Author: Sean Patterson

A new study performed aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has shown that being in space weakens astronauts’ immune systems. Researchers hope the findings can help prevent disease for those of us still on the planet.

European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter performed the experiments while on the ISS, as seen in the video below. Human immune cells were allowed to float freely in microgravity while others were placed in a centrifuge that simulated gravity. The cells in the centrifuge were found to be more healthy than those left to float.

Analysis showed that a transmitter called the Rel/NF-kB pathway stopped working in microgravity, preventing immune cells from working correctly.

“Normally, when our bodies sense an invasion, a cascade of reactions occur that are controlled by the information held in our genes, similar to an instruction book,” said Isabelle Walther, a researcher with the Space Biology Group in Zurich, Switzerland. “Finding which gene does what is like looking for the right key to fit a keyhole, without having found the keyhole yet.”

Researchers stated that these findings could help disease research in two ways. First, being able to deactivate genes associated with the immune system could help patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases. Second, drugs could be developed to target genes that fight specific diseases.

“We are working towards a finer control of disease,” said Millie Hughes-Fulford, a NASA astronaut and an investigator on the research. “If you imagine our immune system responding to diseases as a waterfall, up until now we have been fighting disease at the bottom of the waterfall. In the future we could target the raindrops before they have a chance to cascade into waterfalls. We live in exciting times.”

L.A. Noire, Rockstar’s detective work simulation game, might not have set the world on fire, but it did impress critics and fans with its ambition. Instead of animating characters to match the dialogue, Rockstar used a special motion capture technique and real actors to produce more life-like reactions and facial expressions for its characters.

Since this “Motionscan” technology records an actor’s face and dialogue in real-time, that means even the actors’ mistakes have been preserved for posterity. The Australian company behind the technique is named Depth Analysis, and it has posted a gag reel for the game to its home page.

Though the reel contains the types of mistakes commonly seen in movie or TV gag reels, the fact that the animated characters aren’t quite life-like enough to be considered outside of the uncanny valley makes their very human reactions all the more interesting. Also, seeing a videogame character sneeze convincingly is bizarre.

NASA this weekend revealed that an asteroid named 2012 DA14 will come very close to Earth on February 15. The object will swing within 27,700 kilometers (17,200 miles) of the Earth’s surface – close enough to pass within the geosynchronous satellites that orbit the planet, and only around one-thirteenth the distance from the Earth to the moon.

NASA researchers stated that, according to their observations, there is no chance the asteroid will collide with the Earth. It will cruise by at around 7.8 kilometers per second (17,400 miles per hour). The flyby will set a record for a close approach of an object of such size. Astronomers estimate that such an event occurs an average of every 40 years. A collision with an object the size of 2012 DA14 is expected an average of every 1,200 years.

According to observations of the asteroid’s brightness, object itself is not large. It is estimated to be only 45 meters (150 feet) across. When it passes closest to Earth on February 15, it will appear only as a point of light. Though it will be too faint to see with the naked eye, it should be visible with binoculars or a small telescope. Though the best viewing can be seen in Indonesia, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Australia will get a good view during the object’s closest approach.

2012 DA14 has only been known of for one year. In February 2012 astronomers at the La Sagra Sky Survey discovered the asteroid, which had just made a distant passage of Earth. The object’s orbital period (or, “year”) is 368 days, which very close to the Earth’s orbital period of 365 days. This year’s near-miss of Earth will alter the asteroid’s orbital period, shortening it to around 317 days.

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Everyone snowed-in and sick of winter will be happy to learn that the yearly Groundhog Day prediction in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania will be live-streamed online this year. The Pennsylvania tourism website will stream Punxsutawney Phil’s annual “prognostication” from this website. The prediction is scheduled to take place around 7:25 am EST.

According to the folk tale, six more weeks of winter are predicted by Phil if he sees his shadow. If not, an early spring is “just around the corner.”

The tradition of Punxsutawney’s Groundhog Day dates back to 1887. Since February 2 falls on a weekend this year, record crowds are expected to visit Gobbler’s Knob.

In addition to live-streaming the event, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office has again teamed up with Foursquare to offer a special Groundhog Day badge. The first 500 Foursquare users to check in from Gobbler’s Knob on February 2 will receive a Groundhog Day-branded Slinky toy. The Slinky was declared the official toy of Pennsylvania in 2001.

Last year, Phil predicted six more weeks of winter, as is usually the case. Still, there is always hope that the groundhog will predict an early spring, and that the prediction will happen to be correct.

For those who prefer to sleep in on their Saturdays, the movie Groundhog Day is currently streaming via Netflix Watch Instantly. It is, in every way, more entertaining than one of the real predictions. As proof, last year’s festivities (which consist largely of men in top hats making a spectacle of a terrified rodent) can be seen below.

With eSports becoming more popular and accepted every year, it is only a matter of time before professional gamers will be making money comparable to professional athletes.

Activision today announced the Call of Duty Championship, which will feature a Call of Duty: Black Ops II tournament with a $1 million prize pool. From April 5-7 in Hollywood, California, 32 teams of four players will compete in a live-streamed tournament for their share of the $1 million. The top eight teams will receive a share of the money, with the first place team taking a $400,000 prize.

“More people play Call of Duty multiplayer every day than watch the average regular season game of the NBA,” said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision. “The scale and passion of the Call of Duty fan base is simply humbling, and yet there is no formal way to find out who amongst those millions of players is the best of the best, until now. Watching the performances of the very best Call of Duty players is already a mass spectator sport on YouTube and Call of Duty Elite. We are going to bring the best players in the world to Hollywood to compete on the ultimate stage, for the ultimate prize. And we are going to invite our entire worldwide fan base to join in the fun.”

Registration for the tournament has already begun. Teams will compete for a spot in the tournament via Call of Duty: Black Ops II‘s February League Play on Xbox LIVE. The top eight teams in the League Play season will gain entry into the tournament. Eight more teams will come from Major League Gaming’s (MLG) Winter Championship on March 15-17, as well as eight others from the Electronic Sports League’s (ESL) European Finals that same weekend. The remaining teams will come from Asia, Australia, and Brazil.

The U.S. Justice Department this week filed a civil antiturst lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch Inbev’s (ABI) acquisition of Grupo Modelo. ABI is the maker of the best-selling beer in the U.S., Bud Light. Modelo sells the best-selling import beer in the U.S., Corona Extra.

ABI has proposed buying Modelo for $20.1 billion dollars. Of the $80 billion Americans spent on beer in 2012, around 39% of that amount went to ABI, while Modelo accounts for around 7% of U.S. beer sales. The companies are the largest and third-largest beer companies in the U.S. The justice department claims that the proposed merger would “substantially lessen copetition in the market for beer in the United States” and result in rising beer prices.

“The department is taking this action to stop a merger between major beer brewers because it would result in less competition and higher beer prices for American consumers,” said Bill Baer, assistant attorney general in charge of the Department of Justice antitrust division. “If ABI fully owned and controlled Modelo, ABI would be able to increase beer prices to American consumers. This lawsuit seeks to prevent ABI from eliminating Modelo as an important competitive force in the beer industry.”

The Justice Department’s complaint makes the case that the U.S. beer market is already highly concentrated, and that ABI “generally” acts as a price leader. It points out that while other beer companies such as MillerCoors, the second-largest beer seller in the U.S., generally follow ABI’s yearly price increases, Modelo has priced its imports “aggressively,” keeping ABI’s price increases under pressure.

Yesterday EA teased that something called Madden 25 would be coming later this year on August 27. Today the publisher confirmed that it will, in fact, be the next yearly game in the Madden franchise, titled Madden NFL 25.

“There’s no better way to celebrate and mark the culmination of 25 years of innovation than by naming this year’s game Madden NFL 25,” said Cam Weber, general manager of American football for EA Sports. “This year’s game will push the boundaries with gameplay and feature innovations that will lay a very strong foundation for the next 25 years of this storied franchise.”

Madden NFL 25 will be released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles. No word yet on whether the game will make an appearance on Microsoft’s and Sony’s next-generation consoles, which are rumored to launch this fall.

The cover athlete for the game will be determined using a voting tournament. 32 “all-time NFL greats” will be pitted against one another for a spot on the game’s cover. The bracket will be unveiled on ESPN’s SportsNation TV program on March 11, the day that the voting begins.

“This is the third consecutive year EA Sports and ESPN have collaborated on the Madden NFL cover vote in its current iteration,” said Raphael Poplock, vice president of games and partnerships for ESPN. “Each year has brought record-setting results as NFL fans come out in droves to support their favorite players and teams, and by going big this year with legends facing off against the league’s current leaders, needless to say it will be an interesting vote with much debate and discussion.”

The first Madden-branded game was 1988′s John Madden Football. Since that time, the franchise has sold around 99 million games and generated over $3.7 billion for its publishers.

Bohemia Interactive today announced that it will be changing the name of the main island featured in its upcoming Arma 3. The island will now be known as “Altis,” rather than “Limnos.”

The name change comes after two Bohemia developers, Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar, were arrested in Greece last September under charges of espionage and spent 129 days in prison. The two were on vacation on the Greek island of Lemnos, which serves as the inspiration for Altis. Greek authorities accused the developers of photographing military installations. The two were recently released from prison and allowed to return to the Czech Republic, where Bohemia is based.

“As part of the creative process, our virtual environments are often rooted in real-life locations and, during development, they evolve and grow along with our design,” said Joris-Jan van ‘t Land, project lead on Arma 3. “The resulting fictional environment is often close to its inspiration, but it’s never exactly the same – nor would we want it to be. For us, ‘Altis’ echoes the Mediterranean heart of our island, but differentiates it from any undesired real-life connotations.”

Lemnos was chosen as the inspiration for the Arma 3 island after Bohemia CEO Marek Spanel visited the island on vacation. The name change, according to Bohemia, is meant to emphasize that the game is fiction. A smaller Arma 3 island named “Stratis” will be keeping its name.

NASA‘s Cassini probe has spotted a storm on Saturn that has “consumed” itself. The massive storm whirled around the planet until it ran into its own tail end and dispersed. A new paper on the event, published in the journal Icarus, describes it as the first time researchers have ever seen such a thing happen in the solar system.

“This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane – but with a twist unique to Saturn,” said Andrew Ingersoll, co-author of the paper and a Cassini imaging team member. “Even the giant storms at Jupiter don’t consume themselves like this, which goes to show that nature can play many awe-inspiring variations on a theme and surprise us again and again.”

The storm was first detected in December of 2010, forming from warm gas in the planet’s atmosphere. It began moving west along 33 degrees north latitude, spinning clockwise. The storm eventually stretched 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) around the planet. With no mountains or other land to impede it, the storm eventually ran into itself in June 2011 and faded away.

“This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast,” said Kunio Sayanagi, lead author on the paper and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University. “The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth’s atmosphere in 150 days. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) across.”

Though the storm was the longest-running of the massive storms that occur in Saturn’s northern hemisphere every 30 (Earth) years, it isn’t the longest storm ever detected on the gas giant. That honor goes to a storm 100 times smaller, which formed in the southern hemisphere’s “storm alley” and lasted 334 days in 2009.

“Cassini’s stay in the Saturn system has enabled us to marvel at the power of this storm,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “We had front-row seats to a wonderful adventure movie and got to watch the whole plot from start to finish. These kinds of data help scientists compare weather patterns around our solar system and learn what sustains and extinguishes them.”

Between the new live-action God of War: Ascension Super Bowl commercial and the fact that the reveal of the PlayStation 4 is less than one month away, Sony fans are feeling pretty good right now. They’re probably thinking their day can’t get any better, but they are wrong.

Bethesda has jumped on the Sony hype train today by finally announcing the U.S. release dates for Skyrim DLC on the PlayStation 3. “Dawnguard,” “Hearthfire,” and “Dragonborn” have all been available on the Xbox 360 and PC for months, but PlayStation 3 gamers had been left out. Whatever the problem was, Bethesda has overcome it, and PlayStation 3 gamers can finally dust off their copies of Skyrim and distract themselves until they can get their hands on next-gen PlayStation 4 titles.

As announced back in the middle of January, the Skyrim DLC will be released in reverse order of how they were released on other platforms. Luckily, the release dates are only a week apart for each. “Dragonborn” will come first on February 12, followed by “Hearthfire” on February 19. “Dawnguard” will be released on February 26.

Bethesda stated that all of the Skyrim DLC add-ons will be marked down during their individual release weeks. Also, the release dates for Europe will be coming “soon.”

To jog everyone’s memory of what Skyrim DLC has to offer, here are all the trailers for the add-ons, in the order of their PlayStation 3 release schedule:

Though they rarely have anything worthwhile to reveal about their games, the live action video game trailers seen in the past few years have been memorable. Who can forget the celebrities battling it out in the Call of Duty trailers, or the strange Assassin’s Creed version of America?

Today, Sony released its live-action trailer for God of War: Ascension. Earlier in the week, Sony teased this trailer as a commercial that will play during the upcoming Super Bowl broadcast. That’s a lot of money for a game commercial, showing that this may be Sony’s last big marketing push for the PlayStation 3 before it announces the PlayStation 4 on February 20. The God of War PlayStation 3 bundle announced yesterday is also part of that push.

It’s less bloody than you might imagine, though Kratos looks just as grumpy as ever. Since Ascension is a prequel to the original God of War, it focuses on Kratos’ fall and his motivations behind his epic quest for vengeance against the gods. As the trailer teases, memories of the Spartan’s family and the ash that covers his body will be large themes throughout the game.

A new study from the University of Adelaide has shown that humans, not diseases, were responsible for the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger.

The Tasmanian tiger, also known as thylacine, was a marsupial carnivore found in Tasmania until the species went extinct in the 1930s. According to researchers, the Tasmanian government encouraged the hunting of the animals from 1886 until 1909, paying bounties for thylacine carcasses. The last known wild Tasmanian tiger was captured in 1933.

“Many people, however, believe that bounty hunting alone could not have driven the thylacine extinct and therefore claim that an unknown disease epidemic must have been responsible,” said Thomas Prowse, leader of the project and a research associate at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Environment Institute. “We tested this claim by developing a ‘metamodel’ – a network of linked species models – that evaluated whether the combined impacts of Europeans could have exterminated the thylacine, without any disease.”

The researchers used a modified version of mathematical models developed by conservation biologists to simulate extinction risks to populations of endangered species, called a population viability analysis (PVA). Prowse and his colleagues added species interactions to the normal PVA model.

“The new model simulated the directs effects of bounty hunting and habitat loss and, importantly, also considered the indirect effects of a reduction in the thylacine’s prey (kangaroos and wallabies) due to human harvesting and competition from millions of introduced sheep,” said Prowse. “We found we could simulate the thylacine extinction, including the observed rapid population crash after 1905, without the need to invoke a mystery disease. We showed that the negative impacts of European settlement were powerful enough that, even without any disease epidemic, the species couldn’t escape extinction.”

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Now that EA has revealed to investors that its third quarter revenue was down compared to one year ago, the publisher has been taking the opportunity to reveal bits of news that might not have gone over well before the financial release. It admitted that Medal of Honor: Warfighter was a disaster, and announced that the Medal of Honor games are now “out of the rotation.” EA also announced that the upcoming sci-fi shooter Fuse will be delayed anywhere from one to three months.

Among the bad news, EA has seen fit to tease something that is probably great news for the company. The EA sports website now contains an announcement for Madden 25.

What is Madden 25? That’s a straightforward question, but EA hasn’t released any details at all concerning the title. All that is known for sure is that Madden 25 will be released on August 27, 2013. That date is almost exactly one year from August 28, 2012 – the day that Madden NFL 13 was released. With that in mind, it’s likely that Madden 25 is a rebranding of the franchise for its anniversary, though it could also represent an event or downloadable content of some kind.

The teaser logo shows that it celebrates the 25 year history of Madden video games, from 1989 to 2014. The original John Madden Football for the Commodore 64 was actually released in 1988, but since Madden 25‘s release date is in 2013, the math still works out.

The Madden NFL series is one of EA’s most consistently profitable series. The publisher’s latest earnings report stated that Madden NFL 13 saw both unit sales and revenue increase over last year’s numbers.

Japanese publisher Kadokawa Games today announced that Killer is Dead will get a global release sometime in the summer of 2013. The title will launch for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles.

Killer is Dead is being developed by Grasshopper Manufacture, the studio headed by Goichi Suda, also known as “Suda51.” The developer is famous for quirky and unapologetically juvenile titles such as Killer 7, No More Heroes, Shadows of the Damned, and Lollipop Chainsaw.

The release window announcement is probably meant to reassure fans that the game is still on track, and hasn’t been disrupted by recent events. Yesterday it was announced that Grasshopper Manufacture has been purchased by GungHo Online Entertainment, a Japanese publisher known for the Ragnarok Online series of games.

Killer is Dead puts players into the shoes of Mondo Zappa, a James Bond-type “executioner” who is tasked with eliminating criminals in a not-to-distant noir future. He wields a katana in his right hand and his bionic left hand can become a number of interchangeable weapons. The game features a unique, contrast-heavy art style that can be seen in the first trailer for the game, which was released earlier this month:

Rovio today added the new “Escape from Hoth” levels to Angry Birds Star Wars. The new levels follow the events of The Empire Strikes Back after Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, and C-3P0 narrowly escape Darth Vader on the surface of Hoth.

The new content features 20 new levels inside the “Hoth” planet that was unlocked back at the end of November. There are also 2 bonus levels to unlock. Players will be facing flying Mynock pigs and Rovio even teased “an epic moving boss fight.”

The game has also been updated with a “Coming Soon” tease for the upcoming Cloud City levels. Those levels can’t come fast enough, as far as I’m concerned, as the two things Angry Birds Star Wars is missing is a Lando Calrissian bird and a Boba Fett pig.

With sales of current-generation consoles slowing and the promise of next-generation consoles just months away, Microsoft and Sony are going to be heavily marketing the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this spring. Their efforts will target those gamers who own only one of these consoles, encouraging them to buy the other. Sony’s latest PlayStation 3 bundle does just that.

Sony today announced the new God of War: Ascencion “Legacy Bundle.” The console bundle will include a “garnet red” PlayStation 3 slim console with 500GB of storage. It also comes with a copy of the upcoming God of War: Ascension and a copy of God of War: Saga. The requisite 30-days of PlayStation Plus membership are also thrown in with the deal.

Saga includes all five previous God of War games, including God of War, God of War II, God of War III, and God of War: Origins, which itself includes God of War: Chains of Olympus and God of War: Ghost of Sparta. That’s all six God of War games in one package.

Sony’s statement on the bundle states that the products is the “ultimate collectors’ item for God of War fans” and that it allows fans to “relive nostalgic memories of their first God of War adventure.” That’s not who the product is really aimed at, however. Sony wants Xbox 360 owners who are burnt out on Xbox LIVE and who haven’t ever played the God of War series.

Unfortunately, the number of games in the bundle has raised its price. The God of War bundle will cost $349, almost $50 more than other big-title launch bundles, such as those for Uncharted 3 and Assassin’s Creed III.

EA‘s third quarter earnings revealed lower revenue, but a lower net loss than the previous year. Aside from blaming its revenue woes on its cynical Call of Duty: Warfighter project, EA also had a few other announcements it could reveal now that its holiday earnings have been released.

The most notable announcement is that Fuse has been delayed to the first quarter of EA’s fiscal year 2014. This means the game, instead of being released in March as planned, will be delayed at least one month, and possibly as many as three. From EA’s prepared statement:

Ted Price and the Insomniac Studio are putting a lot of polish into their new game Fuse. The extra work delivers a big payout for players and Fuse will be released in Q1, our Spring quarter.

Fuse is a new sci-fi shooter the Insomniac is working on for EA. A trailer released last December revealed that the game is taking cues from both Borderlands and Gears of War. Insomniac is the studio that has developed quite a few popular PlayStation series, including Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet & Clank, and Resistance: Fall of Man.

The Fuse delay could also be related to EA’s announcement that it will stop making Medal of Honor games. As part of that reveal, EA stated that it has a plan to “bring year-over-year continuity to our shooter offerings.” Here’s hoping EA isn’t forcing Insomniac to change the ending of Fuse to leave more room for yearly sequels or spinoffs.

Windows 8 isn’t being adopted by PC users in the numbers Microsoft had hoped. Though the company has sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses, the new OS still holds a marginal share of the desktop OS market, while Windows 7 and XP make up over 84% of the market.

Normally when software (or hardware, for that matter) isn’t selling is the time when most companies consider a price cut to match the low demand for the product. Microsoft isn’t most companies.

Starting tomorrow, Microsoft will be increasing the price of Windows 8 upgrades, giving customers another reason not to upgrade.

Since the release of Windows 8 in October, Microsoft has been selling Windows 8 Pro upgrades at the “special price” of $40. Starting February 1, an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro will cost PC users $200. Even the upgrade to the normal Windows 8 edition will cost $120. Students with a .edu email address will be able to buy the Windows 8 Pro upgrade for $70.

Microsoft has also been selling the “Pro Pack,” which upgrades regular Windows 8 to Windows 8 Pro, for $70. That upgrade will cost $100 tomorrow. Also, the Windows Media Center upgrade pack that is currently being given away for free to anyone with Windows 8 Pro will cost $10 tomorrow.

Microsoft hasn’t commented on whether prices for stand-alone versions of Windows 8 will be increasing in price tomorrow. If not, that would mean that simply buying a copy of Windows 8 OEM for $140 (or regular the regular Windows 8 OEM for $100) would be far less expensive than upgrading from Windows 7.

The first teaser trailer for BioShock Infinite was tantalizing. After spending two games traipsing around below the ocean in Rapture, seeing the sunlight through the clouds surrounding Columbia was a shock.

Now, with the release of the game less than two months away, 2K and Irrational are spilling all of the game’s secrets. The entire opening scene of the game can be viewed, and the mockumentary trailer released earlier this week reveals some of Columbia’s origins and history.

The latest trailer for the game shows off even more of the city in the sky. It shows, more than past videos, just how the political and religious factions of Columbia will influence the game and deepens the mystery of who or what Elizabeth (“the girl”) might really be.