This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The American Midwest is home to some of the richest, most productive farmland in the world, enabling its transformation into a vast corn- and soy-producing machine—a conversion spurred largely by decades-long policies that support the production of biofuels.

But a new report takes a big swing at the ethanol orthodoxy of American agriculture, criticizing the industry for causing economic and social imbalances across rural communities and saying that the expansion of biofuels will increase greenhouse gas emissions, despite their purported climate benefits.

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Today’s monkey torture videos are the products of a digitally connected world. People who enjoy watching baby animals probed, snipped, and mutilated in horrible ways often have difficulty finding local collaborators, but online communities like “million tears”—now thankfully shuttered—can help them forge connections.

Once they do meet other like-minded souls, communication takes place through chat apps like Telegram and Signal, often using encryption.

Money is pooled through various phone apps, then sent to videographers in countries where wages are low and monkeys are plentiful. (The cases I have seen usually involve Indonesia; read my feature from last year to learn more about how these groups work.)

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It’s been a big week or so in the video game realm between the arrival of the Nintendo Switch 2 (our review is now live) and Summer Game Fest. During the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday, Microsoft announced handheld gaming PCs that will have deep Xbox integration as well as support for storefronts such as Battle.net. Steam, GOG and Ubisoft Connect. If Microsoft and its partner ASUS stick the landing, the Xbox Ally systems could be a strong option for powering through your backlog of games, big and small. As it happens, you might be about to add more to your wishlist thanks to our latest indie games roundup.

The latest Steam Next Fest also started this week. Part of the fun of the event, which runs until June 16, is diving into demos for games you’d never heard of until now, so go forth and play some! You never know if you might be one of the first people to play the next Balatro, for instance. A quick word of advice: if you’d prefer to avoid titles with generative AI, remember that Valve requires developers that use such material in their games or marketing to disclose that on their Steam store page.

New releases

The Alters is the latest project from Frostpunk and This War is Mine studio 11 Bit Studios, which self-published this game. As the sole survivor of a space expedition, Jan Dolski has to keep a large mobile base moving across the surface of a planet to avoid the deadly radiation of the sun. To help him solve problems along the way, Jan must create and rely on clones of himself. These alternate versions (or “alters”) are based on divergences from pivotal life choices Jan made in his past. They each have their own specialist roles, skill sets and personalities, with needs that have to be fulfilled.

The Alters has an interesting premise. Once you factor in elements like traditional survival gameplay and base building, there should be plenty of variety here. Reviews have been positive for this one. I’m interested in trying it out, though it seems like the kind of thing that may prompt one to reflect on their own life choices. The Alters is out now on Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. It’s on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

Dune: Awakening is another major indie game that arrived on Steam this week (well, June 5 for those who bought pricier editions) following a delay. It will hit consoles at a later date. The open-world survival MMO from developer Funcom takes inspiration from Frank Herbert’s novels and Denis Villeneuve’s films. It still takes place on Arrakis but is set in an alternate timeline.

You’ll want to be extra careful when it comes to sandworms. You’ll keep most of your gear if you die by the hands of other players or other computer-controlled enemies, though you’ll drop some resources that you can pick up again if you perish in PvP combat. If a sandworm devours you, though, you’ll lose absolutely everything you’re carrying.

Oh dear, where to start with MindsEye? It is fair to say this is a video game that became available to buy this week on Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. It is also fair to say that the debut of this action-adventure title from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies’ studio Build A Rocket Boy has been less than smooth. 

It was already pretty ominous that two executives left Build a Rocket Boy just days before the arrival of MindsEye. After the game’s release, Sony reportedly issued refunds to some players as clips showing glitches, bugs, performance issues and clunky gameplay spread. There isn’t even an in-game world map.

One creator who played the game kept laughing throughout their sponsored stream (the developer is also said to have pulled the plug on another sponsored stream just as it was about to start). That’s pretty ironic, considering Build a Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard said there was “a concerted effort” against MindsEye and claimed “that there are bot farms posting negative comments and dislikes.” 

The studio claimed this week it was “working around the clock” to improve MindsEye. Perhaps Build A Rocket Boy will surprise everyone and turn things around in a similar fashion to Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky. That seems like a tall order, to say the least.

Indie games aren’t all survival and action, of course. They can also be about things like arranging photos in chronological order to discover a family story. 

Such is the case with Instants from developer Endflame, which debuted on Steam during last Saturday’s Wholesome Direct showcase. It’s a charming-looking puzzle game in which you can decorate your photo album and, if you need it, get some help from a furry friend.

Upcoming

I’ve been itching to get my hands on Baby Steps for ages, so after we got a September 8 release date for the game on Steam and PS5, I was very happy that a Steam demo arrived last weekend. This is a walking simulator in the truest sense of the term from Bennett Foddy (QWOP, Getting Over It), Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch (both of whom worked with Foddy on the enjoyable Ape Out) and publisher Devolver Digital. You use controller triggers or mouse buttons to lift main character Nate’s feet one at a time and place them on the ground after using directional buttons or a thumbstick to position them.

Nate, “an unemployed failson” who seems very unfamiliar with the skill of walking, will fall over and over and over again as you hike up mountains. Sometimes he’ll fall down a muddy ravine, sending him tumbling down the side of a peak.

You might want to quit or uninstall the demo after an unfortunate tumble. I understand. I did too. But the early evidence suggests Baby Steps is shaping up to be a uniquely hilarious, frustrating and hopefully rewarding experience. And so we march on.

One of the more compelling reveals for me at the Xbox Games Showcase was a sequel to Planet of Lana, which I enjoyed very much. The follow-up to that story-driven puzzle platformer is Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf. 

Developer Wishfully and Thunderful Publishing are bringing this installment, which looks just as beautiful as the first game, to Steam, Xbox and PlayStation in 2026. It’ll be available on Game Pass on day one. Looking forward to it.

I’ve had Gecko Gods from developer Inresin and publisher Super Rare Originals on my radar for a few years now. As a little gecko trying to save their friend, you’ll be able to climb on anything while exploring an island.

After some delays, this puzzle platformer is set to arrive on Steam, Switch and PlayStation this fall. A demo dropped as part of Steam Next Fest too.

During the various showcases over the last week or so, we saw not one, but two farming/life sims that are squarely in the horror genre. I am excited for them both. First up is Fractured Blooms from Serenity Forge (Doki Doki Literature Club Plus).

Your character, Angie, is stuck in a time loop and you’ll have to manage her food and stamina. You’ll tend to her garden and prepare meals before completing evening chores in your home, though you may not be the only entity that resides there.

As if I weren’t looking forward to this one enough already, Serenity Forge says the seminal TV show Lost was one of its inspirations for Fractured Blooms. There’s no release window as yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam if you’re interested.

The other horror-inflected farming sim that caught my eye this week is Grave Seasons, from Perfect Garbage and publisher Blumhouse Games. Sure, you’ll harvest crops, go fishing and get to know your neighbors. You might also break and enter into their homes. 

While the mountain town of Ashenridge might seem idyllic on the surface, beware: there’s a supernatural serial killer on the prowl. Grave Seasons is coming to PC and consoles in 2026.

One Steam Next Fest demo I’ll certainly be checking out this weekend is for a game called Dispatch, which was announced at The Game Awards in December. This comedic narrative game is about a hero (Aaron Paul) who has run into difficult times after losing his mech suit. He starts working as a superhero dispatcher. You’ll “manage a dysfunctional team of misfit heroes and strategize who to send to emergencies around the city, all while balancing office politics, personal relationships and your own quest to become a hero.”

Dispatch has a stellar cast that also includes Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer and Academy Award nominee Jeffrey Wright. Given that Dispatch is being made by former Telltale developers at AdHoc Studio, it’s maybe not too much of a surprise that dialogue choices are a key part of the gameplay, which has some strategic elements as well. Dispatch is coming to PC and consoles later this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/clones-sandworms-scrapbooking-and-other-new-indie-games-worth-checking-out-110031834.html?src=rss

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State. The unusual radio pulses were detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a range of instruments flown on balloons high above Antarctica that are designed to detect radio waves from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

The goal of the experiment is to gain insight into distant cosmic events by analyzing signals that reach the Earth. Rather than reflecting off the ice, the signals — a form of radio waves — appeared to be coming from below the horizon, an orientation that cannot be explained by the current understanding of particle physics and may hint at new types of particles or interactions previously unknown to science, the team said. The researchers published their results in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the ANITA team searching for signals from elusive particles called neutrinos. She explained that by their calculations, the anomalous signal had to pass through and interact with thousands of kilometers of rock before reaching the detector, which should have left the radio signal undetectable because it would have been absorbed into the rock. “It’s an interesting problem because we still don’t actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they’re most likely not representing neutrinos,” Wissel said.

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NASA and Axiom Space have indefinitely delayed the Axiom-4 launch to the International Space Station due to concerns about a persistent air leak in the Russian PrK vestibule of the aging Zvezda module. “The PrK serves as a passageway between the station’s Zvezda module and spacecraft docked at its aft port,” notes CBS News. From the report: In a blog post, NASA said cosmonauts aboard the station “recently performed inspections of the pressurized module’s interior surfaces, sealed some additional areas of interest, and measured the current leak rate. Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure.” The post went on to say the Axiom-4 delay will provide “additional time for NASA and (the Russian space agency) Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary.”

Launched in July 2000 atop a Russian Proton rocket, Zvezda was the third module to join the growing space station, providing a command center for Russian cosmonauts, crew quarters, the aft docking port and two additional ports now occupied by airlock and research modules. The leakage was first noticed in 2019, and has been openly discussed ever since by NASA during periodic reviews and space station news briefings. The leak rate has varied, but has stayed in the neighborhood of around 1-to-2 pounds per day. “The station is not young,” astronaut Mike Barratt said last November during a post flight news conference. “It’s been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we’re seeing that in the form of some cracks that have formed.” The Russians have made a variety of attempts to patch a suspect crack and other possible sources of leakage, but air has continued to escape into space.

In November, Bob Cabana, a former astronaut and NASA manager who chaired the agency’s ISS Advisory Committee, said U.S. and Russian engineers “don’t have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks.” “The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the PrK cracks is high cyclic fatigue caused by micro vibrations,” Cabana said. “NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties and environmental exposures. “The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the US believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that’s the case.”

As an interim step, the hatch leading to the PrK and the station’s aft docking compartment is closed during daily operations and only opened when the Russians need to unload a visiting Progress cargo ship. And as an added precaution on NASA’s part, whenever the hatch to the PrK and docking compartment is open, a hatch between the Russian and U.S. segments of the station is closed. “We’ve taken a very conservative approach to close a hatch between the US side and the Russian side during those time periods,” Barratt said. “It’s not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides. And it’s something that we crew live with and enact.” Cabana said last year that the Russians do not believe “catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic (but) NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure.”

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Edd Gent reporting for IEEE Spectrum: IBM has unveiled a new quantum computing architecture it says will slash the number of qubits required for error correction. The advance will underpin its goal of building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, called Starling, that will be available to customers by 2029. Because of the inherent unreliability of the qubits (the quantum equivalent of bits) that quantum computers are built from, error correction will be crucial for building reliable, large-scale devices. Error-correction approaches spread each unit of information across many physical qubits to create “logical qubits.” This provides redundancy against errors in individual physical qubits.

One of the most popular approaches is known as a surface code, which requires roughly 1,000 physical qubits to make up one logical qubit. This was the approach IBM focused on initially, but the company eventually realized that creating the hardware to support it was an “engineering pipe dream,” Jay Gambetta, the vice president of IBM Quantum, said in a press briefing. Around 2019, the company began to investigate alternatives. In a paper published in Nature last year, IBM researchers outlined a new error-correction scheme called quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes that would require roughly one-tenth of the number of qubits that surface codes need. Now, the company has unveiled a new quantum-computing architecture that can realize this new approach. “We’ve cracked the code to quantum error correction and it’s our plan to build the first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer,” said Gambetta, who is also an IBM Fellow. “We feel confident it is now a question of engineering to build these machines, rather than science.”

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According to market analyst firm Canalys, enterprise adoption of AI is slowing due to unpredictable and often high costs associated with model inferencing in the cloud. Despite strong growth in cloud infrastructure spending, businesses are increasingly scrutinizing cost-efficiency, with some opting for alternatives to public cloud providers as they grapple with volatile usage-based pricing models. The Register reports: [Canalys] published stats that show businesses spent $90.9 billion globally on infrastructure and platform-as-a-service with the likes of Microsoft, AWS and Google in calendar Q1, up 21 percent year-on-year, as the march of cloud adoption continues. Canalys says that growth came from enterprise users migrating more workloads to the cloud and exploring the use of generative AI, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure.

Yet even as organizations move beyond development and trials to deployment of AI models, a lack of clarity over the ongoing recurring costs of inferencing services is becoming a concern. “Unlike training, which is a one-time investment, inference represents a recurring operational cost, making it a critical constraint on the path to AI commercialization,” said Canalys senior director Rachel Brindley. “As AI transitions from research to large-scale deployment, enterprises are increasingly focused on the cost-efficiency of inference, comparing models, cloud platforms, and hardware architectures such as GPUs versus custom accelerators,” she added.

Canalys researcher Yi Zhang said many AI services follow usage-based pricing models that charge on a per token or API call basis. This makes cost forecasting hard as the use of the services scale up. “When inference costs are volatile or excessively high, enterprises are forced to restrict usage, reduce model complexity, or limit deployment to high-value scenarios,” Zhang said. “As a result, the broader potential of AI remains underutilized.” […] According to Canalys, cloud providers are aiming to improve inferencing efficiency via a modernized infrastructure built for AI, and reduce the cost of AI services. The report notes that AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud “continue to dominate the IaaS and PaaS market, accounting for 65 percent of customer spending worldwide.”

“However, Microsoft and Google are slowly gaining ground on AWS, as its growth rate has slowed to ‘only’ 17 percent, down from 19 percent in the final quarter of 2024, while the two rivals have maintained growth rates of more than 30 percent.”

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High-voltage electricity cables have become a major constraint throttling the clean energy transition, with manufacturing facilities booked out for years as demand far exceeds supply capacity. The energy transition, trade barriers, and overdue grid upgrades have turbocharged demand for these highly sophisticated cables that connect wind farms, solar installations, and cross-border power networks.

The International Energy Agency estimates that 80 million kilometers of grid infrastructure must be built between now and 2040 to meet clean energy targets — equivalent to rebuilding the entire existing global grid that took a century to construct, but compressed into just 15 years. Each high-voltage cable requires custom engineering and months-long production in specialized 200-meter towers, with manufacturers reporting that 80-90% of major projects now use high-voltage direct current technology versus traditional alternating current systems.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a “waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023.” Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. “The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023,” the notice said.

The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was “a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments.” However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.

“For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has,” Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. “Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model.” Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anker is recalling 1.15 million “PowerCore 10000” portable chargers due to fire and explosion risks linked to overheating lithium-ion batteries, with 19 incidents reported. “That includes two minor burn injuries and 11 reports of property damage amounting to over $60,700,” reports CBS News. Consumers are urged to stop using the affected devices, check their serial numbers, and request a free replacement through Anker’s website. From the report: According to a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the lithium-ion battery inside certain “PowerCore 10000” made by Anker, a China-based electronics maker, can overheat. That can lead to the “melting of plastic components, smoke and fire hazards,” Anker said in an announcement. The company added that it was conducting the recall “out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety of our customers.”

The recalled “PowerCore 10000” power banks have a model number of A1263. They were sold online at Anker’s website — as well as Amazon, eBay and Newegg — between June 2016 and December 2022 for about $27 across the U.S., according to the recall notice. Consumers can check their serial number at Anker’s site to determine whether their power bank is included in the recall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.