When youre starting a new sports league, or really a new anything, youre always praying for your first viral moment.For TGL, a new golf league hoping to reinvent the game for a new era and a new audience, that moment came before the first season ever started. In 2024, Tiger Woods, the golf worlds biggest name and both a player and co-founder in the upstart league, showed up to a not-quite-finished SoFi Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, where all TGL matches would soon be held. He stood near the center of the stadium, on a football field-sized slab of turf, and started hitting balls into the 53-foot-high simulator screen. The next part seems to make TGL producer Jeff Neubarth laugh every time he tells it. He recounts it to me, months later, standing in almost the exact same spot. Neubarth points up to a tiny camera, barely visible five stories up atop that huge screen. Thats camera 91, he says. I pointed it out to Tiger, and I said, Itd be cool if you hit it. He said, sure, dropped the ball, and hit it. First shot.The video of the ball flying upward and whacking the camera made the rounds on social media, before most people even knew what TGL was. It has since become a ritual for players including some of the worlds best golfers to try the Tiger Camera Challenge before their matches or during practice sessions. It quickly became a signature gimmick for a league hoping to create lots and lots more of them.The team behind TGL, which just wrapped up its first regular season, has spent the last couple of years trying to figure out an entirely new way to play golf. Its not played on huge, sprawling courses but rather on this relatively tiny turf field. Players hit their tee shots not into the blue sky but against that five-story screen, before turning around and finishing the hole on top of a green that can be spun in any direction and morphed into nearly any shape. TGL golf is a team sport, played in front of raucous crowds, and borrows ideas and techniques from the NFL and the WWE. It is, above all else, a show. Its made for TV, and for the internet, far more than for anyone in the building. Which changes everything.With none of the normal constraints of filming sports, TGL got to put cameras wherever it wanted.You can explain practically everything about TGL by explaining its constraints. Matches are played mostly on Mondays and Tuesdays because thats typically a slow time for golfers, who are often at tournaments Wednesday through Sunday. (Its also a slow time on ESPN, which owns the leagues broadcast rights TGL has mostly replaced mediocre college basketball games.) Theyre 15 holes instead of the normal 18, a better fit in a two-hour time slot. Theres a 40-second shot clock and a radically simplified scoring system, all in service of making TGL faster-paced and easier to follow than the whispered chaos of a typical golf tournament. Heck, the whole thing is set in West Palm Beach because most professional golfers living within driving distance. Even the building itself is as much TV soundstage as sports arena. When I visit in late January, Neubarth, who helped determine so much of the look and feel of TGL, takes me through his process. His first challenge to Jonathan Evans, the shows director: no camera operators on the field. He chalks that up to personal preference. The second was, what are other sports doing that we think are really cool and useful to put in a space? Neubarth spins around and points to all the ways hes set up to capture the TGL action, some borrowed and some entirely new. Theres a cable-suspended camera known as the Spidercam, which can move both vertically and horizontally all over the arena youve seen that in NFL games. Two cameras zip along on a 400-foot track that goes around half the arena, shooting simultaneously tight and wide necessary in track and field, mostly just fun in golf. There are super high-speed cameras pointed at the tee box, so they get slow-motion shots of every ball that gets hit. There are cameras in the lighting grid hanging from the roof, pointing straight down, getting the kind of shots nobodys ever seen in golf before. Theres a remote-controlled camera on wheels, a tiny little go-kart of a thing, that circles players just before they take shots. Theres even a tiny first-person drone buzzing around the arena.For Neubarth, and for the rest of the TGL team, its all been a bit of a learning curve. This is much more akin to producing a basketball game than it is to producing golf, he says. You have to remind yourself, this is a primetime event, not a golf tournament. The difference is all the more stark because some of the camera operators filming TGL are the same ones who will get on a plane the next day and go shoot a PGA tournament.Maybe the most immediately obvious difference between TGL and other golf TV is the noise. Players enter with WWE-style, shouted announcements. Theres music playing, and fans shouting, from beginning to end. All the players are wearing Beats earbuds in one ear, and are constantly on the mic interacting with each other and the announcers. Part of TGLs goal is to turn the players into personalities, and hearing them talk trash and strategize has been some of the best TGL content so far. Its a lesson the league learned from exhibitions like The Match but also from hit documentaries like Formula 1s Drive to Survive.The night I attended, the match went into overtime a first in TGL history. It was Woods team, Jupiter Links, against a team called Boston Common featuring Rory McIlroy, the other biggest name in golf and the other superstar TGL co-founder. The teams went to a chip-off, a format based on penalty kicks in soccer, in which each player took a shot and whoever got closest to the hole won for their team. Jupiter Links won, in slightly anticlimactic fashion, after nobody hit a particularly good shot. But thats show business. Dont forget, this is a TV show, Woods said later. We need to have a quick ending. Doesnt matter that it was the most exciting match in the history of the league. Shows over. Time to go home.The whole green and surrounding area can rotate to practically any position.Even beyond the broadcast, the TGL story is as much about technology as it is about golf. And theres nowhere to start but with the screen, the 64-by-53-foot panel the players hit most of their shots into. (However big you think a 3,392-square-foot screen looks in person, I promise: its bigger than that.) Andrew Macaulay, CTO of TMRW Sports and the technical mastermind behind TGL, wont tell me the exact resolution of the screen, but he does happily point up to the array of nine projectors all pointing at it. Each one is sort of the biggest laser projector you can buy, he says. There are nine of them in case one (or two or three) breaks mid-match, but also to achieve a certain level of brightness in the arena getting a screen that big to look good on camera and in the arena with lots of other lights flashing is no simple feat. TGL is, at its core, just a really complex golf simulator a little bit pro golf, a little bit Wii golf. At the beginning of each hole, one golfer steps into a designated square of grass 35 yards away from the screen and lines up a shot. Its 35 yards away in part for TV reasons, by the way the TMRW team found that was just enough distance for a ball to start to change direction, which makes it feel more real, both to golfers and viewers. But it also gives us enough time to get the data, Macaulay says. As the players step in, wind up, and drill the ball at the screen, an array of sensors goes to work to figure out how to mesh the real-world golf shot with the onscreen video game. A system called Toptracer tracks the balls spin, speed, and trajectory in the air, while another system called Full Swing studies the initial impact on the ball club speed, immediate spin, ball speed, and more. If youve ever played Topgolf, youve used something like Toptracer, and if youve ever used a simulator, youve probably hit on a Full Swing launch simulator. TGL is that, just more: Macaulay points out all four Toptracer arrays pointed at the tee box and counts the six Full Swing monitors all running at once.Gear like this Full Swing array tracks everything that happens when a player hits the ball.When Tiger Woods or anyone else hits the ball, all that tracking data immediately goes to a cluster of computers just outside the playing area, where TGLs algorithms attempt to discern exactly where the ball was headed. Once it does, usually about a half-second after the ball thunks onto the screen, the virtual ball takes off from the spot of impact and finds its resting place toward the virtual hole. Getting the ballflight right is ultimately the most important thing for TGL. It has been tricky so far. In one of the leagues first matches, Woods hit two balls into the water not the kind of thing one of the greatest golfers ever tends to do. Woods chalked it up to a bad night, and TGL said it was confident in the technology, but fans started to wonder: is the physics engine here really getting it right? Is this really the best tech TGL could have used, or is it skimping on the simulators for business reasons?A few weeks later, when the sensors picked up a chunk of grass instead of the ball and measured Tommy Fleetwoods great shot as a terrible one, the concerns got even louder. (That one, Macaulay says, is a known problem with shot trackers of all kinds, and his team has already found ways to make sure it doesnt happen again.) Most simulators are reasonably accurate but dont claim to be inch-perfect. If TGL wants to approximate real golf with 35 yards and a bunch of sensors, it needs to be.Once the golfers get within a chip shot of the hole, they encounter a different technological project. On the other side of the arena, behind the players as they face the screen, theres a round green area about 40 yards across that includes a couple of sandy bunkers, a small hill, and the hole into which every player is trying to put their ball. The whole thing rests on a turntable, which can rotate to face any direction. The green itself sits on top of hundreds of tiny actuators, each of which can raise and lower to change the shape and trajectory of the green. Put the movements together, and this one hole can turn into just about anything.Macaulay shows me underneath the turntable, which we access by climbing over some of the arenas structure and heading down a hidden staircase. The turntable is just a huge, rust-colored metal slab with dozens of slanted supports, and each actuator is connected to a battery pack with blinking lights. The overall effect is a little like weve just planted an enormous underground bomb. Its all controlled remotely, from a computer elsewhere in the arena all the operator has to do is select which hole is being played, and the green turns and reshapes to fit. The rig is thoroughly disconcerting to stand next to as it undulates, like the sand in Dune before a worm pops out. During a match, it happens all but invisibly.With all the parts of a golf course reduced to actuator degrees and pixels on a huge screen, a TGL hole could be practically anything. In this first season, theyre mostly fairly normal a hole or two played over lava, but nothing wilder than that. How wild it ought to be, no one seems to know. Is the benefit of a largely virtual golf course that players can play a selection of well-known holes from around the world, all in a single night? Or should TGL embrace its video game possibilities and play holes on the moon, underwater, and from the top of the pyramids? One feels like golf; the other feels like fun. And maybe it can be both: one thing the TGL folks say to me over and over is that theyre not trying to compete with the golf people know and love. Theyre trying to build something else, even if they dont know exactly what it is yet.As its first season winds to a close, TGL has, by most measures, been a success. The ratings are solid, consistently beating whatever was in the same time slot a year ago. The matches have largely been fun to watch and have generated some genuinely thrilling moments, even if the overall vibe of the league feels more like pro golfers goofing around on an off day than high-stakes competition. Nearly everyone I talk to has a long list of ways to improve the product, whether by tweaking rules to raise the stakes or through tech improvements meant to make things feel even more realistic. And the league still has plenty of critics, both from golf purists who find this all a bit ridiculous and from non-fans who still cant find a reason to care.Theres no question, though, that things like TGL are the future of sports. (And in case youre wondering: yes, theres a gambling plan.) As our lives shift ever more into personalized bubbles, shared cultural experiences are few and far between and theyre mostly sports. As a result, any live sport that can draw an audience becomes a hot commodity, which is both the reason for TGLs existence and the reason for the countless upstart leagues trying to reinvent and tweak sports from basketball and soccer to volleyball and lacrosse to darts and snowboarding. TGL, though, may have the hardest road to follow. Its not just trying to build a new league, but practically a new sport altogether. Its video games; its augmented reality; its the biggest screen youve ever seen. Its golfers hitting golf balls, and yet, its almost not golf at all. Its unfamiliar terrain for everyone involved, but the TGL team seems excited to figure it out. After all, with the push of a button or two, that terrain can become whatever they want it to be.Photography by David Pierce / The Verge See More:

Star of Providence is like a retro game I would have loved as a kid. But the roguelike bullet hell shooter is also a modern twin-stick shooter, and the melding of the two eras results in a fun, fast, and challenging experience.In Star, you control a ship and explore randomly generated dungeons. As you navigate room by room similar to an old-school Legend of Zelda game youll pick up powerful weapons to fight the many enemies youll stumble across in your dungeon crawling.The weapons are a delight, filling your screen with bullets and lasers. Sometimes, youll get cool effects like the ability for your bullets to phase through one side of the screen and appear on the other. But enemies can also spew out huge amounts of bullets, and that means many rooms turn into chaos as you weave through attack patterns to line up a perfect shot. The games narrow aspect ratio makes rooms feel pretty small, too (though I appreciate how it adds to the retro vibe).Watch out for the bullets. Image: Team D-13, BigmodeStars controls are tight, so it always feels like you can thread the needle to escape danger. A useful dash can get you out of rough spots. And you can deploy bombs to clear bullets from a room, but they can take a while to recharge.As you explore dungeons, youll have to make a lot of typical roguelike-y choices, like what to buy at a shop or what upgrades to pick. Arguably the most important choice is what weapons youll pick up along the way: theyre much more powerful than your basic gun, but they also have a limited amount of ammo. But I found that made for some fun strategy. Do I buy a weapon right when I come upon a store but risk running out of ammo before I really need it? Or should I try to survive a floor without it and instead buy the weapon when Im about to take on the floors boss?Speaking of bosses: theyre awesome. Theyre typically giant, taking up a good portion of the square screen, and they spew bullets in all sorts of unpredictable and nail-biting patterns. Im a particularly big fan of the huge green skeleton with horns.Perhaps my favorite thing about Star is that everything is fast. Rooms typically take just seconds to clear, meaning you can zip through a whole dungeon floor in a few minutes. The games map lets you instantly teleport to rooms youve previously been to as youre exploring a floor. Even boss fights usually only take a minute or two. And when you want to start a new run, all you need to do is go through a door at your home base.Theres a constant sense of forward momentum that I think more games should emulate. That actually might be where Star is most like the old-school games its inspired by: jumping into the action is almost as easy as adding another quarter to an arcade machine.Star of Providence is available now on Nintendo Switch and PC.See More:

That Christopher Nolan! What an unpredictable guy he is, with his movies told out of order games, is it a dream or reality stories, what timeframe are we witnessing things happen in trickery, and his screw it, lets just run time backwards hijinks.All of which is to say, for someone with such a notably wacky outside-the-box storytelling track record, its a bit surprising that Nolans next movie is seemingly a straight-up adaptation of Homers epic poem The Odyssey.Sure, we dont really know all that much about the film yet. Matt Damon is playing Odysseus, who is of course the main character of Homers story, and an extensive group of noteworthy actors have been cast in as-yet unannounced roles in the film, including Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong'o, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, and Charlize Theron, among others. The Odyssey is shooting now and has a release date of July 17, 2026, with Universal Pictures calling the film a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology.Real quick for those who skipped it in high school, The Odyssey tells the 10-year story of Odysseus attempt to get home to the Greek island of Ithaca after the events of the Trojan War, an effort that is made all the more difficult when he angers the god of the sea, Poseidon. And this after already being stuck at Troy for 10 years! Waiting for him at home are his now adult son Telemachus and his ever-faithful wife Penelope, although things have grown increasingly dicey for both of them as a group of suitors vie for Penelopes hand in marriage. As he fights to get home, Odysseus encounters all manner of mythological creatures and challenges.Its freaking great, and one of my favorite books. But its also proven challenging to properly adapt to the screen. There have been a bunch of attempts over the years, dating back at least as far as the 1911 Italian silent film L'Odissea, but often the scope of Odysseus story has been truncated or mismanaged in translation to movie or TV form. However, Nolan, fresh off the financial and critical success of the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, is perfectly placed to finally get Homers story right on the big screen.Its Nolan's interest in playing with time, or how the viewer perceives time in relation to the story being told, that is perhaps the key to nailing The Odyssey.But again, what exactly is the director drawn to in this story? Hes often got sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent concepts in his films, and while Odysseus certainly exists in the realm of the fantastical, thats not quite the same vibe. (A cyclops is not sci-fi, sorry!) Still, I think theres a good chance that Nolans real obsession no, not dead wives, his other obsession could be why hes making this movie, and also why hes perfect for this movie: Its his interest in playing with time, or how the viewer perceives time in relation to the story being told, that is perhaps the key to nailing The Odyssey.One of the reasons why The Odyssey has always been a challenge to properly adapt to movies and TV (aside from the obstacle of convincing visual effects until relatively recently) is the nature of the main characters story. While his time away in the Trojan War isnt technically part of The Odyssey (thats The Iliad, for those who also skipped that class), those first 10 years away from his family are a necessary bit of backstory that infuses The Odyssey with a lot of its emotion. Add to that the 10 years that it takes Odysseus to finally get back home and then the actual re-taking of that home when he battles the suitors (this last part was its own movie alone just last year The Return starring Ralph Fiennes), and youve got a lot of story taking place over a very long period of time.Ive always thought that biopics always run the danger of being the CliffsNotes version of a persons life, which is why when a movie like James Mangolds A Complete Unknown focuses in on just a few years of a historical figure like Bob Dylans life, it can be a much more effective way of telling a story. Equally, trying to do The Odyssey in, what, three hours? Its a tall, tall order.But here comes old Chris Nolan with his timey-wimey and, lets be fair, highly creative ways of dipping in and out of a story, using the very nature of time as a tool rather than an obstacle. Look at Interstellar, where Matthew McConaugheys Cooper takes off into outer space for what is basically a one-way mission where time gets all kinds of weird for him and his crewmates, even while his children grow to adulthood back on Earth and, eventually, mourn their apparently lost father. There are certainly Odyssey parallels right there in terms of the missing father on a lost voyage, whose family faces disaster back home, but its the way that Nolan tells the story, despite the challenges of, well, time, that is so affecting. Hes not deterred by the vast gulf between the father and his children, but instead uses it to his advantage.Odyseuss fights a giant Cyclops, sees a bunch of his men turned into pigs, and confronts a bunch of other crazy shit in his story, but he also faces time as an enemy, and in a variety of ways. Not only is he literally 20 years away from his family by the end of his journey, but seven of those years see him trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso, who loves him and offers him immortality (another aspect of time or the perception of it) if hell stay with her. He and his crew's visit to the realm of the Lotus-Eaters plays with time in a different way, in that those who eat the fruit of the land lose any interest in returning home, content to stay and eat the fruit forever. And then theres our heros trip to the Underworld, where he finds lost friends and family, including his mother and his comrade Achilles, who are doomed to exist, if not quite live, for eternity as mere shades of their former selves.Ranking the Movies of Christopher NolanThen theres the situation back home, as Telemachus was just a baby when his father left and is now a young man. Odysseus father Laertes is a sad shell of his former self, having lost his wife to grief over the past 20 years, while assuming his son is gone forever too. And in one of the most effective passages in Homers poem, even Odyseuss dog Argos has been waiting for him all this time!Will Nolan be able to tell Odyseuss full story effectively by utilizing his particular brand of stylized filmmaking? The guy is fixated on time, and by extension memory, and that certainly seems to be a quality he shares with the hero of The Odyssey as well, a man who eventually has nothing but memories of his family and the life he once lived to rely on as he fights the great gulf of time to get home.

Kate Mara knows a little bit about being in space. As one of the stars of Ridley Scotts 2015 hit, The Martian, Mara continues to carry parts of that experience with her, including the costuming. I have my flight suit from The Martian, she admits with a smile while inside the Den of Geek studio.But where that Scott movie focused on a man abandoned in space, Maras new movie The Astronaut is about a space traveller feeling abandoned at home. For a lot of the film, I am solo, Mara says of her character, the titular astronaut Sam. Its just me and my imagination. Well that, plus whatever really is out there going bump in the night after Maras Captain Sam Walker returns to Earth. It was a remarkable homecoming, too, since she survived something penetrating her space capsule. Afterward she was discovered in the ocean with luminescent liquid on her face and no memory of what happened. Nonetheless, she is aware that something is going on during her quarantine in the woods when shadows move out of the corner of her eye.Mara did plenty of research to prepare for her role as Sam, but she didnt need to go far to replicate the feeling of being separated from everyone that she loves. Thats just part of being an actor.Theres always sort of like a re-entry period after you film something intense, especially if youre not filming where you live, which is really 99 percent of the time. Even if you have your family with you, I had my kids with me in Ireland while we filmed this, when you go back home, theres always just adjusting to what life is like when you dont have a very specific place to go every day and you have to become somebody else. I can relate to that aspect of an astronauts work, but everything else is just way more intense and way cooler than being an actor.Writer and director Jess Varley adds to Maras own experience with the real-world research she did into the space oddities and anti-gravity dreams real astronauts have experienced after returning home.I looked at real symptoms that astronauts have, Varley tells us. Sam crash lands in the beginning of the movie, so I felt like there was some license we could take with bruising, spreading on her body, while trying to keep everything as grounded as possible I wanted her condition to feel organic, like it was unfolding before our eyes in a real way, so that it never felt prosthetic-heavy or overly-stylized. I tried to keep it as grounded as possible.That said, Varley did draw inspiration from other films, namely one about women undergoing a crisis of identity, and the men in their life doubting them every step of the way.I love Black Swan, she says of the 2010 Darren Aronofsky movie. That actually was a bit of an inspiration for The Astronaut. We have this unreliable narrator, and some other elements that may be a little spoilery, so I wont say. But its fun creating these red-herring moments where were not sure if we can trust [Sam].Lest it sound like The Astronaut is another movie about people mistrusting a woman, Varley adds, Shes not sure if she can trust herself and it helps us to sort of enjoy the ride, but also leaves enough room for us to hopefully be shocked at where the movie ultimately goes.Producer Brad Fuller notes that sense of a thrill ride as one of the main appeals to a genre film like The Astronaut. People go to the movie theaters to have a shared experience, he explains. And genre movies really offer an incredible opportunity for everyone in the movie theater to scream.Fuller also notes that The Astronaut isnt pure escapism thanks to the level of realism that Mara and Varley described. Its about something that could actually really happen. When [Fuller and his producing partners] are looking at scripts, were looking at things that are not so outlandish that the audience says, well, that could never happen. Horror is scarier if you think that this could happen to you.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!The relatable element also helps drive the performance of Gabriel Luna, who plays Sams husband Mark.To me, the story is about families that are built on a love that goes beyond blood, Luna explains. You take this leap to embrace something other than you. You see how strong they truly are at their core. Our relationship roots the entire story in the human experience, Luna explains, pointing to the difficulties Mark and Sam have before the sci-fi element comes in. Theres a lot of turbulence in their relationship, just because of the distance and having to deal with the separation and raising a child.The commonplace relationship struggles that Luna describes get at Varleys goals for the movie and its reception. I hope that people relate to the messy things that we all go, she says. We dont always get to see that on screen and theres something very human and often very private about that. Hopefully The Astronaut puts it out there more so people feel a little bit less alone in their transformations and struggles in their own journeys.And what of Maras journey, going from playing an astronaut in space in The Martian to an astronaut at home in The Astronaut? Its always nice when you have information from another film that you can use in whatever way, she confesses. I definitely carried some of that stuff with me, but there was a lot more to learn for sure.But at least she didnt need to learn how to wear a flight suit again.The Astronaut premiered March 7 at SXSW.

You know microplastics, the little bits of plastic trash that'veso deeply permeated the Earth that they've been foundinclouds, rocks, caves that were sealed off from all humans,and even our brains, arteries, hearts, and sperm?Well, now scientists are warning that these dastardly particles could undermine the entire world's food supplies by undercutting plants' ability to photosynthesize.As detailed in a new meta-study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and spotted by The Guardian, an international team of researchers examined the results of 157 studies on how microplastics affect plant life.Their findings which other experts say will require further data and research to be confirmed paint an alarming picture of the future of our food supply. According to their analysis, between four and 14 percent of the globe's wheat, rice, and maize crops are being lost due to microplastics.That's because the presence of microplastics reduces the photosynthetic efficiency across terrestrial, marine, and freshwater ecosystems by anywhere from seven to 12 percent, the researchers found.Worse yet, the situation could get even worse within the next two decades, an "alarming scenario" for food security.Crop losses could even climb to a similar scale of the losses induced by climate change, the researchers suggest."Humanity has been striving to increase food production to feed an ever-growing population [but] these ongoing efforts are now being jeopardised by plastic pollution," the paper reads. "These findings underscore the urgency for effective plastic mitigation strategies and provide insights for international researchers and policymakers to safeguard global food supplies in the face of the growing plastic crisis."How extensive the problem really is, however, remains a subject of debate."This analysis is valuable and timely in reminding us of the potential dangers of microplastic pollution and the urgency of addressing the issue, [but] some of the major headline figures require more research before they can be accepted as robust predictions," University of South Wales biotechnology professor Denis Murphy told The Guardian.Others were even more careful about the scientists' latest conclusions."I have considerable concerns about the quality of the original data used by the model and this has led to overspeculation about the effects of plastic contamination on food supplies," UK National Oceanography Center observational biogeochemist Richard Lampitt told the newspaper.Nonetheless, plastic pollution has turned into a monumental issue facing humanity. Worryingly, world nations have yet to agree on ways to systematically address the problem. In December, negotiators failed to agree on a United Nations treaty to curb global plastic pollution, in large part due to a handful of oil-producing countries that refused to place a cap on plastic production.The failed talks highlight how much work there's still left to be done despite the existential threats plastic pollution and microplastics could already be posing.More on microplastics: This New Paper About Eating Out of Plastic Containers Is a Bit TerrifyingShare This Article

A researcher has made a puzzling discovery while analyzing observations taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.While analyzing images for the telescope's Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), Kansas State University associate professor of computer science Lior Shamir found that out of the 263 galaxies examined, two thirds of them rotated clockwise, while only a third rotated counterclockwise, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.This challenges the assumption that any given universe would have half of them spinning one way, with the rest spinning counter to that, according to a press release about the discovery."It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations," said Shamir in a statement. "One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole."The findings add credence to an existing, Russian doll-like theory called "Schwarzschild cosmology," which suggests that our galaxy is trapped within a black hole, which in turn is located inside another universe.As Space.com reports, this would imply that other observed black holes could be wormholes, otherwise known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, to other universes, which are unobservable to us due to the black holes trapping light within them."I think that the simplest explanation of the rotating universe is the universe was born in a rotating black hole," University of New Haven theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski, who champions the theory that we're surrounded by doorways to other universes and wasn't involved in the research, told Space.com. "A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry.""The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed," he added.But Shamir's findings still leave the possibility that the Milky Way's own rotation could have influenced the galaxies' unusual distribution of spin rotation.Since the Earth rotates around the center of the Milky Way, researchers expect light from galaxies rotating in the opposite direction to be brighter, causing the discrepancy in the JADES observations, Shamir suggests.In other words, the velocity at which the Milky Way rotates may be influencing our celestial measurements, which had previously been considered negligible."If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," he said in the statement. "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.More on black holes: Scientists Discover Black Hole So Gigantic That You Will Quiver in Existential TerrorShare This Article

Steffan Baumgart's team welcoming the champions-elect to the Stadion An der Alten Frsterei.

David Moyes welcomes his old club to Goodison Park.

Horizon Forbidden West actress Ashly Burch responds to Sony's controversial AI Aloy"It hurts my heart. It scares me."Image credit: Guerrilla/Getty/Eurogamer News by Victoria Kennedy News Reporter Published on March 15, 2025 Actress Ashly Burch has responded to the leaked AI Aloy footage, which made the rounds earlier this week.The footage in question showed a Sony employee engaging with an on-screen AI version of the Horizon lead. The employee asked the AI Aloy a number of questions, such as "how are you", to which the character replied she was ok, but "dealing with a sore throat", before she shared some Horizon lore.Now, Burch - who along with starring as Horizon's Aloy has featured in a series such as Life is Strange, Borderlands and The Last of Us - has shared her thoughts on the leaked footage.8 Wholesome 2025 Cosy Games. Watch on YouTube"I saw the tech demo earlier this week," Burch said in a video shared on her social channels, adding Horizon developer Guerrilla had been in contact with her to say the "demo didn't reflect anything that was actively in development".Meanwhile, Sony "didn't use any of [Burch's] performance" for the demo. "So none of my facial or voice data," Aloy's actress said. "Guerrilla owns Aloy as a character."But still, "I feel worried," Burch continued. "Not worried about Guerrilla specifically, or Horizon, or my performance, or my career specifically, even. I feel worried about this art form."Game performance as an art form."Burch went on to speak about the current SAG-AFTRA strikes, of which AI is a big part of the discussion. "We're asking for protections," Burch said. "What we are fighting for is, you have to get our consent before you make an AI version of us in any form. You have to compensate us fairly and you have to tell us how you're using this AI double."Burch added she doesn't feel worried because the technology exists, or even because game companies want to use it, reasoning "of course they do - they always want to use technological advancements". "I just imagine a video like this coming out that does have someone's performance attached to it. That does have someone's voice, or face, or movement. And the possibility that if we lose this fight, that person would have no recourse," the actress said. "They wouldn't have any protections. Any way to fight back. "And that possibility... it makes me so sad. It hurts my heart. It scares me." Image credit: Guerrilla/EurogamerBurch stated she loves this industry and the creative art form. She wants there "to be a new generation of actors", and for there to be "so many more incredible game performances" from those actors."I want to be able to continue, to do this job, and if we don't win, then that future is really compromised," Burch said. "I'm genuinely not trying to put any game company specifically on blast, certainly not Guerrilla, because again, I don't think... the technology isn't the problem. Game companies wanting to use the technology isn't the problem. The problem is we are currently on strike and the bargaining group will not agree to give us common sense protections."Burch closed by stating she supports the strike, and always has. "Fighting is what we have to do to protect the future and longevity of this career we all love so much."You can see Burch's full video via the embed below. @ashly.burch let us speak on AI aloy original sound - Ashly Burch To see this content please enable targeting cookies.AI continues to be a hot topic and several video game developers have flirted with the technology. Last month, Microsoft trumpeted the announcement of Muse, a new "generative AI breakthrough" designed to aid "gameplay ideation". Also in February, Take-Two Interactive boss Strauss Zelnick opened up about his views on AI, calling the concept of artificial intelligence "an oxymoron".Meanwhile, the Microsoft-owned Activision recently came under fire for its use of generative AI, admitting some in-game content in Call of Duty has been created using the technology.

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games hereMarvel Rivals has been one of the most popular games over the past few months. Its attracted millions of players, which doesnt come as a surprise considering how fun it is. On top of this, the game features some of the most popular comic book characters ever created. Unfortunately, this rapid growth has also brought some problems, and after layoffs, the Marvel Rivals developer is also facing a lawsuit.The game developer is being sued for $900 million by Jeff and Annie Strain, owners of Prytania Media.The outcome of the Marvel Rivals developer lawsuit is uncertainThe lawsuit against NetEase was filed in January inLouisiana. Its outcome remains uncertain, as this could be a long legal process. Jeff and Annie Strain claim that the game developer, which previously held a 25% stake in their subsidiary Crop Circle Games, leaked false information about Prytania Media. This information suggested mismanagement and fraud, causing potential investors to withdraw their support.Shortly after NetEase spread the above referenced rumors, all of the potential investors into Crop Circle Games pulled out of the ongoing discussions regarding possibly investing in the Company, the lawsuit states. These problems have led to financial trouble for Prytania Media, which was forced to close all of its studios. Eventually, the company was shut down.The Marvel Rivals developer is facing a $900 million lawsuit. Image by VideoGamer.The Marvel Rivals developer addressed the lawsuit and provided the following statement for Polygon: The allegations by Prytania Media and its founders Annie and Jeff Strain are wholly without merit, and we emphatically deny and will vigorously defend ourselves against them. Our record as a global gaming company speaks for itself, and we remain committed to conducting business with integrity. We are confident that the legal process will vindicate our position and shed light on the real reasons behind the demise of the Strains studios.Not even a month ago, NetEase was put on blast for laying off its Seattle-based team. Now, the Marvel Rivals creator is facing a lawsuit, which could have serious consequences for the companys reputation and future business dealings. As the legal battle progresses, many are watching closely to see its outcome.Marvel RivalsPlatform(s):macOS, PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series XGenre(s):Fighting, ShooterSubscribe to our newsletters!By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime.Share