Raffles and gift give-aways aren’t uncommon at company parties, but the company behind Genshin Impact went a step further, randomly awarding hard-to-get graphics cards and PS5s to employees as thanks for helping make one of last year’s hottest new free-to-play gacha games.
“MiHoYo, the developers of Genshin Impact, held their annual employee meeting where they gave away a bunch of electronics to employees in a lottery,” Niko Partners senior data analyst, Daniel Ahmad, wrote on Twitter yesterday. Accompanying photos showed giant stacks of iPhones, Nintendo Switches, GeForce RTX graphics cards, and PlayStation 5s, the latter of which has been especially hard for people to get their hands on following ongoing inventory shortages.
The irony, of course, as PC Gamer pointed out, is that Genshin Impact is itself largely based around lotteries—based on random number generators (RNG)—in which players pay currency earned in-game or real money for a chance to unlock rare new characters. Some are much harder to get than others, leading players to grind and burn through resources waiting for top-tier characters like Venti to drop. Some players have spent loads of money on the game this way, one of the reasons Genshin Impact went on to make nearly $400 million in its first couple of months, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower.
To celebrate the game’s lucrative launch, MiHoYo reportedly used a similar drop-rate system to allocate the limited supply of gaming hardware it planned to give away to employees on top of other bonuses. According to a screenshot shared by Ahmad, staff had a 30% shot at a Nintendo Switch, a 21% shot at an RTX 3070 graphics card, a 16% shot at a PS5, and a 1% chance of getting a combined Apple Watch Series 6 and iPhone 12 Pro Max bundle.
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For the time being, it looks like you’ve got at least as good a chance of scoring a PS5 from getting a job working on Genshin Impact as you do from refreshing your Amazon cart.
The following may contain spoilers for Disney+’s WandaVision. We don’t know yet.
Disney+’s first Marvel Cinematic Universe tie-in, WandaVision, has quickly been transitioning from a weirdo sitcom parody to a proper superhero story, and star Elizabeth Olsen—the Wanda half of that weird title—is teasing some big exciting stuff that’s yet to come. TVLine, inspired by Mark Hamill’s digitally de-aged appearance in the season finale of The Mandalorian, recently spoke with Olsen and decided to cut right to the chase and ask her if there’s anything on par with that (specifically “a casting that she can’t believe hasn’t leaked yet”) coming up on her show. Olsen, who is either very confident or doesn’t care about managing expectations, responded with a simple “yes.” TVLine says she then laughed and added, “I’m really excited.”
That’s all we’ve got to go off of, but it certainly seems intriguing. It’s worth noting that it doesn’t sound like Olsen specifically said that there’s an exciting surprise character showing up, so it’s not necessarily exactly like Luke Skywalker on The Mandalorian, but that is the sort of thing the MCU is already very good at. If we trust that she is talking about an unexpected character stopping by for a visit, who will it be? Doctor Strange would be an easy choice, since Wanda is going to be in his next movie, but it wouldn’t be as exciting as Luke Skywalker’s appearance was. Aaron Taylor-Johnson appearing as Wanda’s dead brother Pietro/Quicksilver would be wild, but the internet seems pretty confident that it’ll actually be Evan Peters’ version of Quicksilver from the Fox X-Men movies that will make an appearance—establishing some kind of connection to that series and the MCU now that they’re all under Disney’s roof.
Then again, if people are expecting Evan Peters’ Quicksilver to be on WandaVision, would it really be an exciting reveal on par with Luke Skywalker on The Mandalorian? Is there anything that could,now that we know to expect something? Wanda is (sort of sometimes) Magneto’s daughter in the comics, so maybe Michael Fassbender could come by? We don’t know, but just thinking about it and tossing out ideas like this runs the risk of either spoiling it or setting up unfairly high expectations, so really it was kind of mean of Olsen to bring this up in the first place.
Apple’s iOS 13.5 update made your iPhone jump to your secondary method of authentication more quickly when you’re trying to use Face ID while wearing a face mask, but it’s still an arduous process you have to go through each time you want to unlock your iPhone. iOS 14.5 fixes this by adding in a new auto-unlock option for those who also own an Apple Watch; I do, and this is too good a feature to wait for.
I say “wait for” because iOS 14.5 isn’t technically available to the public yet. Apple’s testing the update as part of a developer beta—that wonderful phrase that suggests you’re in for a potentially buggy experience if you opt to slap it on your iPhone right now. I go back and forth on this; I love being able to access the latest features, but having a sluggish or otherwise fussy iPhone—especially if it’s my primary device—isn’t the best experience.
Still, in these pandemic times, having to tap-tap-tap my iPhone after I’ve gotten used to the wonderful convenience of Face ID isn’t very fun, either. So much so, that I think I’m going to go ahead and install the iOS 14.5 beta. What’s the worst that could happen?
If you’d like to join me, here’s how you can get into this normally-for-developers beta. To start, make a backup of your iPhone, whether you’re sending it to iCloud (via Settings > your Apple ID > iCloud > iCloud Backup) or connecting your iPhone to a computer and performing a manual backup. This is important, as you’ll want to be able to revert back to your normal operating system if the beta is too buggy for your tastes.
Screenshot: David Murphy
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Next, open Safari on your iPhone and navigate over to Beta Profiles. Tap “Download” on the box for the iOS 14.5 beta and don’t be stymied by the warning screen:
When prompted by your iPhone about downloading a configuration profile to your device, tap “Allow.” Once done, close Safari and open up your Settings app. Tap on General > Profile, where you’ll find the profile you just downloaded. Tap on it, and then tap on Install in the upper-right corner. You’ll eventually be asked to restart your iPhone as part of the installation process. Do that.
Screenshot: David Murphy
Once your iPhone boots back up, tap on Settings again, and then General > Software Update. You should now be able to download the iOS 14.5 Developer Beta (if it hasn’t already started downloading).
Screenshot: David Murphy
Once it’s done, you’ll find the new Apple Watch-unlock feature in Settings > Face ID & Passcode. However, you’ll also need to repeat these same steps to install the developer beta of watchOS 7.4 (updating your Apple Watch as you normally would in the end, rather than going to your iPhone’s Software Update section).
Don’t assume that this handy feature will work each time you’re using your iPhone while wearing your Apple Watch. The feature, designed for pandemic life, requires your iPhone to detect that you’re wearing a face mask. If it does, and you’re also wearing your (passcode-enabled and unlocked) Apple Watch, your iPhone will unlock automatically. If you aren’t wearing a mask, you’ll have to unlock your iPhone the old-fashioned way.
A ceramic Granitec pan, showing a dry spot at center—the result of thermocapillary convection.Image: Alex Fedorchenko
An investigation into the way oils behave on hot, flat surfaces has uncovered the process responsible for foods sticking to non-stick frying pans.
I love the opening line to this new paper, published today in Physics of Fluids: “Here, the phenomenon of food sticking when frying in a frying pan is experimentally explained.”
Concise and straight to the point, as is the explanation: “thermocapillary convection,” according to the authors, Alexander Fedorchenko and Jan Hruby, both from the Czech Academy of Sciences.
This is very powerful knowledge. The next time this happens while cooking, you can shake your angry fist at the stovetop and say, “curse you, thermocapillary convection!” It’ll be a very satisfying moment, not just because you have a fancy new term at your disposal, but also because you’ll have full awareness of what it actually means.
For their experiment, Fedorchenko and Hruby, specialists in fluid dynamics and thermophysics, tested two non-stick frying pans—one coated in ceramic particles and one covered with Teflon. The surfaces of the pans were covered with a thin layer of sunflower oil, and then, using an overhead camera, the scientists measured the speed at which it took dry spots to form and grow as the pans were heated.
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The scientists noticed that, as the pans were being warmed from below, a temperature gradient appeared across the oily film. This in turn created a surface tension gradient, which directed the oils away from the center of the pan and towards the periphery; liquids with high surface tension pull more forcefully on surrounding liquids compared to liquids with low surface tension.
A Teflon pan showing the effect in action. Image: Alex Fedorchenko
This is an excellent example of thermocapillary convection at work—a phenomenon in which a surface tension gradient forces a liquid (in this case, oil) to migrate outwards. Once this happens, food is more apt to stick to the center of the pan, the result of the “formation of a dry spot in the thin sunflower oil film,” according to the study.
Fedorchenko and Hruby actually created a formula to calculate the “dewetting rate,” which measures the speed of receding oil droplets. Very cool, but the word “dewetting” is something we don’t need in our lives right now. The scientists also identified the conditions that lead to dry spots, resulting in the following advice:
“To avoid unwanted dry spot formation, the following set of measures (and/or) should be applied: increasing the oil film thickness, moderate heating, completely wetting the surface of the pan with oil, using a pan with a thick bottom, stirring food regularly during cooking,” the authors write.
Wow. Don’t know about you, but for me that’s all blazingly obvious advice (not to mention how the first and third items on that list are basically the same thing). Except for using pans with a thick bottom—I didn’t know that. But to be fair, I often used a cast iron pan when frying foods, so I must’ve subconsciously felt this to be true.
Anyhoo, this is all making me very hungry, so I’m going to end it right here, head to the kitchen, and do my best to master the idiosyncrasies thermocapillary convection.
This is the end. Cadillac, a brand with a rich history of stuffing gigantic gasoline motors under the hoods of luxury sedans, is about to call it quits on internal combustion, but not before going out with a bang. Well, two bangs, with one of them called the CT5-V Blackwing, a 668-horsepower 6.2-liter supercharged V8 sedan with a standard…standard transmission. The other is the CT4-V Blackwing, a smaller 472-HP twin-turbo 3.6-liter V6 sedan that also comes with a stick shift, in keeping with the car gods’ orders. Let’s take a first look at these last hurrahs for high-performance gasoline Cadillacs.
The auto industry is quickly entering the electric era, so it feels a bit strange for Cadillac to be debuting two entirely-conventional flagship sedans. But this is the last stand for performance gasoline Cadillacs, and my god is GM’s premium brand going out swinging.
So Much Power, So Many Pedals
Photo: David Tracy
The CT5-V is a 668-HP, 659 lb-ft supercharged V8 sedan with a six-speed manual transmission sending torque to the rear wheels. On paper, it is epic, fulfilling the entirety of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Automotive Needs (other than perhaps “low curb weight” — the CT5-V Blackwing weighs roughly two tons). I can’t wait to drive this machine.
Photo: David Tracy
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The other car Cadillac showed was the CT4-V, which also comes standard with a manual transmission, and also has a boosted engine that sends torque to the rear wheels, though that engine is a V6, and the high intake manifold air pressure comes from a pair of turbochargers instead of a supercharger.
Photo: David Tracy
Here’s a little walk-around of these two cars with marketing manager Ken Kornas:
When Cadillac released horsepower figures for the regular CT4-V and CT5-V, the automotive media pretty much spit out its drink and laughed. “We Regret To Inform You That The Cadillac CT4-V Has Just 24 More HP Than A Toyota Camry,” my colleague wrote after Jalopnik’s initial article titled “The 2020 Cadillac CT4-V and CT5-V Arrive Without The Big Power We’re Used To.”
After having been spoiled by the 464 HP ATS-V and 640 HP CTS-V, we just weren’t excited about the paltry 325 HP turbocharged inline-four in the CT4-V or the 360-HP twin-turbo V6 in the CT5-V. “Hey, this isn’t the real V, is it?” my Editor-in-Chief Rory Carroll asked Cadillac at an event in 2019. The brand responded that a “big V” was under development. Now it’s here along with its little sibling.
Photo: David Tracy
The 668-HP CT5-V Blackwing can allegedly pull off a 0-60 mph time of 3.7 seconds, and reach a top speed of over 200 mph. The 472-HP, 445 lb-ft CT4-V Blackwing takes a tenth more to get to 60, and its top speed plateaus at around 189 mph, per Cadillac. Both cars are built on the Alpha II platform, the successor to the Alpha platform that underpinned the Chevy Camaro and Cadillac ATS. Like the ATS and Camaro, the CT4 and CT5 have MacPherson strut front suspensions and five-link setups in the back.
Speaking of the ATS, the CT4-V Blackwing is likely going to be quite similar to that car’s V-model, which was an excellent driver’s car thanks to incredible steering feel and sharp handling. The CT4 has essentially the same engine and transmission, with roughly the same power (it’s up 8 HP). Car And Driver gets into the differences, writing in its story 472-HP 2022 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing Is like an ATS-V, but Better:
Chassis upgrades include larger front and rear brake rotors, a newer version of the standard magnetorheological dampers, and Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires instead of the old Pilot Super Sport rubber. These tires wrap around 18-inch wheels with a staggered-width setup; the magnesium wheels that Cadillac teased earlier won’t be available until later in the production run. The housing for the electronic limited-slip differential is now aluminum, which Cadillac says saves 22 pounds. Overall curb weight is up by a claimed 77 pounds.
Photo: David Tracy
I’m conflicted here, because as much as I love the idea of an improved ATS-V that handles well, the bigger, couple-of-hundred-pounds-heavier CT5-V Blackwing has the V8 with a 1.7-liter Eaton supercharger on it, and you know that’s going to sound much, much better. So the question is: Do you choose nimble(ish) handling or do you choose the glorious sound of a boosted V8?
Perhaps I’m a bit basic, but my initial primal instinct is to go with option B.
The Hardware
Photo: Cadillac
Cadillac didn’t have engineers at my preview session in a warehouse in Warren, Michigan, so the brand wasn’t able to get deep into the CT4-V Blackwing and CT5-V Blackwing’s tech. But right away, it was obvious how epic the cooling systems are — unsurprising, given the ATS-V was a masterpiece in this area.
The cars each have roughly a dozen heat exchangers, with tiny outboards ones tilted, and angled a bit inboard:
Photo: David Tracy
My favorite heat exchanger (everyone should have a favorite heat exchanger, right?) on the CT4-V is the flat one up front, which I’m fairly sure cools the transmission and rear differential.
A heat exchanger whose face is actually parallel to airflow?! It seems counterintuitive, but it makes sense if you consider that it’s located just ahead of the main cooling module, which — due to its restriction — creates an area of high pressure ahead of itself. That high pressure, along with the low pressure under the vehicle as air rushes at a high velocity, forces air through the heat exchanger mounted parallel to the car’s floor:
Photo: David Tracy
While we’re on the topic of aerodynamics, Cadillac says the new grille design is a key enabler for improving airflow over the ATS-V, and the brand mentions a new Carbon Fiber Aero Package, which allegedly reduces lift by 214 percent on the CT4-V Blackwing and 75 percent on the CT5-V Blackwing. It goes without saying that there’s a drag penalty.
Also exciting are the underbody “airflow-channeling strakes” that make up what Cadillac calls the “Underwing” — basically, an underbody airflow strategy that Cadillac says reduces drag and improves track performance:
Photo: David Tracy
Speaking of the underbody, here’s an “Easter Egg” V-Series logo at the bottom of the liquid-cooled electronic limited-slip differential:
Photo: David Tracy
The brakes are huge. The CT4-V Blackwing’s rotors are 15 inches up front and 13.4 out back, while the bigger sibling has 15.7-inch rotors ahead of the driver and 14.7s behind. Both cars have six-piston calipers at the nose and four-piston grabbers at the tail.
Photo: David Tracy
The standard manual transmission is a six-speed Tremec, with a dual-disk LuK clutch. In case you’re not familiar with how a twin-disc clutch works, it essentially involves bolting a housing to the flywheel, using axial space to create an additional surface for an additional clutch to grab onto. Here, watch this Aussie show you how it works:
Both cars get rev matching capability and “No-Lift Shift,” which is what it sounds like: You can stay hard on the accelerator pedal while shifting — something that, per Cadillac, helps keep the CT4-V Blacking’s turbos in boost.
There’s also a 10-speed automatic available if you’re into that sort of thing.
Pricing
Photo: David Tracy
Photo: David Tracy
The CT4-V Blackwing starts at $59,990, while the CT5-V Blackwing costs $84,990. These are higher base prices than those of the Audi RS3 and BMW M3 with which GM says the two cars compete, respectively. How the Caddies will hold up on the track against their German counterparts is something I can’t wait to find out. Will Cadillac’s final internal combustion engine V-Series cars go out on top?
Google Stadia, the late 2019 streaming platform that promised to revolutionize gaming by letting users stream games without needing to own a powerful PC or console, is altering course, getting out of the game-making business and will now offer its platform directly to game publishers alongside offering Stadia Pro to the public.
The company is announcing the news today, though Kotaku began to hear rumblings from sources close to Stadia last week that Google’s service was heading for a major change. One games industry source told Kotaku that Google was canceling multiple projects, basically any games slated for release beyond a specific 2021 window, though they believed games close to release would still come out. Today brings some clarification.
Google will close its two game studios, located in Montreal and Los Angeles. Neither had released any games yet. That closure will impact around 150 developers, one source familiar with Stadia operations said. The company says it will try to find those developers new roles at Google.
Jade Raymond, the veteran producer who helped build Assassin’s Creed for Ubisoft and moved on to EA several years ago before leaving to run game creation at Stadia, is exiting the company, according to Google.
Google will continue to operate the Stadia gaming service and its $10 monthly Stadia Pro service. It’s unclear how many, if any, exclusive games will still come to the service, though the company has indicated that it can still sign new games and will bring more third-party releases to the platform. It nevertheless will look to many like a draw down of the plan to have Stadia run as a bona fide competitor to console platforms.
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The company plans to begin offering its Stadia tech to publishers, opening up the possibility for Stadia to become the streaming tech for other video game companies. Google’s head of Stadia operations, longtime console executive Phil Harrison, will focus on pursuing these new partnerships.
“We see an important opportunity to work with partners seeking a gaming solution all built on Stadia’s advanced technical infrastructure and platform tools,” Harrison wrote in a blog post today. “We believe this is the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business that helps grow the industry.”
Google initially offered Stadia in a $129 Founder’s Edition bundle, which included a custom controller, a Chromecast Ultra (used for streaming games from Google’s servers to a TV), and three months of Stadia Pro, a subscription service that granted access to certain games.
Google promoted some exciting features, including the ability to let players pass control of a livestreamed Stadia game on the fly and to share savestates of games, but many of them weren’t available at launch and remained in testing phases.
The service’s best moments may have been when its third-party ports showed off the strength of the cloud gaming model, in which a game can run well on just about any device with a screen and a strong internet connection. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ran well on Stadia. Destiny 2‘s Stadia support let players of that game drop in for an extra match or quest from their phone or laptop when they were far from their regular gaming gear. When Cyberpunk 2077 was faltering on everything else in December, it was running quite well on Stadia.
Still, without offering an all-you-can-play service nor offering killer exclusive games, Stadia struggled to get its footing. Meanwhile, Microsoft ramped up its xCloud cloud gaming service as part of its Game Pass Ultimate bundle, and Stadia became less and less alluring to the kind of hardcore gamer who can build buzz for a new gaming service.
Google seemingly built for the future with the creation of first-party studios and a leadership team consisting of accomplished studio heads and creative directors, but those efforts weren’t enough to stave off the fate many people feared when hearing about this Google initiative: that it would lose support from within before it got ample time to realize its potential.
Stadia isn’t quite done. The Stadia tech could still succeed. By many accounts, Stadia runs games great. But as a game-maker, Google appears to have packed it in. Said one source familiar with Stadia’s first-party operations, citing another tech giant’s widelypublicized failure to create video games: “Google was a terrible place to make games. Imagine Amazon, but under-resourced.”
The PlayStation 5 launched last November, but months later, it’s still hard to snag one, especially in Japan. Early today, the Yodobashi Camera electrics megastore in Akihabara, one of the biggest in the country, sold a huge shipment of PS5. All hell broke loose.
People began shoving and pushing, descending on a Yodobashi clerk who had a stack of an estimated 300 numbered tickets to purchase the PS5.
Have a look at the chaos that ensued:
The police were called, and the sale was cancelled.
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Why did this happen? As Twitter’s AJapaneseDream points out, the Akihabara location is apparently only one of two Yodobashi Cameras in the greater Tokyo-Yokohama area that does not require the retailer’s black credit card to purchase the hardware—a requirement that was instituted, it seems, to thwart resellers.
What’s more, unlike in the past, the store gave out numbered tickets first come, first served. In the past, also in an effort to discourage console flipping, the retailer would give away raffle numbers for the chance to purchase the hardware.
This created a perfect opportunity for those who wanted to get a PS5 for themselves or even to resell.
Keep in mind that the Japanese government has currently declared a state of emergency over the novel coronavirus. Tokyo has the highest number of cases in the country.
Here’s Power-Up Baseball running in a forthcoming version of the MAME arcade emulator. Gif: Midway / Incredible Technologies / Video Game History Foundation
Midway’s NBA Jam and NFL Blitz are two of the greatest sports game franchises thanks to how they both provide fun, over-the-top experiences that require little knowledge of the pastime in question. The company would eventually set its sights on hockey, boxing, and even professional wrestling, but it never quite got around to releasing a baseball game in the same vein. Or did it?
Thanks to the Video Game History Foundation, we now have a first-hand look at (and ROM downloads for) Power-Up Baseball, which was in development by Midway and Incredible Technologies in the mid-1990s. After discovering a prototype for the game among the belongings of late developer Chris Oberth (whose work the organization is helping his family preserve), VGHF co-director Frank Cifaldi spoke to several former Midway and Incredible Technologies employees about what happened to Power-Up Baseball.
“[Power-Up Baseball] was supposed to be over-the-top and extreme and all those good things from the ‘90s,” art director Alan Noon told Cifaldi. “So, the initial art style that I went with was what was pretty trendy at the time with like, shattered fonts and lots of paint splashes and things like that. That kind of look and feel ran pretty much throughout the game.”
The main goal behind Power-Up Baseball was to give America’s favorite pastime its own NBA Jam, combining the digitized graphics and sense of humor that made Midway’s basketball game such a hit with Incredible Technologies’ trackball expertise. But while the special pitches and swings would have definitely set it apart from the rest of the crowd, baseball’s pace didn’t gel with the fast-paced arcade action the two studios envisioned for Power-Up Baseball as well as basketball had in NBA Jam.
“It was too long,” programmer Brian Smolik explained. “We shortened it down to maybe three innings or something like that. And at some point you could buy one inning at a time. And who’s gonna play one inning, right? It was great if you could be there for a whole game. But that was like the length of two or three [NBA Jam games], and that’s tough for anybody to sit through.”
Power-Up Baseball was tested locally in Chicago, with several cabinets being built and sent to various arcades, but there just wasn’t a market for it. The passion for the project was there, but the developers had overlooked one important factor: how well it would make money for operators. Sadly, Power-Up Baseball was canceled, and only now is it finally seeing the light of day thanks to the diligent work of video game historians.
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Be sure to check out the Video Game History Foundation’s full write-up on Power-Up Baseball for more details on how this recently unearthed project was created, not to mention all the requisite files to check it out for yourself. VGHF is offering full source code and ROM downloads for Power-Up Baseball, and even helped add support for the game to a forthcoming version of arcade emulator MAME. What a helpful bunch!
Apple may have struggled to get its AirPower multi-device charging pad to work, but just over the horizon is a new technology that promises to make wireless charging truly wireless, and Xiaomi is the latest company to promise a world without charging cables—we just don’t know when it will actually arrive.
Wireless charging in its current form is definitely convenient since it allows you to just plop a device like a smartphone or headphones down on a pad to top off its battery without having to reach for a cable. But at the same time, it’s also restrictive, requiring you to all but abandon a device on a desk or side table until it’s charged. Truly wireless charging is the ideal solution because as long as you’re in the same room as a wireless power transmitter your phone will charge no matter where it is, even if you’re still using it in hand.
It sounds like total science fiction, but the technology exists, and back in 2016 a company called Ossia demonstrated working prototypes of its Cota wireless charging system at CES. A smartphone (upgraded with a special case) could be carried anywhere around the company’s booth and it would continue to charge indefinitely. Today, Xiaomi announced its own wireless charging eco-system called “Mi Air Charge Technology” that appears to offer similar functionality (and limitations) as Ossia’s Cota tech.
In lieu of wires or a pair of aligned magnetic coils, Mi Air Charge uses a transmitter (that’s about the size of a portable air conditioner) packed with antennas that both accurately determine the location of a device and then use beamforming to broadcast “millimeter-wide waves” towards it. A separate smaller collection of antennas function as a receiver inside another device, converting the wireless signals into about 5-watts of power, which is what the iPhone’s tiny cube charger delivered when plugged into a power outlet.
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Xiaomi promises the system can provide power to multiple devices all at the same time, be it a smartphone, a tablet, headphones, or even a pair of wirelessly powered batteries like Ossia also demonstrated a few years ago that ensures legacy devices never need a fresh pair. Distances are still limited to several meters, or roughly the size of an average room, but the technology isn’t hindered by physical obstacles, so the beefy power transmitter can potentially be hidden away out of sight.
It’s exciting to see more companies announce wireless charging solutions like this because it helps legitimize the technology, but unfortunately, to date all we really have are announcements. Since its debut at CES 2016 Ossia still hasn’t launched a wireless charging product available to consumers. And Xiaomi’s announcement today doesn’t even include vague promises about how long it will take the company to make its Mi Air Charge Technology available outside its own R&D labs.
There are considerable challenges to making this technology both safe and reliable, and it’s unfortunately not backward-compatible. Moving forward Xiaomi could include the compact antenna receiver array in its future smartphones, but your iPhone won’t work with the system without a special charging case, or Apple agreeing to play nice with Xiaomi. There’s little doubt truly wireless charging will one day be commonplace—we might even be able to blanket entire cities in wireless power instead of requiring a transmitter in every room of a house—but for now, it still remains nothing more than a tantalizing tech demo.
The night side of Venus as seen in thermal infrared. Image: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Damia Bouic
Scientists stunned the world last year by claiming to have discovered traces of phosphine in the Venusian clouds. New research suggests this gas—which, excitingly, is produced by microbes—was not actually responsible for the signal they detected. Instead, it was likely sulfur dioxide, a not-so-thrilling chemical.
Extraordinary research published in Nature last September is being challenged by a paper set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, a preprint of which is currently available at the arXiv. This is not the first paper to critique the apparent discovery of phosphine on Venus, and it’s probably not going to be the last.
That phosphine might be present on Venus was a revelation that blew our minds, and that’s because living organisms are one of the only known sources of the stinky gas. The team responsible for the apparent discovery, led by astronomer Jane Greaves from Cardiff University, found the evidence in spectral signals collected by two radio dishes: the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Spectral lines at certain wavelengths indicate the presence of specific chemicals, and in this case they implied the presence of phosphine in the Venusian cloud layer.
The authors of the Nature study were not claiming that life exists on Venus. Rather, they were asking the scientific community to explain their rather bizarre observation. Indeed, it was an exceptional claim, as it implied that Venus—one of the most inhospitable planets in the solar system—might actually be habitable, with microscopic organisms floating through the clouds.
Alas, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
“Instead of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, the data are consistent with an alternative hypothesis: They were detecting sulfur dioxide,” Victoria Meadows, a co-author of the new study and an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, explained in a statement. “Sulfur dioxide is the third-most-common chemical compound in Venus’ atmosphere, and it is not considered a sign of life.”
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Meadows, along with researchers from NASA, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Riverside, reached this conclusion by modeling conditions inside the Venusian atmosphere, which they did to re-interpret the radio data gathered by the original team.
“This is what’s known as a radiative transfer model, and it incorporates data from several decades’ worth of observations of Venus from multiple sources, including observatories here on Earth and spacecraft missions like Venus Express,” explained Andrew Lincowski, a researcher with the UW Department of Astronomy and the lead author of the paper, in the statement.
Equipped with the model, the researchers simulated spectral lines produced by phosphine and sulphur at multiple atmospheric altitudes on Venus, as well as how those signatures were received by ALMA and JCMT. Results showed that the shape of the signal, detected at 266.94 gigahertz, likely came from the Venusian mesosphere—an extreme height where sulphur dioxide can exist but phosphine cannot owing to the harsh conditions there, according to research. In fact, so extreme is this environment that phosphine wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds.
As the authors argue, the original researchers understated the amount of sulphur dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere and instead attributed the 266.94 gigahertz signal to phosphine (both phosphine and sulphur dioxide absorb radio waves around this frequency). This happened, according to the researchers, due to an “undesirable side-effect” known as spectral line dilution, study co-author and NASA JPL scientist Alex Akins explained in the statement.
“They inferred a low detection of sulfur dioxide because of [an] artificially weak signal from ALMA,” added Lincowski. “But our modeling suggests that the line-diluted ALMA data would have still been consistent with typical or even large amounts of Venus sulfur dioxide, which could fully explain the observed JCMT signal.”
This new result could prove devastating for the Nature paper, and it’ll be interesting to hear how the authors respond to this latest critique. That said, some scientists believe the writing is already on the wall, or more accurately, the trash bin.
“Already quickly after publication of the original work, we and others have put strong doubts on their analysis,” wrote Ignas Snellen, a professor at Leiden University, in an email. “Now, I personally think that this is the final nail in the coffin of the phosphine hypothesis. Of course, one can never prove that Venus is completely phosphine-free, but at least there is now no remaining evidence to suggest otherwise. I am sure that others will keep on looking though.”
Back in December, Snellen and his colleagues challenged the Nature study, arguing that the method used by the Greaves team resulted in a “spurious” high signal-to-noise ratio and that “no statistical evidence” exists for phosphine on Venus.
The apparent absence of phosphine on Venus, and thus the absence of any hints of microbial life, is far less interesting than the opposite, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Science makes no claims or promises about the interestingness of all things, and we, as defenders of the scientific method, must come to accept our unfolding universe as we find it.