Enlarge / An example of the kind of ads that showed up on the Xbox One dashboard. Soon those could expand to include video ads in exchange for gameplay time. (credit: Microsoft)

Since its launch in 2017 , Microsoft has convinced over 25 million people to pay a monthly subscription fee to access a substantial library of Xbox Game Pass titles. For those not as interested in a monthly subscription, though, Microsoft is now floating a potential model where players could view an ad in exchange for a short period of game time.

The nod toward potential ad-supported game time comes from Xbox Corporate VP for Game Creator Experience and Ecosystem Sarah Bond, who told Rolling Stone UK that she's constantly looking to "introduce more business model diversity" for game developers.

"We’ve talked about how we’re experimenting with other models, like what does it mean for advertising in games which is more prevalent in mobile—are there models of that that work well in PC and console?" Bond said. "Are there other models where you might have timed slices of games and stuff like that?"

Enlarge / Nvidia's RTX 4060 lineup. It's not listed here, but the regular 4060 will be launching at $299. (credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia is beginning to roll out its new Ada Lovelace GPU architecture to sub-$500 graphics cards, the models that the vast majority of PC gamers buy and use . There's good news and bad news.

The good news is that the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti will launch on May 24 for $399, the same price that the RTX 3060 Ti launched for in December 2020—it's the first GPU launch in ages not to come with a price hike built in. Like other RTX 4000-series GPUs, it supports DLSS 3's AI-assisted frame rate-boosting technologies and AV1 video encoding support, and it's much more power-efficient than its predecessors. The bad news is that the 4060 Ti is an unusually mild upgrade over the 3060 Ti, with the same 8GB bank of RAM and (according to Nvidia) just 15 percent faster performance than the 3060 Ti in games without the DLSS Frame Generation feature enabled.

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  When DLSS FG is out of the picture, the 4060 Ti is about 15 percent faster than a 3060 Ti. Obviously comparisons against older cards will be even better, and most people choose not to upgrade their GPU every single generation. [credit: Nvidia ]

Nvidia will sell a Founders Edition version of the 4060 Ti that looks about the same size as its Founders Edition RTX 4070 ; it also uses Nvidia's 12VHPWR connector, though cards from Nvidia's partners will often opt to use a traditional 8-pin power connector instead.

Enlarge / A screenshot from the first Spider-Man PlayStation game. (credit: Sony)

E3 might be canceled this year, but the big gaming companies are forging ahead regardless—either as part of Summer Games Fest or with their own presentations and livestreams. Arguably the top dog these days is Sony, which will host what it claims to be a meaty "PlayStation Showcase" on May 24.

The show will last more than an hour, making it quite a bit longer than the usual PlayStation State of Play livestreams, which are usually 30 minutes or so. While Sony has mostly moved beyond the old industry marketing cadence of centering heavily on E3 every June, this looks to be as close to an E3 presser as Sony will offer this year.

Sony promises "a wealth of new games" for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation VR2 from a wide range of development studios. "Expect a glimpse at several new creations from PlayStation Studios, as well as spellbinding games from our third-party partners and indie creators," a blog post announcing the event says.

Enlarge / "OK EVERYONE QUEUE UP! NO ONE GETS IN THIS SERVER PORTAL UNTIL YOU QUEUE UP!" (credit: Blizzard)

Blizzard says it's "really confident" that the upcoming launch of Diablo IV will not be subject to the infamous server issues that plagued the launch of Diablo III over a decade ago.

That quoted vote of confidence comes from Diablo IV Art Director John Mueller, who told Eurogamer that the game's March beta tests and recent "Server Slam" test weekend gave the team valuable perspective on how the game's infrastructure will function when millions of early adopters try to log in at once on June 5 (or June 2 if you paid for early access ).

"It's not a marketing thing," Mueller said of the beta tests. "It's really about getting that information so we know day one is going to be as good as we can possibly make it and that we just feel confident going in. So, currently right now, we feel really confident."

Enlarge / Still life of a boy blowing a bubble (circa 1734) by 18th century French painter Jean Siméon Chardin. (credit: Public domain)

French painters Jean Siméon Chardin and Édouard Manet both created well-known paintings that depicted children blowing bubbles through straw-like tubes, albeit more than a century apart. Those realistic depictions of bubble dynamics have now inspired two physicists at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, who conducted their own soap bubble experiments to learn more about the early formation stages of bubble dynamics. They describe their experimental results in a forthcoming paper to be published on May 22 in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Bubbles may seem frivolous, but there is some complex underlying physics, and their study has long been serious science. In the 1800s, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau outlined four basic laws of surface tension that determine the structure of soapy films. Surface tension is why bubbles are round; that shape has the least surface area for a given volume, so it requires the least energy to maintain. Over time, that shape will look more like a soccer ball than a perfect sphere as gravity pulls the liquid downward ("coarsening").

More recently, French physicists in 2016 worked out a theoretical model for the exact mechanism for how soap bubbles form when jets of air hit a soapy film. The researchers found that bubbles only formed above a certain speed, which depends on the width of the jet of air. In 2018, we reported how mathematicians at New York University's Applied Math Lab had fine-tuned the method for blowing the perfect bubble based on a series of experiments with thin, soapy films. In 2019, physicists at MIT and Princeton University demonstrated how to develop spherical bubbles uniformly by confining them in a narrow tube. Something about the interactions between the walls of the tube and the bubble makes the whole system less sensitive to irregularities in the initial conditions.

For a marquee game on 6-year-old hardware (which was already relatively underpowered when it launched in 2017), the open-world construction set of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a pretty impressive technical feat. Digital Foundry recently laid out how the game's day-one patch ensures the software "holds very close to the 30 frames per second target" for "nearly the entirety" of their playtime.

Still, Digital Foundry does note that Tears of the Kingdom 's frame rate can still drop down to 20 fps at times, especially when Link's signature Ultra Hand ability is activated in crowded areas like Kakariko Village or Goron City. For those situations, though, Switch users with a hacked console can use overclocking tools to make the game run more smoothly.

In a recent video , Modern Vintage Gamer (MVG) walks viewers through the overclocking options offered to Tears of the Kingdom players who have installed a tool like sys-clk on their hacked systems. Pushing the CPU up from around 1 GHz to 1.5 GHz leads to "really not much difference at all" in MVG's testing. By contrast, increasing the GPU speed from 768 MHz to just 900 MHz (in docked mode) results in frame rates that are "definitely smoothed out," though there are "still... times where it does drop its frame rate."

Enlarge / Archaeologists used cosmic rays to detect a secret underground burial chamber from the Hellenistic period in Naples, circa late fourth century/early third century BCE. This is a laser-scanned 3D view of the underground part of the site (credit: V. Tioukov et al., 2023)

The ruins of the ancient necropolis of Neapolis lie some 10 meters (about 33 feet) below modern-day Naples, Italy. But the site is in a densely populated urban district, making it challenging to undertake careful archaeological excavations of those ruins. So a team of scientists turned to cosmic rays for help—specifically an imaging technique called muography, or muon tomography —and discovered a previously hidden underground burial chamber, according to a recent paper published in the Scientific Reports journal.

As we've reported , there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures , a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn't find any hidden chambers.

Muons are also used to hunt for illegally transported nuclear materials at border crossings and to monitor active volcanoes in hopes of detecting when they might erupt. In 2008, scientists at the University of Texas, Austin , tried to follow in Alvarez’s footsteps, repurposing old muon detectors to search for possible hidden Mayan ruins in Belize. And physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been developing portable versions of muon imaging systems to unlock the construction secrets of the soaring dome (Il Duomo) atop the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower in Florence, Italy, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 15th century. The dome has been plagued by cracks for centuries, and muon imaging could help preservationists figure out how to fix it.

Enlarge / Just a few of the Activision franchises that will become Microsoft properties if and when the acquisition is finalized. (credit: Microsoft / Activision)

The European Commission (EC) has officially approved Microsoft's long-proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision , concluding a long-running "in-depth investigation" that has long been expected to go Microsoft's way . But the decision is in direct conflict with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which says it "stands by its decision" to block the deal in that Brexit-separated country .

Microsoft will fix it

Months ago, the EC's preliminary investigation of the Microsoft/Activision deal concluded that the proposed merger could reduce competition in areas including cloud gaming services and PC operating systems. And despite the EC's final decision, today's final report in the matter actually affirms some of those preliminary competition concerns.

"If Microsoft made Activision's games exclusive to its own cloud game streaming service, Game Pass Ultimate, and withheld them from rival cloud game streaming providers, it would reduce competition in the distribution of games via cloud game streaming," the EC concluded. Such a move could "also strengthen the position of Windows in the market for PC operating systems," the European regulators wrote.

It has been too long since we binged all 10 episodes of Apple TV's 2021 epic sci-fi series Foundation , loosely adapted from Isaac Asimov's hugely influential Foundation series of novels. We're finally getting a second season this summer, announced with the release of the first teaser.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As I wrote in my review , Asimov's Foundation series is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen. The author admitted that he wrote strictly for the printed page, and he always refused invitations to adapt his work for film or TV. But Asimov was more than happy to let others adapt his work to a new medium, and he was wise enough to expect that there would—and should—be significant departures from the print version. That's just what showrunner David S. Goyer ( Dark Knight trilogy, Da Vinci's Demons) set out to do with Foundation , describing it as more of a remix than a direct adaptation. Reviews of S1 were mixed, but I personally found the first season to be: