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  If you paid $40 for the physical edition of Concord , you can make a lot more than that back on eBay. [credit: Kyle Orland ]

As recently as a week ago, a new disc copy of Sony's team-based shooter Concord on the PlayStation 5 would set you back about $40 at most retailers . Now that Sony has shut off the game's servers after just two weeks , you might think those now-useless discs would be practically worthless.

Instead, the physical version of Concord on PS5 has become a surprise collector's item. An Ars analysis of nearly 300 eBay listings completed between September 3–8 shows new copies of the now-defunct game selling for a median price of $100 since the game's shutdown. That going rate peaked at a median of $118 on September 5, up from $89.50 on September 3, before settling at $110 for eBay sales made on September 8.

Supply and demand

As usual with gaming collectibles , the price increase has less to do with playability and more to do with rarity. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told IGN last month that he estimated an underwhelming 25,000 total sales for Concord across PS5 and PC. Even if we assume 80 percent of those sales were on the PS5, most of those console sales probably came as purely digital downloads, given long-running industry trends and the game's focus on online play.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

The newest Apple Watch is all about a big screen, a thinner case, and lighter metal options, allowing for better typing and easier viewing.

Apple's first wide-angle OLED display inside the Series 10 is 40 percent brighter than the Series 9. It allows for a wider variety of viewing angles. Its refresh rate, when idle, can update information from apps and complications once a second instead of the existing once-a-minute rate.

The 9.7 mm case, the thinnest Watch so far, required miniaturization of various components, including the speaker, logic board, and metal backing. The aluminum version weighs 10 percent less than the previous generation. The titanium version, replacing stainless steel, shaves even more weight off the Watch than the already reduced Series 10.

Enlarge / Medieval scholar Lisa Fagin Davis examined multispectral images of 10 pages from the Voynich manuscript. (credit: Lisa Fagin Davis)

About 10 years ago, several folios of the mysterious Voynich manuscript were scanned using multispectral imaging. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, has analyzed those scans and just posted the results , along with a downloadable set of images , to her blog, Manuscript Road Trip. Among the chief findings: Three columns of lettering have been added to the opening folio that could be an early attempt to decode the script. And while questions have long swirled about whether the manuscript is authentic or a clever forgery, Fagin Davis concluded that it's unlikely to be a forgery and is a genuine medieval document.

As we've previously reported , the Voynich manuscript is a 15th century medieval handwritten text dated between 1404 and 1438, purchased in 1912 by a Polish book dealer and antiquarian named Wilfrid Voynich (hence its moniker). Along with the strange handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with bizarre pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. It's currently kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library of rare books and manuscripts. Possible authors include Roger Bacon, Elizabethan astrologer/alchemist John Dee, or even Voynich himself, possibly as a hoax.

There are so many competing theories about what the Voynich manuscript is—most likely a compendium of herbal remedies and astrological readings, based on the bits reliably decoded thus far—and so many claims to have deciphered the text, that it's practically its own subfield of medieval studies. Both professional and amateur cryptographers (including codebreakers in both World Wars) have pored over the text, hoping to crack the puzzle.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

America has been getting more and more dangerous for pedestrians over the past few years. It's a trend with several contributing factors— our built environment prioritizes passenger vehicle traffic and encourages speeding, and traffic enforcement is virtually absent in many cities. But it's undeniable that vehicle design—particularly of large pickup trucks and SUVs—has been causing excess casualties. For example, a study published in January found that an increase in hood height of four inches (100 mm) translated to a 28 percent increase in pedestrian deaths.

Today, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that vehicle design needs to change to reduce the number of pedestrians killed or seriously injured in crashes. The notice of proposed rulemaking, which is open for public comment for the next 60 days, wants to harmonize federal motor vehicle safety standards (FMVSS) with a global standard already in effect in many countries around the world.

"We have a crisis of roadway deaths, and it’s even worse among vulnerable road users like pedestrians. Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities increased 57 percent, from 4,779 to 7,522. This proposed rule will ensure that vehicles will be designed to protect those inside and outside from serious injury or death. We will continue to work to make our roads safer for everyone and help protect vulnerable road users,' said Sophie Shulman, NHTSA’s deputy administrator.

Enlarge / Boeing Factory workers assemble Boeing 787 airliners at the Boeing factory in Everett, WA. (credit: Vince Streano | The Image Bank Unreleased )

Boeing is hoping to avoid a strike Friday with a tentative deal reached Sunday with the Machinists union representing 33,000 of its West Coast employees fighting for better wages and working conditions.

If Boeing employees agree to the deal in a vote Thursday, their new contract will provide the "largest-ever general wage increase" in the company's history, Boeing Commercial Airplanes president and CEO Stephanie Pope said in a press release .

The potential deal guarantees that over the next four years, Boeing employees would receive a 25 percent pay raise, as well as "lower medical cost share to make healthcare more affordable, greater company contributions toward" retirement, and "improvements for a better work-life balance," Pope said.

Enlarge / The reMarkable Paper Pro tablet. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Our main critique of Amazon's Kindle Scribe when it launched in late 2022—and one that still mostly holds up—was that it felt like a big e-reader with writing functionality tacked on rather than a tablet designed specifically for writing and note-taking. Though Amazon's hardware is arguably superior (and definitely more affordable), we definitely wanted software that was closer to what was available on the reMarkable 2 tablet.

The reMarkable 2 mostly doesn't bother with e-reader features, though it does support EPUB and PDF documents; it's focused almost entirely on the creation and organizing of notes in various formats. And now reMarkable (the company) is out with a new reMarkable (the tablet), one that attempts to catch up with and surpass Amazon's hardware while still keeping the focus on writing.

Writing is fun

The new $579 reMarkable Paper Plus is an evolution of the previous design—slightly larger and heavier, but with a much bigger 11.8-inch display (up from 10.3 inches in the reMarkable 2) that also adds a front-light and color e-ink support. Where most color e-readers use E Ink's Kaleido technology , which offers faster page refresh times but relatively dull, washed-out color, the reMarkable Paper Pro uses E Ink Gallery, which has richer color reproduction at the expense of refresh speed.

Enlarge / At the US Army’s Camp Century on the Greenland ice sheet, an Army truck equipped with a railroad wheel conversion rides on 1,300 feet of track under the snow. (credit: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University )

In recent years, the Arctic has become a magnet for climate change anxiety , with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for signs of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation . It wasn’t always that way.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, as the fear of nuclear Armageddon hung over American and Soviet citizens, ­idealistic scientists and engineers saw the vast Arctic region as a place of unlimited potential for creating a bold new future. Greenland emerged as the most tantalizing proving ground for their research.

Scientists and engineers working for and with the US military cooked up a rash of audacious cold-region projects—some innovative, many spit-balled, and most quickly abandoned. They were the stuff of science fiction: disposing of nuclear waste by letting it melt through the ice; moving people, supplies, and missiles below the ice using subways, some perhaps atomic powered; testing hovercraft to zip over impassable crevasses; making furniture from a frozen mix of ice and soil; and even building a nuclear-powered city under the ice sheet.

Enlarge / Loads of lava: Kasbohm with a few solidified lava flows of the Columbia River Basalts. (credit: Joshua Murray)

As our climate warms beyond its historical range , scientists increasingly need to study climates deeper in the planet’s past to get information about our future . One object of study is a warming event known as the Miocene Climate Optimum (MCO) from about 17 to 15 million years ago. It coincided with floods of basalt lava that covered a large area of the Northwestern US, creating what are called the “Columbia River Basalts.” This timing suggests that volcanic CO ₂ was the cause of the warming.

Those eruptions were the most recent example of a “Large Igneous Province,” a phenomenon that has repeatedly triggered climate upheavals and mass extinctions throughout Earth’s past. The Miocene version was relatively benign; it saw CO ₂ levels and global temperatures rise, causing ecosystem changes and significant melting of Antarctic ice, but didn’t trigger a mass extinction.

A paper just published in Geology , led by Jennifer Kasbohm of the Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory, upends the idea that the eruptions triggered the warming while still blaming them for the peak climate warmth.

Enlarge / Power lines are cast in silhouette as the Creek Fire creeps up on on the Shaver Springs community off of Tollhouse Road on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020, in Auberry, California. (credit: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times )

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here .

Most people are “very” or “extremely” concerned about the state of the natural world, a new global public opinion survey shows.

Roughly 70 percent of 22,000 people polled online earlier this year agreed that human activities were pushing the Earth past “ tipping points ,” thresholds beyond which nature cannot recover, like loss of the Amazon rainforest or collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s currents . The same number of respondents said the world needs to reduce carbon emissions within the next decade.