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Formula 1's 2024 season burst into action this past weekend at the Bahrain Grand Prix. The 10 teams had just spent three days conducting preseason testing at the Sakhir circuit, but Friday's qualifying session was the first time everyone left the sandbags in the garage. On Saturday, we got a true reflection of just how much of a gap there is between Max Verstappen in the Red Bull and the other 19 drivers.

The prospect of a third runaway championship for the Dutch driver will be too much for some fans to stomach, and social media is full of complaints from people who want to cancel their F1 subscriptions. Not everyone can find the excitement in a race for second place, after all. Luckily, F1 isn't the only game in town.

Check out Formula 2

Take this year's Formula 2 season, for example. As the name suggests, it's the feeder series for F1, a place for younger drivers to cut their teeth before (hopefully) moving up to the main attraction. Everyone uses the same car in F2, and for 2024, it's all-new. The car is built by Dallara, which also makes IndyCar's chassis, the Japanese Super Formula car, the Formula 3 car, and sports prototypes for Ferrari, Cadillac, and BMW. It's powered by a 3.4 L turbocharged V6 with around 620 hp (462 kW).

Enlarge (credit: Narumon Bowonkitwanchai | Moment)

India's plan to let a moratorium on imposing customs duties on cross-border digital e-commerce transactions expire may end up hurting India's more ambitious plans to become a global chip leader in the next five years, Reuters reported.

It could also worsen the global chip shortage by spiking semiconductor industry costs at a time when many governments worldwide are investing heavily in expanding domestic chip supplies in efforts to keep up with rapidly advancing technologies.

Early next week, world leaders will convene at a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting, just before the deadline to extend the moratorium hits in March. In place since 1998, the moratorium has been renewed every two years since—but India has grown concerned that it's losing significant revenues from not imposing taxes as demand rises for its digital goods, like movies, e-books, or games.

Enlarge (credit: Pocketpair)

The unexpected success of Palworld continues to be one of the biggest gaming stories of 2024 so far, as developer Pocketpair says the game's sales and Xbox downloads have exceeded 19 million, with 12 million in sales on Steam and 7 million players on Xbox. Microsoft has also announced that the game has been the biggest third-party launch in the Game Pass service's history, as well as the most-played third-party title on the Xbox Cloud Gaming service.

These numbers continue a remarkable run for the indie-developed Pokémon-survival-crafting-game pastiche, which sold 5 million copies in its first weekend as a Steam Early Access title and had sold 8 million Steam copies as of a week ago. There are signs that the game's sales are slowing down—it's currently Steam's #2 top-selling game after over a week in the #1 spot. But its active player count on Steam remains several hundred thousand players higher than Counter-Strike 2, the next most-played game on the platform.

Sometimes described (both admiringly and disparagingly) as "Pokémon with guns," Palworld's unexpected success has driven some Internet outrage cycles about the possibility that it may have used AI-generated monster designs and allegations that its designers copied or modified some of the 3D character models from the actual Pokémon series to create some of the game's more familiar-looking monsters.

Enlarge / Our two main heroes so far, Buck and Bucky. Or possibly Bucky and Buck. I forget which is which. (credit: Apple)

I'm writing this article under duress because it's not going to create anything new or try to make the world a better place—instead, I'm going to do the thing where a critic tears down the work of others rather than offering up their own creation to balance the scales. So here we go: I didn't like the first two episodes of Masters of the Air, and I don't think I'll be back for episode three.

The feeling that the show might not turn out to be what I was hoping for has been growing in my dark heart since catching the first trailer a month or so ago—it looked both distressingly digital and also maunderingly maudlin, with Austin Butler's color-graded babyface peering out through a hazy, desaturated cloud of cigarette smoke and 1940s World War II pilot tropes. Unfortunately, the show at release made me feel exactly how I feared it might—rather than recapturing the magic of Band of Brothers or the horror of The Pacific, Masters so far has the depth and maturity of a Call of Duty cutscene.

World War Blech

After two episodes, I feel I've seen everything Masters has to offer: a dead-serious window into the world of B-17 Flying Fortress pilots, wholly lacking any irony or sense of self-awareness. There's no winking and nodding to the audience, no joking around, no historic interviews with salt-and-pepper veterans to humanize the cast. The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy. And pining wistfully for that special girl waiting at home.

Enlarge / Nexus Mods says it wants nothing to do with this kind of Palworld content. (credit: ToastedShoes / X)

Palworld's viral success has already drawn a lot of obvious "Pokémon with guns" comparisons. But when it comes to mods that might add actual Pokémon to the game, at least one major online clearinghouse is preemptively and proactively avoiding anything that could draw Nintendo's legal ire.

Nexus Mods, a mod distribution site with tens of millions of registered users, said in a posted statement that it won't take the legal risk of distributing any Pokémon-themed Palworld mods. “We do think that adding Pokémon content to Palworld is a very cool idea and we understand why people would want such a thing," the statement reads. "However, we’re not comfortable hosting this content."

Nexus Mods cites Nintendo's "consistent record of mercilessly submitting legal challenges, DMCAs, and takedowns against fan-made content" as the main reason behind its hesitation. "Given Palworld’s similarity to the Pokémon franchise as a base game, hosting content that adds copyrighted characters or assets into the game is almost certainly going to put us at risk of legal action. Palworld content that is uploaded to Nexus Mods and is considered to have Pokémon-derived characters or assets will be taken down. Our normal moderation policies will apply."

Enlarge / Everyone is focused on the Pals that look a lot like Pokémon; meanwhile, this guy is just a Totoro painted yellow. (credit: Pocketpair)

This past weekend, a monster-catching survival game called Palworld took Steam by storm; the game has sold over 8 million copies and has been sitting at the top of Steam's "Top Selling" and "Most Played" charts all week. As of this writing, Steam's dashboard claims that just under 2 million players are currently exploring Palworld, twice as many as Counter-Strike 2 (the second game on the list).

You can tell just from looking at screenshots from developer Pocketpair that many of Palworld's monster designs are clearly inspired by designs from the Pokémon series, but the game's surprise success has led to greater scrutiny. Some observers have claimed that Pocketpair has taken actual 3D models from the games and modified them to seem original. (That has also prompted counter-claims that those 3D models were fudged to make them seem more similar, though it seems the alterations just scaled the models up and down to make them easier to compare.)

Today, the Pokémon Company released a brief statement about "another company's game released in January 2024," which could be a reference to a non-Palworld game but can only realistically be a reference to Palworld. The company will "investigate and take appropriate measures" in response to any asset theft or other infringement that it discovers.

Enlarge (credit: Pocketpair)

I'm whacking at a rock as the sun sets. The game is telling me that I am cold and hungry. But I need to collect enough resources to make a Pal Sphere to catch some Pals so I can assign them to work at my base and gather even more resources.

I am in the very opening minutes of Palworld, a game made by an obscure Japanese indie studio named Pocketpair. Some combination of algorithmic providence and word of mouth helped the game score some impressive achievements in its first Early Access weekend: over 5 million copies sold and nearly 1.3 million concurrent Steam users playing the game, beating out the high-watermarks for big-name games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3. 

The game's success means it has already been through multiple cycles of minor Internet controversy, mainly related to circumstantial evidence that its monster designs may have been created by generative AI or from the actual 3D models used in the Pokémon games.

Enlarge (credit: GCHQ | Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) announced the release of previously unseen images and documents related to Colossus, one of the first digital computers. The release marks the 80th anniversary of the code-breaking machines that significantly aided the Allied forces during World War II. While some in the public knew of the computers earlier, the UK did not formally acknowledge the project's existence until the 2000s.

Colossus was not one computer but a series of computers developed by British scientists between 1943 and 1945. These 2-meter-tall electronic beasts played an instrumental role in breaking the Lorenz cipher, a code used for communications between high-ranking German officials in occupied Europe. The computers were said to have allowed allies to "read Hitler's mind," according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

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  A photo of a surviving Colossus computer in 1963. [credit: GCHQ ]

The technology behind Colossus was highly innovative for its time. Tommy Flowers, the engineer behind its construction, used over 2,500 vacuum tubes to create logic gates, a precursor to the semiconductor-based electronic circuits found in modern computers. While 1945's ENIAC was long considered the clear front-runner in digital computing, the revelation of Colossus' earlier existence repositioned it in computing history. (However, it's important to note that ENIAC was a general-purpose computer, and Colossus was not.)

Enlarge / Like Kepler-10 b, illustrated above, newly discovered exoplanet HD 63433 d is a small, rocky planet in a tight orbit of its star. (credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

Astronomers have discovered an unusual Earth-sized exoplanet they believe has a hemisphere of molten lava, with its other hemisphere tidally locked in perpetual darkness. Co-authors and study leaders Benjamin Capistrant (University of Florida) and Melinda Soares-Furtado (University of Wisconsin-Madison) presented the details yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. An associated paper has just been published in The Astronomical Journal. Another paper published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics by a different group described the discovery of a rare small, cold exoplanet with a massive outer companion 100 times the mass of Jupiter.

As previously reported, thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched with the intention of helping us figure out what exoplanets are actually like. TESS is designed to identify planets orbiting bright stars relatively close to Earth, conditions that should allow follow-up observations to figure out their compositions and potentially those of their atmospheres.

Enlarge / "Coming 2025." (credit: Rockstar Games / YouTube)

Grand Theft Auto VI, like its protagonist, Lucia, keeps finding itself in an awkward spot because of "Bad luck, I guess."

The trailer for Rockstar Games' heavily, mightily, impossibly anticipated sequel in its record-breaking series landed on YouTube Monday evening, earlier than its previously published Tuesday morning release. That's because a pop-up, quickly suspended X (formerly Twitter) account posted it early, and Rockstar rushed to get its official version out, ending with a "Coming 2025" notice.

It's a mishap far smaller in scale than most leaks, but it's notable for Rockstar, which typically lets out very little about its games beyond official trailers. GTA VI had nearly an hour of early gameplay and testing footage leak in early September 2022, following a network intrusion. A teenager in the UK was arrested on charges related to the leak soon after Rockstar confirmed the leak. TikTok videos have also recently surfaced, with computer monitors showing off images of the game's setting, according to The Verge.

Blizzard just held the opening keynote of its first in-person BlizzCon since 2019, announcing numerous updates to its various games and franchises. Among those was Diablo IV, which launched earlier this year. The big news for that game is that its first full expansion will launch in "late 2024."

The expansion will be titled Vessel of Hatred, and it will take players to a new, jungle-like region called Nahantu, which will be about the same size as any one of the five regions that shipped in the game initially. The story will take place right after the main game and will deal with Mephisto, the brother of Diablo and Baal.

The announcement was light on further details other than to note that a new class will be added to the game—specifically, one that has not been seen in any prior Diablo game. Some leaks a few days back suggested the new class could be called the Spiritborn, but nothing's certain on that front.

A consensus among leading American astronomers is that NASA's next wave of great observatories should take advantage of game-changing lift capabilities offered by giant new rockets like SpaceX's Starship.

Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies' Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space," said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We want to take advantage of that.”

Enlarge / The winning entry: a rodent optic nerve head with astrocytes (yellow), contractile proteins (red), and retinal vasculature (green). (credit: Hassanain Qambari and Jayden Dickson)

Millions of Americans with diabetes (about 1 in 5) face the risk of eventual blindness due to diabetic retinopathy, a condition that affects blood vessels in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye. It's a difficult condition to spot in its earliest stages, since many people don't show immediate symptoms (although one 2021 study identified key biomarkers that potentially could one day help with early identification). By the late stages, the damage is often irreversible.

Hassanain Qambari's research at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Australia, focuses on early detection and possible reversal of diabetic retinopathy, including taking precise images of the tiny micron-sized vessels in the eye. With colleague Jayden Dickson's assistance, he created the winning image in the 2023 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, depicting an optic nerve head in a rodent in exquisite detail.

Now in its 49th year, the annual competition is designed to highlight "stunning imagery from scientists, artists, and photomicrographers of all experiences and backgrounds from across the globe," according to Nikon's communications manager, Eric Flem, adding, "I am consistently awed by how these advancements make it possible to create art out of science for the public to enjoy." Photomicrography involves attaching a camera to a microscope (either an optical microscope or an electron microscope) so that the user can take photographs of objects at very high resolutions. British physiologist Richard Hill Norris was one of the first to use it for his studies of blood cells in 1850, and the method has increasingly been highlighted as art since the 1970s.

Enlarge / Surveying the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system (artist’s concept of four of the system’s seven planets shown), could turn up interesting molecules that might indicate life. But ruling out false positives will be a challenge. (credit: ADAPTED FROM NASA / JPL-CALTECH / R. HURT, T. PYLE (IPAC))

In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in the search for alien life.

The finding follows similar news regarding neighboring planet TRAPPIST-1 B, another planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Its dim, red star hosts seven rocky worlds, a few of which are in the habitable zone—at a distance from their star at which liquid water could exist on their surfaces and otherworldly life might thrive.

What it would take to detect that life, if it exists, isn’t a new question. But thanks to the JWST, it’s finally becoming a practical one. In the next few years, the telescope could glimpse the atmospheres of several promising planets orbiting distant stars. Hidden away in the chemistry of those atmospheres may be the first hints of life beyond our solar system. This presents a sticky problem: What qualifies as a true chemical signature of life?

Enlarge / When Aston Martin first announced the Valkyrie it planned to take it to Le Mans. That plan got put on hold for a while, but now it's happening for real. (credit: Aston Martin)

Aston Martin is set to return to the world's premier endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with a prototype Valkyrie hypercar in 2025. The return to Le Mans also signals the marque joining the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

Often talked about in hushed tones by people in the know, the idea of Aston Martin's halo hypercar entering the top flight of endurance motorsport has long been wished for, and the firm's announcement is sure to make race fans happy. The Gaydon, UK, company intends to enter at least one Valkyrie in both WEC and IMSA from 2025, giving itself a chance to take the top step at Le Mans, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, and the 12 Hours of Sebring.

The basis for the competition car is set to be the Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR Pro, an even more hardcore version of the already rather raucous Valkyrie road car. The car with license plates boasts a Cosworth-developed 6.5-liter V12 packing 1,000 hp (745 kW), mated to a 160 hp (120 kW) electric motor, giving it an F1-style kinetic energy recovery system. Its hybrid setup makes it a ferocious thing.