Nintendo is at it again. The Nintendo Switch 2 is coming later this year and preorders are starting soon. The preorder is the easiest way to beat the line and ensure you get your Nintendo Switch 2 when it comes out on June 5. Starting at the very first second of April 24 (12:00 a.m. ET, i.e. when it hits midnight on Wednesday, the 23 in NYC) you’ll be able to begin your pre-ordering at Walmart via the button below. You’ll be able to get the Nintendo Switch 2 by itself for $449 or the Nintendo Switch 2 and Mario Kart World Bundle for $499, all with free shipping so long as you order by 8:00 a.m. of your local time on June 4. However, Walmart has very specifically said “while supplies last” for this offer. That indicates that they think there’s a possibility of them selling out. They don’t have an infinite supply of Nintendo Switch 2 handhelds. So, be sure to tap the button below now, just in case, and bookmark this page for later if the preorder is not yet available. Read on for an overview of everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2. Related The Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t out yet, but we still have quite a lot of knowledge about the Switch 2. Part of this is because it looks so similar to the original Switch, which is a good thing because it is backwards compatible. If you compare the hardware of the Switch and Switch 2, however, you’ll start to see glimpses of major changes — a 4K docked video output, a massive storage upgrade, dual USB-C ports, and support for microSD express cards (which the original lacks, meaning you’ll need to upgrade cards). Furthermore, the Switch 2 is going to have new magnetic Joy-Cons that are somewhat larger and can operate in a new mode that’s not entirely unlike a computer mouse. The Mario Kart World Bundle also includes Mario Kart 9, which features classic Mario-style, powerup-infused karting with a twist — transitions from track to track in a set progress seamlessly. We’re also seeing more abilities to pull off skateboard style grind tricks and there’s even a rewind feature to give you a second shot at that jump you missed. Of course, knowing all of this is moot if you don’t get a Nintendo Switch 2 console in your hands. Starting on April 24 you can preorder the Nintendo Switch 2 for $449 or the Nintendo Switch 2 with Mario Kart World for $499 if you tap the button below. Editors’ Recommendations

Spine finding Universities (finally) band together, fight “unprecedented government overreach” New statement is weak—but a start. Nate Anderson – Apr 22, 2025 6:51 pm | 20 Credit: Cavan Images via Getty Credit: Cavan Images via Getty Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Last Friday, in an op-ed piece on the Trump administration's war on American universities, we called for academia to 1) band together and 2) resist coercive control over hiring and teaching, though we noted that the 3) "temperamental caution of university administrators" means that they might "have trouble finding a clear voice to speak with when they come under thundering public attacks from a government they are more used to thinking of as a funding source." It only took billions of dollars in vindictive cuts to make it happen, but higher education has finally 1) banded together to 2) resist coercive control over its core functions. More than 230 leaders, mostly college and university presidents, have so far signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities statement that makes a thundering call gentle bleat for total resistance "constructive engagement" with the people currently trying to cripple, shutter, and/or dominate them. Clearly, 3) temperamental caution remains the watchword. Still, progress! (Even Columbia University, which has already capitulated to Trump administration pressure, signed on.) The statement largely consists of painful pablum about how universities "provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce," etc, etc. As a public service, I will save you some time (and nausea) by excerpting the bits that matter: We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education... We must reject the coercive use of public research funding... American institutions of higher learning have in common the essential freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom... In their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation. This is fine, as far as it goes. But what are all these institutions going to do about the funding cuts, attempts to revoke their nonprofit status, threats not to hire their graduates, and student speech-based deportations? They are going to ask the Trump administration for "constructive engagement that improves our institutions and serves our republic." This sounds lovely, if naive, and I hope it works out well for every one of them as they seek good-faith dialogue with a vice president who has called universities the "enemy" and an administration that demanded Harvard submit to the vetting of every department for unspecified "viewpoint diversity." As a first step to finding common ground and speaking with a common voice, the statement is a start. But statements, like all words, can be cheap. We'll see what steps schools actually take—and how much they can speak and act in concert—as Trump's pressure campaign continues to ratchet. Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 20 Comments

3800+ kills/hour 12-year-old Doom 2 challenge map finally beaten after six-hour, 23K-demon grind Streamer Coincident gets a dream run on the Okuplok's nightmarish "slaughter map." Kyle Orland – Apr 22, 2025 12:31 pm | 17 Piece of cake. Credit: Coincident / Youtube Piece of cake. Credit: Coincident / Youtube Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Over 12 years ago, a reclusive DoomWorld forum member going by the handle Okuplok released what he called "a slaughter map" for Doom 2. Packed to the gills with 23,211 enemies (often in extremely claustrophobic corridors), the level quickly gained a reputation in the classic Doom player community as being one of the hardest ever constructed. That reputation didn't stop classic FPS streamer Coincident, who has been grinding away at the "Okuplok slaughter map" in some form or another for years. And over the weekend, Coincident became the first player to defeat every enemy and complete the map in a single segment during a livestreamed marathon run that clocked in at just over six hours. A long time coming To be clear, this isn't the first time the Okuplok slaughter map has been completed in any form. In 2023, Coincident managed to take it down in a single segment run on the much easier "I'm too young to die" difficulty, which halves the damage taken and doubles the ammo provided. At the time, Coincident estimated that an Ultra Violence run on the same level would be "eight times more difficult," thanks in large part to randomized damage that could end a run after a single mistake. Tool-assisted speedruns have shown that an Ultra Violence run of the Okuplok slaughter map was technically possible in under two hours with mechanically perfect input. But at that difficulty, humans had only been able to force their way through the slaughter level in multi-segment runs, exploiting save states to preserve their best performances and break up the nerve-wracking tedium. Coincident himself completed one such Ultra Violence run in just two segments last year, an achievement that still took 56 total attempts and what he said was "countless hours of practice." Coincident beating the slaughter level on "I'm too young to die" difficulty in 2023. In the run-up to his single-segment completion, Coincident put together a series of strategy videos that highlight the difficulty of completing even the relatively easy opening sections of this brutal level. There, he outlines the "scientific approach" he takes to movement through each section of the map, making use of rare points of partial cover and using constant movement to prioritize survival and ammo management above all else. In the descriptions for those videos, though, Coincident acknowledged some of the reasons that Okuplok's level has been "deemed impossible to beat in one segment" on Ultra Violence difficulty. Even if you have a perfect strategy mapped out for each segment, "some of the later fights are a pure RNG grind," he wrote. "Losing multiple 5-hour-long [Ultra Violence] runs over and over again that late into the map would drive me insane." Coincident's strategy videos for the slaughter map highlight just how tough even the "easy" sections are to complete. The slaughter level's "wildly varying levels of difficulty between each fight" are "extremely frustrating as a challenge, especially when you die to a difficult fight, after having cleared several easy (and borderline boring) fights for 3 hours," Coincident continued in another video description. "Some consider that the only reason why no one has single-segmented Okuplok on UV yet is because no one even wants to try. I wouldn't be surprised." “It’s over!” Nonetheless, over the weekend, Coincident proved he was willing to try what he once considered an "impossible" task. His grueling, six-hour-long marathon isn't actually that fun to watch at many points. The occasional moments of intense, close-quarters combat are punctuated by long segments where Coincident circle-strafes endlessly around large hordes, waiting for enemies to hurt each other with incidental damage so he can conserve ammunition. He also kills many kited enemies one by one in corridors or through small gaps to keep things as safe as possible. Even if you're not willing to sit through six hours of that kind of meticulous gameplay, it can be thrilling to jump around the stream and revel in the portions where Coincident shows off some extremely precise, near-perfect dodging through arenas filled with projectiles and floors littered with pixelated corpses. The drama gets especially intense near the end, when Coincident's breathing becomes noticeably heavy before finishing the run with a flashy rocket to the face just as he hits the exit panel. "Yes! Fuck yes!" Coincident exclaims after the run is finally over. "Okuplok is done! Done, done, done, done, done! ... Oh my god, what a ride, this was quite the ride... It's done, I don't have to run this again! It's over!" Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 17 Comments

The newly discovered colony of Pavona coral in the Red SeaRed Sea Global Researchers have discovered a giant coral colony on the north-western coast of Saudi Arabia, in a part of the Red Sea that is being developed as a luxury tourist resort. The colony, a feature within a reef made up of one specific type of the tiny coral-building animal known as a polyp, is suspected to be of the species Pavona clavus and measures approximately 30 metres by 21 metres, making it probably the largest discovered in the Red Sea.

When the prison doors first closed behind him more than 50 years ago, Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, felt decidedly unsettled.   In his first job out of college, as a researcher for a consulting company working on a project for the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, he had been tasked with interviewing incarcerated participants in a drug rehab program. Once locked inside, he found himself alone in a room with a convicted criminal. “I didn’t know whether I should be scared,” he recalls.  Since then, he has spent countless hours in such environments in his role as a teacher of philosophy. He’s had “very, very few experiences” where he felt unsafe in prisons over the years, he says. “But that first time you go in, you do feel unsafe. I think that’s what you should feel. That teaches you something about what it feels like for anybody going into prison.” As a lecturer in MIT’s Experimental Study Group (ESG) for more than 40 years, Perlman has guided numerous MIT students through their own versions of that passage through prison doors. He first began teaching in prisons in the 1980s, when he got the idea of bringing his ESG students studying nonviolence into the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk to talk with men serving life sentences. The experience was so compelling that Perlman kept going back, and since the early 2000s he has been offering full courses behind bars.  In 2018, Perlman formalized these efforts by cofounding the Educational Justice Institute (TEJI) at MIT with Carole Cafferty, a former corrections professional. Conceived both to provide college-level education with technology access to incarcerated individuals and to foster empathy and offer a window into the criminal justice system for MIT students, TEJI creates opportunities for the two groups to learn side by side.  “There’s hard data that there’s nothing that works like education to cut recidivism, to change the atmosphere within a prison so prisons become less violent places.” Lee Perlman, PhD ’89 “We believe that there are three fundamental components of education that everybody should have, regardless of their incarceration status: emotional literacy, digital literacy, and financial literacy,” says Cafferty. TEJI offers incarcerated students classes in the humanities, computer science, and business, the credits from which can be applied toward degrees from private universities and community colleges. The emotional literacy component, featuring Perlman’s philosophy courses, is taught in an “inside-out” format, with a mixed group of incarcerated “inside” students and “outside” classmates (from MIT and other universities where TEJI courses are sometimes cross-listed).  “I’ve been really torn throughout my life,” Perlman says, “between this part of me that would like to be a monk and sit in a cave and read books all day long and come out and discuss them with other monks, and this other half of me that wants to do some good in the world, really wants to make a difference.” Behind prison walls, the concepts he relishes discussing—love, authenticity, compassion—have become his tools for doing that good. TEJI also serves as a convener of people from academia and the criminal justice system. Within MIT, it works with the Sloan School of Management, the Music and Theater Arts Section, the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center, and others on courses and special prison-related projects. And by spearheading broader initiatives like the Massachusetts Prison Education Consortium and the New England Commission on the Future of Higher Education in Prison, TEJI has helped lay the groundwork for significant shifts in how incarcerated people across the region and beyond prepare to rejoin society. “Lee and I both share the belief that education can and should be a transformative force in the lives of incarcerated people,” Cafferty says. “But we also recognize that the current system doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for that.” Through TEJI, they’re working to create more. Perlman didn’t set out to reform prison education. “There’s never been any plan,” he says. “Before I was an academic I was a political organizer, so I have that political organizer brain. I just look for … where’s the opening you can run through?” Before earning his PhD in political philosophy, Perlman spent eight years making his mark on Maryland’s political scene. At age 28, he came up short by a few hundred votes in a primary for the state senate. In the late 1970s, Perlman says, he was named one of 10 rising stars in Maryland politics by the Baltimore Sun and one of the state’s most feared lobbyists by Baltimore Magazine because he got lawmakers to “do things they’d be perfectly willing to leave alone,” as he puts it, like pass election reform bills. The legislators gave him the nickname Wolfman, “probably just because I had a beard,” he says, “but it kind of grew to mean other things.” Perlman still has the beard. Working in tandem with Cafferty and others, he’s also retained his knack for nudging change forward. Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, and Philip Hutchful, an incarcerated student, take part in the semester’s final meeting of Perlman’s “inside-out” class Nonviolence as a Way of Life at the Boston Pre-Release Center.JAY DIAS/MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION Cafferty understands, better than most, how difficult that can be in the prison system. She held numerous roles in her 25-year corrections career, ultimately serving as superintendent of the Middlesex Jail and House of Correction, where she oversaw the introduction of the first tablet-based prison literacy program in New England.  “I used to say someday when I write a book, it’s going to be called Swimming Against the Tide,” she says. In a correctional environment, “safety and security come first, always,” she explains. “Programming and education are much further down the list of priorities.” TEJI’s work pushes against a current in public opinion that takes a punitive rather than rehabilitative view of incarceration. Some skeptics see educating people in prison as rewarding bad deeds. “Out in the world I’ve had people say to me, ‘Maybe I should commit a crime so I can get a free college education,’” says Perlman. “My general response is, well, you really have one choice here: Do you want more crime or less crime? There’s hard data that there’s nothing that works like education to cut recidivism, to change the atmosphere within a prison so prisons become less violent places. Also, do you want to spend more or do you want to spend less money on this problem? For every dollar we spend on prison education and similar programs, we save five dollars.” The research to which Perlman refers includes a 2018 RAND study, which found that participants in correctional education programs in the US were 28% less likely to reoffend than their counterparts who did not participate. It’s a powerful number, considering that roughly 500,000 people are released from custody each year. Perlman has such statistics at the ready, as he must. But talk to him for any amount of time and the humanity behind the numbers is what stands out.  “There is a sizable group of people in prison who, if society was doing a better job, would have different lives,” he says, noting that “they’re smart enough and they have character enough” to pull it off: “We can make things happen in prison that will put them on a different path.”  “Most of the people I teach behind bars are people that have had terrible experiences with education and don’t feel themselves to be very capable at all,” he says. So he sometimes opens his class by saying: “Something you probably wouldn’t guess about me is that I failed the 11th grade twice and dropped out of high school. And now I have a PhD from MIT and I’ve been teaching at MIT for 40 years. So you never know where life’s gonna lead you.”  Though Perlman struggled to find his motivation in high school, he “buckled down and learned how much I loved learning,” as he puts it, when his parents sent him to boarding school to finish his diploma. He went on to graduate from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Growing up in Michigan in the 1960s, he’d learned about fair housing issues because his mother was involved with the civil rights movement, and he lived for a time with a Black family that ran a halfway house for teenage girls. By the time he took that first job interviewing incarcerated former drug addicts, he was primed to understand their stories within the context of poverty, discrimination, and other systemic factors. He began volunteering for a group helping people reenter society after incarceration, and as part of his training, he spent a night booked into jail.  “I didn’t experience any ill treatment,” he says, “but I did experience the complete powerlessness you have when you’re a prisoner.” Jocelyn Zhu ’25 took a class with Perlman in the fall of 2023 at the Suffolk County House of Correction, and entering the facility gave her a similar sense of powerlessness.  “We had to put our phones away, and whatever we were told to do we would have to do, and that’s not really an experience that you’re in very often as a student at MIT,” says Zhu. “There was definitely that element of surrender: ‘I’m not in charge of my environment.’” On the flip side, she says, “because you’re in that environment, the only thing you’re doing while you’re there is learning—and really focusing in on the discussion you’re having with other students.” “I call them the ‘philosophical life skills’ classes,” says Perlman, “because there are things in our lives that everybody should sit down and think through as well as they can at some point.” He says that while those classes work fine with just MIT students, being able to go into a prison and talk through the same issues with people who have had very different life experiences adds a richness to the discussion that would be hard to replicate in a typical classroom.  He recalls the first time he broached the topic of forgiveness in a prison setting. Someone serving a life sentence for murder put things in a way Perlman had never considered. He remembers the man saying: “What I did was unforgivable. If somebody said ‘I forgive you for taking my child’s life,’ I wouldn’t even understand what that meant. For me, forgiveness means trying, at least … to regard me as somebody who’s capable of change … giving me the space to show you that I’m not the person who did that anymore.’”  Perlman went home and revised his lecture notes. “I completely reformulated my conception of forgiveness based on that,” he says. “And I tell that story every time I teach the class.” The meeting room at the minimum-­security Boston Pre-Release Center is simply furnished: clusters of wooden tables and chairs, a whiteboard, some vending machines. December’s bare branches are visible through a row of windows that remain closed even on the warmest of days (“Out of Bounds,” warns a sign taped beside them). This afternoon, the room is hosting one of Perlman’s signature classes, Nonviolence as a Way of Life. To close the fall 2024 semester, he has asked his students to creatively recap four months of Thursdays together.  Before long, the students are enmeshed in a good-natured showdown, calling out letters to fill in the blanks in a mystery phrase unfolding on the whiteboard. Someone solves it (“An eye for an eye makes the world go blind”) and scores bonus points for identifying its corresponding unit on the syllabus (Restorative Justice).  “It’s still anybody’s game!” announces the presenting student, Jay Ferran, earning guffaws with his spot-on TV host impression. Ferran and the other men in the room wearing jeans are residents of the Pre-Release Center. They have shared this class all semester with undergrad and grad students from MIT and Harvard (who are prohibited from wearing jeans by the visitor dress code). Before they all part ways, they circle up their chairs one last time. “Humor can be a defense mechanism, but it never felt that way in here,” says Isabel Burney, a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “I really had a good time laughing with you guys.” “I appreciate everyone’s vulnerability,” says Jack Horgen ’26. “I think that takes a lot of grace, strength, and honesty.” “I’d like to thank the outside students for coming in and sharing as well,” says Ferran. “It gives a bit of freedom to interact with students who come from the outside. We want to get on the same level. You give us hope.” After the room has emptied out, Ferran reflects further on finding himself a college student at this stage in his life. Now in his late 40s, he dropped out of high school when he became a father. “I always knew I was smart and had the potential, but I was a follower,” he says.  As Ferran approaches the end of his sentence, he’s hoping to leverage the college credits he’s earned so far into an occupation in counseling and social work. His classmate Philip Hutchful, 35, is aiming for a career in construction management.  Access to education in prison “gives people a second chance at life,” Hutchful says. “It keeps your mind busy, rewires your brain.” JAY DIAS/MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION JAY DIAS/MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION JAY DIAS/MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION MIT undergrads Denisse Romero Cruz ’25, Jack Horgen ’26, and Alor Sahoo ’26 at the final session of Perlman’s Nonviolence as a Way of Life class at the Boston Pre-Release Center. Along with about 45% of the Boston Pre-Release Center’s residents, Ferran and Hutchful are enrolled in the facility’s School of Reentry, which partners with MIT and other local colleges and universities to provide educational opportunities during the final 12 to 18 months of a sentence.  “We have seen a number of culture shifts for our students and their families, such as accountability, flexible thinking, and curiosity,” says the program’s executive director, Lisa Millwood. There are “students who worked hard just so they can proudly be there to support their grandchildren, or students who have made pacts with their teenage children who are struggling in school to stick with it together.” Ferran and Hutchful had previously taken college-level classes through the School of Reentry, but the prospect of studying alongside MIT and Harvard students raised new qualms.  “These kids are super smart—how can I compete with them? I’m going to feel so stupid,” Ferran remembers thinking. “In fact, it wasn’t like that at all.” “We all had our own different types of knowledge,” says Hutchful. Both Ferran and Hutchful say they’ve learned skills that they’ll put to use in their post-release lives, from recognizing manipulation to fostering nonviolent communication. Hutchful especially appreciates the principle that “you need to attack the problem, not the person,” saying, “This class teaches you how to deal with all aspects of people—angry people, impatient people. You’re not being triggered to react.”  Perlman has taught Nonviolence as a Way of Life nearly every semester since TEJI launched. Samuel Tukua ’25 took the class a few years ago. Like Hutchful, he has applied its lessons.  “I wouldn’t be TAing it for the third year now if it didn’t have this incredible impact on my life,” Tukua says.  Meeting incarcerated people did not in itself shift Tukua’s outlook; their stories didn’t surprise him, given his own upbringing in a low-income neighborhood near Atlanta. But watching learners from a range of backgrounds find common ground in big philosophical ideas helped convince him of those ideas’ validity. For example, he started to notice undercurrents of violence in everyday actions and speech.  “It doesn’t matter whether you came from a highly violent background or if you came from a privileged, less violent background,” he says he realized. “That kind of inner violence or that kind of learned treatment exists inside all of us.”  Marisa Gaetz ’20, a fifth-year PhD candidate in math at MIT, has stayed in TEJI’s orbit in the seven years since its founding—first as a student, then as a teaching assistant, and now by helping to run its computer science classes.  Limitations on in-person programming imposed by the covid-19 pandemic led Gaetz and fellow MIT grad student Martin Nisser, SM ’19, PhD ’24, to develop remote computer education classes for incarcerated TEJI students. In 2021, she and Nisser (now an assistant professor at the University of Washington) joined with Emily Harburg, a tech access advocate, to launch Brave Behind Bars, which partners closely with TEJI to teach Intro to Python, web development, and game design in both English and Spanish to incarcerated people across the US and formerly incarcerated students in Colombia and Mexico.  Since many inside students have laptop access only during class time, the remote computer courses typically begin with a 30-minute lecture followed by Zoom breakouts with teaching assistants. A ratio of one TA for every three or four students ensures that “each student feels supported, especially with coding, which can be frustrating if you’re left alone with a bug for too long,” Gaetz says.  Gaetz doesn’t always get to hear how things work out for her students,but she’s learned of encouraging outcomes. One Brave Behind Bars TA who got his start in their classes is now a software engineer. Another group of alums founded Reentry Sisters, an organization for formerly incarcerated women. “They made their own website using the skills that they learned in our class,” Gaetz says. “That was really amazing to see.” Although the pandemic spurred some prisons to expand use of technology, applying those tools to education in a coordinated way requires the kind of bridge-building TEJI has become known for since forming the Massachusetts Prison Education Consortium (MPEC) in 2018. “I saw there were a bunch of colleges doing various things in prisons and we weren’t really talking to each other,” says Perlman. TEJI secured funding from the Mellon Foundation and quickly expanded MPEC’s membership to more than 80 educational institutions, corrections organizations, and community-based agencies. Millwood says the School of Reentry has doubled its capacity and program offerings thanks to collaborations developed through MPEC. At the regional level, TEJI teamed up with the New England Board of Higher Education in 2022 to create the New England Commission on the Future of Higher Education in Prison. Its formation was prompted in part by the anticipated increase in demand for high-quality prison education programs thanks to the FAFSA Simplification Act, which as of 2023 reversed a nearly three-decade ban on awarding federal Pell grants to incarcerated people. Participants included leaders from academia and correctional departments as well as formerly incarcerated people. One, Daniel Throop, cochaired a working group called “Career, Workforce, and Employer Connections” just a few months after his release.  “I lived out a reentry while I was on the commission in a way that was very, very powerful,” Throop says. “I was still processing in real time.”  “Most of the people I teach behind bars are people that have had terrible experiences with education and don’t feel themselves to be very capable at all.” Lee Perlman, PhD ’89 During his incarceration in Massachusetts, Throop had revived the long-defunct Norfolk Prison Debating Society, which went head-to-head with university teams including MIT’s. Credits from his classes, including two with Perlman, culminated in a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies magna cum laude from Boston University, which he earned before his release. But he still faced big challenges. “Having a criminal record is still a very, very real hurdle,” Throop says. “I was so excited when those doors of prison finally opened after two decades, only to be greatly discouraged that so many doors of the community remained closed to me.”  Initially, the only employment he could get was loading UPS trucks by day and unloading FedEx trucks by night. He eventually landed a job with the Massachusetts Bail Fund and realized his goal of launching the National Prison Debate League.  “I fortunately had the educational credentials and references and the wherewithal to not give up on myself,” says Throop. “A lot of folks fail with less resources and privilege and ability and support.” The commission’s 2023 report advocates for improved programming and support for incarcerated learners spanning the intake, incarceration, and reentry periods. To help each state implement the recommendations, the New England Prison Education Collaborative (NEPEC) launched in October 2024 with funding from the Ascendium Education Group. Perlman encouraged TEJI alumna Nicole O’Neal, then working at Tufts University, to apply for the position she now holds as a NEPEC project manager.  Like Throop, O’Neal has firsthand experience with the challenges of reentry. Despite the stigma of having served time, having a transcript with credits earned during the period she was incarcerated “proved valuable for both job applications and securing housing,” she says. With the help of a nonprofit called Partakers and “a lot of personal initiative,” she navigated the confusing path to matriculation on Boston University’s campus, taking out student loans so she could finish the bachelor’s degree she’d begun in prison. A master’s followed. “I’ve always known that education was going to be my way out of poverty,” she says. From her vantage point at NEPEC, O’Neal sees how TEJI’s approach can inspire other programs. “What truly sets TEJI apart is the way that it centers students as a whole, as people and not just as learners,” she says. “Having the opportunity to take an MIT course during my incarceration wasn’t just about earning credits—it was about being seen as capable of engaging with the same level of intellectual rigor as students outside. That recognition changed how I saw myself and my future.” On a Zoom call one Wednesday evening in December, Perlman’s inside-out course on Stoicism is wrapping up. Most participants are women incarcerated in Maine. These are among Perlman’s most advanced and long-standing students, thanks to the state’s flexible approach to prison education—Perlman says it’s “maybe the most progressive system in the country,” early to adopt remote learning, experiment with mixed-gender classes, and allow email communication between teachers and students.  The mood is convivial, the banter peppered with quotes from the likes of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. More than one student is crocheting a Christmas gift, hands working busily at the edges of their respective Zoom rectangles.  As the students review what they’ve learned, the conversation turns to the stereotype of Stoicism as a lack of emotion. “I get the feeling the Stoics understood their emotions better than most because they weren’t puppets to their emotions,” says a student named Nicole. “They still feel things—they’re just not governed by it.” Jay Ferran, an incarcerated student at the Boston Pre-Release Center, presents a game to help recap what the class learned over the semester.JAY DIAS/MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION Jade, who is a year into a 16-month sentence, connects this to her relationship with her 14-month-old son: “I think I would be a bad Stoic in how I love him. That totally governs me.” Perlman, a bit mischievously: “Does anyone want to talk Jade into being a Stoic mother?”  Another classmate, Victoria, quips: “I think you’d like it better when he’s a teenager.” When the laughter dies down, she says more seriously, “I think it’s more about not allowing your emotions to carry you away.” But she adds that it’s hard to do that as a parent.   “Excessive worry is also a hindrance,” Jade concedes. “So how do I become a middle Stoic?” “A middle Stoic would be an Aristotelian, I think,” muses Perlman. When the conversation comes around to amor fati, the Stoic notion of accepting one’s fate, Perlman asks how successful his students have been at this. The group’s sole participant from a men’s facility, Arthur, confesses that he has struggled with this over more than 20 years in prison. But for the last few years, school has brought him new focus. He helps run a space where other residents can study. “I hear you saying you can only love your fate if you have a telos, a purpose,” Perlman says. “I was always teaching people things to survive or get ahead by any means necessary,” Arthur says. “Now it’s positive building blocks.” “Education is my telos, and when I couldn’t access it at first, I had to focus on what was in my control,” says Victoria. “I framed my prison experiences as refusing to be harmed by the harmful process of incarceration. I’m going to use this opportunity for myself … so I can be who I want to be when I leave here.”  Soon after, the video call—and the course—ends. But if Perlman’s former students’ experience is any indication, the ideas their teacher has introduced will continue to percolate. O’Neal, who took Perlman’s Philosophy of Love, is still mulling over an exploration of loyalty in Tristan and Isolde that brought a classmate to tears. She thinks Perlman’s ability to nurture dialogue on sensitive topics begins with his relaxed demeanor—a remarkable quality in the prison environment. “It’s like you’re coming to our house. A lot of [people] show up as guests. Lee shows up like someone who’s been around—you know, and he’s willing to clean up the dishes with you. He just feels at home,” she says. “So he made us feel at home.”  Throop becomes animated when he describes taking Philosophy of the Self and Soul with Perlman and MIT students at MCI-Norfolk in 2016.  “Over those days and weeks, we got to meet and discuss the subject ­matter—walking around the prison yards together, my classmates and I, and then coming back and having these almost indescribable—I’m rarely at a loss for words!—weekly class discussions,” Throop remembers. Perlman “would throw one big question out there, and he would sit back and patiently let us all chop that material up,” he adds. “These discussions were like the highlight of all of our weeks, because we got to have this super-cool exchange of ideas, testing our perspectives … And then these 18-to-20-year-old students who were coming in with a whole different worldview, and being able to have those worldviews collide in a healthy way.”   “We all were having such enriching discussions that the semester flew by,” he says. “You didn’t want school to end.” 

It all began with a simple origami model.  As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor’s office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity about how the structure of molecules influences their function.  She stayed and chatted with the professor after the other students left, and he persuaded her to drop his class so she could instead dive immediately into the study of chemistry at a higher level. Soon she was hooked. After graduating with a chemistry degree, Freedman earned a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, did a postdoc at MIT, and joined the faculty at Northwestern University. In 2021, she returned to MIT as the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry. Freedman’s fascination with the relationship between form and function at the molecular level laid the groundwork for a trailblazing career in quantum information science, eventually leading her to be honored with a 2022 MacArthur fellowship—and the accompanying “genius” grant—as one of the leading figures in the field. Today, her eyes light up when she talks about the “beauty” of chemistry, which is how she sees the intricate dance of atoms that dictates a molecule’s behavior. At MIT, Freedman focuses on creating novel molecules with specific properties that could revolutionize the technology of sensing, leading to unprecedented levels of precision.  Designer molecules Early in her graduate studies, Freedman noticed that many chemistry research papers claimed to contribute to the development of quantum computing, which exploits the behavior of matter at extremely small scales to deliver much more computational power than a conventional computer can achieve. While the ambition was clear, Freedman wasn’t convinced. When she read these papers carefully, she found that her skepticism was warranted. “I realized that nobody was trying to design magnetic molecules for the actual goal of quantum computing!” she says. Such molecules would be suited to acting as quantum bits, or qubits, the basic unit of information in quantum systems. But the research she was reading about had little to do with that.  Nevertheless, that realization got Freedman thinking—could molecules be designed to serve as qubits? She decided to find out. Her work made her among the first to use chemistry in a way that demonstrably advanced the field of quantum information science, which she describes as a general term encompassing the use of quantum technology for computation, sensing, measurement, and communication.  Unlike traditional bits, which can only equal 0 or 1, qubits are capable of “superposition”—simultaneously existing in multiple states. This is why quantum computers made from qubits can solve large problems faster than classical computers. Freedman, however, has always been far more interested in tapping into qubits’ potential to serve as exquisitely precise sensors. Qubits store information in quantum properties that can be easily disrupted. While the delicacy of those properties makes qubits hard to control, it also makes them especially sensitive and therefore very useful as sensors. Qubits encode information in quantum properties—such as spin and energy—that can be easily disrupted. While the delicacy of those properties makes qubits hard to control, it also makes them especially sensitive and therefore very useful as sensors. Harnessing the power of qubits is notoriously tricky, though. For example, two of the most common types—superconducting qubits, which are often made of thin aluminum layers, and trapped-ion qubits, which use the energy levels of an ion’s electrons to represent 1s and 0s—must be kept at temperatures approaching absolute zero (–273 °C). Maintaining special refrigerators to keep them cool can be costly and difficult. And while researchers have made significant progress recently, both types of qubits have historically been difficult to connect into larger systems. Eager to explore the potential of molecular qubits, Freedman has pioneered a unique “bottom-up” approach to creating them: She designs novel molecules with specific quantum properties to serve as qubits targeted for individual applications. Instead of focusing on a general goal such as maximizing coherence time (how long a qubit can preserve its quantum state), she begins by asking what kinds of properties are needed for, say, a sensor meant to measure biological phenomena at the molecular level. Then she and her team set out to create molecules that have these properties and are suitable for the environment where they’d be used. To determine the precise structure of a new molecule, Freedman’s team uses software to analyze and process visualizations (such as those in teal and pink above) of data collected by an x-ray diffractometer. The diagram at right depicts an organometallic Cr(IV) complex made of a central chromium atom and four hydrocarbon ligands.COURTESY OF DANNA FREEDMAN Made of a central metallic atom surrounded by hydrocarbon atoms, molecular qubits store information in their spin. The encoded information is later translated into photons, which are emitted to “read out” the information. These qubits can be tuned with laser precision—imagine adjusting a radio dial—by modifying the strength of the ligands, or bonds, connecting the hydrocarbons to the metal atom. These bonds act like tiny tuning forks; by adjusting their strength, the researchers can precisely control the qubit’s spin and the wavelength of the emitted photons. That emitted light can be used to provide information about atomic-level changes in electrical or magnetic fields.  While many researchers are eager to build reliable, scalable quantum computers, Freedman and her group devote most of their attention to developing custom molecules for quantum sensors. These ultrasensitive sensors contain particles in a state so delicately balanced that extremely small changes in their environments unbalance them, causing them to emit light differently. For example, one qubit designed in Freedman’s lab, made of a chromium atom surrounded by four hydrocarbon molecules, can be customized so that tiny changes in the strength of a nearby magnetic field will change its light emissions in a particular way.   A key benefit of using such molecules for sensing is that they are small enough—just a nanometer or so wide—to get extremely close to the thing they are sensing. That can offer an unprecedented level of precision when measuring something like the surface magnetism of two-­dimensional materials, since the strength of a magnetic field decays with distance. A molecular quantum sensor “might not be more inherently accurate than a competing quantum sensor,” says Freedman, “but if you can lose an order of magnitude of distance, that can give us a lot of information.” Quantum sensors’ ability to detect electric or magnetic changes at the atomic level and make extraordinarily precise measurements could be useful in many fields, such as environmental monitoring, medical diagnostics, geolocation, and more. When designing molecules to serve as quantum sensors, Freedman’s group also factors in the way they can be expected to act in a specific sensing environment. Creating a sensor for water, for example, requires a water-compatible molecule, and a sensor for use at very low temperatures requires molecules that are optimized to perform well in the cold. By custom-­engineering molecules for different uses, the Freedman lab aims to make quantum technology more versatile and widely adaptable. Embracing interdisciplinarity As Freedman and her group focus on the highly specific work of designing custom molecules, she is keenly aware that tapping into the power of quantum science depends on the collective efforts of scientists from different fields. “Quantum is a broad and heterogeneous field,” she says. She believes that attempts to define it narrowly hurt collective research—and that scientists must welcome collaboration when the research leads them beyond their own field. Even in the seemingly straightforward scenario of using a quantum computer to solve a chemistry problem, you would need a physicist to write a quantum algorithm, engineers and materials scientists to build the computer, and chemists to define the problem and identify how the quantum computer might solve it.  MIT’s collaborative environment has helped Freedman connect with researchers in different disciplines, which she says has been instrumental in advancing her research. She’s recently spoken with neurobiologists who proposed problems that quantum sensing could potentially solve and provided helpful context for building the sensors. Looking ahead, she’s excited about the potential applications of quantum science in many scientific fields. “MIT is such a great place to nucleate a lot of these connections,” she says. “As quantum expands, there are so many of these threads which are inherently interdisciplinary,” she says. Inside the lab Freedman’s lab in Building 6 is a beehive of creativity and collaboration. Against a backdrop of colorful flasks and beakers, researchers work together to synthesize molecules, analyze their structures, and unlock the secrets hidden within their intricate atomic arrangements. “We are making new molecules and putting them together atom by atom to discover whether they have the properties we want,” says Christian Oswood, a postdoctoral fellow.  Some sensitive molecules can only be made in the lab’s glove box, a nitrogen-filled transparent container that protects chemicals from oxygen and water in the ambient air. An example is an organometallic solution synthesized by one of Freedman’s graduate students, David Ullery, which takes the form of a vial of purple liquid. (“A lot of molecules have really pretty colors,” he says.) Freedman is a passionate educator, dedicated to demystifying the complexities of chemistry for her students. Aware that many of them find the subject daunting, she strives to go beyond textbook equations. Once synthesized, the molecules are taken to a single-crystal x-ray diffractometer a few floors below the Freedman lab. There, x-rays are directed at crystallized samples, and from the diffraction pattern, researchers can deduce their molecular structure—how the atoms connect. Studying the precise geometry of these synthesized molecules reveals how the structure affects their quantum properties, Oswood explains. Researchers and students at the lab say Freedman’s cross-disciplinary outlook played a big role in drawing them to it. With a chemistry background and a special interest in physics, for example, Ullery joined because he was excited by the way Freedman’s research bridges those two fields.  Crystals of an organometallic Cr(IV) complex. Freedman’s lab designed a series of molecules like this one to detect changes in a magnetic field.COURTESY OF DANNA FREEDMAN Others echo this sentiment. “The opportunity to be in a field that’s both new and expanding like quantum science, and attacking it from this specific angle, was exciting to me both intellectually and professionally,” says Oswood. Another graduate student, Cindy Serena Ngompe Massado, says she enjoys being part of the lab because she gets to collaborate with scientists in other fields. “It allows you to really approach scientific challenges in a more holistic and productive way,” she says. Though the researchers spend most of their time synthesizing and analyzing molecules, fun infuses the lab too. Freedman checks in with everyone frequently, and conversations often drift beyond just science. She’s just as comfortable chatting about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce as she is discussing research. “Danna is very personable and very herself with us,” Ullery says. “It adds a bit of levity to being in an otherwise stressful grad school environment.” Bringing textbook chemistry to life In the classroom, Freedman is a passionate educator, dedicated to demystifying the complexities of chemistry for her students. Aware that many of them find the subject daunting, she strives to go beyond textbook equations. For each lecture in her advanced inorganic chemistry classes, she introduces the “molecule of the day,” which is always connected to the lesson plan. When teaching about bimetallic molecules, for example, she showcased the potassium rubidium molecule, citing active research at Harvard aimed at entangling its nuclear spins. For a lecture on superconductors, she brought a sample of the superconducting material yttrium barium copper oxide that students could handle.  Chemistry students often think “This is painful” or “Why are we learning this?” Freedman says. Making the subject matter more tangible and showing its connection to ongoing research spark students’ interest and underscore the material’s relevance. Freedman sees frustrating research as an opportunity to discover new things. “I like students to work on at least one ‘safer’ project along with something more ambitious,” she says.M. SCOTT BRAUER/MIT NEWS OFFICE Freedman believes this is an exceptionally exciting time for budding chemists. She emphasizes the importance of curiosity and encourages them to ask questions. “There is a joy to being able to walk into any room and ask any question and extract all the knowledge that you can,” she says.  In her own research, she embodies this passion for the pursuit of knowledge, framing challenges as stepping stones to discovery. When she was a postdoc, her research on electron spins in synthetic materials hit what seemed to be a dead end that ultimately led to the discovery of a new class of magnetic material. So she tells her students that even the most difficult aspects of research are rewarding because they often lead to interesting findings.  That’s exactly what happened to Ullery. When he designed a molecule meant to be stable in air and water and emit light, he was surprised that it didn’t—and that threw a wrench into his plan to develop the molecule into a sensor that would emit light only under particular circumstances. So he worked with theoreticians in Giulia Galli’s group at the University of Chicago, developing new insights on what drives emission, and that led to the design of a new molecule that did emit light.  “Frustrating research is almost fun to deal with,” says Freedman, “even if it doesn’t always feel that way.” 

The cast of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" season two. Hulu Updated 2025-04-23T00:00:49Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Hulu's "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" follows a group of Mormon mothers and TikTok creators. When season two premieres May 15, a new MomTok member joins the group. Here's everything we know about season two, from the trailer to the cast and plot. "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" is officially one of Hulu's biggest reality hits — and it will soon be back for more episodes.The reality series follows a group of eight Mormon mothers and content creators who are part of a TikTok collective known as "MomTok." In May 2022, one of the moms, Taylor Frankie Paul, said on TikTok that she and her husband, Tate Paul, were divorcing after she slept with another person in their "soft swinging" circle without her husband's knowledge.The controversy thrust MomTok into the spotlight — and eventually, it led to a television series.The series also stars fellow MomTok members Whitney Leavitt, Layla Taylor, Demi Engemann, Jessi Ngatikaura, Jen Affleck, Mikayla Matthews, and Mayci Neeley. According to Hulu, the show was the streamer's most-watched unscripted series of 2024.The drama is set to continue on Hulu in season two, which premieres on May 15 with 10 episodes. Here's what we know.'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' season 2 cast includes one new member The cast of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives." Disney/Ashley Rose Ramirez All eight of the season one moms are confirmed to return. That's Taylor Frankie Paul, Mayci Neeley, Whitney Leavitt, Layla Taylor, Demi Engemann, Jessi Ngatikaura, Jen Affleck, and Mikayla Matthews. There's also one new member of the cast, Miranda McWhorter, who's introduced in the trailer as Taylor's former best friend who was involved in the swinging scandal. In the clip, she promises to "set the record straight" on what really happened between them.While the end of season one made both Whitney and Jen's futures on the show unclear — Whitney was seemingly on the outs after she left the MomTok group chat, and Jen ended the season planning to move to New York with her husband Zac — it appears that both will be back as full-time cast members.Whitney's plot line this season could focus on making her way back into the fold and reconciling with the group. "Whitney wants back in MomTok," Jessi says in the trailer.Meanwhile, Jen and Zac's relationship has taken many turns since the end of season one. Both are seen in the trailer fighting about their relationship, and both appear to be back in Utah — not New York. On social media, Jen has been open about their struggles. She and Zac also announced in February that she's pregnant with their third child, so chances are we'll see what led the couple there this season.The season 2 trailer for 'The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' teases more male strippers and baby daddy dramaDuring the show's first season, Taylor and her boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen, prepared to welcome their first child, Ever True, while also working on their relationship. In episode six, Mayci shared that she received an anonymous tip on Instagram from a woman who said that she and Dakota had slept together while he and Taylor were in a relationship, which she wasn't aware of. The revelation ended on a cliffhanger in season one, but the season two trailer suggests that Taylor and Dakota's relationship is still rocky. "Things are just getting worse," Taylor says in the trailer when asked about Dakota. "I do worry about Dakota's sobriety." The male strippers that nearly ruined Jen and Zac's relationship in Las Vegas may be returning for season two — or, at least, somebody dressed as a stripper at a Halloween party where Jen is seen grimacing during a lap dance.Still, as Demi says in an interview, "The show must go on." We'll see exactly what unfolds when season two of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" premieres May 15 on Hulu. Recommended video

Nanoplastic particles from carotid-artery plaque, with a measurement key at the bottom in nanometers. University of New Mexico 2025-04-22T23:06:55Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Microplastics and nanoplastics might interact with the plaque that causes heart attacks and strokes. A new study found high levels of plastic in the arterial plaque of stroke and vision-loss patients. Cells in plastic-filled plaque also showed signs of altered gene activity, but it's unclear why. Tiny, microscopic bits of plastic have been found almost everywhere researchers look — including throughout the human body.Microplastics and their even tinier cousins, nanoplastics, are probably flowing through your blood and building up in your organs like the lungs and liver.Now, a new study is connecting the dots on microplastics' mysterious correlation with heart attack and stroke risk."There is some microplastics in normal, healthy arteries," Dr. Ross Clark, a University of New Mexico medical researcher who led the study, told Business Insider before he presented his findings at the meeting of the American Heart Association in Baltimore on Tuesday. "But the amount that's there when they become diseased — and become diseased with symptoms — is really, really different," Clark said.Clark and his team measured microplastics and nanoplastics in the dangerous, fatty plaque that can build up in arteries, block blood flow, and cause strokes or heart attacks.Compared to the walls of healthy plaque-free arteries, plaque buildup had 16 times more plastic — just in the people who didn't have symptoms. In people who had experienced stroke, mini-stroke, or vision loss, the plaque had 51 times more plastic."Wow and not good," Jaime Ross, a neuroscientist at the University of Rhode Island who was not involved in the study but has studied microplastics in mice, told BI after reading the results."It's very shocking to see 51 times higher," she said, adding that in her research, a signal that's just three times stronger is "very robust and striking."What exactly the plastics are doing in there, if anything, remains a mystery. The new study offers some possible clues, though.This research has not yet undergone the scrutiny of peer review, but Clark said he plans to submit it for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal later this year, after replicating some of their results. Genetic activity looked different with plasticClark is a vascular surgeon, not a microplastics specialist. However, he got the idea for this study by talking with his colleague Matthew Campen, who recently discovered that human brains contain a spoon's worth of plastic. Microplastics get way smaller than this. Getty Images "We realized together that there really wasn't a lot of data on nanoplastics and microplastics in the vascular system, within blood vessels," Clark said.Previous research had found that people with microplastics in their arterial plaque were more likely to have a heart attack or stroke or die.To investigate why, Clark studied samples from 48 people's carotid arteries — the pair of superhighways in your neck that channel blood to your brain.The difference in plastic quantities surprised him, but his team found another concerning trend, too. Cells in the plaque with lots of plastic showed different gene activity than those with low plastic.In the high-plastic environment, one group of immune cells had switched off a gene that's associated with turning off inflammation. Clark's team also found genetic differences in a group of stem cells thought to help prevent heart attacks and strokes by reducing inflammation and stabilizing plaque."Could it be that microplastics are somehow altering their gene expression?" Clark said.He added that there's "lots more research needed to fully establish that, but at least it gives us a hint as to where to look."Ross, who specializes in the genetic mechanisms behind disease, agreed that more research is needed, but added that she thinks "these plastics are doing something with these plaques."'We just don't know'Tracking microplastics in the human body is a new scientific endeavor as of the last couple years. It's not perfect.Clark's team heated the plaque samples to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit to vaporize plastic polymers and break them down into smaller organic molecules, which can be identified and measured by their mass and other properties.Unfortunately, the lipids in plaque can break down into chemicals that look very similar to polyethylene, the most common plastic found in everything from plastic bags to car parts."Because we know about this problem, we've taken a lot of steps to remove those lipids and confirm their removal, so that we're sure we're measuring polyethylene," Clark said.Still, he added, "it's a big limitation, and it should be acknowledged that these types of methodologies are continuously improving."Clark is trying to get funding to further study interactions between microplastics and immune cells in the walls of blood vessels. He hopes to expand this research beyond the carotid artery and also run some animal experiments to test for cause and effect."We just don't know," Clark said. "Almost all of what we know about microplastics in the human body, no matter where you look, can be summed up as: It's there, and we need to study further as to what it's doing, if anything." Recommended video

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered – everyone seems impressed (Bethesda) The Wednesday letters page thinks it understands Sony’s plans for the PS6 portable, as a reader celebrates pre-ordering a Nintendo Switch 2. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk Honest hype Nice to see some hype that was actually worth it, with the Oblivion remaster looking really nice. I appreciated that they made lots of changes to the gameplay and UI and other aspects to modernise it too. It reminds me of Metroid Prime, in that while they’re both technically remasters this looks more significant than some remakes.The price is good too and as of right now I’ve bought it on PlayStation 5 and I’m downloading it now. Bethesda always seem a bit too full of themselves, which I think leads to some of their biggest mistakes, but at the end of the day they do make some great games. I’m not quite sure what went wrong with Starfield, but I know Oblivion is good and I can’t wait to start playing what, in terms of the number of hours it’ll suck me in, looks to be the bargain of the year.Purple Ranger Face to face I’ve got to hand it to Bethesda, the Oblivion remaster looks really good. A major upgrade in graphics and I really like the way they’ve improved the combat with special effects and new sound. The landscapes look really good and it’s not actually too expensive, given it’s a nearly 20 year old game.The only problem, and I can’t believe they drew attention to it, is that the faces are still terrible. What is it with Bethesda and facial animation? Why do all their characters look like Mr Potato Head after too much cosmetic surgery? There was some improvement in Starfield, but it was still well behind the curve and while I guess this is bad because it’s a remaster and not a remake, it’s still laughable. It makes it seem like everyone at Bethesda is an alien that’s never seen a real human being before.Bosley Random remaster I have to admit the Oblivion remaster looks really nice and I will probably end up getting it. I don’t really see why it’s Oblivion they’ve picked on though. Everyone jokes about how many times Skyrim has been re-released, but it’s never had a remaster like this. Why not start with it or with Morrowind, which is in desperate need of a full remake.Starting in the middle with Oblivion seems a bit random to me. I’ll be honest and admit I don’t really remember the game all that well, just that I liked it and the celebrity voiceovers were good, so it’s definitely worth a revisit. I just hope it’s not a one-off, as the other two games definitely need the attention. Heck, why not do Daggerfall as well, I’ve never even played that one.Glottis Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk Three not of a kind I feel the logic behind the PlayStation 6 portable is beginning to make sense. The initial rumours said that Sony was inspired by the unexpected success of the PlayStation Portal, so it would track that they’d want to make a new one for the PlayStation 6 that could play its games through streaming and PlayStation 5 games natively.That actually seems really appealing to me, although I don’t know how existing Portal owners would feel, faced with having to buy another portable. It’s clearly not very much like the Switch though and I’m going to guess the Xbox handheld is going to be a much more straightforward copy of the Steam Deck. If that’s true, then we could end up with three very different portables this generation, from all three console manufacturers. That’s pretty exciting.Focus Mysteries within mysteries The Nintendo Switch 2 Direct gets more puzzling the more you think of it. What gets me is that there was no major first party game that used mouse controls and there was no equivalent of 1-2-Switch or WarioWare to show off all the new features.There sort of was, but not really. Welcome Tour was the closest to something like 1-2-Switch but somehow it seemed even worse, while you got Drag X Drive as the first party game that showed off mouse controls. But I’d hardly call it ‘big’, considering it looked like a £5 indie Steam game. There was the DLC for Super Mario Party too, but none of that really seems like the sort of centrepiece game that instantly proves what it’s all about. Mario Kart and Donkey Kong look good, but they also could’ve been on any sufficiently powerful console.Dalston Gravy train I know you don’t need me to say how weird it is to make an OutRun movie, but did no one involved think about it for more than a second? A game with no plot or characters, that hasn’t had a new sequel in nearly two decades, and they’ve got two major Hollywood stars attached.I hear that sales of A Minecraft Movie are slowing quicker than expected, so it won’t make $1 billion. Hardly a disaster but a hint that if it had actually been any good it would’ve done even better. OutRun is so old and so irrelevant nowadays it seems incredible that Michael Bay and a major actress could be talked into making a film of it. If they fall for such nonsense just imagine how easy it must be for just about any idea to get through at the moment, just as long as you can say it is, or was, a famous video game. I hope we get something fun out of this current fad though, because it’s bound not to last. I’d love an Ape Escape movie or Castlevania or Katamari Damacy or something. I don’t even really care if they’re good movies or not, I just want to see what publishers can talk Hollywood into. Of course, it would be a nice bonus if they were quality, but I’m not convinced it’s ever going to happen. When Sonic The Hedgehog 3 is the high water mark I think it’s a sign that overall potential is pretty low.Losca Transfer difficulties I have a quick question, I strangely can’t find a direct answer for online.Do I need my Switch to transfer to a Switch 2? Ideally, I would like to sell my Switch before the Switch 2 is released to maximise the price but wasn’t sure if I can transfer everything online or will need the actual, original console.John GC: We don’t think there is a definitive answer. In theory you should just be able to log in with your Nintendo account and be able to redownload any of your digital games. It’s the saves that’s the problem – some use cloud saving, if you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online, but others, like Zelda and Animal Crossing, don’t. So presumably the only option there is to manually move them from one console to another. All paid up My partner is a legend. Because I’m not able to get out at the moment, she went to my local Currys store and pre-ordered me a Nintendo Switch 2 Mario Kart World bundle and Pro Controller 2. I did have to pay up front and it cost me £505. I’ve also purchased a 256GB express microSD card from the Game Collection and I’ve got a code for the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack for £25 from CDKeys. That’s already £580 spent!Having been used to purchasing games digitally on my Xbox Series X/S consoles I will most likely continue to buy digital games on the Switch 2, although I plan to be extremely picky because of Nintendo games not dropping much in price and I’m only really interested in Nintendo exclusive games (including the games I missed on the first Switch) and indie games that skip the Xbox, like Pizza Tower. I do plan on day one to download Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and some Mario platformer games, although I can’t decide between Super Mario Odyssey, Wonder or 3D World + Bowser’s Fury. I could buy all three Mario platformers but then I might feel overwhelmed, having said that I can still see me buying Odyssey and Wonder, as they are both very different. I’m also pleasantly surprised by the file sizes of these games. Most are around 5GB to 10GB each, with the exception of Smash Bros. and Mario Kart World. It makes a nice surprise to not need in excess of 100GB+ for games. I could also do with knowing if there are any good Mario sports games on the Switch that are worth a download. Hope everyone who wants a pre-order gets one and it’s worth visiting a store to grab one.Charlie H. GC: Mario Tennis Aces, Mario Golf: Super Rush, and Mario Strikers: Battle League Football are all okay but none of them are must-haves. The golden age of Mario sports games seems to be behind us now. Inbox also-rans Just to point out but Street Fighter 6 on Switch 2 also seems to be using DLSS. I think most games will end up using it, once the devs get their heads around the new console.MatchamanI know that strategy game got announced at the convention but it’s a shame we’ve still never heard anything about the third and final Star Wars Jedi game. I know the director left, but surely EA aren’t going to leave it at that?Campbell More Trending Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk The small printNew Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content. You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot. You can also leave your comments below and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter. Arrow MORE: Games Inbox: Will GTA 6 be on Nintendo Switch 2? GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy

There are enough Elder Scrolls games to keep you busy until Elder Scrolls 6 comes out (Bethesda) With a remaster of the fourth game out this week, GameCentral looks back at the best entries in Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls series. Out of all the franchises Bethesda has under its belt, The Elder Scrolls is perhaps its most important. In its early days, the studio was primarily making sports games and movie tie-ins, with 1994’s The Elder Scrolls: Arena marking its first venture into the role-playing genre. Since then, both the series and Bethesda itself have ballooned into industry juggernauts. So much so, that there’s feverish excitement for The Elder Scrolls 6 despite there been next to no information about it. With a remaster of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion just released, let’s take a look back through the series’ history and rank its best entries. 8. An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire (1997) Originally designed as an expansion pack for The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire was ultimately sold as a separate spin-off with more of a focus on dungeon crawling. While not the worst Elder Scrolls game ever (that’d probably be mobile title The Elder Scrolls: Blades), Battlespire’s limited scope, more linear structure, and limited role-playing elements do make it a hard sell. It’s less than £5 on Steam, though, so there’s little harm in trying it. 7. The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998) For the series’ second spin-off, Bethesda opted to make a third person action adventure game; one with a named protagonist and a linear story. While that may sound like a turn-off for some fans, Redguard does have a few things going for it, although mostly in terms of atmosphere rather than gameplay. Like Battlespire, it’s incredibly cheap nowadays and potentially worth experiencing because its setting of Hammerfell is purportedly being used for The Elder Scrolls 6. 6. The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994) Unsurprisingly, the very first Elder Scrolls game hasn’t aged too gracefully, over the last 30 years, but it had to have done something right to spark numerous sequels. It was impressively dense at the time, sporting a huge open world jam-packed with quests to complete and dungeons to explore. It can be unforgiving to newbies during its early hours, but it’s still worth experiencing as a point of historical interest, if nothing else. 5. The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall (1996) While The Elder Scrolls: Arena relied on procedural generation for its cities and dungeons, the sequel offered set locations to explore, and it was all the better for it. Daggerfall was an overall improvement in every way, not forcing you to follow questlines and allowing you to simply live in the huge world Bethesda had crafted. Between its many quests to complete, guilds to join, and customisation options, it’s no wonder it was deemed one of the best role-playing games of all time when it was originally released. 4. The Elder Scrolls Online (2014) We’re honestly not too sure where to include The Elder Scrolls Online in this ranking, since as an MMO it’s always evolving and despite the same setting and similar gameplay is a very different experience to the other single-player titles. While it was deemed pretty average when it launched, subsequent expansions and updates have improved things greatly over the last decade, while adding in numerous new regions, characters, and creatures – to the point where all of the settings from the mainline games can now be found in The Elder Scrolls Online itself. When will The Elder Scrolls 6 be released? Although no formal release date has been given, the popular assumption is that The Elder Scrolls 6 will launch in 2028 at the earliest, based on comments made by Xbox boss Phil Spencer. The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced with a teaser trailer in 2018. However, Bethesda has provided very few updates on its progress since then. What we do know is that it will retain the levelling system seen in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, with Todd Howard returning to direct it. As of March 2024, playable builds of the game do exist and, this past February, Bethesda held a charity auction for fans to bid on the chance to appear in The Elder Scrolls 6 as a non-playable character. There were plans for The Elder Scrolls 6 to launch as an Xbox exclusive, according to internal Microsoft emails, but those have likely been abandoned considering Microsoft’s current multiplatform strategy. As such, you can expect The Elder Scrolls 6 to launch for Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, PC, and perhaps Nintendo Switch 2. 3. The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind (2002) Many fans would argue that The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind is the best game in the series but the problem is it’s over 20 years old now and it is showing its age. Oblivion is the one that’s just got a remaster but it’s Morrowind that desperately needs a full remake, so modern audiences can properly appreciate it. Morrowind is a considerably more complex role-playing game than Oblivion and Skyrim, with much more detailed systems than its action-orientated successors. That means it’s not nearly as accessible, and the combat is bad even by Bethesda standards, but the storytelling and sense of freedom is arguably the best the series has ever been. 2. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (2006) Before Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls was a relatively obscure franchise, that had seen little mainstream success. That all changed with the fourth mainline entry, which successfully refined everything that had come before. It streamlined the interface and role-playing elements and beefed up the combat, transforming the series into the household name it is today. More Trending It’s also fondly remembered for its full voice acting, which often borders on unintentionally hilarious, and the introduction of more advanced computer-controlled allies. The remastered version is close to a full remake, further improving the UI and graphics to modern standards. 1. The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (2011) Yes, Bethesda has re-released The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim so many times it’s become a running joke, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s one of the best Western style role-players ever made. Fans can debate over the minutiae of the story, characters, and worldbuilding, but Skyrim is mechanically superior to its predecessors, with a giant world that’s always fun to explore and packed with interesting and unexpected things to see and do. Many fans have put hundreds of hours into it and there’s still a thriving mod community creating new content. That doesn’t mean a follow-up isn’t long overdue but it’s a testament to Skyrim’s quality that it’s kept fans sated for this long. Elder Scrolls 6 has its work cut out if it wants to top Skyrim (Bethesda) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. 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