- First Total War: Warhammer 3 Throne Of Decay trailer pits maggots against airships Rock Paper Shotgun
- Huge Total War Warhammer 3 DLC Thrones of Decay will come with new, free content for every single player PCGamesN
- Total War: Warhammer 3 Thrones of Decay DLC finally gives the Dwarfs a flying Thunderbarge gunship and more Windows Central
- Total War: Warhammer 3’s upcoming Thrones of Decay expansion gets huge pricing change Rock Paper Shotgun
- The three parts of Total War: Warhammer 3’s next DLC, Thrones of Decay, will be available individually Yahoo! Voices
Tag Archives: decay
How did Netflix ‘win the streaming wars’ while being criticized for becoming ‘unwatchable?’ It could all be explained by the concept of ‘platform decay’ – Yahoo Finance
- How did Netflix ‘win the streaming wars’ while being criticized for becoming ‘unwatchable?’ It could all be explained by the concept of ‘platform decay’ Yahoo Finance
- Netflix Cuts Over 100 Shows From Programming Slate Bloomberg
- Netflix cuts over 100 shows: New content strategy or the aftermath of twin strike? | WION WION
- What’s Next in ‘The Streaming Wars’ – by Sonny Bunch The Bulwark
- How did Netflix ‘win the streaming wars’ while being criticized for becoming ‘unwatchable?’ It could all be explained by the concept of ‘platform decay’ Fortune
‘This is an emergency’: Dr Chris Van Tulleken on why ultra processed food fuels obesity, tooth decay and illness – Channel 4 News
- ‘This is an emergency’: Dr Chris Van Tulleken on why ultra processed food fuels obesity, tooth decay and illness Channel 4 News
- The most ultra processed foods experts say you should cut from your diet now Wales Online
- There is nothing healthy about our paranoia over ultra processed food The Telegraph
- I’m a dietitian – here’s the 9 worst ultra-processed foods ‘linked to silent killers’ and what to eat inste… The Sun
- Oh Good – Ultra-Processed Food Might Be Worse For Us Than We Thought HuffPost UK
- View Full Coverage on Google News
State of Decay 3 Is Being Made in Unreal Engine 5 – and Gears of War Developers Are Assisting
News on State of Decay 3 has been about as rare as a pleasant day in a zombie apocalypse, but Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty has just revealed that the upcoming game is being made in Unreal Engine 5 with the assistance of Gears of War developer The Coalition.
As reported by Wccftech, Booty appeared on Xbox’s Major Nelson podcast and shared some interesting behind-the-scenes details on the development of State of Decay 3.
“You mentioned [State of Decay 3 developer] Undead Labs, they’re working with The Coalition up in Vancouver, our Gears of War studio, using some of the technology around Unreal Engine 5 and some of the stuff that’s been in Gears of War before to bring that into State of Decay 3,” Booty said to Nelson.
“Last week before last, we spent all day at Undead Labs in Seattle, which was great, getting the update on State of Decay 3, which has really got some cool stuff, in addition to the fact that State of Decay 2 just continues to grow its user base,” Booty added. “It’s kind of this stealth thing that just keeps growing, and it was cool to get an update. I think we hit eleven million lifetime players on State of Decay 2 now, which is pretty cool. All of that, the things they are doing there, are really the testbed, the proving grounds, for all the stuff that’s going in State of Decay 3.”
Booty also discussed how he and the team handle learning from the teams about the progress of their games and how these studios share technology back and forth, and it all happens at various summits.
“We have a structure in place, we just call them summits, where we get subject matter experts together for one or two days,” Booty explained. “We’ve had animation summits, UI summits, Unreal Engine summits, physics summits, etc. I think we did in the last year close to 25 of these. That’s our main mechanism for teams to share technology back and forth.”
The Coalition is one of Microsoft’s studios on the front line of Unreal Engine 5, as it announced in 2021 that it was moving to UE5 for “multiple new projects.” Back in April 2022, The Coalition even showed off some Unreal Engine 5 experiments.
As for State of Decay 3, it was announced at an Xbox Games Showcase in 2020 and we only caught a quick cinematic glimpse of a lone woman in the wilderness and a wolf corpse being eaten by a zombie deer.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
State of Decay 3 stalled as studio battles discrimination claims
State of Decay 3 has lingered in pre-production for the past two years, reports Kotaku, while Undead Labs has mutated from a lean and ambitious independent studio into a first-party Xbox developer battling big-time industry problems, such as a toxic workplace, discrimination, and burnout.
In fact, reports Kotaku, Undead Labs was pressured into announcing State of Decay 3 at the Xbox Games Showcase in July 2020 well before developers felt the game was ready for it. That, said Undead Labs veterans, was followed by a rushed internal demo for Microsoft leadership, that accelerated their feeling of disarray.
State of Decay 3, according to unnamed sources cited by Kotaku, was supposed to have two more internal demonstrations in the fall of 2021, and Philip Holt, the studio executive brought in as Undead Labs’ chief of staff after Microsoft acquired the studio in 2018, wanted both to include actual gameplay. Developers “revolted,” according to the report, considering the work and crunch that would be necessary to get the project o such a state. While Holt relented, the disruption still pushed a lot of Undead Labs veterans out the door, developers said.
“If this was what pre-production was like there was no way I was sticking around for full production,” an unidentified developer told Kotaku.
State of Decay 3 still has no official launch date or window. Its 2020 Xbox Games Showcase announcement was notorious for a pre-render trailer that dwelled on a zombie deer, seen through a crossbow’s scope.
“They’re still at square one with a lot of stuff,” another developer said. Meanwhile, Kotaku’s extensive report depicts Undead Labs as roiled by internal dissent and mistrust over matters of discrimination and misconduct, which many workers felt were neglected by new boss Microsoft.
Physicists Detect Mysterious X Particles in ‘Primordial Soup’ For The First Time
A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the ‘primordial soup’.
Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed to tease out 100 of the exotic motes known as X particles.
“This is just the start of the story,” says physicist Yen-Jie Lee of MIT, and a member of the international CMS Collaboration headquartered at CERN in Switzerland.
“We’ve shown we can find a signal. In the next few years we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to probe the X particle’s internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce.”
Mere moments after the Big Bang, the very early Universe wasn’t made of the same stuff we see floating around today. Instead, for a few millionths of a second, it was filled with plasma superheated to trillions of degrees, consisting of elementary particles called quarks and gluons. That’s the quark-gluon plasma.
In less time than it takes to blink, the plasma cooled and the particles came together to form the protons and neutrons of which normal matter is constructed today. But in that very brief twitch of time, the particles in the quark-gluon plasma collided, stuck together, and came apart again in different configurations.
One of those configurations is a particle so mysterious, we don’t even know how it’s put together. This is the X particle, and it’s only been seen very rarely and briefly in particle colliders – too briefly to be probed.
Theoretically, however, X particles could appear in the very small flashes of quark-gluon plasma that physicists have been creating in particle accelerators for some years now. And this might afford a better opportunity to understand them.
During the Large Hadron Collider’s 2018 run, positively charged atoms of lead were slammed together at high speeds. Each of these roughly 13 billion collisions produced a shower of tens of thousands of particles. That’s a dauntingly colossal amount of data to sift through.
“Theoretically speaking, there are so many quarks and gluons in the plasma that the production of X particles should be enhanced,” Lee says. “But people thought it would be too difficult to search for them because there are so many other particles produced in this quark soup.”
Although X particles are very short-lived, when they decay, they produce a shower of lower-mass particles. To streamline the data analysis process, the team developed an algorithm to recognize the patterns characteristic of X particle decay. Then they fed the 2018 LHC data into their software.
The algorithm identified a signal at a specific mass that indicated the presence of around 100 X particles in the data. This is an excellent start.
“It’s almost unthinkable that we can tease out these 100 particles from this huge dataset,” Lee said.
At this point, the data are insufficient to learn more about the X-particle’s structure, but the discovery could bring us closer. Now that we know how to find the X-particle’s signature, teasing it out in future data sets should be a lot easier. In turn, the more data we have available, the easier it will be to make sense of them.
Protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks. Physicists believe that X particles may be made of four – either an exotic, tightly bound particle known as a tetraquark, or a new kind of loosely bound particle made from two mesons, each of which contain two quarks. If it’s the former, because it’s more tightly bound, it will decay more slowly than the latter.
“Currently our data is consistent with both because we don’t have enough statistics yet. In the next few years we’ll take much more data so we can separate these two scenarios,” Lee says.
“That will broaden our view of the kinds of particles that were produced abundantly in the early Universe.”
The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
Affluent Children Are More Prone to Tooth Decay, First Meta-Study of Its Kind Reveals
Even with regular visits to the dentist, affluent children are more likely to experience tooth decay, according to the first meta-analysis of its kind.
The systematic review suggests the corrosive effects of soda, juices, and energy drinks have eaten away at some of the privileges provided by wealth and education.
Across 65 studies from 30 countries, including more than 60,000 individuals from age 6 to 79, researchers found a link between socioeconomic status and tooth wear.
Among adolescents who attend private school and whose parents have higher levels of education and income, tooth wear appears to be significantly worse.
That might sound strange at first, especially since teens from more affluent families are more likely to have access to regular dental care, but given how closely diet is tied to socioeconomic status, it does make sense.
“Fizzy drinks, energy drinks and packaged juices are in many countries available to the affluent. And despite a focus on sugar, such as the implementation of a sugar tax in the UK, the diet/low-sugar/sugar-free alternatives remain acidic,” explains Khaled Ahmed, who researches dentistry and oral health at Griffith University in Australia.
“These dietary habits may predispose children of all socio-economic levels to erosive risk, but those from a ‘high’ [socioeconomic] area may be more frequently exposed than their counterparts due to increased access as a result of affluence in low- and middle-income countries.”
Of course, the vast majority of people experience some level of tooth wear over the course of their lives, but the rate at which teeth erode, wear down and chip away depends on a whole bunch of factors that can ebb and flow with time and age.
Some children with a low socioeconomic status, for instance, might not show tooth wear initially, but as they grow older and continue to use their teeth day in and day out, tooth wear might become a problem.
In nations where acidic foods – like hibiscus, citrus, tamarind and baobab – are eaten frequently, for example, tooth wear seems to be significantly worse. Yet diet isn’t the only factor at play.
In the current meta-analysis, higher-educated adults were also less likely to develop pathological tooth wear over time. Not only does this bracket of the population tend to eat healthier, they also generally maintain better oral hygiene practices.
In addition, more affluent individuals are less likely to experience other health issues, like reflux disorder and diabetes, which can further complicate dental hygiene and care.
“Adults with lower socioeconomic status were more likely to have tooth wear due to poor diet, underlying medical conditions such as acid reflux, eating disorders or stress and depression as well as limited access to dental care,” says Ahmed.
“Wealthier adults not only have a lower risk but also improved access to dental treatment resulting in early identification and intervention.”
But not all dental practices that are popular today are necessarily good for the longevity of our chompers.
Multiple studies in the meta-analysis found certain brushing habits, like using an electric toothbrush or a hard-bristle brush, were linked to greater tooth wear in adults and not less, like you’d expect.
This suggests we need to better communicate healthy dental practices to the population, although more thorough first-hand research is needed. Most studies on tooth wear included in the meta-analysis were based in high-income countries. Only seven papers came from nations with lower relative incomes.
What’s more, the majority of studies included in the review gathered data predominantly from adolescents, which means the results might not capture the full extent of tooth wear and tear as we age.
Measuring tooth wear is also tricky business, with many studies using different evaluations, making them challenging to compare.
That said, the current review is a good assessment of current research on tooth wear and its connection to education, income, and social standing. The findings suggest a person’s socioeconomic status could very well act as a strong risk factor for dental complications later in life.
Future epidemiological studies will need to explore this connection in further detail, so we can figure out why the association exists and who is most at risk in the long run.
After all, protecting the teeth we already have is the healthiest and cheapest option.
The study was published in the Journal of Dentistry.
Cornel West says in resignation letter over tenure dispute that Harvard is in ‘decline and decay’ – The Washington Post
- Cornel West says in resignation letter over tenure dispute that Harvard is in ‘decline and decay’ The Washington Post
- Cornel West resigns from Harvard after tenure dispute and accuses university of ‘spiritual rot’ CNN
- Cornel West rips ‘decadence’ in ‘market-driven universities’ in Harvard resignation letter | TheHill The Hill
- Cornel West releases ‘candid’ resignation letter to Harvard dean The Boston Globe
- Cornel West quits Harvard with blistering letter attacking ‘spiritual rot’ and racism at university The Independent
- View Full Coverage on Google News
More Results From The Large Hadron Collider Point to Entirely New Physics
Update (24 March 2021): The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment is still insisting there’s a flaw in our best model of particle physics.
As explained below, previous results comparing the collider’s data with what we might expect from the Standard Model threw up a curious discrepancy by around 3 standard deviations, but we needed a lot more information to be confident it truly reflected something new in physics.
Newly released data have now pushed us closer to that confidence, putting the results at 3.1 sigma; there’s still a 1 in 1,000 possibility that what we’re seeing is the result of physics just being messy, and not of a new law or particle. Read our original coverage below to learn all the details.
Original (31 August 2018): Past experiments using CERN’s super-sized particle-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), hinted at something unexpected. A particle called a beauty meson was breaking down in ways that just weren’t lining up with predictions.
That means one of two things – our predictions are wrong, or the numbers are out. And a new approach makes it less likely that the observations are a mere coincidence, making it nearly enough for scientists to start getting excited.
A small group of physicists took the collider’s data on beauty meson (or b meson for short) disintegration, and investigated what might happen if they swapped one assumption regarding its decay for another that assumed interactions were still occurring after they transformed.
The results were more than a little surprising. The alternative approach doubles down on the take that something strange really is going on.
In physics, anomalies are usually viewed as good things. Fantastic things. Unexpected numbers could be the window to a whole new way of seeing physics, but physicists are also conservative – you have to be when the fundamental laws of the Universe are at stake.
So when experimental results don’t quite match up with the theory, it’s first presumed to be a random blip in the statistical chaos of a complicated test. If a follow-up experiment shows the same thing, it’s still presumed to be ‘one of those things’.
But after enough experiments, sufficient data can be collected to compare the chances of errors with the likelihood of an interesting new discovery. If an unexpected result differs from the predicted outcome by at least three standard deviations it’s called a 3 sigma, and physicists are allowed to look at the results while nodding enthusiastically with their eyebrows raised. It becomes an observation.
To really attract attention, the anomaly should persist when there’s enough data to push that difference to five standard deviations: A 5 sigma event is cause to break out the champagne.
Over the years, the LHC has been used to create particles called mesons, with the purpose of watching what happens in the moments after they’re born.
Mesons are a type of hadron, somewhat like the proton. Only instead of consisting of three quarks in a stable formation under strong interactions, they’re made of only two – a quark and an antiquark.
Even the most stable of mesons fall apart after hundredths of a second. The framework we use to describe the construction and decay of particles – the Standard Model – describes what we should see when different mesons split up.
The beauty meson is a down quark connected to a bottom anti-quark. When the particle’s properties are plugged into the Standard Model, b-meson decay should produce pairs of electrons and positrons, or electron-like muons and their opposites, anti-muons.
This electron or muon outcome should be 50-50. But that’s not what we’re seeing. Results are showing far more of the electron-positron products than muon-anti-muons.
This is worth paying attention to. But when the sum of the results are held up next to the Standard Model’s prediction, they’re out by a couple of standard deviations. If we take into account other effects, it could be even further out – a real break from our models.
But how confident can we be that these results reflect reality, and aren’t just part of the noise of experimentation? The significance is well short of that sigma of 5, which means there’s a risk that gap from the Standard Model isn’t anything interesting after all.
The Standard Model is a fine piece of work. Built over decades on the foundations of the field theories first laid out by the brilliant Scottish theorist James Clerk Maxwell, it’s served as a map for the unseen realms of many new particles.
But it’s not perfect. There are things we’ve seen in nature – from dark matter to the masses of neutrinos – that currently seem to be out of reach of the Standard Model’s framework.
In moments like this, physicists tweak basic assumptions on the model and see if they do a better job of explaining what we’re seeing.
“In previous calculations, it was assumed that when the meson disintegrates, there are no more interactions between its products,” physicist Danny van Dyk from the University of Zurich said in 2018.
“In our latest calculations we have included the additional effect: long-distance effects called the charm-loop.”
The details of this effect aren’t for the amateur, and aren’t quite Standard Model material.
In short, they involve complicated interactions of virtual particles – particles that don’t persist long enough to go anywhere, but arise in principle in the fluctuations of quantum uncertainty – and an interaction between the decay products after they’ve split up.
What is interesting is that by explaining the meson’s breakdown through this speculative charm loop the anomaly’s significance jumps to a convincing 6.1 sigma.
In spite of the leap, it’s still not a champagne affair. More work needs to be done, which includes piling up the observations in light of this new process.
“We will probably have a sufficient amount within two or three years to confirm the existence of an anomaly with a credibility entitling us to talk about a discovery,” Marcin Chrzaszcz from the University of Zurich said in 2018. (As you know, it’s 2021 and we’re still not quite there, but getting closer.)
If confirmed, it would show enough flexibility in the Standard Model to stretch its boundaries, potentially revealing pathways to new areas of physics.
It’s a tiny crack, and still might turn up nothing. But nobody said solving the biggest mysteries in the Universe would be easy.
The 2018 study was published in European Physical Journal C; the 2021 results are awaiting peer-review, but are available for researchers to check out on arXiv.