Spontaneously generating reality is a messy affair.

Our Big Bang, for example, unleashed a universe’s worth of energy and matter in an instant, then flung it omnidirectionally away at the speed of light as temperatures throughout the growing cosmos exceeded 1,000 trillion degrees Celsius in the first few nanoseconds of time’s existence. The following couple hundred million years, during which time the universe cooled to the point that particles beyond quarks and photons could exist — when actual atoms like hydrogen and helium came into being — are known as the dark ages, on account of stars not yet existing to provide light.

Eventually however, vast clouds of elemental gasses compressed themselves enough to ignite, bringing illumination to a formerly dark cosmos and driving the process of cosmic reionization, which is why the universe isn’t still just a whole bunch of hydrogen and helium atoms. The actual process of how the light from those new stars interacted with surrounding gas clouds to create the ionized plasma that spawned heavier elements is not fully understood but a team of researchers at MIT have just announced that their mathematical model of this turbulent epoch is the largest and most detailed devised to date.

The Thesan simulation, named in honor of the Etruscan goddess of dawn, simulates the period of cosmic reionization looking at the interactions between gasses, gravity, and radiation in a 100 million cubic light year space. Researchers can scrub through a synthetic timeline extending from 400,000 years to 1 billion years after the Big Bang to see how changing different variables within the model impacts the generated outcomes.

“Thesan acts as a bridge to the early universe,” Aaron Smith, NASA Einstein Fellow in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, told MIT News. “It is intended to serve as an ideal simulation counterpart for upcoming observational facilities, which are poised to fundamentally alter our understanding of the cosmos.”

Grimes’ connections to hacking extend beyond a Cyberpunk 2077 cameo, apparently. Cybersecurity expert Jackie Singh and Pitchfork report the electropop star (aka Claire Boucher) confessed to hacking the culture blog Hipster Runoff in a Vanity Fairinterview. She said she coordinated a distributed denial of service attack against the site in 2012 after its anonymous author Carles posted an allegedly “mean” story including a photo of her kissing a friend at a party.

John Roach — the former chief of RadioShack parent company Tandy who later became one of the lead proponents of the personal computer — has died at 83, reportedThe New York Times. The Fort Worth native died in the city where he was raised, and no cause of death was given by his wife. As an employee of Tandy in the 70s, Roach convinced RadioShack executives to sell the TRS-80, a desktop microcomputer that retailed for just under $600, in its stores nationwide. This was at a time when few complete, pre-assembled computers were on the market. The TRS-80 first hit RadioShack stores in 1977, and by 1981 became the largest-selling computer of all time, beating out Apple’s early offerings.

“It is obvious that the microcomputer is at the center of a communications and information revolution. I believe that within 20 years most Americans will be computer users and will benefit from the attendant mental advantage,” Roach toldCreative Computing in 1984.

Roach was born on November 22, 1938 in Stamford, Texas. He started his career at Tandy Corporation as a data processing manager in 1967. Once a top-seller of CB radios through its RadioShack stores, the Tandy Corporation was then in a sales slump due to a decline in demand. The TRS-80, which sold exclusively at RadioShack stores, helped revive the company. By the time Roach became chief operating officer of Tandy in 1980, the company had close to 40 percent of the personal computer market.

The very first TRS-80 came equipped with a Zilog 80 processor, 4 KB DRAM, 64-character per line video monitor and Level I BASIC language interpreter. Its keyboard could only type uppercase letters. But the units sold like wildfire, and became a favorite among computer hobbyists and business professionals. By the early ‘90s, the TRS-80’s market share took a nosedive, overtaken by offerings from Apple and IBM. Roach retired as chief executive of Tandy in 1998.

“I was saddened to hear of John’s passing. John’s vision and his ability to get early computers, like the TRS-80, into people’s hands through RadioShack made him one of the true pioneers of this industry,” Bill Gates said in a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “He helped create a market that so many people and companies benefited from as the personal computing industry took shape.”

Source: Engadget – Former Tandy CEO and PC innovator John Roach dead at 83