Enlarge / A pathologist examines brain tissue of a diseased deer. The white circular shapes are the sponge-like holes found with prion-related diseases called transmissable spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). (credit: Getty | Star Tribune)

Five public research institutions in France announced a three-month moratorium on prion research this week, following a newly identified case of prion disease in a retired lab worker.

If the case is found to be linked to a laboratory exposure, it would be the second such case identified in France. In 2019, another lab worker in the country died of a prion disease at the age of 33. Her death came around nine years after she accidentally jabbed herself in the thumb with forceps used to handle frozen slices of humanized mouse brains infected with prions.

Prions and disease

Prions are misfolded, misshapen forms of normal proteins, called prion proteins, which are commonly found in human and other animal cells. What prion proteins do normally is still unclear, but they’re readily found in the human brain. When a misfolded prion enters the mix, it can corrupt the normal prion proteins around them, prompting them to misfold as well, clump together, and corrupt others. As the corruption ripples through the brain, it leads to brain tissue damage, eventually causing little holes to form. This gives the brain a sponge-like appearance and is the reason prion diseases are also called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs).

Faebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Facebook)

For months, Apple and Facebook waged a PR war (with threats of a legal one) over App Tracking Transparency, a change in recent versions of the iPhone’s iOS software that will often limit how advertising-focused apps and companies can monetize iPhone users.

Facebook’s original public predictions about App Tracking Transparency’s effect were apocalyptic. But even though App Tracking Transparency took effect during Facebook’s most recent quarter (Q2 of 2021), the company still posted huge ad revenue growth.

Facebook’s revenue, which is largely driven by the kinds of advertising that Apple’s iOS change undermines, grew 56 percent year-over-year in Q2, beating investor expectations. The company had 1.9 billion daily active users and 2.9 billion monthly active users. It earned $10.12 of revenue per user, on average.

When Sony announced Monday that it had sold 10 million PlayStation 5 consoles to consumers, it trumpeted the system as “the fastest-selling console in Sony Interactive Entertainment history.” That statement certainly sounds impressive, but it lacks the specificity we need to judge just how impressive the PS5’s sales have been so far (despite component shortages that could make the system hard to find into next year).

To add more context to Sony’s announcement, we looked at how quickly some other recent consoles took to sell their first 10 million systems worldwide. While different launch dates and staggered international launches skew some of these comparisons, the data overall shows that the PS5 is selling as fast or faster than some of the most popular consoles of the recent past.

We also looked at newly revealed sales data for PS5 exclusives Returnal and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and compared their sales rates to similar early system-sellers on the Switch.

Enlarge / Plague-bearing Bambi? (credit: Cheryl E Davis / Getty Images)

On Wednesday, the US Department of Agriculture released some rather disturbing news: a survey of wild deer populations has found that large numbers of the animals seem to have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The finding indicates that there’s a very large population of wild animals in North America that could serve as a reservoir for the virus, even if we were to get its circulation within the human population under control.

Probably not an error

Why check deer in the first place? It turns out that the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is studying a variety of species “to identify species that may serve as reservoirs or hosts for the virus, as well as understand the origin of the virus, and predict its impacts on wildlife and the risks of cross-species transmission.” This is the same group that identified the spread of the virus to a wild mink in 2020.

Using a captive deer population, the USDA had already determined that deer can be infected by the virus, although the animals display no symptoms. So although direct interactions between deer and humans are relatively limited, checking the wild populations made sense. The USDA checked populations in a total of 32 counties in four different states, obtaining blood samples to look for antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2.

Enlarge / Another sim racer bites the dust—and this time without a new one in its place. (credit: Xbox Game Studios / Turn 10)

Microsoft has long boasted about the backward compatibility of its Xbox consoles, which means you can also expect to play hundreds of past-gen games on newer systems like Series X/S. But the game publisher and console maker is quieter about taking older games down from its digital storefronts—and this week’s latest casualty, coming from a popular first party, presents problems for Xbox’s recent sales pitches.

On paper, the basic announcement may look humdrum to savvy modern-gaming fans. Starting September 15, 2021, the sim racing game Forza Motorsport 7 will no longer be available from Xbox’s digital download shops. That date marks roughly four years past its 2017 launch on Xbox One consoles, and “four years” is key. Since the Xbox Live download store has been in operation, other Forza games, both in the Motorsport and Horizon camps, have been delisted at a nearly identical cadence. This suggests that the game’s car licenses factor into the cutoff dates.

Knocked out of the usual lineup

Look closely enough at major licenses in classic video games and you’ll see a similar trend. Arguably the most prominent early example came when Nintendo began reprinting copies of its 1987 sports-action classic Punch-Out!! in 1990 without re-upping its original license deal with Mike Tyson, and it’s not uncommon to see publishers either strip licenses on older games or give up on them altogether. For most of the modern gaming industry’s history, four-year-old games have usually been relegated to bargain bins—especially if they receive regular sequels—so such a licensing term doesn’t seem egregious.

Enlarge / It sure looks like a crab, but it isn’t. Why are crab-like forms so common? (credit: David Kirkland / Design Pics)

Around a year ago, this evolutionary process captured the imagination of the Internet. Headlines like “Why everything eventually becomes a crab” and “Why Does Evolution Keep Turning Everything Into Crabs” popped up. PBS even made a video.

“Everything” is clear hyperbole—the overwhelming majority of things on Earth are not crabs and seemingly have no plans to become them. But if there are benefits to having a crab-like shape on Earth, should we view that as a general rule of life? Could it hold true on other planets? If the process of carcinization operates here, it’s not unreasonable to expect that it might happen elsewhere.

New PlayStation 5 system software rolling out in beta today finally unlocks the long-promised ability to expand the system’s 667GB of usable internal storage, using M.2 SSDs that fit certain technical and physical requirements.

As listed on a new PlayStation support page, the new system software supports 22 mm-wide M.2 drives using the PCIe Gen 4 standard. Single- or double-sided drives with storage sizes ranging from 250GB to 4TB should work with the console.

Sony recommends that any PS5 expansion drive have a sequential read speed of at least 5500MB/s but warns that even then, “not all games are necessarily playable with the exact same performance provided by the PS5 console’s internal Ultra-High Speed SSD.” The company also recommends a heatsink (either built in or attached by the user) to aid with heat dissipation but warns that the heatsink should only rise 8 mm “above the board” to help ensure the entire housing can fit in the PS5’s 11.25 mm-high compartment.

In iOS 14, Apple added a “privacy” section to the app store, requiring app developers to list the data they collect and how they use it. Google—which was one of the biggest targets of Apple’s privacy nutrition labels and delayed app updates for months to avoid complying with the policy—is now aping the feature for Google Play.

Google posted a demo of what the Google Play “Data privacy & security” section will look like, and it contains everything you’d expect if you’ve looked at the App Store lately. There’s information on what data apps collect, whether or not the apps share the data with third parties, and how the data is stored. Developers can also explain what the data is used for and if data collection is required to use the app. The section also lists whether or not the collected data is encrypted, if the user can delete the data, and if the app follows Google’s “Families” policy (meaning all the usual COPPA stuff).

Google Play’s privacy section will be mandatory for all developers in April 2022, and starting in October, Google says developers can start populating information in the Google Play Console “for review.” Google also says that in April, all apps will need to supply a privacy policy, even if they don’t collect any data. Apps that don’t have an “approved” privacy section by April may have their app updates rejected or their app removed.

Enlarge / Ex-Blizzard developer Alex Afrasiabi as he appeared in a 2019 video promoting World of Warcraft. (credit: Blizzard)

Last year, reports started to bubble up among Blizzard-watchers that longtime World of Warcraft developer Alex Afrasiabi, who was first hired in 2004, had quietly left the company without any official explanation. Now that Afrasiabi has been specifically named in a gender discrimination lawsuit brought against the company by California state, Blizzard is confirming that Afrasiabi was let go in early 2020 “for his misconduct in his treatment of other employees.”

That confirmation from a Blizzard spokesperson comes from a scathing Kotaku report that includes pictures of and stories about the so-called “Cosby suite,” a hotel room at Blizzcon 2013 that was reportedly used as an alcohol-filled party space for Blizzard employees and fans.

The California lawsuit refers to a “Crosby Suite” (misspelled in the suit), alleging that “Afrasiabi was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the ‘Crosby Suite’ after alleged rapist Bill Crosby [sic].” More specifically, the suit alleges that Afrasiabi “would hit on female employees, telling [them] he wanted to marry them, attempting to kiss them, and putting his arms around them. This was in plain view of other male employees, including supervisors, who had to intervene and pull him off female employees.”