Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Probiotics are everywhere, claiming to help us poop, restore gut health, and more. They can also be used to help threatened coral reefs. A bacterial probiotic has helped slow the spread of stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) in wild corals in Florida that were already infected with the disease. The findings are detailed in a study published June 5 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science and show that applying this new probiotic treatment across coral colines helped prevent further tissue loss. What is stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD)? SCTLD first emerged in Florida in 2014. In the 11 years since, it has rapidly spread throughout the Caribbean. This mysterious ailment has been confirmed in at least 20 other countries and territories. Other coral pathogens typically target specific species. SCTLD infects more than 30 different species of stony corals, including pillar corals and brain corals. The disease causes the soft tissue in the corals to slough off, leaving behind white patches of exposed skeleton. The disease can devastate an entire coral colony in only a few weeks to months.  A great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa) colony infected with stony coral tissue lossdisease (SCTLD) on the coral reef in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The lesion, where the white band of tissue occurs, typically moves across the coral, killing coral tissue along the way. CREDIT: KellyPitts, Smithsonian. The exact cause of SCTLD is still unknown, but it appears to be linked to some kind of harmful bacteria. Currently, the most common treatment for SCTLD is using a paste that contains the antibiotic amoxicillin on diseased corals. However, antibiotics are not a silver bullet. This amoxicillin balm can temporarily halt SCTLD’s spread, but it needs to be frequently reapplied to the lesions on the corals. This takes time and resources, while increasing the likelihood that the microbes causing SCTLD might develop resistance to amoxicillin and related antibiotics. “Antibiotics do not stop future outbreaks,” Valerie Paul, a study co-author and the head scientist at the Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, Florida, said in a statement. “The disease can quickly come back, even on the same coral colonies that have been treated.” Finding the right probiotic Paul and her colleagues have spent over six years investigating whether beneficial microorganisms (aka probiotics) could be a longer lasting alternative to combat this pathogen. Just like humans, corals are host to communities known as microbiomes that are bustling with all different types of bacteria. Some of these miniscule organisms produce antioxidants and vitamins that can help keep their coral hosts healthy.  First, the team looked at the microbiomes of corals that are impervious to SCTLD to try and harvest probiotics from these disease-resistant species. In theory, these could be used to strengthen the microbiomes of susceptible corals.  They tested over 200 strains of bacteria from disease-resistant corals and published a study in 2023 about the probiotic Pseudoalteromonas sp. McH1-7 (or McH1-7 for short). Taken from the great star coral (Montastraea cavernosa), this probiotic produces several antibacterial compounds. Having such a stacked antibacterial toolbox made McH1-7 an ideal candidate to combat a pathogen like SCTLD. They initially tested McH1-7 on live pieces of M. cavernosa and found that the probiotic reliably prevented the spread of SCTLD in the lab. After these successful lab tests, the wild ocean called next. Testing in the ocean The team conducted several field tests on a shallow reef near Fort Lauderdale, focusing on 40 M. cavernosa colonies that showed signs of SCTLD. Some of the corals in these colonies received a paste containing the probiotic McH1-7 that was applied directly to the disease lesions. They treated the other corals with a solution of seawater containing McH1-7 and covered them using weighted plastic bags. The probiotics were administered inside the bag in order to cover the entire coral colony.   “This created a little mini-aquarium that kept the probiotics around each coral colony,” Paul said. For two and a half years, they monitored the colonies, taking multiple rounds of tissue and mucus samples to see how the corals’ microbiomes were changing over time. They found that  the McH1-7 probiotic successfully slowed the spread of SCTLD when it was delivered to the entire colony using the bag and solution method. According to the samples, the probiotic was effective without dominating the corals’ natural microbes.  Kelly Pitts, a research technician with the Smithsonian Marine Station at Ft. Pierce, Floridaand co-lead author of the study treats great star coral (Montaststraea cavernosa) colonies infected with SCTLD with probiotic strain McH1-7 by covering the coral colony in a plastic bag, injecting a probiotic bacteria solution into the bag and leaving the bag for two hours to allow for the bacteria to colonize on the coral. CREDIT: Hunter Noren. Fighting nature with nature While using this probiotic appears to be an effective treatment for SCTLD among the reefs of northern Florida, additional work is needed to see how it could work in other regions. Similar tests on reefs in the Florida Keys have been conducted, with mixed preliminary results, likely due to regional differences in SCTLD. The team believes that probiotics still could become a crucial tool for combatting SCTLD across the Caribbean, especially as scientists fine tune how to administer them. Importantly, these beneficial bacteria support what corals already do naturally.  “Corals are naturally rich with bacteria and it’s not surprising that the bacterial composition is important for their health,” Paul said. “We’re trying to figure out which bacteria can make these vibrant microbiomes even stronger.”

The 12-year campaign to free Ross Ulbricht — the criminal mastermind behind the Silk Road, the original crypto-enabled dark web mail-order-drug emporium — finally ended in January, when newly-minted second term president Donald Trump officially pardoned the bitcoin criminal.Now, Ulbricht is picking up where he left off, getting his first taste of a world he left behind in 2013 when a federal judge sentenced him to two counts of life in prison, plus 40 years without parole.In sum, Ulbricht's feeling some culture shock. Taking the stage at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas this week, the drug kingpin was agog at the piles of kitschy tech products that had passed him by."When I walked out of prison a few months ago, I’d never seen a drone, used AI, or tried VR. I hadn’t even chatted with AI," Ulbricht marveled. "Now it's all hitting me at once — the freedom, the technology, the fact that I have a future again."He also basked in the glow of the crypto community's love — a parasocial following that lavished his clemency petition with over 600,000 signatures and an astonishing number of right-libertarian micro-celebrity endorsements."You didn't abandon me. You didn't forget me. You wrote me letters. You raised money for my defense. When I was silenced, you spoke up against the slander and the smears," the former dope baron lauded.Keep in mind, this wasn't a political activist jailed for protesting an unjust war, or a whistleblower whose life was destroyed after revealing a massive corporate fraud scheme.This is a guy who made millions selling drugs to teenagers and communities ravaged by the opioid crisis, resulting in at least six overdose deaths that we know of. (Not to mention the hitmen he tried to hire to take out his enemies, though he was unsuccessful.)At its peak in 2013, Ulbricht's Silk Road saw an estimated daily connected user base of 5.5 million. In just two years, it processed some $1.2 billion in illicit sales, according to the Department of Homeland Security.Through transaction fees, the service generated over $80 million worth of Bitcoin. Authorities in 2014 called it the "most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet."Of course, Ulbricht's saving grace isn't some ethical dilemma Trump has over incarceration or judicial mishandling, but the fact that he built Silk Road off the then-nascent blockchain. That single fact has cemented his status as a crypto superstar.For context, out of the 1.2 million citizens incarcerated in the US, over 360,000 of them face charges of nonviolent drug possession.In 2023, there were roughly 870,000 arrests for drug-related charges, the vast majority, or 87.8 percent of which were for drug possession — in other words, for carrying an impossibly tiny fraction of the volume that passed through Ulbricht's drug empire every minute.With his new lease on life, Ulbricht plans on paying it forward — not as an advocate for carceral reform or prison abolition, but to the crypto community of get-rich-quick schemers and granny scammers."With so much speed and chaos, it’s more important than ever to stay true to our principles," he told the crowd of cryptobros. "If we agree that we deserve freedom and that [crypto] decentralization secures it, we can stand together. Have each other’s backs, as you had mine. Freedom, decentralization, unity — stay true to these, and the future is ours."More on crypto: Visitors At This Bitcoin-Heated Spa Are Complaining About Mold and UTIsShare This Article

A Fungal Disease Ravaged North American Bats. Now, Researchers Found a Second Species That Suggests It Could Happen Again White-nose syndrome caused millions of bat deaths, and scientists are sounding the alarm that a second fungus could be disastrous if it reaches American wildlife Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor May 30, 2025 A little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) is seen with white fuzz on its nose, a characteristic of the deadly white-nose syndrome. Ryan von Linden / New York Department of Environmental Conservation In February 2006, a cave explorer near Albany, New York, took the first photograph of bats with a mysterious white growth on their faces. Later, biologists studying the mammals in caves and mines discovered piles of dead bats in the state—also with the fuzzy white mold. The scientists were floored. For years, no one knew what was causing the mass die-offs from this “white-nose syndrome.” In early 2007, Albany residents called local authorities with reports of typically nocturnal bats flying in broad daylight. “They were just dying on the landscape,” wildlife biologist Alan Hicks told the Associated Press’ Michael Hill in 2008. “They were crashing into snowbanks, crawling into woodpiles and dying.” At last, scientists identified a culprit: The bats had succumbed to an infection caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. Since its initial discovery, white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats across 40 U.S. states and nine Canadian provinces, making it “the most dramatic wildlife mortality event that’s ever been documented from a pathogen,” DeeAnn Reeder, a disease ecologist at Bucknell University, tells the New York Times’ Carl Zimmer. Now, nearly two decades later, scientists have developed some promising ways to fend off the disease, including an experimental vaccine. But a new study published this week in the journal Nature warns of a newly discovered second species of fungus that, if it reaches North America, could set all that progress back. “We thought we knew our enemy, but we have now discovered it is twice the size and potentially more complex than we had imagined,” lead author Nicola Fischer, a biologist at the University of Greifswald in Germany, says in a statement. Little brown bats are susceptible to white-nose syndrome in North America. Krynak Tim, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service The team analyzed 5,479 fungus samples collected by hundreds of citizen science volunteers across North America, Asia and Europe. They found that white-nose syndrome is caused by two distinct fungal species native to Europe and Asia, with only one species having reached North America so far. If the second species hits the continent, it could look like a “reboot” of the epidemic, Reeder tells the New York Times. Study co-author Sébastien Puechmaille, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montpellier in France, knew bats in Europe had also been seen with white fuzz on their noses, as he tells the New York Times. But those populations didn’t die off like American bats. Charting the disease across Europe and Asia, he noticed that the fungus was able to live alongside those bats, while it ravaged American ones. In its native range, the fungus grows in the bodies of hibernating bats as their internal temperature drops, then it’s shed in the spring when they awaken. But in American bats, the fungus causes their immune systems to activate and burn fat reserves as they hibernate. The bats then wake up periodically, causing irregular activity and eventual starvation. The researchers suggest the damaging fungal spores were first brought to North America by cavers that traveled from Europe—potentially western Ukraine—to the United States without completely disinfecting their boots or rope. White-nose syndrome poses a threat not just to bats, but to whole ecosystems. Bats are vital parts of many food chains, eating insects and pollinating plants. However, they reproduce fairly slowly, only having one or two pups at a time. Rebuilding a bat population, then, could take decades. And since cave ecosystems are similarly delicate, biologists are wary of trying to kill off the fungus preemptively. “Cave ecosystems are so fragile that if you start pulling on this thread, what else are you going to unravel that may create bigger problems in the cave system?” said University of Wisconsin–Madison wildlife specialist David Drake to the Badger Herald’s Kiran Mistry in December. The discovery also occurs as the original wave of white-nose syndrome continues to spread across North America, having just crossed the Continental Divide in Colorado. Just one spore of the new species could be devastating to American bat colonies. Puechmaille tells the New York Times that policies should be put in place to make sure the second fungus does not spread to more continents, and that cavers should not move equipment between countries and should disinfect it regularly. “This work … powerfully illustrates the profound impact a single translocation event can have on wildlife,” he adds in the statement. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

What worked in The Witcher 3 and what didn't: looking back on a landmark RPG with CD Projekt Red "We learned a lot of lessons down the road." Image credit: CD Projekt Red Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Published on May 31, 2025 Do you remember what you were doing when The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released? It came out on 19th May 2015. I remember because I was inside CD Projekt Red at the time, trying to capture the moment for you - a moment I'm unlikely to replicate there or anywhere else. I recall sitting in the studio's canteen in the small hours of the morning, after a midnight launch event in a mall in Warsaw, chewing on a piece of cold pizza and wondering out loud what would come next for the studio, because at the time, who could know? One era was ending and another was about to begin. Would it bring the fame and fortune CD Projekt Red desired? Today, more than 60 million sales of The Witcher 3 later, we know the answer is yes. The Witcher 3 became a role-playing classic. It delivered one of the most touchable medieval worlds we've explored, a rough place of craggy rocks and craggier faces, of wonky morales and grim realities, of mud and dirtiness. And monsters, though not all were monstrous to look at. It was a world of grey, of superstition and folklore, and in it stood we, a legendary monster hunter, facing seemingly impossible odds. The Witcher 3 took fantasy seriously. But the decade since the game's release has been turbulent for CD Projekt Red. The studio launched its big new sci-fi series in 2020 with Cyberpunk 2077, and though the game has now sold more than 30 million copies, making it monetarily a success, it had a nightmarish launch. The PS4 version had to be removed from sale. It brought enormous pressure, growing pains and intense scrutiny to the studio, and CD Projekt Red would spend a further three years patching and updating - and eventually releasing an expansion - before public opinion would mostly turn around. Today the studio returns to safer ground, back to The Witcher world with the new game The Witcher 4, and as we look forward to it we should also look back, to the game that catapulted the studio to fame, and see what has been learnt. The Witcher 3 is at version 4.04 today, a number that represents an enormously long period of post-release support.Watch on YouTube It all began with naivety, as perhaps any ambitious project should. It's easy to forget that 14 years ago, when The Witcher 3 was being conceived, CD Projekt Red had never made an open-world game before. The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2 were linear in their approaches. It's also easy to forget that the people making the game were 14 years younger and less experienced. Back then, this was the studio's chance at recognition, so it aimed high in order to be seen. "The Witcher 3 was supposed to be this game that will end all other games," Marcin Blacha, the lead writer of the game, tells me. Simply make an open-world game that's also a story-driven game and release it on all platforms at the same time. How hard could it be? "When I'm thinking about our state of mind back in those days, the only word that comes to my mind is enthusiastic," Blacha says. "It was fantastic because we were so enthusiastic that we were full of courage. We were trying to experiment with stuff and we were not afraid. We were convinced that when we work with passion and love, it will pay off eventually." Every project has to begin somewhere and for Blacha, the person tasked with imagining the story, The Witcher 3 could only begin with Ciri, the daughter-of-sorts to The Witcher's central monster hunter character Geralt. As Blacha says, "The most important thing about Geralt and the most important thing about the books is the relationship between Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer. I already did two games with no sign of Ciri, no sign of Yennefer, and then we finally had a budget and proper time for pre-production, so for me, it was time to introduce both characters." It's a decision that would have major repercussions for the rest of The Witcher series at CD Projekt Red. Blacha didn't know it then, but Ciri would go on to become the protagonist of The Witcher 4. Had she not been the co-protagonist of The Witcher 3 - for you play as her in several sections during the game - who knows if things would have worked out the same way. It's an understandable progression as it is, though there is still some uncertainty among the audience about Ciri's starring role. But Ciri's inclusion came with complications, because the Ciri we see in the game is not the Ciri described in the books. That Ciri is much closer to the Ciri in the Netflix Witcher TV show, younger and more rebellious in a typical teenager way. She might be an important part of the fiction, then, but that doesn't mean she was especially well liked. "People were thinking that she's annoying," says Blacha, who grew up reading The Witcher books. CD Projekt Red, then, decided to make a Ciri of its own, aging her and making her more "flesh and bone", as Blacha puts it. He fondly recalls a moment in the game's development when reviewing the Ciri sections of the game, and saying aloud to studio director Adam Badowski how much he liked her. "I didn't know that she's going to be the protagonist of the next game," he says, "but I said to Adam Badowski, she's going to be very popular." Once Ciri had been earmarked for inclusion in The Witcher 3, the idea to have her pursued by the phantom-like force of the Wild Hunt - the members of which literally ride horses in the night sky, like Santa Claus' cursed reindeer - came shortly after. CD Projekt Red had introduced the Wild Hunt in The Witcher 2 so it made sense. The outline of the main story was then laid down as a one-page narrative treatment. Then it was expanded to a two-page treatment, a four page treatment, an eight page treatment and so on. At around 10 pages, it already had the White Orchard prologue, almost the entirety of the No Man's Land zone, and a hint of what would happen on Skellige and in Novigrad. When it was around 40 pages long, the quest design team was invited in. CD Projekt Red made their Ciri older than she is in the books. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The quest design team's job is to turn a story into a game, and this was a newly created department for The Witcher 3, created because the old way of writers designing the quests wasn't working any more. "We were struggling a bit with making sure that every written story that we have prepared is also a story that we can play well," Paweł Sasko says. He joined CD Projekt Red to be a part of that quest design team. The quest design team carves up a narrative treatment, paragraph by paragraph, and expands those into playable questlines for the game. "It's basically something between game design and a movie scenario," Sasko says. There's no dialogue, just a description of what will happen, and even a one-paragraph prompt can balloon into a 20-30 page design. Among the paragraphs Sasko was given to adapt was a storyline in No Man's Land concerning a character known as the Bloody Baron. The Bloody Baron storyline is widely acclaimed and has become synonymous with everything Sasko and CD Projekt Red were trying to do with the game. It's a storyline that probes into mature themes like domestic abuse, fatherhood, and love and loss and grief. More importantly, it presents us with a flawed character and allows us time and space to perhaps change our opinion of them. It gives us layers many other games don't go anywhere near. When Sasko first encountered the storyline, there was only an outline. "It said that Geralt meets the Bloody Baron who asks Geralt to hunt a monster and look for his wife and daughter, and for that, he is going to share information about Ciri and tell Geralt where she went. That was pretty much it." And Sasko already knew a few things about what he wanted to do. He knew he wanted to show No Man's Land as a Slavic region bathed in superstitions and complex religious beliefs, one that had been ravaged by famine and war. He also knew the tone of the area was horror because this had been outlined by Blacha and the leaders of The Witcher 3 team. Says Blacha: "My opinion is that a successful Witcher game is a mix of everything, so you have a horror line, you have a romance, you have adventure, you have exploration. When we started to think about our hubs, we thought about them in terms of a show, so No Man's Land, the hub with the Bloody Baron, was horror; Skellige was supposed to be an adventure; and Novigrad was supposed to be a big city investigation." But there were key missing pieces then from the Bloody Baron sequence we know today. The botchling, for instance - the monstrous baby the quest revolves around. It didn't exist. It was an idea that came from Sasko after he read a Slavic bestiary. "Yes," he says, "the botchling idea came from me." The Bloody Baron. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red He wanted the botchling to be the conduit through which more mature themes of the story could be approached - something overt to keep you busy while deeper themes sunk in. It's an approach Sasko says he pinched from Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, after deconstructing his work. "What he's doing is he's trying to find universal truths about human beings and struggles, but he doesn't tell those stories directly," Sasko says. "So for instance racism: he doesn't talk about that directly but he finds an interesting way how, in his world, he can package that and talk about it. I followed his method and mimicked it." This way the botchling becomes your focus in the quest, as the Baron carries it back to the manor house and you defend him from wraiths, but while you're doing that, you're also talking and learning more about who the Bloody Baron - who Phillip Strenger - is. "I wanted you to feel almost like you're in the shoes of that Bloody Baron," Sasko says. "Peregrination is this path in Christianity you go through when you want to remove your sins, and that's what this is meant to be. He's just trying to do it, and he's going through all of those things to do something good. And I wanted the player to start feeling like, 'Wow, maybe this dude is not so bad.'" It's a quest that leaves a big impression. An email was forwarded to Sasko after the game's release, written by a player who had lost their wife and child as the Baron once had. "And for him," he says, "that moment when Baron was carrying the child was almost like a catharsis, when he was trying so badly to walk that path. And the moment he managed to: he wrote in his letter that he broke down in tears." There's one other very significant moment in The Witcher 3 that Sasko had a large hand in, and it's the Battle of Kaer Morhern, where the 'goodies' - the witchers and the sorceresses, and Ciri - make a stand against the titular menace of the Wild Hunt. Sasko designed this section specifically to emotionally tenderise you, through a series of fast-paced and fraught battles, so that by the time the climactic moment came, you were aptly primed to receive it. The moment being Vesemir's death - the leader of the wolf school of witchers and father figure to Geralt. This, too, was Sasko's idea. "We needed to transition Ciri from being a hunted animal to becoming a hunter," he tells me, and the only event big enough and with enough inherent propulsion was Vesemir's death. Eredin, the leader of the Wild Hunt, breaks Vesemir's neck. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red But for all of the successful moments in the game there are those that didn't work. To the team that made the game, and to the players, there are things that clearly stand out. Such as Geralt's witcher senses, which allow him to see scent trails and footsteps and clues in the world around him. Geralt's detective mode, in other words. Sasko laughs as he cringes about it now. "We've overdone the witcher senses so much, oh my god," he says. "At the time when we were starting this, we were like, 'We don't have it in the game; we have to use it to make you feel like a witcher.' But then at the end, especially in the expansions, we tried to decrease it so it doesn't feel so overloaded." He'd even turn it down by a further 10 to 20 per cent, he says. There were all of the question marks dotted across the map, luring us to places to find meagre hidden treasure rewards. "I think we all scratch our heads about what we were thinking when trying to build this," Sasko tells me. "I guess it just came from fear - from fear that the player will feel that the world is empty." This was the first time CD Projekt Red had really the player's hand go, remember, and not controlled where in the world you would be. Shallow gameplay is a criticism many people have, especially in the game's repetitive combat, and again, this is something Sasko and the team are well aware of. "We don't feel that the gameplay in Witcher 3 was deep enough," he says. "It was for the times okay, but nowadays when you play it, even though the story still holds really well, you can see that the gameplay is a bit rusty." Also, the cutscenes could have been paced better and had less exposition in them, and the game in general could have dumped fewer concepts on you at once. Cognitive overload, Sasko calls it. "In every second sentence you have a new concept introduced, a new country mentioned, a new politician..." It was too much. More broadly, he would also have liked the open-world to be more closely connected to the game's story, rather than be, mostly, a pretty backdrop. "It's like in the theatre when you have beautiful decorations at the back made of cardboard and paper, and not much happens to them except an actor pulls a rope and it starts to rain or something." he says. It's to do with how the main story influences the world and vice versa, and he thinks the studio can be better at it. Ciri and Geralt look at a coin purse in The Witcher 3. This is, coincidentally, the same tavern you begin the game in, with Vesemir, and the same tavern you meet Master Mirror in. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red One conversation that surprises me, when looking back on The Witcher 3, is a conversation about popularity, because it's easy to forget now - with the intense scrutiny the studio seems always to be under - that when development began, not many people knew about CD Projekt Red. The combined sales of both Witcher games in 2013 were only 5 million. Poland knew about it - the Witcher fiction originated there and CD Projekt Red is Polish - and Germany knew about it, and some of the rest of Europe knew about it. But in North America, it was relatively unknown. That's a large part of the reason why the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 was made at all, to begin knocking on that door. And The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red hoped, would kick that door open. "We knew that we wanted to play in the major league," says Michał Platkow-Gilewski, vice president of communications and PR, stealing a quote from Cyberpunk character Jackie. That's why The Witcher 3 was revealed via a Game Informer cover story in early 2013, because that was deemed the way to do things there - the way to win US hearts, Platkow-Gilewski tells me. And it didn't take long for interest to swell. When Platkow-Gilewski joined CD Projekt Red to help launch the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 in 2012, he was handing out flyers at Gamescom with company co-founder Michał Kicinski, just to fill presentations for the game. By the time The Witcher 3 was being shown at Gamescom, a few years later, queues were three to four hours long. People would wait all day to play. "We had to learn how to deal with popularity during the campaign," Platkow-Gilewski says. Those game shows were crucial for spreading the word about The Witcher 3 and seeing first-hand the impact the game was having on players and press. "Nothing can beat a good show where you meet with people who are there to see their favourite games just slightly before the rest of the world," he says. "They're investing their time, money, effort, and you feel this support, sometimes love, to the IP you're working on, and it boosts energy the way which you can't compare with anything else. These human to human interactions are unique." He says the studio's leader Adam Badowski would refer to these showings as fuel that would propel development for the next year or so, which is why CD Projekt Red always tried to gather as many developers as possible for them, to feel the energy. It was precisely these in-person events that Platkow-Gilewski says CD Projekt Red lacked in the lead up to Cyberpunk's launch, after Covid shut the world down. The company did what it could by pivoting to online events instead - the world-first playtest of Cyberpunk was done online via stream-play software called Parsec; I was a part of it - and talked to fans through trailers, but it was much harder to gauge feedback this way. "It's easy to just go with the flow and way harder to manage expectations," Platkow-Gilewski says, so expectations spiralled. "For me the biggest lesson learned is to always check reality versus expectations, and with Cyberpunk, it was really hard to control and we didn't know how to do it." It makes me wonder what the studio will do now with The Witcher 4, because the game show sector of the industry still hasn't bounced back, and I doubt - having seen the effect Covid has had on shows from the inside of an events company - whether it ever will. "Gamescom is growing," Platkow-Gilewski says somewhat optimistically. "Gamescom is back on track." But I don't know if it really is. Michał Platkow-Gilewski cites this moment as one of his favourite from the Witcher 3 journey. The crew were at the game show PAX in front of a huge live audience and the dialogue audio wouldn't play. Thankfully, they had Doug Cockle, the English language voice actor of Geralt, with them on the panel, so he live improvised the lines. Watch on YouTube Something else I'm surprised to hear from him is mention of The Witcher 3's rocky launch, because 10 years later - and in comparison to Cyberpunk's - that's not how I remember it. But Platkow-Gilewski remembers it differently. "When we released Witcher 3, the reception was not great," he says. "Reviews were amazing but there was, at least in my memories, no common consensus that this is a huge game which will maybe define some, to some extent, the genre." I do remember the strain on some faces around the studio at launch, though. I also remember a tense conversation about the perceived graphics downgrade in the game, where people unfavourably compared footage of Witcher 3 at launch, with footage from a marketing gameplay trailer released years before it. There were also a number of bugs in the game's code and its performance was unoptimised. "We knew things were far from being perfect," Platkow-Gilewski says. But the studio worked hard in the years after launch to patch and update the game - The Witcher 3 is now on version 4.04, which is extraordinary for a single-player game - and they released showcase expansions for it. Some of Marcin Blacha's favourite work is in those expansions, he tells me, especially the horror storylines of Hearts of Stone, many of which he wrote. That expansion's villain, Master Mirror, is also widely regarded as one of the best in the game, disguised as he is as a plain-looking and unassuming person who happens to have incredible and undefinable power. It's not until deep into the expansion you begin to uncover his devilish identity, and it's this subtle way of presenting a villain, and never over explaining his threat, that makes Master Mirror so memorable. He's gathered such a following that some people have concocted elaborate theories about him. Lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk tells me about one theory whereby someone discovered you can see Master Mirror's face on many other background characters in the game, which you can, and that they believed it was a deliberate tactic used by CD Projekt Red to underline Master Mirror's devilish power. Remember, there was a neat trick with Master Mirror in that you had already met him at the beginning of The Witcher 3 base game, long before the expansion was ever developed, in a tavern in White Orchard. If CD Projekt Red could foreshadow him as far back as that, the theory went, then it could easily put his face on other characters in the game to achieve a similar 'did you see it?' effect. The real villain in the Hearts of Stone expansion, Gaunter O'Dimm. Better known to many as Master Mirror. There's a reason why he has such a plain-looking face... | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The truth is far more mundane. Other characters in the game do have Master Mirror's face, but only because his face is duplicated across the game in order to fill it out. CD Projekt Red didn't know when it made the original Witcher 3 game that this villager would turn into anyone special. There was a tentative plan but it was very tentative, so this villager got a very villager face. "We just got a request for a tertiary unimportant character," says Mileniczuk. "We had like 30-40 faces for the entire game so we just slapped a random face on him." He laughs. And by the time Hearts of Stone development came around, the face - the identity - had stuck. Expansions were an important part of cementing public opinion around The Witcher 3, then, as they were for cementing public opinion around Cyberpunk. They've become something of a golden bullet for the studio, a way to creatively unleash an already trained team and leave a much more positive memory in our heads. Exactly what went wrong with Cyberpunk and how CD Projekt Red set about correcting it is a whole other story Chris Tapsell told recently on the site, so I don't want to delve into specifics here. Suffice to say it was a hard time for the studio and many hard lessons had to be learned. "The pressure was huge," Platkow-Gilewski says, "because from underdogs we went to a company which will, for sure, deliver the best experience in the world." But while much of the rhetoric around Cyberpunk concerns the launch, there's a lot about the game itself that highlights how much progress the studio made, in terms of making open-world role-playing games. One of my favourite examples is how characters in Cyberpunk walk and talk rather than speak to you while rooted to the spot. It might seem like a small thing but it has a transformative and freeing effect on conversations, allowing the game to walk you places while you talk, and stage dialogue in a variety of cool ways. There's a lot to admire about the density of detail in the world, too, and in the greater variety of body shapes and diversity. Plus let's not forget, this is an actual open world rather than a segmented one as The Witcher 3 was. In many ways, the game was a huge step forward for the studio. Cyberpunk wasn't the only very notable thing to happen to the Witcher studio in those 10 years, either. During that time, The Witcher brand changed. Netflix piggybacked the game's popularity and developed a TV series starring Henry Cavill, and with it propelled The Witcher to the wider world. Curiously, CD Projekt Red wasn't invited to help, which was odd given executive producer Tomek Baginski was well known to CD Projekt Red, having directed the intro cinematics for all three Witcher video games. But beyond minor pieces of crossover content, no meaningful collaboration ever occurred. "We had no part in the shows," Pawel Mileniczuk says. "But it's Hollywood: different words. I know how hard it was for Tomek to get in there, to convince them to do the show, and then how limited influence is when the production house sits on something. It's many people, many decision makers, high stakes, big money. Nobody there was thinking about, Hey, let's talk to those dudes from Poland making games. It's a missed opportunity to me but what can I say?" The debut trailer for The Witcher 4.Watch on YouTube Nevertheless, the Netflix show had a surprisingly positive effect on the studio, with sales of The Witcher 3 spiking in 2019 and 2020 when the first season aired. "It was a really amazing year for us sales wise," Platkow-Gilewski says. This not only means more revenue for the studio but also wider understanding; more people are more familiar with The Witcher world now than ever before, which bodes very well for The Witcher 4. Not that it influenced or affected the studio's plans to return to that world, by the way. "We knew already that we wanted to come back to The Witcher," Platkow-Gilewski says. "Some knew that they wanted to tell a Ciri story while we were still working on Witcher 3." But, again, with popularity also comes pressure. "We'll have hopefully millions of people already hooked in from the get-go but with some expectations and visions and dreams which we have to, or may not be able to, fulfil," Platkow-Gilewski adds. You can already sense this pressure in comments threads about the new game. Many people already have their ideas about what a new Witcher game should be. The Witcher 4 might seem like a return to safer ground, then, but the relationship with the audience has changed in the intervening 10 years. "I think people are again with us," Platkow-Gilewski says. "There are some who are way more careful than they used to be; I don't see the hype train. We also learned how to talk about our game, what to show, when to show. But I think people believe again. Not everyone, and maybe it's slightly harder to talk with the whole internet. It's impossible now. It's way more polarised than it used to be. But I believe that we'll have something special for those who love The Witcher." Here we are a decade later, then, looking forward to another Witcher game by CD Projekt Red. But many things have changed. The studio has grown and shuffled people around and the roles of the people I speak to have changed. Marcin Blacha and Pawel Mielniczuk aren't working on The Witcher 4, but on new IP Project Hadar, in addition to their managerial responsibilities, and Pawel Sasko is full-time on Cyberpunk 2. It's only really Michał Platkow-Gilewski who'll do a similar job for The Witcher 4 as on The Witcher 3, although this time with dozens more people to help. But they will all still consult and they're confident in the abilities of The Witcher 4 team. "They really know what they're doing," says Sasko, "they are a very seasoned team." "We learned a lot of lessons down the road," Platkow-Gilewski says, in closing. "I started this interview saying that we had this bliss of ignorance; now we know more, but hopefully we can still be brave. Before, we were launching a rocket and figuring out how to land on the moon. Now, we know the dangers but we are way more experienced, so we'll find a way to navigate through these uncharted territories. We have a map already so hopefully it won't be such a hard trip."

The Last Braindance? Cyberpunk 2077's sequel includes a new city that "feels more like Chicago gone wrong", and I'm now wondering how the USA's collapse might have affected Michael Jordan's legacy Look, all I'm saying is that the declaration of martial law might have made that last three-peat a bit tougher to pull off. Image credit: VG247/CD Projekt News by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on May 21, 2025 Cyberpunk 2077's sequel will let us take a detour from the returning Night City to visit a new location which feels a bit "like Chicago gone wrong". Naturally, this news has me questioning how Cyberpunk's timeline might have affected the most prominent basketball dynasty of the 1990s. The tiny nugget of info we got about this second city comes from Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk TTRPG series that CD Projekt's futuristic RPGs are based on. It's the first bit of concrete info about the game - beyond just where it's at in the production process - we've gotten for a while. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Speaking to Tvgry during this year's Digital Dragons Conference, Pondsmith touched on his current relationship with CD Projekt's Cyberpunk devs. He's "not as involved directly with the sequel as he was with the first Cyberpunk, but he does still pop by the studio to look at scripts and offer his views on stuff like new cyberware made for Project Orion. For instance, he revealed that when he was there recently, he "spent a lot of time talking to one of the environment guys, and he was explaining how the new place in Orion - because there's another city we visit, I'm not telling you any more than that, but there's another city we visit." "Night City's still there," Pondsmith continued, telling us more, "I remember looking at it and going 'yeah, I understand the feel that you're going for in this, and this really does work - it doesn't feel like Blade Runner, it feels more like Chicago gone wrong'. I said 'yeah, you know, I can see this working.'" Watch on YouTube This chatter starts at around the three hour and 45 minute mark of the video embedded above, if you want to check it out for yourself. I don't know if you'll do the same, but the mention of a Cyberpunk city that might be a bit like Chicago got me wondering what the existing Cyberpunk lore says about the actual Windy City. According to the series' Fandom Wiki (which does note that it needs more citations), Chi-town was "left in a state of absolute devastation" by the collapse of the United States that occurs between 1996 and 2008 in the Cyberpunk timeline, and was subsequently ravaged by a "catastrophic bio-plague" created by the federal government itself. By 2077, the city's "implied to have undergone some level of reconstruction" by rumours of it being connected to Night City via the transcontinental maglev rail network that Cyberpunk 2077's database describes as "currently inoperational", but subject to revitalisation efforts by Night Corp. Cool. But here's the thing. If Chicago started to fall apart in 1996 - the year that martial law was declared across the USA in Cyberpunk lore - do Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls win the 1996, 1997, and 1998 NBA championships to cement themselves as arguably the greatest basketball dynasty of all-time? That's assuming Jordan and the Bulls even exist in the Cyberpunk universe, but I think it's worth exploring anyway. The situation is this as far as I can tell - the aforementioned martial law runs from 1996 to 1999, so Jordan and co have that to contend with, in addition to a 1998 midwest drought and the collapse doing so much damage that "an estimated 90%" of Chicago is abandoned by the end of it in 2008. It's MJ though. I'm still banking on him to beat the Jazz in the finals, even if he's got to dribble past bio-plagues and hostile cybernetically-augmented soldiers to do it. Do you think his airness still ends up with six rings on his weird cyber-fingers? Also, how do you feel about visiting this second city in Cyberpunk 2? Let us know below!

Anita Hofschneider & Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist Published May 18, 2025 | Comments (0) | Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Robert Prevost arrives on the main central loggia balcony of the St Peter's Basilica for the first time. © ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images On a sweltering January day in 2018, Pope Francis addressed 100,000 of the faithful in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, not far from where gold mining had ravaged an expanse of Amazon rainforest about the size of Colorado. “The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,” he told the crowd. He simultaneously condemned extractive industries and conservation efforts that “under the guise of preserving the forest, hoard great expanses of woodland and negotiate with them, leading to situations of oppression for the native peoples.” Francis denounced the insatiable consumerism that drives the destruction of the Amazon, supported those who say Indigenous peoples’ guardianship of their own territories should be respected, and urged everyone to defend isolated tribes. “Their cosmic vision and their wisdom have much to teach those of us who are not part of their culture,” he said. To Julio Cusurichi Palacios, an Indigenous leader who was in the stadium that day, the words from the head of the Catholic Church — which claims 1.4 billion members and has a long, sordid history of violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide — were welcome and momentous. “Few world leaders have spoken about our issues, and the pope said publicly the rights of Indigenous peoples were historically violated,” he said after Pope Francis died last month. “Let us hope that the new pope is a person who can continue implementing the position the pope who passed away has been talking about.” During his 12 years as pontiff, Francis radically reshaped how the world’s most powerful religious institution approached the moral and ethical call to protect the planet. Beyond his invocations for Indigenous rights, Francis acknowledged the Church’s role in colonization, and considered climate change a moral issue born of rampant consumption and materialism. As the Trump administration dismantles climate action and cuts funding to Indigenous peoples around the world — and far-right politics continues to rise globally — experts see the conclave’s selection of Robert Francis Prevost, or Pope Leo XIV as he is now known, as a clear beacon that the faith-based climate justice movement his predecessor led isn’t going anywhere. In 2015, Pope Francis released his historic papal letter, or encyclical, titled Laudato si’. In the roughly 180-page document, he unequivocally identified planet-heating pollution as a pressing global issue disproportionately impacting the world’s poor, and condemned the outsize role wealthy countries like the U.S. have in contributing to the climate crisis. With it, Francis did what no pope had done before: He spoke with great clarity and urgency about human degradation of the environment being not just an environmental issue, but a social and moral one. Laudato si’ established the definitive connection between faith, climate change, and social justice, and made it a tenet of Catholic doctrine. The lasting influence of Francis’ encyclical would be buoyed by his other writings, homilies, and his direct appeals to world leaders. He was, for example, credited with helping rally nearly 200 countries to sign the 2015 Paris Agreement, regularly urged cooperation at international climate summits, and released a follow-up to his pioneering encyclical in 2023 that sounded the alarm in the face of the climate crisis. “Pope Francis routinely said that we have a throwaway society. We throw away people, we throw away nature … and that we really need a culture that’s much more based in care,” said Christopher Cox, executive director of the Seventh Generation Interfaith Coalition for Responsible Investment and a former priest. “That means care for people, especially the most poor, the most vulnerable, the most marginalized. And we also need much greater care for creation. We’ve been given a beautiful earth and we’re consuming it at a rate that goes far beyond what will be able to sustain life for the long term.” The first Latin American pope, Francis was unique in implicitly embracing some elements of liberation theology, a Catholic social justice movement that calls for the liberation of marginalized peoples from oppression. Although Francis was occasionally critical of the doctrine’s Marxist elements and never fully supportive of it, many observers see his statements regarding poor and Indigenous peoples as reflective of the doctrine’s central values. “Right from the beginning of his papacy, that outreach, that recognition of Indigenous ways of being Catholic and Indigenous language in Catholicism, heralded — up to that point — the most expansive official recognition of Indigenous contributions to Catholicism thus far,” said Eben Levey, an assistant professor of history at Alfred University who has studied the relationship between Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. In the centuries since conquistadores arrived in the Americas and forced Indigenous peoples to accept their religion, many Indigenous communities have made Catholicism their own, and a growing number of church leaders have embraced the idea that there are multiple ways of being Catholic and that Catholicism and Indigenous cultures can coexist. A year after becoming pope, Francis approved the use of two Mayan languages, Tzotzil and Tzeltal, in mass and sacraments like baptism and confession. In 2015 he expanded that list to include the Aztec language Nahuatl, and in 2016, during a visit to Mexico, he celebrated mass in Tzeltal, Tzotzil and Chol. In 2022, Francis officially apologized to Canada for the residential schools that ripped Indigenous children from their families, leading to the deaths of many who were later buried in unmarked graves. The following year, he rejected the Doctrine of Discovery, a religious concept that colonizers used to justify the illegal seizure of land from Indigenous peoples and became part of an 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that described Native Americans as “savages.” “The Doctrine of Discovery is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,” Pope Francis said, adding that he strongly supports the global implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He also drew a clear connection between those rights and climate action: In 2023, he made clear that Indigenous peoples are critical to fighting climate change when he said, “Ignoring the original communities in the safeguarding of the Earth is a serious mistake, not to say a great injustice.” But Pope Francis’ progressivism had its limits. In 2019, he called for a meeting of church leaders, known as the Synod of Bishops, for the Pan-Amazon region to address issues affecting the Amazon Basin. Indigenous Catholics who attended brought up illegal logging and violence against land defenders and proposed reforms. “The ancestral wisdom of the aboriginal peoples affirms that mother earth has a feminine face,” reads the document that emerged from the gathering and urged the church to give women more leadership roles and allow married deacons to be ordained as priests. In his response, Francis condemned corporations that destroy the Amazon as committing “injustice and crime,” yet refused to embrace the proposals to make church leadership more inclusive of women and married men. Francis’ climate activism was also riddled in constraint. He transformed how religious institutions viewed the climate crisis, framing a failure to act on it as a brutal injustice toward the most vulnerable, but could have implemented “more direct institutional action,” said Nadia Ahmad, a Barry University School of Law associate professor who has studied faith-based environmental action. Though the former pontiff publicly supported renewable energy adoption, called for fossil fuel disinvestment, and prompted churches across the world to go solar, he did not mandate what he deemed a “radical energy transition” across dioceses, schools, and hospitals. The work he accomplished “could have been amplified a bit more and had more accountability,” said Ahmad. But that limitation, she noted, likely stemmed from contradictory politics playing out within the church — many traditional, conservative Catholics, particularly in the United States, resisted Francis’ progressive teachings. A 2021 study found that over a period of five years, most U.S. bishops were “nearly silent and sometimes even misleading,” in their official messaging to parishioners about climate change and the pope’s famed encyclical. Though Pope Leo XIV has been lauded for his advocacy in defense of immigrants and worker rights — his namesake, Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 until 1903 is known as a historical Catholic champion of social justice and equality — the new pope’s track record on engaging directly with climate change is sparse. Still, Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, sees comments the new pope made last year on the need to move “from words to action” as a promising sign that he will continue Francis’ commitment to communicating the urgency of a warming world. The timing of the conclave’s unprecedented decision to select the first pontiff from the United States, coming amid the Trump administration’s sweeping dismissal of climate action, elimination of environmental protections, and attacks on Indigenous rights, isn’t lost on her. “It may be a signal to say ‘America, come back into the world community, come back into a planetary future where we collectively have been working to create a future worthy of our children and our children’s children,’” she said. Leo grew up in Chicago and is a citizen of both the U.S. and Peru, where he spent decades serving as a missionary and bishop before Francis made him a cardinal in 2023. He speaks five languages fluently and some Quechua, an Indigenous Incan language. While he was working in Peru in the 1990s, Leo was critical of the government’s human rights abuses — though he refrained from explicitly taking sides in the political fight between Maoist rebels and the government of then-dictator Alberto Fujimori, according to Matthew Casey, a historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State University based in Lima. Still, his reaction to the country’s authoritarianism could provide a glimpse of what stances he might take as pope, Casey said. “It doesn’t matter who was abusing human rights, he was on the side of the people,” he said. In 2016, the would-be pontiff spoke at a conference in Brazil where attendees talked about threats to the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous peoples who lived there. He praised Francis’ encyclical, describing the document as “very important,” and representing “something new in terms of this explicit expression of the church’s concern for all of creation.” To Casey, that suggests Pope Leo XIV, like his predecessor, has an awareness of the issues affecting Indigenous peoples, such as the rampant degradation of the environment. “Both Francis and Prevost are attuned to Indigeneity in ways that they couldn’t have been if they worked in Europe or the United States, because the politics of Indigeneity in Latin America are just so different,” Casey said. More than a week after the conclave that named him pope, communities across Peru are still celebrating the selection of Pope Leo XIV. Francis and Leo’s shared experiences working with marginalized communities harmed by colonialism and climate change, and their commitment to the social justice aspects of the church’s mission, are particularly meaningful in this political moment, said Levey, the Alfred University historian. “We are seeing a resurgence of ultra right wing politics globally, and the Catholic Church next to the United Nations is one of the few multilateral organizations perhaps capable of responding in some form or fashion to the questions of our modern age or contemporary moment,” he said. This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/pope-leo-climate-catholic-indigenous-francis/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Matt Novak Published February 18, 2025

For a designer obsessed with detail, it’s a fantasy to find a friend, much less a client, with the enthusiasm and stamina to sustain an 80-email thread about one fabric trim. But this was the level of unrushed, joyful consideration that ELLE Decor A-List designer Nicholas Obeid shared with homeowner Deirdre Brodie while working on her historic townhouse in Albany, New York. After completing a gut renovation on the 1875 home, which abuts the city’s 90-acre Washington Park, Brodie and her husband Dan Odabashian tapped Obeid to create some enchanting cohesion among the home’s three floors, and to delight in the details—and emails—alongside her.William Jess LairdSage-green walls create a relaxed mood in the dining room, where a vintage burlwood table is surrounded by French Art Deco chairs with upholstery in Zak + Fox fabrics. Antique rug from Upstate Rug Supply.It was important to Brodie, an Albany native who has lived within the same square mile for two decades, to establish a forever home for her and her husband that was at once welcoming and exciting and that turned the spotlight on local artisanship. Together, designer and client saw the home’s three 19-foot-wide stories as the chapters of a book: a vibrant first floor for hosting and community; a serene second floor for the primary suite, outfitted in soothing brown tones; and a top floor with two guest rooms to suit different design moods. (Brodie says invited couples sometimes happily opt to split up to better relish their preferred quarters.)The stairwell, with original steps dating back to the late 19th century, serves as the book’s binding. A mural composed of large-scale Greek keys, applied by hand using custom-engineered rollers by local artist Nina Stanley, ties the landings together. “It’s a representation of how we wanted the floors to communicate to each other,” says Obeid, who pulled from classical elements in the architecture to create a unifying iconography that draws on Greek and Egyptian motifs, as well as motifs by the Art Deco rug designer Ivan da Silva Bruhns. “The pattern is very classic, but seen in a fresh way,” he says.William Jess LairdIn the stair hall the custom mural features classical motifs and was hand-painted by Nina Stanley.Obeid drew on the strict yet expressive forms of his own furniture line to inform the artful geometries that repeat throughout the interior. “At two feet or 20 feet, every view is totally interesting,” Brodie says. Prized rugs, artworks, and two antique Fortuny chandeliers served as creative fodder for Obeid, who prioritized working with pieces purchased by Brodie’s mother at estate sales and on Facebook Marketplace, transforming them into new family heirlooms. “He was so generous in honoring that,” Brodie says. “My mother’s sense of how beautiful hospitality could be is what made me excited to have the opportunity to do this house.”Other bits of sentimental flotsam and jetsam were taken in decorative stride, like a box of vintage orange Brunschwig & Fils wallpaper that Brodie rescued from an architectural parts warehouse. When she brought the dusty box of “crazy orange” (her term—his was “bananas”) wallpaper to Obeid, she recalls him saying, “This is not exactly my comfort zone, but that’s why I want to do it.” The saturated hue appears in a guest room, tempered with tasseled green curtains in a custom Rule of Three hand-marbled -malachite-like silk.Obeid anchored the space with a chaise longue covered in a striped velvet by Misia, rescued and revived from a cat-ravaged past in storage. But the focal point of the room is a set of seven bespoke decorative plates by the artist Shane Gabier, designed to echo the wallpaper in tones of olive green, butter yellow, and an ultra-classic Parisian blue checkerboard. It’s just one more detail in which to delight in a home punctuated by craft, care, and a commitment to circling back. ◾This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Elle Decor. SUBSCRIBE

Despite high-profile return-to-office mandates from the likes of Amazon, AT&T, Dell, and even the US government, many organizations continue to support employees who work remotely. According to a November 2024 Gallup poll, 26% of US workers with remote-capable jobs work outside the office full-time. Embracing remote work opens the door to having employees located in different parts of the country or different regions of the world — and that makes it more likely that individual employees will be affected by emergencies that occur far from corporate headquarters, ranging from simple power outages to catastrophic storms, wildfires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. In the US alone, 90 major weather-related disasters were declared in 2024, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by the International Institute for Environment and Development. The researchers estimate that 137 million Americans — about 41% of the population — live in areas that were under major disaster or emergency declarations last year. When disaster strikes, employees may be without electricity, internet, or cell service for days or weeks. They may have to evacuate their homes. They may be struggling with the loss of family members, friends, or neighbors. Just as organizations have disaster mitigation and recovery plans for main offices and data centers, they should be prepared to support remote employees in disaster situations they likely have never encountered before. Employers must counsel workers on what to do, provide additional resources, and above all, ensure that their mental health is attended to. This may sound like a job for HR — and it is — but it’s IT’s responsibility to make sure remote employees have the tools they need to stay in contact during a disaster, to protect sensitive data on their devices, and to help them get back to work when it’s safe to do so. Organizations that look after their employees when they need it the most may see benefits in the form of increased engagement, productivity, and retention: Who wouldn’t want to work for an employer that truly cares about your welfare? We spoke with tech leaders and disaster recovery experts for their advice on how companies can prepare for and support remote employees facing a disaster situation. Plan for the worst through simulations  Dr. Oliver Schlake, director of the BSE Scholars Program at the University of Maryland and a survival instructor for 40 years, says there is a significant cultural component to disaster preparedness — or the lack thereof. People often prefer the “hero” over the “person who’s doing the continued maintenance,” he says. For example, people will hail the firefighter who rescues a victim from a burning house, but not the janitor who changes the battery in the smoke detector that helps to prevent the spread of fire in the first place. As a result of this cultural tendency, organizations under-invest in tools, resourcing, and programs necessary for disaster preparedness. “There’s no ROI on their reliability until [a disaster] happens. And that’s why a lot of organizations cut out those backup systems,” he says. To avoid this short-sighted thinking, business leaders should prepare well in advance of any disaster. While companies can offer disaster preparedness training in a classroom setting, Schlake recommends hands-on simulations for greater effectiveness. For example, the organization could shut off its intranet or force employees to switch off their usual internet connection to mimic a disaster where connectivity is limited. Schlake introduces companies conducting these exercises to a decision-making framework called the Rule of Three. “You basically use time intervals of three — three seconds, three minutes, three hours, three days, three weeks, three months — to prioritize your activities in a disaster situation,” he says. The goal is not for business leaders and employees to respond flawlessly to a simulated disaster. Instead, it is to help them identify gaps they can address before a real crisis occurs. For example, during an exercise, a B2B organization working with Schlake realized that if its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system were disrupted, its employees would be unable to make client calls. To mitigate this risk, the company purchased around 100 burner phones, pre-programmed them, and stored them for emergency use. The foresight paid off: six or seven months later, when a disaster prevented employees from coming on-site, the phones became essential for maintaining client relationships. Organizations will come to their own unique realizations through these simulations, which should include remote and hybrid workers as well as those who work in the office full-time. If a company discovers it has no means of communicating with remote workers in a power or internet outage, for example, they may decide to outfit those workers with additional communication tools or come up with other contingency plans. Protect employee devices Depending on the disaster, a remote employee’s home office may be unavailable: It may have been ravaged by a fire or flood, or they may be under evacuation orders from local or federal authorities. In such cases, employees who are otherwise unaffected by the disaster may go to coffee shops, libraries, or other public locations to connect to the internet and continue working. These environments make organizations more prone to cyberattacks, says Jocelyn Rhindress, a senior manager in business resource initiatives at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). During an outage of a Canadian telco in 2022, remote workers had to take this exact risk. “A lot of at-home workers flocked to places — coffee shops and quick-service restaurants — to use their public Wi-Fi,” she says. “So one big problem is just unsafe networks.” To mitigate this risk, the organization’s IT department needs to make sure that employees are provided with the right tools to protect sensitive information, such as virtual private networks (VPNs), says Kris Lahiri, CSO and co-founder of Egnyte. Like all disaster planning, installing VPNs and other security tools on workers’ laptops should be done well in advance of an actual disaster. Help with ‘personal disaster recovery planning’ Beyond cybersecurity risks, being forced to leave their home environment presents employees with another significant challenge: the potential loss of personal artifacts, from tax documents and family heirlooms to cherished photos. Lahiri refers to the process of safeguarding such items as “personal disaster recovery planning” and notes that this aspect of worker support is often overlooked. While companies have experience migrating servers from local offices to distributed teams, few have considered how to support employees on a personal level, he says. Lahiri urges IT teams to take a more empathetic approach and broaden their scope to include disaster recovery planning for employees’ home offices. “It’s important for IT to help these people to think, ‘Hey, have you thought of your personal stuff? Like, where do you keep your valuables? Are you making sure that your tax files and other financial info is backed up someplace?’” he says. Some might see advising employees on personal disaster recovery as beyond the IT department’s role. However, Lahiri argues that this guidance is essential as part of the organization’s broader mandate to ensure employees’ safety and well-being. Mitigate risks across geographies Beyond addressing individual employees’ needs, companies must also take a macro view of their workforce to prepare for disasters. As businesses become not only more remote but also more global, understanding employees’ locations becomes crucial. “As a company, I would monitor where all my remote workers are,” says Schlake from the University of Maryland. The goal is to help companies create contingency plans when a disaster is on the horizon for a particular location. “When I see there’s a crisis coming up in a certain area, I can take preventive measures,” he says. For example, if a typhoon is approaching the Philippines, a company can plan how it will compensate if, say, 5% of its Philippines-based workforce loses internet access. To maintain business continuity, companies must pay special attention to business-critical roles. Hiring and training should be approached with a global mindset, allowing for backup workers in different locations to step in when disasters affect specific geographies, says Egnyte’s Lahiri. Oxfam International takes this kind of strategic approach to workforce management. According to CIO Kenny Kamal, the organization’s mission to fight inequality and end poverty often requires responding to natural disasters and crises worldwide. “This often means that Oxfam staff and partners are responding while managing the risks to themselves and their own communities,” he says. To tackle this challenge, Oxfam prioritizes “key operational locations rather than individual endpoints,” Kamal says. This strategy relies on hubs that support hybrid teams in disaster-affected areas. These hubs are equipped with redundant power solutions, backup internet connectivity, and prepositioned resources such as satellite kits and solar-powered chargers. Building on this foundation, Oxfam develops multiple contingency plans to guide employees in crisis situations. “To prepare for a range of scenarios, organizations should develop scalable disaster response plans. By categorizing disasters by impact — localized, regional, or wide-scale — teams can follow clearly defined protocols,” he says. Put employee well-being above all else Preparing for disasters is a complex challenge that requires companies to focus on agility, redundancy, flexibility, resilience, and business continuity. But employee well-being must remain the top priority. CFIB’s Rhindress notes that in some locations, such as Canada, health and safety are legally mandated components of any disaster response plan. However, organizations should aim to go beyond mere compliance — starting with effective communication. “It might come down to sharing your personal cell phone number or making sure there’s a way for your employees to always get in touch with someone,” she says. Mario Jabbour, Chief Finance & Admin Officer for Project HOPE, a global health and humanitarian organization, echoes this perspective. “Prioritizing employee well-being with mental health resources and balanced expectations, along with clear policies, training, and disaster response guides, is key to navigating crises effectively,” he says. Oxfam’s Kamal also advocates for mental health support, flexible work arrangements, and open communication. Since no organization will execute employee support perfectly, he stresses the importance of continuous self-assessment. “After every disaster response, it’s essential to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. Learning from these experiences allows organizations to refine their plans and strengthen their collective resilience,” he says. Kamal emphasizes that while disasters are inherently unpredictable, proactive preparation can significantly mitigate their impact. “By focusing on resilience, flexibility, and the well-being of hybrid teams, organizations can empower their workforce to navigate challenges with confidence and continue delivering on their mission when it matters most,” he says.

Much has been made of the fact that the year’s most recent breakout hit, an idiosyncratic role-playing game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, was made by a small team. (It has just sold its two-millionth copy). It’s a tempting narrative in this age of blockbuster mega-flops, live-service games and eye-watering budgets: scrappy team makes a lengthy, unusual and beautiful thing, sells it for £40, and everybody wins. But it’s not quite accurate.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.Sandfall Interactive, the game’s French developer, comprises around 30 people, but as Rock Paper Shotgun points out, there are many more listed in the game’s credits – from a Korean animation team to the outsourced quality assurance testers, and the localisation and performance staff who give the game and its story heft and emotional believability.Compared to the enormous teams who make the Final Fantasy games – a clear inspiration for Sandfall – Clair Obscur’s team is minuscule. The more interesting achievement isn’t that a small team has made a successful game – it’s that a small team has made the most extravagantly French thing any of us will ever play. Much to my partner’s annoyance, I’ve set the voice language to French with English subtitles, just to enhance the immersion.In Clair Obscur’s belle époque-inspired world, a sinister entity called the Paintress daubs a number on a distant totem every year, descending from 100 – and every person of that age dissolves heartbreakingly into petals and dust, leaving behind devastated partners and orphaned children. (This and Neva are the only games in recent memory to make me shed a tear at their beginning.) The game starts as the Paintress counts down from 34 to 33, and an expedition of brave and slightly magic thirtysomethings from the dwindling population sets out, as they do every year, to sail across to the Paintress’s continent and try to kill her and stop the cycle. I was sad to leave this opening area, because the city was so beautiful, and everyone was impeccably dressed. Also, nothing was trying to kill me every few minutes.The most French thing you’ll ever play … Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Photograph: Sandfall InteractiveMany expeditions have gone before. You find their grisly remnants all over the place as you explore, their recorded diaries left to help whoever comes next. You start off in a kind of ravaged Paris, the Eiffel Tower distorting towards a distant horizon like a Dalí painting. The game looks like a waltz through a distinguished art museum that’s about to get sucked into a black hole. One early area of the continent is a waterless ocean, the wrecked vessel of one expedition wrapped around a dead leviathan of a sea creature, fronts of seaweed waving in the nonexistent currents. It’s beautiful but extremely dangerous: you quickly have to get the hang of a pretty complicated combat system to survive even the first few boss fights.Clair Obscur’s fighting is inspired by classic and modern Japanese RPGs: rhythmic and flashy, it lets you supercharge a fireball or dodge the fist of a stone automaton with a well-timed button press. Combining your unusually distinctive characters’ abilities is the key. One of them wields a rapier and changes stance every attack, another attacks with an impenetrable system of sun and moon tarot cards, a third mostly with a gun and a sword. If this all sounds needlessly extravagant, it is – and I love it. The combat menus are a tinkerer’s dream, letting you pore over and combine characters’ esoteric powers and skills to create interesting combo attacks.What I enjoy most about this game is that it doesn’t look like everything else or, indeed, anything else. The majority of games riff on the same few predictable references: Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Marvel. Instead it draws from completely different aesthetic and thematic sources; this is a baroque fantasy that tells a story about fatalism and love and death and legacy, a European-style tale with Japanese-style action and flair. It plays very differently, but its distinctiveness and determination to actually say something with its story reminds me of last year’s excellent Metaphor: ReFantazio. (There is a strong correlation between intellectually ambitious RPGs and baffling titles, it seems.)Clair Obscur also illustrates just how good game development tools are now: if you’re wondering how a smallish team could create something that looks this high-end, that’s a large part of the answer. This makes me feel pretty optimistic about the future of this middle sector of game development, in between blockbuster and indie. In the 00s and 2010s, that was where many of the most interesting games could be found. I can imagine several large publishers deeming this game simply too French to be marketable, but Sandfall was able to make it anyway. Expedition 33 is an encouraging commercial success that will be cited all year as a counternarrative to the games industry’s prevailing doomsaying, but it’s a creative success, too.What to playA thrill a minute … Doom: The Dark Ages. Photograph: BethesdaA new Doom game is out very shortly and reviews suggest that it is a glorious heavy-metal orgy of violence. It has you massacring hordes of gross demons at once, impaling them with spikes, shredding them with a chainsaw-shield, even punching gigantic hellspawn from within a giant robot or shooting at them from the back of a mecha-dragon. Doom: The Dark Ages is slower than the other modern games in the series, with more up-close combat and (as the title suggests) a vaguely medieval flavour to its aesthetic, but it’s still thrill-a-minute.Available on: Xbox, PS5, PC Estimated playtime: What to readChaos machine … Grand Theft Auto VI. Photograph: Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto VI, which is delayed until next May, left a crater in the 2025 release schedule that other game companies are scrambling to fill, reports Bloomberg (via Kotaku). Expect some serious rescheduling to be going on behind the scenes before the summer’s glut of game announcements. The Strong National Museum of Play in the US has inducted four new games into its Hall of Fame: Defender, GoldenEye 007, Quake and the (IMO) equally deserving Tamagotchi. They beat contenders from Age of Empires to Angry Birds. After last week’s industry media drama, long-established podcast-video collective Giant Bomb has bought itself out and gone independent, joining a growing stable of worker-owned and reader-supported games outlets. skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion Block‘Read a book, rube’ … Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth. Photograph: 2K GamesReader Travis sent in this week’s question:“I’m planning to start a book club-style video game club. Two questions: what should I call it and what game would you love to share and discuss in such a setting?”This is an excellent idea, and you’ve reminded me that I tried to do something like this a million years ago as a podcast on IGN, but I cannot for the life of me remember what we called it. Press Pause? Save Point? LFG? I would pick shorter games for a book club-style group (so that everyone could actually play them through), and I’d want ones that leave room for people’s personal histories to inform how they respond to it. I’d love to hear other people talk about Neva’s environmentalist and parental themes, or any Life Is Strange game’s mix of emerging-adulthood drama and quasi-successful supernatural storytelling, or even a game like While Waiting, what it made them think about. That would surely be more interesting than simply arguing about whether the latest Assassin’s Creed is any good.I asked my partner what he’d call a video game book club, and he suggested Text Adventure, which is annoyingly better than anything I can think of. My pal Tom suggested Pile of Shame, One More Go and Shared Worlds. Readers: can you think of any more?If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.