This Week in the Universe rounds up some of the best and most interesting stories from around the web you may have missed this week.
“I Didn’t Ask For This” was the phrase used by Adam Jensen after having received robotic augmentations due to a serious injury and right now no one would ask for it. But what happens when prosthetics become better than the human body? How close are we to this? Dave Lee took a look.
Paralympics: Should technology push athletes beyond their limits?
“Soon, athletes using technology to enhance their bodies will be able to jump higher, leap farther and last longer – stretching our concept of what it means to push the human body to the limit.”
It may seem like Sci-Fi but when you think about it augmentation is not as far fetched as you might think. Due to ear infections as a kid I have had my middle ear replaced with plastic (sadly it is not as good as the original and super hearing was always out of the question) and things like pacemakers are so common place people don’t even think about them until the go wrong. This next story is one of those times. Via Boing Boing.
Vital Signs: The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down
“The emergency room was busy that afternoon. I had just started my shift and was making my way through a scrum of frantic doctors, nurses, and orderlies when I heard yelling coming from the ambulance bay entrance. “Put her down now!” I recognized the stern voice of Herb, one of our security guards.”
Previously the modding community’s Duke Nukem Forever (can we still use that to mean vapourware after it final got a release?) Black Mesa: Source has both new screen shots and a release date. Have a read of the story over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
! Black Mesa Source: A Release Date !
“I have the most terrible guilt about gazumping Jim’s sterling Sunday Papers, but I do so with signficant news. SIGNIFICANT. So significant that I’m attempt to post this from my phone while on the train. Will it work? Will you ever see these words? Such a vague, mysterious situation draws certain parallels with the subject of this post – the fabled, long-delayed, oft-accused of non-corporeal status Half-Life 1 fan remake Black Mesa Source. Which, would you Adam & Eve it, now has a release date.”
Continuing their rapid releases Mozilla have launched Firefox 15 this week, mainly technological improvements rather than anything you will notice, well apart from irritatingly bundling AVG toolbar and secure-search with it… These technological improvements will enable plug-in free gaming right in your web browser.
Firefox 15 offers fewer leaks, more frags
“To prove it, Mozilla developers have created a demo first-person shooter game, code named BananaBread, that puts the new features through their paces. BananaBread is based on the Cube 2: Sauerbraten 3D gaming engine, which was ported to the web platform using the Emscripten C++-to-JavaScript compiler.”
This is an interesting story even though I can’t quite take it’s use of “high definition full console-quality titles” seriously. But get past the fact that the quality is going to be somewhat like looking at a youtube video of the game and will have some lag it is an interesting idea when it comes to a publisher’s back catalogue.
Square Enix’s CoreOnline makes console games ‘free’ online
“Developer Square Enix has launched a service allowing gamers to play high definition full console-quality titles through their web browser.CoreOnline streams games from the firm’s back catalogue for free, with users encouraged to watch advertising in order to “earn” more playing time.”
Gizmodo Editor Brian Barrett is not on his own with his thoughts on online piracy, I also wish they would make it easier to fairly buy or rent content, why is it that certain film studios don’t let you stream rentals when others do? Why do most of them insist on putting ridiculous restrictions on the content you paid for?
Why I Pay for Content (And Why That Makes Me Feel Like a Sucker)
“I’m a person who pays for content because I want to support the people who created it, but who’s increasingly frustrated by how hard content owners make it to just give them my money sometimes. That may put me in the minority, but I don’t think I’m alone.”
Now it is 5,000 light years distant so we will not be going there any time soon to find out but Nasa’s Kepler space telescope has made an interesting discovery, a binary star system with planets.
Tatooine-like double-star systems can host planets
“A new study shows that planetary systems can form and survive in the chaotic environment around pairs of stars. A team reports in Science the discovery of two planets orbiting a pair of stars – a so-called binary.”
While we are on the subject of space, the video this week (thanks to Boing Boing) is an HD Interpolated version of Curiosity’s decent to the surface of Mars.
Have a good week!
Gaming and Tech Network 