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      The crew of Artemis II will fly on Integrity during mission to the Moon

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September

    The first astronauts set to fly to the Moon in more than 50 years will do so in Integrity .

    NASA's Artemis II crew revealed Integrity as the name of their Orion spacecraft during a news conference on Wednesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    "We thought, as a crew, we need to name this spacecraft. We need to have a name for the Orion spacecraft that we're going to ride this magical mission on," said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission .

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      Console wars death watch: Microsoft Flight Simulator coming to PS5 in December

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September

    For decades now, the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise has been associated with Microsoft's own DOS/Windows operating systems and, more recently , Xbox consoles (weird exceptions like this 1986 Macintosh port notwithstanding). However, that era seems set to end as Sony announced during this evening's State of Play livestream that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will come to the PlayStation 5 on December 8.

    No, that's not a typo. Credit: Sony

    The move isn't entirely shocking for modern Microsoft, which has been publishing previous Xbox exclusives on competing consoles in increasing numbers for a while now. And Flight Simulator 2024 has been available on Xbox Series S/X for almost a year now , as the name suggests, giving Xbox owners a "timed exclusive" at least.

    Still, it's a bit striking to see a franchise that literally has the Microsoft brand name integrated into its title moving to a major non-Microsoft platform like this. The impact is a little bit like seeing a Sonic game on a Nintendo console for the first time in 2001 , after years of Sega selling itself as the anti-Nintendo .

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      “Screwworm is dangerously close”: Flesh-eating parasites just 70 miles from US

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September

    Texas officials are telling residents to check their pets and livestock, and insisting on immediate use of pesticide bait after officials in Mexico confirmed an infection with the flesh-eating New World Screwworm (NWS) less than 70 miles from the US border.

    NWS is a horrifying parasitic fly that attacks warm-blooded animals, laying hundreds of eggs in any openings or wounds, even minute ones. The resulting larvae both look and act like screws, boring and twisting into the animal while feasting on its living flesh. The ravenous larvae create ghastly wounds that can be deadly to livestock and wild animals.

    Long ago, this ferocious fly was endemic in the US and stymied the livestock industry. However, in the 1950s, eradication efforts using sterile male flies and livestock monitoring began to push the fly population southward. By around 1966, it was cleared from the US, and Mexico zapped the population in the 1980s. By 2006, it was pushed out of Central America, with Panama declaring it eradicated and holding the flies at bay at the Darién Gap at the border with Colombia. However, in 2022, the gap was breached, and the flies have been steadily moving northward.

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      Newly found ancient Egyptian port may lead to Cleopatra’s tomb

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September • 1 minute

    Doomed Egyptian queen Cleopatra has captured the imaginations of people all over the world for centuries. Archaeologists have long sought to locate her tomb , which she shared with her lover, Mark Antony, per popular legend. Thus far, the search has been unsuccessful, although many believe she would have been buried near the royal palace in Alexandria, Egypt.

    National Geographic explorer Kathleen Martinez thinks she might be on the verge of locating Cleopatra's final resting place at a site called Taposiris Magna . Her 20-year journey (and counting) to prove her hypothesis—and the exciting new discovery of a submerged ancient port several miles off the Mediterranean shore that was likely once part of that temple—are chronicled in Cleopatra's Final Secret , a new documentary film from National Geographic.

    Martinez has a degree in archaeology but initially became a criminal lawyer. She brought that legal training to bear on the question of the location of Cleopatra's tomb, treating it as she would a forensic case. "I tried to understand her personality, who were her friends, who were her enemies," Martinez told Ars. "She was a strategist and she always had a Plan A and a Plan B." It simply made sense to her that Cleopatra would have brought that same strategic thinking to orchestrating her death. Martinez suggested that the queen arranged for loyal subjects to transport her body through secret tunnels to a hidden final resting place.

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      Jimmy Kimmel returns, calls FCC chairman an embarrassment to Republicans

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September

    Much to President Trump's dismay, Jimmy Kimmel returned to TV last night. In a wide-ranging monologue met with near-constant applause, Kimmel discussed the comments that got him suspended and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr's attempts to silence speech the president doesn't like.

    "Brendan Carr is the most embarrassing car Republicans have embraced since this one, and that's saying something," Kimmel said, showing a photo of a Tesla Cybertruck painted with the American flag and the word "Trump" in big, gold letters.

    Carr justified his threats to Disney by saying the FCC has to uphold the public interest standard applied to broadcasters with licenses to use the public airwaves. Carr's stance is the opposite held by previous FCC chairs from both major parties , who said the FCC should uphold the free speech rights of broadcasters.

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      A “cosmic carpool” is traveling to a distant space weather observation post

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September

    Scientists loaded three missions worth nearly $1.6 billion on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for launch Wednesday, toward an orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, to measure the supersonic stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun.

    One of the missions, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will beam back real-time observations of the solar wind to provide advance warning of geomagnetic storms that could affect power grids, radio communications, GPS navigation, air travel, and satellite operations.

    The other two missions come from NASA, with research objectives that include studying the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space and observing the rarely seen outermost layer of our own planet's atmosphere.

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      Meet the first person to own over 40,000 paid Steam games

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September • 1 minute

    If you spend any significant amount of time using Steam, you've probably joked ruefully about your massive backlog of games acquired through cheap bundles or the service's frequent massive sales . However, we're willing to bet your backlog can't hold a candle to that of SonixLegend, who recently earned a unique Steam badge as the first person to own 40,000 distinct paid games on Valve's platform.

    Based in Shanghai, SonixLegend obtained their 40,000th Steam game this week, according to Steam's badge data , putting them atop an elite club of just 19 Steam users with at least 30,000 paid games . According to SteamDB tracking , that makes for an account roughly worth anywhere from $248,000 (based on the lowest prices ever tracked in the database) to $642,000 (based on the current prices of those games).

    However, SonixLegend's full collection might be more extensive than this massive achievement suggests. That's because Steam's Game Collector badges don't track any of the many, many shovelware titles that have failed to reach "broad player engagement and some commercial success" on the service under Valve's "profile features" guidelines . It also reportedly doesn't include almost all free-to-play games , which could easily be used to inflate a title count for determined badge chasers.

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      Anti-vaccine allies cheer as Trump claims shots have “too much liquid”

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September

    When the bar is set at suggesting that people inject bleach into their veins , it's hard to reach a new low. But in a deranged press event on autism Monday evening, President Trump seemed to go for it—sharing "rumors" and his "strong feelings" not just on Tylenol but also his bonkers views on childhood vaccines.

    Trump was there with his health secretary, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to link autism to the use of Tylenol (acetaminophen) during pregnancy. While medical experts condemn the claim as unproven and dangerous (which it is), Kennedy's anti-vaccine followers decried it as a distraction from their favored false and dangerous explanation—that vaccines cause autism (which they don't).

    Pinning the blame on Tylenol instead of vaccines enraged Kennedy's own anti-vaccine organization , Children's Health Defense. In the run-up to the event Monday evening, CHD retweeted an all-caps defense of Tylenol, and CHD President Mary Holland called the announcement a "sideshow" in an interview with Steve Bannon.

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      Why does OpenAI need six giant data centers?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 24 September

    On Tuesday, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced plans for five new US AI data center sites for Stargate , their joint AI infrastructure project, bringing the platform to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years.

    The massive buildout aims to handle ChatGPT's 700 million weekly users and train future AI models, although critics question whether the investment structure can sustain itself. The companies said the expansion puts them on track to secure the full $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment they announced in January by the end of 2025.

    The five new sites will include three locations developed through an OpenAI and Oracle partnership: Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an unspecified Midwest location. These sites, along with a 600-megawatt expansion near the flagship Stargate site in Abilene, Texas, can deliver over 5.5 gigawatts of capacity, which means the computers on site will be able to draw up to 5.5 billion watts of electricity when running at full load. The companies expect the sites to create over 25,000 onsite jobs.

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