Tag Archives: 1980s

Science

First observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets achieved by exploiting loophole in 1980s theorem

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UCF CREOL Graduate Research Assistant Layton Hall, ’22MS (left) and Dr. Ayman Abouraddy. Credit: University of Central Florida

University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics researchers achieved the first observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets by exploiting a loophole in a 1980s-era laser physics theorem.

The research paper by CREOL and Florida Photonics Center of Excellence professor Ayman Abouraddy and research assistant Layton Hall has been published in the journal Nature Physics.

Observation of optical de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets highlights the team’s research using a class of pulsed laser beams they call space-time wave packets.

In an interview with Dr. Abouraddy, he provides more insight into his team’s research and what it may hold for the future.

You accomplished several ‘firsts’ during this phase of your research. Will you provide some history of the theoretical ideas that brought you here?

In the early days of the development of quantum mechanics almost 100 years ago, Louis de Broglie made the crucial conceptual breakthrough of identifying waves with particles, sometimes called wave-particle duality. However, a crucial dilemma was not resolved. Particles are spatially stable: their size does not change as they travel, however waves do change, spreading in space and time. How can one construct a model out of the waves suggested by de Broglie that nevertheless correspond accurately to a particle?

In the 1970s, L. Mackinnon proposed a solution by combining Einstein’s special theory of relativity with de Broglie’s waves to construct a stable ‘wave packet’ that does not spread and can thus accompany a traveling particle. This proposal went unnoticed because there was no methodology for producing such a wave packet. In recent years, my group has been working on a new class of pulsed laser beams that we have called ‘space-time wave packets,’ which travel rigidly in free space.

In our recent research, Layton extended this behavior to propagation in dispersive media, which normally stretch optical pulses—except for space-time wave packets that resist this stretching. He recognized that the propagation of space-time wave packets in a medium endowed with a special kind of dispersion (so-called ‘anomalous’ dispersion) corresponds to Mackinnon’s proposal. In other words, space-time wave packets hold the key to finally achieving de Broglie’s dream. By carrying out laser experiments along these lines, we observed for the first time what we have called de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets and verified their predicted properties.

What is unique about your results?

There are several unique aspects of this paper. This is the first example of a pulse propagating invariantly in a medium with anomalous dispersion. In fact, a well-known theorem in laser physics from the 1980’s purports to prove that such a feat is impossible. We found a loophole in that theorem that we exploited in designing our optical fields.

Also, all previous pulsed fields that propagate without change have been X-shaped. It has long been theorized that O-shaped propagation-invariant wave packets should exist, but they have never been observed. Our results reveal the first observed O-shaped propagation-invariant wave packets.

The U.S. Office of Naval Research is supporting your research. How are your findings useful to them and others?

We don’t know yet exactly. However, these findings have practical consequences in terms of the propagation of optical pulses in dispersive media without suffering the deleterious impact of dispersion.

These results may pave the way to optical tests of the solutions of the Klein-Gordon equation for massive particles, and may even lead to the synthesis of non-dispersive wave packets using matter waves. This would also enable new sensing and microscope techniques.

What are the next steps?

This work is a part of a larger study of the propagation characteristics of space-time wave packets. This includes long-distance propagation of space-time wave packets that we are testing at UCF’s Townes Institute Science and Technology Experimentation Facility (TISTEF) on Florida’s space coast. From a fundamental perspective, the optical spectrum that we have used in our experiments lies on a closed trajectory. This has never been achieved before, and it opens the path to studying topological structures of light on closed surfaces.

More information:
Layton A. Hall et al, Observation of optical de Broglie–Mackinnon wave packets, Nature Physics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-022-01876-6

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Sports

Dave Butz, stalwart of Washington’s 1980s defenses, dies at 72

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Dave Butz garnered a reputation as something of a gentle giant over his lengthy NFL career, a notion he disabused in the 1980s by becoming a menace to opposing quarterbacks.

“Every quarterback I hit knows I hit him,” Butz said upon his retirement after the 1988 season.

Butz, the massive lineman who helped anchor the defense for Washington’s NFL team in the 1970s and ’80s and was part of two Super Bowl-winning teams, has died, the team announced Friday. He was 72. The cause of death was not disclosed.

After a standout college career at Purdue that eventually landed Butz in the College Football Hall of Fame, the St. Louis Cardinals selected him with the fifth pick of the 1973 NFL draft. Butz played only two seasons with St. Louis before departing acrimoniously (a hatred that would fester throughout his career with Washington, which then played the Cardinals twice a year as NFC East rivals). Though Butz technically was a free agent who could sign with whichever team he chose, at the time NFL rules stated the team that signed a free agent had to compensate his former team. That didn’t bother Washington Coach George Allen, who in 1975 paid the Cardinals what was then the largest compensation for a free agent in NFL history: first-round draft picks in 1977 and 1978 plus a second-round pick in 1978.

Allen would call it “one of the best trades I ever made,” even though Butz came to Washington soon after suffering a serious knee injury and would only start 18 of 42 games his first three seasons in D.C. But Butz eventually became a dependable presence at left tackle on Washington’s defensive line, starting all but one game for the rest of his career.

Simply massive at 6 feet 7 and 300-plus pounds — he also wore size 12EEEEEEE cleats — Butz eventually became Washington’s primary run-stuffer, his helmet annually showing the scars of his trench wars with offensive linemen.

From 1984: When Butz is inspired, mountains are moved

Butz’s pass-rush skills would soon present themselves as well. In the strike-shortened 1982 season, Butz tied for second on the team with 4.5 sacks as Washington won its first Super Bowl title, its defense limiting the Miami Dolphins to 16 yards in the second half of Super Bowl XVII. The next year, Butz’s finest, he recorded a career-high 11.5 sacks and earned Pro Bowl and all-pro honors for the only time in his career, rebutting critics who questioned his supposed lack of a mean streak.

“If you mean do I have the ability to blindside a quarterback or hit him in the middle of the back as he’s throwing the ball, I have absolutely no problem with that whatsoever,” Butz said of his methods. “To hit him with 300 pounds, plus another 30 pounds of equipment.

“Because my problem is I’m immense. Once I’m there, I’m going to hit him. But if I had to hit that quarterback — and I could take his legs out from under him, break his legs or whatever — I wouldn’t do it. I’d still hit him high.

“I’ve broken collarbones, dislocated a few shoulders on some quarterbacks. On one quarterback, I heard the bone break, when [teammate Karl Lorch] and I hit him. He was trying to get up and I said: ‘Stay down; you’re hurt.’ ”

Still, Butz developed a reputation as an enigmatic player who was “equal parts serious and sensitive,” as The Washington Post’s Gary Pomerantz put it in a 1984 profile.

“He kids around a lot, but sometimes it’s hard to tell,” Darryl Grant, who lined up to Butz’s right on Washington’s defensive line, told Pomerantz. “I try to stay clear of him when I’m not sure what his mood is.”

Butz’s 59 career sacks rank fifth in Washington history.

No one questioned Butz’s toughness after a 1987 game against the New York Jets. Butz had been hospitalized for an intestinal virus but checked himself out of an Arlington hospital on the morning of the game. He finished with three tackles and a sack in the 17-16 Washington victory, even though he had lost 26 pounds because of the virus.

“It was,” he said after the game, “the first time in 15 years that I’ve weighed under 300.”

Washington won its second Super Bowl that season, and Butz had two tackles in a 42-10 dismantling of the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII.

In his final season in 1988, Butz played in his 197th game for Washington, at the time a franchise record. In an interview with The Post around the time he set the record, he recalled coming up six inches short of a touchdown on one of his two career interceptions, in 1981 against the Chicago Bears.

“Only good thing was Walter Payton didn’t catch me,” Butz said of his near score, mentioning the Bears’ legendary running back. “Bad part was that the center did.”

Butz got the game ball the day he broke the record. It was inscribed, “Six inches too short.”



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US

Vermont: DNA leads to arrest in 1980s Peacock murders

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CNN
 — 

A single drop of blood has led to the arrest of a suspect in the unsolved 1989 murders of Catherine and George Peacock in Danby, Vermont, police say.

George, 76, and Catherine, 73, were killed in their residence in September 1989, according to the Vermont State Police website. The couple had been stabbed to death and there was no sign of forced entry.

Police announced in a news release on Thursday that they had finally arrested a suspect in the case after decades of investigation involving detectives and cold-case specialists. The suspect, Michael Anthony Louise, 79, was arrested at his home in Syracuse, New York, on two counts of second-degree murder and is being jailed in New York pending extradition to Vermont.

CNN was unable to determine if Louise has an attorney.

Louise was married to one of the Peacocks’ daughters at the time of the murders, according to the news release. He was identified as a suspect just two weeks after his in-laws were killed – but investigators were unable to establish a “conclusive link” to the murders, say police.

But in May 2020, DNA testing confirmed that a drop of blood found inside Louise’s car belonged to George Peacock. The blood had been previously tested but the results were inconclusive, according to the release. Advances in forensic technology over the past decades allowed investigators to match the blood to George, police said.

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Entertainment

WWE’s first female ref, who claimed Vince McMahon raped her in the 1980s, reveals new details

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WWE’s first female referee who claimed she was raped by former chairman Vince McMahon in the 1980s revealed new details about the incident amid a slew of fresh allegations against the wrestling boss. 

Rita Chatterton, who became a licensed wrestling referee in New York in 1984, had previously accused McMahon of forcing himself on her in a limo in a 1992 interview with Geraldo Rivera.

Her allegations were corroborated by former pro wrestler Leonard Inzitari in a new report by New York Magazine — which also delved into what led up to the harrowing encounter nearly four decades ago.

“He promised me half-a-million dollars a year,” she told the outlet in the story out Monday, referring to the contract offer McMahon extended over the phone following her television debut with the then-WWF in January 1985.

McMahon, whose father started WWF, had called Chatterton to tell her he was “impressed” with her work and wanted her to go “full-time” but had a warning for her, she told New York Magazine.

Rita Chatterton’s claim that she was raped by former WWE chairman Vince McMahon has recently been corroborated by former professional wrestler Leonard Inzitari.
Rachman, Chad

“Keep yourself clean,” he said, according to Chatterton.

“I don’t wanna see you messing around with any of the wrestlers. You keep it professional.”

The wrestling mogul also told Chatterton she’d be on the cover of glossies like Women’s Day, Better Homes and Gardens and Time, so she quit her job as a delivery driver with Frito-Lay and began to pursue wrestling full-time. But the relationship soured when the young ref tried to follow up – and McMahon allegedly raped her in July 1986.

During her interview with New York Magazine, Chatterton refused to go into specifics but Inzitari, a longtime friend from the business, corroborated her story for the first time since the allegations were made.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Inzitari told the outlet.

“She was a wreck. She was shaking. She was crying.”

Inzitari, whose stage name was Mario Mancini, said soon after the incident, he found Chatterton standing by herself close to the wrestling ring and when she saw him, she burst into tears and told him she was in McMahon’s limo when he “took his penis out.” 

“He kinda forced my head down there, and I made it known I wasn’t interested in doing that,” Inzitari recalled Chatterton telling him. 

“Then, [McMahon] pulled me on top of him,” she told Inzitari and soon, “He was inside her.”

Chatterton told the outlet the attack happened after she asked McMahon to discuss her career and he told her to meet her at a diner after the show.

Later, while sitting at a “big round table” with about a dozen others, Chatterton brought up her career but McMahon told her to keep quiet, she told the outlet.

“[He] put his finger to his mouth, in a shhh sign,” she recalled.

“When I come out of the ladies’ room, McMahon’s standing there … and he says, ‘I don’t wanna talk to you about your career in front of all these people, because it’s none of their business.’”

He suggested the two go to another diner down the street but when she left the restaurant, McMahon said he was tired and asked to speak inside his limo.

“It’ll only take 10 minutes,” he allegedly said.

During her interview with Rivera, Chatterton claimed McMahon then unzipped his pants and orally raped her. 

“Vince continued to, you know, ‘If you want a half-a-million-dollar contract, you’re going to have to satisfy me, and this is the way things have to go,’” she said at the time.

“Vince grabbed my hand, kept trying to put my hand on him. I was scared. At the end, my wrist was all purple, black, and blue. Things just didn’t … He just … God, he just didn’t stop. This man just didn’t stop.”

Chatterton told Rivera that McMahon asked how her daughter planned to go to college and said “Of course, she doesn’t have to go to college.”

“I was forced into oral sex with Vince McMahon. When I couldn’t complete his desires, he got really angry, started ripping off my jeans, pulled me on top of him, and told me again that, if I wanted a half-a-million-dollar-a-year contract, that I had to satisfy him. He could make me or break me, and if I didn’t satisfy him, I was black-balled, that was it, I was done,” she told Rivera. 

Speaking to New York Magazine, Chatterton recalled what McMahon said once the attack was over.

“One of the things that sticks with me, and always will… was, after he got done doing his business, he looked at me and said, ‘Remember when I told you not to mess with any of the wrestlers? Well, you just did,’” she recalled.

Following the attack, Chatterton told New York Magazine she went to the diner’s restroom and “cried my heart out” before going home and taking a “five-hour shower.”

While she did contact a lawyer in hopes of holding McMahon accountable, she ultimately decided against it.

“It came down that it was my word against McMahon’s, because I took a shower and didn’t go to the hospital,” she said.

“I was scared … He was powerful. It was gonna be him over me.”

When Chatterton first told Rivera her story in 1992, WWE was already in the midst of numerous scandals and her claims were buried in the noise. Soon, she left wrestling altogether and became a youth counselor. 

Earlier this month, McMahon was accused of paying millions of dollars in hush money to a female employee he had an affair with, leading to his resignation from his role as CEO and chairman of WWE.

The fresh claims are what inspired Chatterton and Inzitari to speak out after so much time had passed. 

“I’m sure others will come forward. Because we’re not the only two. There’s not a doubt in my mind about that,” Chatterton told the outlet. 

“As far as wrestling goes, I guess I’m the first in a lot of things … As far as I know, I’m the first to come out with the whole issue of what a scumbag he is.”

Inzitari, who has avoided speaking negatively about McMahon in the past, agreed. 

“I’ll tell you why I’m hopping on the bandwagon now,” he said. 

“There’s worse stuff than that.”

WWE didn’t return a request for comment.

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US

Body From 1980s Homicide Is Found in Barrel at Lake Mead

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A metal barrel containing the remains of a person killed in the 1980s was found on Sunday on the shore of Nevada’s Lake Mead, a discovery that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said was made possible by an ongoing drought.

“It’s really odd in the sense that had the lake never receded, we would never have discovered the body,” Lt. Ray Spencer of the Police Department said by phone on Monday.

Lieutenant Spencer said the police were trying to learn the victim’s identity. He declined to share details about the victim, including a possible age, sex or specific cause of death. It’s clear that the person “died as a result of a homicide,” he said, but he would not share how that was determined.

Based on items recovered inside the barrel, investigators believe the victim was killed in the 1980s, Lieutenant Spencer said. He declined to say what those items were.

The drop in the lake’s water level could result in other bodies being found at the lake, Lieutenant Spencer said. Rangers with the National Park Service find one or two bodies at Lake Mead every year, he said, “so it’s not uncommon to work a homicide out at the lake.”

Experts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will help them identify the remains and determine the age of the barrel’s metal, Lieutenant Spencer said.

Since the victim was killed in the 1980s in an area near Las Vegas, where mob-connected casinos dominated the Strip, investigators will “definitely not rule out” that the killing may have been Mafia-related, Lieutenant Spencer said.

“We are going to look at that potential possibility,” he said.

The barrel was discovered about 3 p.m. on Sunday afternoon by people walking along the shoreline of Lake Mead — America’s largest man-made reservoir, which is about 40 miles east of Las Vegas and was formed by the construction of Hoover Dam.

They saw the corroded, rusted barrel embedded in mud, its beige exterior covered in barnacles, Lieutenant Spencer said. While the sun shined on nearby boaters floating in the water, they peeked their heads inside and discovered a skeleton.

“We were docking our boat to go home and heard a woman scream,” Shawna Hollister, a witness to the discovery, told KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. “My husband walked over and found the body. His shirt and belt were the only thing we could see over his decomposing bones.”

Photos of the barrel obtained by KLAS-TV show it on its side, close to the receding shoreline, with a boat floating in the background.

Witnesses called the National Park Service, which responded and confirmed that the contents inside were in fact human remains, Lieutenant Spencer said. The National Park Service then called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which is investigating.

Investigators also plan to scan missing-person cases from the 1980s to search for clues, Lieutenant Spencer added.

The investigation could take years because the police are starting “at square one,” Lieutenant Spencer said.

“In the 1980s, we did not have any of the DNA databases, so there was no DNA collection,” he said.

If investigators are able to recover DNA samples from the remains, it will take extensive genealogy work to determine the person’s identity, Lieutenant Spencer said.

Since 2000, the elevation of Lake Mead has dropped by nearly 150 feet because of “drought and climate change,” according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Recent conditions have resulted in more significant water level declines. On Sunday, the Southern Nevada Water Authority issued mandatory summer water restrictions.

In August, the federal government for the first time declared a water shortage at Lake Mead, triggering cuts in water supply for the region.

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Entertainment

William Hurt, Oscar-Winning Leading Man of the 1980s, Dies at 71

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In recent years he had worked more in television, including the FX series “Damages” and the British sci-fi drama “Humans.” He was also in the 2013 television movie “The Challenger Disaster,” which in a 2015 interview prompted The Guardian to ask him if he was interested in space travel.

“I’m interested in all horizons and what’s on the other side of them,” he said. “We know less about the ocean than we do about space. I like to swim, float and fly.”

William McChord Hurt was born on March 20, 1950, in Washington, the son of Alfred Hurt, a career diplomat, and Claire Isabel (McGill) Hurt, who worked at Time Inc. When Bill was 6, his parents separated, and his mother married Henry Luce III, the son of Time magazine’s founder.

Mr. Hurt attended Tufts University and went on to study acting at Juilliard. By the second half of the 1970s, he was drawing notice on New York stages, notably appearing in the Lanford Wilson play “Fifth of July” at Circle Rep in 1978. In 1981, Frank Rich, reviewing “Childe Byron” at Circle Rep for The Times, singled him out.

“Maybe William Hurt has now been discovered by Hollywood (‘Altered States,’ ‘Eyewitness’), but he hasn’t lost any of that crazy intensity that makes him a joy to watch in the theater,” Mr. Rich’s review began. “What makes this talented actor so special — and, inevitably, a star — is his ability to create his own reality onstage. While he can create a powerful character when he wants to (as he did with Kenneth Talley in the original production of “Fifth of July”), he’s prepared to be fascinating without any help from a playwright.”

If his acting drew raves, Mr. Hurt’s personal life was rocky. He had a relationship with his co-star in “Children of a Lesser God,” Marlee Matlin, which she later described as abusive. A long-term relationship with Sandra Jennings, a dancer, landed in court in 1989, with Ms. Jennings contending, unsuccessfully, that they were in effect married. His marriages to Mary Beth Hurt and Heidi Henderson ended in divorce.

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Science

New study of 1980s Mars meteorite debunks proof of ancient life on planet | Mars

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A four billion-year-old meteorite from Mars that caused a splash here on Earth decades ago contains no evidence of ancient, primitive Martian life after all, scientists have said.

In 1996, a Nasa-led team announced that organic compounds in the rock appeared to have been left by living creatures. Other scientists were skeptical and researchers chipped away at that premise over the decades, most recently by a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Andrew Steele.

Tiny samples from the meteorite show the carbon-rich compounds are actually the result of water – most likely salty or briny water – flowing over the rock for a prolonged period, Steele said. The findings appear in the Science journal.

During Mars’ wet and early past, at least two impacts occurred near the rock, heating the planet’s surrounding surface, before a third impact bounced it off the red planet and into space millions of years ago. The 4lb (2kg) rock was found in Antarctica in 1984.

Groundwater moving through the cracks in the rock, while it was still on Mars, formed the tiny globs of carbon that are present, according to the researchers. The same thing can happen on Earth and could help explain the presence of methane in Mars’ atmosphere, they said.

But two scientists who took part in the original study took issue with these latest findings, calling them “disappointing”. In a shared email, they said they stand by their 1996 observations.

Mars rock Allan Hills 84001, discovered in 1984, is shown at a Nasa news conference in 1996. Photograph: Doug Mills/AP

“While the data presented incrementally adds to our knowledge of (the meteorite), the interpretation is hardly novel, nor is it supported by the research,” wrote Kathie Thomas-Keprta and Simon Clemett, astromaterial researchers at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“Unsupported speculation does nothing to resolve the conundrum surrounding the origin of organic matter” in the meteorite, they added.

According to Steele, advances in technology made his team’s new findings possible.
He commended the measurements by the original researchers and noted that their life-claiming hypothesis “was a reasonable interpretation” at the time. He said he and his team – which includes Nasa, German and British scientists – took care to present their results “for what they are, which is a very exciting discovery about Mars and not a study to disprove” the original premise.

This finding “is huge for our understanding of how life started on this planet and helps refine the techniques we need to find life elsewhere on Mars, or Enceladus and Europa,” Steele said in an email, referring to Saturn and Jupiter’s moons with subsurface oceans.

The only way to prove whether Mars ever had or still has microbial life, according to Steele, is to bring samples to Earth for analysis. Nasa’s Perseverance Mars rover has already collected six samples for return to Earth in a decade or so; three dozen samples are desired.

Millions of years after drifting through space, the meteorite landed on an ice field in Antarctica thousands of years ago. The small gray-green fragment got its name, Allan Hills 84001, from the hills where it was found.

Just this week, a piece of this meteorite was used in a first-of-its-kind experiment aboard the International Space Station. A mini scanning electron microscope examined the sample. Researchers hope to use the microscope to analyze geologic samples in space – on the moon one day, for example – and debris that could ruin station equipment or endanger astronauts.

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Science

A 1980s Space Telescope May Have Seen Planet Nine

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In 1983, astronomer Michael Rowan-Robinson conducted a search for a proposed 10th planet (Pluto still being a planet at the time) using data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, the first infrared space telescope. Rowan-Robinson didn’t turn up a new planet, and by 1991, he was pretty sure that such a planet did not exist, at least not in the area of the sky he looked in.

But since then, new regions of the sky have been proposed as potential homes of a hidden planet, now called Planet Nine. Some astrophysicists suspect that a planet—or at least, something with a lot of gravity—exists out there due to the movements of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a distant disc of comets, asteroids, and icy things beyond the orbit of Neptune.

On the heels of recent research that suggested new potential hiding spots for Planet Nine, Rowan-Robinson revisited the 38-year-old data and found three infrared sources that he says could be the theorized world. His paper is set to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv.

Planet Nine (formerly Planet X, said like the letter) has long been considered a possibility. The discovery of Neptune in 1846 came after astronomers found Uranus’s orbit was slightly different than math predicted. They realized that something was perturbing Uranus gravitationally; that object turned out to be an eighth planet.

Observations of Neptune then led astronomers to believe there may be yet another planet out there, messing with the newly discovered world’s orbit. Pluto was found in 1930 by looking at objects on photographic plates, but it couldn’t account for the movement of Neptune.

Scientists who search for Planet Nine estimate that its mass is several times bigger than Earth’s, with an orbit lasting thousands of years. Of course, Planet Nine is just one answer to the quandary of why some objects’ orbits are wonky. One alternative theory is that instead of Planet Nine is actually a ring of debris. Others have suggested the “planet” could be a bowling ball-sized black hole.

For the recent work, Rowan-Robinson redid his search from nearly 40 years ago and found three points in the data from late summer 1983 that indicate some object moving across the sky. The data sources sit low on the galactic plane, though, meaning that the satellite was taking the data through plenty of dusty, cloudy material that can emit infrared light.

In other words, the work is something of a long shot. And Rowan-Robinson is well aware of that. “Given the poor quality of the IRAS detections, at the very limit of the survey, and in a very difficult part of the sky for far infrared detections, the probability of the candidate being real is not overwhelming,” he wrote in his paper.

But that’s no reason not to dig further. It’s not cryptoastronomy; people looking for a ninth planet are investigating a real mathematical problem. It is a particularly “shiny solution,” though, as planetary astronomer Michele Bannister told Gizmodo in 2017.

We may have new answers fairly soon. The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile is under construction and will image the entire sky every week using the largest digital camera ever built. Compared to when astronomers had to use just their eyes to search for changes in the cosmos, we now have artificial intelligence that can detect intriguing signals in data far beyond the abilities of the naked eye. It’s fair to say we’re closer to finding out the truth than we were before. Good things come to those who wait… but hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer.

More: Is the Elusive ‘Planet Nine’ Actually a Massive Ring of Debris in the Outer Solar System?

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Technology

The Kids We Were Will Offer A Charming Exploration Of 1980s Japan On Switch

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The routes that Indie games take to the Switch vary a great deal, and one of them is to make a start on mobile before arriving on Nintendo’s system in a ‘premium’ iteration down the road. The Kids We Were is following that approach having earned awards and plenty of praise on Android and iOS, with a release date of 26th January now confirmed for Switch and Steam.

Developed by GAGEX, The Kids We Were is a narrative adventure game that adopts blocky voxel-style visuals – think The Touryst but with a calmer colour palette. On mobile it boasts of high user review averages full of comments praising the story, and it does sound like the concept and setting could make for an intriguing experience. It involves a bit of time travel, a ‘Back to the Future’-esque quest and a setting of 1980s Tokyo suburbs.

Our story begins with Minato arriving in the small town of Kagami, an exceptionally ordinary sort of place in a sleepy suburb of Tokyo.

But there’s more to this simple trip than meets the eye. Minato has a secret objective: he intends to find his missing father, who is supposedly living somewhere in the area.

Our young sleuth Minato wastes no time getting started, and soon finds a puzzling clue to his father’s whereabouts. A mysterious notebook left for him with the portentous title “The Seven Mysteries.”

With this notebook as his guide, Minato sets out on a long and difficult journey, not through space, but through time. For his destination is none other than 33 years in the past—the day his father and mother first met!

On Switch it’ll have the full story from the Android and iOS versions, alongside a new bonus episode and additional collectibles.

Let us know what you think in the comments!



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