Nothing says it’s holiday season quite like a new installment of Rian Johnson’s delightful Knives Out mystery series. The final trailer for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery was just released, featuring Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in all his Southern gentleman detective glory. This time, he’s tackling the strange death of a parish priest in a spookily Gothic small-town setting.

As we’ve previously reported , the original Knives Out was a masterfully plotted winning mashup of Clue and Murder on the Orient Express —or any number of adaptations of novels by the grande dame of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie—along with other classics like Deathtrap , Gosford Park , and Murder by Death . Craig clearly found Blanc a refreshing counter to the 007 franchise, and he and Johnson soon committed to filming a sequel: 2022’s Glass Onion , inspired particularly by the Christie-based “tropical getaway” whodunnit Evil Under the Sun (1982) and an under-appreciated 1973 gem called The Last of Sheila .

And now we have Wake Up Dead Man . With this franchise, the less one knows going in, the better. But Johnson has assembled yet another winning all-star cast. Josh Brolin plays the victim, the fire-and-brimstone-spewing Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks; Josh O’Connor plays a young priest named Rev. Jud Duplenticy; Glenn Close plays a devout churchgoer named Martha Delacroix, Wick’s loyal helper; Mila Kunis plays local police chief Geraldine Scott; Jeremy Renner plays town doctor Nat Sharp; Kerry Washington plays uptight lawyer Vera Draven; Daryl McCormack plays aspiring politician Cy Draven; Thomas Haden Church plays groundskeeper Samson Holt; Andrew Scott plays bestselling author Lee Ross; and Cailee Spaeny plays Simone Vivane, a disabled former classical cellist.

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A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord , the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.

The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”

Accessing the “Concord Delta” servers reportedly requires a legitimate PC copy of the game, which is relatively hard to come by these days. Concord only sold an estimated 25,000 copies across PC and PS5 before being shut down last year. And that number doesn’t account for the players who accepted a full refund for their $40 purchase after the official servers shut down.

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Oracle has been hit harder than Big Tech rivals in the recent sell-off of tech stocks and bonds, as its vast borrowing to fund a pivot to artificial intelligence unnerved Wall Street.

The US software group founded by Larry Ellison has made a dramatic entrance to the AI race, committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next few years on chips and data centers—largely as part of deals to supply computing capacity to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

The speed and scale of its moves have unsettled some investors at a time when markets are keenly focused on the spending of so-called hyperscalers—big tech companies building vast data centers.

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For well over a decade now, the Cities franchise has done its best to pick up the urban simulation ball that EA’s SimCity famously dropped . Going forward, though, that ball will be handed off from longtime developer Colossal Order to Finnish studio Iceflake (a subsidiary of Cities publisher Paradox Interactive).

The surprise announcement Monday morning on Paradox’s official forums says that Cities ‘ developer and publisher “mutually decided to pursue independent paths” without going into many details as to why. “The decision was made thoughtfully and in the interest of both teams—ensuring the strongest possible future for the Cities: Skylines franchise,” the announcement says.

“Both companies are excited for what the future holds while remaining deeply appreciative of our shared history and grateful to the Cities ’ community,” the statement continues. Colossal Order “will work on new projects and explore new creative opportunities,” Paradox wrote in an accompanying FAQ .

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Be careful with your marketing stunts around national landmarks. That should be the take-home message from Chery Automobile’s recent attempt to measure itself up against Land Rover, an attempt that went sadly wrong.

In 2018, Land Rover and Chinese racing driver Ho-Pin Tung drove a Range Rover Sport up the 999 steps that make up the “Stairway to Heaven” that climb China’s Tianmen mountain. It was a dazzling stunt, for driving up a staircase that ranges between 45–60 degrees is no simple task, and one that’s certain to have left an impression with any acrophobics out there.

Chery certainly remembered it. The brand—which in fact is a long-time collaborator with Jaguar Land Rover and next year even takes over the Freelander brand from the British marque—has a new electric SUV called the Fulwin X3L and decided that it, too, was made of the right stuff. The SUV, which costs between $16,500–$22,000 in China, features a plug-in hybrid powertrain, boxy looks, and a whole bunch of off-roading features, including the ability to do tank turns.

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Scientists have found traces of ancient opiates in the residue lining an Egyptian alabaster vase, indicating that opiate use was woven into the fabric of the culture. And the Egyptians didn’t just indulge occasionally: according to a paper published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, opiate use may have been a fixture of daily life.

In recent years, archaeologists have been applying the tools of pharmacology to excavated artifacts in collections around the world. As previously reported , there is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes not just ancient Egypt but also ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have also been known to participate.

For instance, in 2023, David Tanasi, of the University of South Florida, posted a preprint on his preliminary analysis of a ceremonial mug decorated with the head of Bes, a popular deity believed to confer protection on households, especially mothers and children. After collecting sample residues from the vessel, Tanasi applied various techniques—including proteomic and genetic analyses and synchrotron radiation-based Fourier-transform infrared microspectroscopy—to characterize the residues.

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Valve’s second big foray into first-party PC hardware isn’t a sequel to the much-imitated Steam Deck portable, but rather a desktop computer called the Steam Machine. And while it could go on your desk, Valve clearly intends for it to fit in an entertainment center under a TV—next to, or perhaps even instead of, a game console like the Xbox or PlayStation 5.

I am pretty sure this idea could work, and it’s because I’ve already been experimenting with what is essentially a “Steam Machine” underneath my own TV for months, starting in May when Valve began making it possible to install SteamOS on certain kinds of generic PC hardware .

Depending on what it costs— and we can only guess what it will cost —the Steam Machine could be a good fit for people who just want to plug a more powerful version of the Steam Deck experience into their TVs. But for people who like tinkering or who, like me, have been messing with miniature TV-connecting gaming PCs for years and are simply tired of trying to make Windows workable, the future promised by the Steam Machine is already here.

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When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we could reconsider that evidence. “You know—ask ourselves if we should really believe that based on the evidence we’ve got,” says Jan M. Engelmann, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Engelmann says that from the beginning of the Western intellectual tradition, people thought that only humans are rational. So, he designed a study to see if rationality shows up in chimpanzees. It turned out that they’re almost as rational as we are.

Food puzzles

“There was quite a bit of research showing that chimpanzees can form their beliefs in response to evidence,” Engelmann says. The experiments usually involved chimpanzees deciding which of the two boxes contained a snack. When the researchers shook both boxes and there was a rattling sound coming from one of them, the chimps almost always chose the box where the rattling came from.

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Edmontosaurus annectens , a large herbivore duck-billed dinosaur that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, was discovered back in 1908 in east-central Wyoming by C.H. Sternberg, a fossil collector. The skeleton, later housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and nicknamed the “AMNH mummy,” was covered by scaly skin imprinted in the surrounding sediment that gave us the first approximate idea of what the animal looked like.

More than a century later, a team of paleontologists led by Paul C. Sereno, a professor of organismal biology at the University of Chicago, got back to the same exact place where Sternberg dug up the first Edmontosaurus specimen. The researchers found two more Edmontosaurus mummies with all fleshy external anatomy imprinted in a sub-millimeter layer of clay. For the first time, we uncovered an accurate image of what Edmontosaurus really looked like, down to the tiniest details, like the size of its scales and the arrangement of spikes on its tail. And we were in for at least a few surprises.

Evolving images

Our view of Edmontosaurus changed over time, even before Sereno’s study. The initial drawing of Edmontosaurus was made in 1909 by Charles R. Knight, a famous paleoartist, who based his visualization on the first specimen found by Sternberg. “He was accurate in some ways, but he made a mistake in that he drew the crest extending throughout the entire length of the body,” Sereno says. The mummy Knight based his drawing on had no tail, so understandably, the artist used his imagination to fill in the gaps and made the Edmontosaurus look a little bit like a dragon.

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