica


Christopher Brito

Christopher Brito is a social media producer and trending writer for CBS News, focusing on sports and stories that involve issues of race and culture.

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World

Long Covid keeping 2-4 million Americans out of workforce, report says | Coronavirus

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About 16 million working-age Americans have long-term Covid and 2-4 million are out of work because of its ill effects, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution.

Employers have complained of labor shortages throughout the pandemic, and the analysis of data from the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, which collects data from Americans through a survey on education, employment, health and housing, suggests one possible reason for the lack of workers.

The report found that about 16 million Americans between 18 and 65 have long Covid. Of these people, who are considered of working age, they estimate that 2 to 4 million are out of work because of their symptoms.

Brookings estimates that there are currently 10.6m unfilled jobs. The report estimates the dollar amount of the lost wages is between $170bn and $230bn a year.

Long Covid, defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as Covid-related symptoms that last three or more months after first contracting the virus, has turned out to be a complicated beast. It is hard to track and study as symptoms can vary from individual to individual. Symptoms can range from gastrointestinal issues to nerve pain and fatigue.

The CDC in June estimated that nearly one in five American adults who had Covid-19 still have long Covid symptoms. Overall, one in 13 adults in the US – about 7.5% of the population – have long Covid.

Other countries have reported similar problems with long Covid affecting employment. In a May speech, a Bank of England representative attributed the workforce shrinking by 440,000 largely to “increases in long-term sickness”.

Estimates say the US workforce has decreased by between 3 million and 3.5 million people over the course of the pandemic.

The report noted that addressing long Covid’s impact on the workforce will entail policy measures like expanded paid sick leave and better employer accommodations. Over 25% of private sector workers do not have any form of paid sick leave. Of those in the bottom 25% of earners, over half do not have access to paid sick leave. Some workers have reported being fired for taking sick leave.

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Technology

Warner Bros. Games has Discovery’s support

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The longtime head of Warner Bros. Games, David Haddad, is feeling good at a particularly pivotal time for his 11-studio team.

Why it matters: WB Games is having a banner year after an uncharacteristically fallow stretch devoid of major in-house releases since 2020.

  • It’s also doing so amid high-profile job and project cuts at other divisions of the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate.
  • Haddad tells Axios his division is profitable, and his teams have been well-supported, with no layoffs and no projects cut by the new owners.

Details: WB Games’ run of 2022 hits began with April’s Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which has outsold everything this side of Bandai Namco’s Elden Ring. Then came July’s externally developed MultiVersus, that month’s best-selling game in the U.S. and a title that just passed the 20 million player mark.

  • Expected blockbusters still to come include the Batman-themed Gotham Knights (October), Hogwarts Legacy (February) and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (TBD 2023).
  • It also has a big Harry Potter mobile game co-published with Netease on the way this year.

What they’re saying: “One of our superpowers is the strength of those 11 studios,” Haddad told Axios during a video call from his corner office overlooking the Warner Bros. lot.

  • Developers at those studios worked on games throughout WB Games’ quiet period, Haddad said, as he repeatedly emphasized a division-wide push for game quality.
  • He attributed the cancellation of versions of Gotham Knights for older consoles as well as a recent nine-week delay for Hogwarts Legacy as part of the division’s strategy to give “the right amount of time to deliver the best experiences.”

The Discovery factor: Haddad has held on to his position while other Warner leaders have been cleared out following the Discovery deal. He exudes confidence that his team won’t be kneecapped.

  • “I do believe, especially moving forward, that we have a critically important role to play inside the company,” he said, describing a division-wide opportunity to bring company franchises to people who prefer games to other media.
  • Asked if the division would be there for the long haul, he said: “Warner Bros. Discovery leadership has expressed a strong belief in the growth of the games business and being part of that overall company strategy.”
  • Bloomberg and CNBC reported that previous owner AT&T had tried selling the studios for $4 billion in 2020.

The big picture: WB has far more in-house development muscle than media rivals Disney, which shed its studios in 2016, and Netflix, which only recently began purchasing some small teams.

Notes on three of WB Games’ biggest games:

  • Haddad frames the free-to-play MultiVersus as proof of the division’s potential with long-lasting games that are run as services. With plans for a continuously expanding roster, it could be another crossover-filled Fortnite, though Haddad said the team’s “attention and focus” for roster growth will be on WB Discovery’s existing intellectual property.
  • The release of the well-received Lego Star Wars raised questions about the future of the Lego license with WB Games. “We’ve been a long, long partner with Lego and we’re excited for that to continue,” Haddad said. It also put a microscope on work conditions at WB’s TT Games studios, which the company says it is committed to getting right.
  • Trailers for Hogwarts Legacy have been popular, but some potential players called for a boycott of the game, considering Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s comments about transgender people. Bloomberg has reported that the game’s developers have pushed to include trans characters in the game, and WB Games has previously said Rowling was not “directly involved” with the game. Asked about people who might avoid the game to avoid supporting Rowling, Haddad said: “We’re going to stay very focused on the game that we built and the great job that Avalanche Studios has done.” He added: “We want everybody that loves this world and loves these stories and loves these characters.”

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