The Digital Insider | Month: February 2024

Annie Liau: Infinite caring for the MIT community

Growing up in Thailand, Annie Srethabhakti Liau could not have imagined spending the bulk of her career working at the storied Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, as she heads into retirement, she and those around her are reflecting on her journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and on four decades as an integral member of the MIT community.

One of the longest-serving physicians at MIT Health, Liau is an obstetrician and gynecologist who managed the delivery of some 1,500 babies and oversaw an estimated 100,000 visits with patients during her tenure at the Institute. For her extraordinary work ethic and unsurpassed care for patients and colleagues alike, Liau has become a beloved figure at both MIT and at the affiliated hospitals she’s worked at for the past 39 years.

From Bangkok to Cambridge

Liau was born in Bangkok to Chinese parents, the eldest of six children. Her father was a physician who traveled the world for his training and practice, so Liau was exposed early on to the idea of caring for others as a vocation. Her parents strongly valued education for all their children and made that a priority, starting with young Annie. In school, her teachers encouraged her inclinations toward math and science, and her stellar grades earned her a place at Mahidol University, where she decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and pursue a career in medicine.

In the 1970s, when her mother opted to move the family to the U.S. to be closer to relatives already here, Liau, then a young adult, followed suit. She initially stayed in Thailand to complete her medical training at Mahidol, but after passing a number of exams, Liau began her career in New England, at medical centers in Waltham and Brighton, Massachusetts, and Danbury, Connecticut. By this time, she had decided to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. “I feel that it’s a miracle to be part of the beginning” of life, she says. “Continuing the journey with the patient to all the stages in life, it seemed to be very fulfilling.”

Before long, she saw a position listed in the New England Journal of Medicine for a full-time physician at what was then MIT Medical — now MIT Health. It was the mid 1980s, and MIT Health had recently moved into its current location in Building E23 from its previous headquarters in Building 11. Liau was excited about the opportunity to serve a changing Institute population — one in which women were an increasing percentage of the student and faculty bodies.

“I just love the feeling of caring and healing,” Liau says. “I always felt from the beginning that MIT Medical is MIT Health: It always embraces the wellness, immunizations, community support. It wasn’t just taking care of the sick. … We need to take care of the MIT population so that they are well and they can focus on their work, so they can actually achieve their goals.”

Infinite care

From the start, Liau’s services were in high demand. An MIT Tech Talk article from the early 1990s described a period in which “the queue to see her was extremely long.” At the time, MIT Health doctors oversaw the births of some 200 babies per year — a number that Liau says has since dropped by about two-thirds, largely mirroring a national trend in birth rate.

During her time at MIT, Liau held appointments at several Boston-area hospitals, where she helped Institute affiliates give birth at all hours of the day and night. In addition, she served as a part-time instructor with Harvard Medical School (HMS). She was also a preceptor for gynecology residents at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and for medical students from HMS, the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, and Boston University. And she has served on numerous committees and professional societies, including as the past president of the Obstetrical Society of Boston.

Back on campus, Liau not only supported those expanding their families but also any community members in need of basic gynecological care.

“With our recent rebrand to MIT Health, we’ve been talking about ‘Infinite Caring’ as the underpinning of how we care for the people of MIT. To me, Dr. Liau is the epitome of Infinite Caring — and has been for 39 years,” says Cecilia Stuopis, MIT’s chief health officer and a fellow obstetrician/gynecologist. “She has cared for generations of women at MIT by being curious about their lives, their well-being, and their overall state of health. She is always learning and always teaching her patients and colleagues about what she has learned. Most importantly, she does all of these things with incomparable levels of kindness; kindness defines Dr. Liau in all aspects — professionally and personally.”

“Dr. Liau has been the foundation of our department,” says Chana Wasserman, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at MIT Health who has worked with Liau for over 26 years. “She is very personable and truly interested in people’s wellness. She always wants to learn from everyone and everything. She reads and retains everything she hears or learns. When professors, graduate students, or postdocs request her help with their research studies, she goes above and beyond to really try to help them. She has tremendous empathy for patients and colleagues alike.”

At a recent farewell event during which Liau had a chance to say goodbye to longtime patients, one attendee noted that while it’s unusual to look forward to gynecological appointments, she found that to be the case every time she went to see Liau.

“With Annie, it seems the construct of time is nonexistent and all that matters is that patient and their well-being,” says Nicole Napier, population health manager at MIT Health who worked closely with Liau for 18 years in her former role as the OB/GYN nurse practice manager. “She understands the true ‘health’ of a person is shaped by their personal relationships, diet, sleep, overall outlook on life, and many other factors. Her goal is to assess and advise on as many of these factors as possible to make you the best human being you can be. … Her ability to care knows no limits.”

Part of the family

In recognition of her remarkable service, Liau has over the years earned four MIT Health awards, including two Infinite Mile Awards, for clinical excellence and for lifetime contribution; the Commitment to Care Team Award; and the Patient Choice Award. She also regularly earned MIT Health’s highest Press Ganey scores, which measure patient satisfaction.

Colleagues and patients have expressed myriad ways in which Liau will be missed — from sharing findings from seminars she’d attend to constantly serving as a valued partner in health as well as a cherished friend.

Several colleagues mentioned Liau’s gifts of fruit — oranges and persimmons, especially — that would frequently appear on their desks. “I had always thought that Dr. Liau only gave me fruit since she knew I would never bring lunch to work,” says Wasserman. “At her retirement party at Mount Auburn [Hospital], though, one of the speakers asked the audience to raise their hand if they had ever received a piece of fruit from Dr. Liau. Almost the entire crowd raised their hands! This is just a small way that she made sure not only that I had something to eat, but that everyone she knew was kept healthy and well.”

“Every day she walks into the building, whether she’s scheduled to work or not, she cares about her patients and colleagues,” adds Eleashea Passley, a patient service representative at MIT Health who worked with Liau for 19 years. Liau was, according to Passley, “a social butterfly” who, in addition to fruit offerings, often delighted her team with lunch orders of comfort food to help keep spirits high.

In retirement, Liau is looking forward to quality time with family. She plans to help care for her mother, who is now 90 and looking to move back to Massachusetts following four years on the West Coast. She also aims to visit with her siblings, nieces, nephews, and their children around the country. And she hopes to get a bit more sleep and exercise, and to attend more lectures, services, and other events.

“I will miss the connection between me and my patients, and also the staff at MIT and at the hospital. I have been at MIT more than half of my life, so it’s really special. I feel like I grew up here,” says Liau. “I feel very moved and very thankful for the love and appreciation from my patients, and I’m grateful for their trust and for the support throughout the years. I feel like they’re part of my family. … I just help to navigate the care, like someone in the family, but I’m really grateful and thankful that they looked out for me, too.”

Safer skies with self-flying helicopters

In late 2019, after years of studying aviation and aerospace engineering, Hector (Haofeng) Xu decided to learn to fly helicopters. At the time, he was pursuing his PhD in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, so he was familiar with the risks associated with flying small aircraft. But something about being in the cockpit gave Xu a greater appreciation of those risks. After a couple of nerve-wracking experiences, he was inspired to make helicopter flight safer.

In 2021, he founded the autonomous helicopter company Rotor Technologies, Inc.

It turns out Xu’s near-misses weren’t all that unique. Although large, commercial passenger planes are extremely safe, people die every year in small, private aircraft in the U.S. Many of those fatalities occur during helicopter flights for activities like crop dusting, fighting fires, and medical evacuations.

Rotor is retrofitting existing helicopters with a suite of sensors and software to remove the pilot from some of the most dangerous flights and expand use cases for aviation more broadly.

“People don’t realize pilots are risking their lives every day in the U.S.,” Xu explains. “Pilots fly into wires, get disoriented in inclement weather, or otherwise lose control, and almost all of these accidents can be prevented with automation. We’re starting by targeting the most dangerous missions.”

Rotor’s autonomous machines are able to fly faster and longer and carry heavier payloads than battery powered drones, and by working with a reliable helicopter model that has been around for decades, the company has been able to commercialize quickly. Rotor’s autonomous aircraft are already taking to the skies around its Nashua, New Hampshire, headquarters for demo flights, and customers will be able to purchase them later this year.

“A lot of other companies are trying to build new vehicles with lots of new technologies around things like materials and power trains,” says Ben Frank ’14, Rotor’s chief commercial officer. “They’re trying to do everything. We’re really focused on autonomy. That’s what we specialize in and what we think will bring the biggest step-change to make vertical flight much safer and more accessible.”

Building a team at MIT

As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Xu participated in the Cambridge-MIT Exchange Program (CME). His year at MIT apparently went well — after graduating Cambridge, he spent the next eight years at the Institute, first as a PhD student, then a postdoc, and finally as a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), a position he still holds today. During the CME program and his postdoc, Xu was advised by Professor Steven Barrett, who is now the head of AeroAstro. Xu says Barrett has played an important role in guiding him throughout his career.

“Rotor’s technology didn’t spin out of MIT’s labs, but MIT really shaped my vision for technology and the future of aviation,” Xu says.

Xu’s first hire was Rotor Chief Technology Officer Yiou He SM ’14, PhD ’20, whom Xu worked with during his PhD. The decision was a sign of things to come: The number of MIT affiliates at the 50-person company is now in the double digits.

“The core tech team early on was a bunch of MIT PhDs, and they’re some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with,” Xu says. “They’re just really smart and during grad school they had built some really fantastic things at MIT. That’s probably the most critical factor to our success.”

To help get Rotor off the ground, Xu worked with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), and the National Science Foundation’s New England Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program on campus.

A key early decision was to work with a well-known aircraft from the Robinson Helicopter Company rather than building an aircraft from scratch. Robinson already requires its helicopters to be overhauled after about 2,000 hours of flight time, and that’s when Rotor jumps in.

The core of Rotor’s solution is what’s known as a “fly by wire” system — a set of computers and motors that interact with the helicopter’s flight control features. Rotor also equips the helicopters with a suite of advanced communication tools and sensors, many of which were adapted from the autonomous vehicle industry.

“We believe in a long-term future where there are no longer pilots in the cockpit, so we’re building for this remote pilot paradigm,” Xu says. “It means we have to build robust autonomous systems on board, but it also means that we need to build communication systems between the aircraft and the ground.”

Rotor is able to leverage Robinson’s existing supply chain, and potential customers are comfortable with an aircraft they’ve worked with before — even if no one is sitting in the pilot seat. Once Rotor’s helicopters are in the air, the startup offers 24/7 monitoring of flights with a cloud-based human supervision system the company calls Cloudpilot. The company is starting with flights in remote areas to avoid risk of human injury.

“We have a very careful approach to automation, but we also retain a highly skilled human expert in the loop,” Xu says. “We get the best of the autonomous systems, which are very reliable, and the best of humans, who are really great at decision-making and dealing with unexpected scenarios.”

Autonomous helicopters take off

Using small aircraft to do things like fight fires and deliver cargo to offshore sites is not only dangerous, it’s also inefficient. There are restrictions on how long pilots can fly, and they can’t fly during adverse weather or at night.

Most autonomous options today are limited by small batteries and limited payload capacities. Rotor’s aircraft, named the R550X, can carry loads up to 1,212 pounds, travel more than 120 miles per hour, and be equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks to stay in the air for hours at a time.

Some potential customers are interested in using the aircraft to extend flying times and increase safety, but others want to use the machines for entirely new kinds of applications.

“It is a new aircraft that can do things that other aircraft couldn’t — or maybe even if technically they could, they wouldn’t do with a pilot,” Xu says. “You could also think of new scientific missions enabled by this. I hope to leave it to people’s imagination to figure out what they can do with this new tool.”

Rotor plans to sell a small handful of aircraft this year and scale production to produce 50 to 100 aircraft a year from there.

Meanwhile, in the much longer term, Xu hopes Rotor will play a role in getting him back into helicopters and, eventually, transporting humans.

“Today, our impact has a lot to do with safety, and we’re fixing some of the challenges that have stumped helicopter operators for decades,” Xu says. “But I think our biggest future impact will be changing our daily lives. I’m excited to be flying in safer, more autonomous, and more affordable vertical take-off and-landing aircraft, and I hope Rotor will be an important part of enabling that.”

This ultrasound sticker senses changing stiffness of deep internal organs

MIT engineers have developed a small ultrasound sticker that can monitor the stiffness of organs deep inside the body. The sticker, about the size of a postage stamp, can be worn on the skin and is designed to pick up on signs of disease, such as liver and kidney failure and the progression of solid tumors.

Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

In an open-access study appearing today in Science Advances, the team reports that the sensor can send sound waves through the skin and into the body, where the waves reflect off internal organs and back out to the sticker. The pattern of the reflected waves can be read as a signature of organ rigidity, which the sticker can measure and track.

“When some organs undergo disease, they can stiffen over time,” says the senior author of the paper, Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “With this wearable sticker, we can continuously monitor changes in rigidity over long periods of time, which is crucially important for early diagnosis of internal organ failure.”

The team has demonstrated that the sticker can continuously monitor the stiffness of organs over 48 hours and detect subtle changes that could signal the progression of disease. In preliminary experiments, the researchers found that the sticky sensor can detect early signs of acute liver failure in rats.

The engineers are working to adapt the design for use in humans. They envision that the sticker could be used in intensive care units (ICUs), where the low-profile sensors could continuously monitor patients who are recovering from organ transplants.

“We imagine that, just after a liver or kidney transplant, we could adhere this sticker to a patient and observe how the rigidity of the organ changes over days,” lead author Hsiao-Chuan Liu says. “If there is any early diagnosis of acute liver failure, doctors can immediately take action instead of waiting until the condition becomes severe.” Liu was a visiting scientist at MIT at the time of the study and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Southern California.

The study’s MIT co-authors include Xiaoyu Chen and Chonghe Wang, along with collaborators at USC.

Sensing wobbles

Like our muscles, the tissues and organs in our body stiffen as we age. With certain diseases, stiffening organs can become more pronounced, signaling a potentially precipitous health decline. Clinicians currently have ways to measure the stiffness of organs such as the kidneys and liver using ultrasound elastography — a technique similar to ultrasound imaging, in which a technician manipulates a handheld probe or wand over the skin. The probe sends sound waves through the body, which cause internal organs to vibrate slightly and send waves out in return. The probe senses an organ’s induced vibrations, and the pattern of the vibrations can be translated into how wobbly or stiff the organ must be.

Ultrasound elastography is typically used in the ICU to monitor patients who have recently undergone an organ transplant. Technicians periodically check in on a patient shortly after surgery to quickly probe the new organ and look for signs of stiffening and potential acute failure or rejection.

“After organ transplantation, the first 72 hours is most crucial in the ICU,” says another senior author, Qifa Zhou, a professor at USC. “With traditional ultrasound, you need to hold a probe to the body. But you can’t do this continuously over the long term. Doctors might miss a crucial moment and realize too late that the organ is failing.”

The team realized that they might be able to provide a more continuous, wearable alternative. Their solution expands on an ultrasound sticker they previously developed to image deep tissues and organs.

“Our imaging sticker picked up on longitudinal waves, whereas this time we wanted to pick up shear waves, which will tell you the rigidity of the organ,” Zhao explains.

Existing ultrasound elastrography probes measure shear waves, or an organ’s vibration in response to sonic impulses. The faster a shear wave travels in the organ, the stiffer the organ is interpreted to be. (Think of the bounce-back of a water balloon compared to a soccer ball.)

The team looked to miniaturize ultrasound elastography to fit on a stamp-sized sticker. They also aimed to retain the same sensitivity of commercial hand-held probes, which typically incorporate about 128 piezoelectric transducers, each of which transforms an incoming electric field into outgoing sound waves.

“We used advanced fabrication techniques to cut small transducers from high-quality piezoelectric materials that allowed us to design miniaturized ultrasound stickers,” Zhou says.

The researchers precisely fabricated 128 miniature transducers that they incorporated onto a 25-millimeter-square chip. They lined the chip’s underside with an adhesive made from hydrogel — a sticky and stretchy material that is a mixture of water and polymer, which allows sound waves to travel into and out of the device almost without loss.

In preliminary experiments, the team tested the stiffness-sensing sticker in rats. They found that the stickers were able to take continuous measurements of liver stiffness over 48 hours. From the sticker’s collected data, the researchers observed clear and early signs of acute liver failure, which they later confirmed with tissue samples.

“Once liver goes into failure, the organ will increase in rigidity by multiple times,” Liu notes.

“You can go from a healthy liver as wobbly as a soft-boiled egg, to a diseased liver that is more like a hard-boiled egg,” Zhao adds. “And this sticker can pick up on those differences deep inside the body and provide an alert when organ failure occurs.”

The team is working with clinicians to adapt the sticker for use in patients recovering from organ transplants in the ICU. In that scenario, they don’t anticipate much change to the sticker’s current design, as it can be stuck to a patient’s skin, and any sound waves that it sends and receives can be delivered and collected by electronics that connect to the sticker, similar to electrodes and EKG machines in a doctor’s office.

“The real beauty of this system is that since it is now wearable, it would allow low-weight, conformable, and sustained monitoring over time,” says Shrike Zhang, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate bioengineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who was not involved with the study. “This would likely not only allow patients to suffer less while achieving prolonged, almost real-time monitoring of their disease progression, but also free trained hospital personnel to other important tasks.”

The researchers are also hoping to work the sticker into a more portable, self-enclosed version, where all its accompanying electronics and processing is miniaturized to fit into a slightly larger patch. Then, they envision that the sticker could be worn by patients at home, to continuously monitor conditions over longer periods, such as the progression of solid tumors, which are known to harden with severity.

“We believe this is a life-saving technology platform,” Zhao says. “In the future, we think that people can adhere a few stickers to their body to measure many vital signals, and image and track the health of major organs in the body.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health.

MIT community members honored with 2024 Franklin Institute Awards

The Franklin Institute recently announced its 2024 cohort of award winners, as part of its bicentennial celebration. Since its inception, the Franklin Institute Awards Program has honored the most influential scientists, engineers, and inventors who have significantly advanced science and technology. It is one of the oldest comprehensive science awards in the world.

The 2024 honorees include Institute Professor and Vice Provost for Faculty Paula T. Hammond ’84 PhD ’93; Associate Professor Gabriela S. Schlau-Cohen; Research Affiliate Robert Metcalfe ’69; Mary Boyce SM ’84, PhD ’87; and Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94. All 2024 Franklin Institute Award Laureates will be celebrated in a ceremony on April 18 at the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial of the Franklin Institute.

Paula Hammond was awarded the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, one of the oldest comprehensive science awards in the world. The award cites her “innovative methods to create novel materials one molecular layer at a time and for applying these materials to areas ranging from drug delivery to energy storage.” Hammond’s techniques for creating thin polymer films and other materials using layer-by-layer assembly is groundbreaking. They can be used to build polymers with highly controlled architectures by alternately exposing a surface to positively and negatively charged particles. Materials can then be designed for many different applications, including drug delivery, regenerative medicine, noninvasive imaging, and battery technologies. Hammond is the recipient of MIT’s 2023-24 Killian Award and, in 2021, was named an Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty honor. Hammond is one of only 25 people who have been elected to all three U.S. National Academies — Engineering, Science, and Medicine.

Gabriela Schlau-Cohen earned the Benjamin Franklin NextGen Award for “illuminating the fundamental chemical processes that protect plants from sun damage, uncovering novel approaches to increasing crop yields.” Schlau-Cohen combines tools from chemistry, optics, biology, and microscopy to develop new approaches to probe dynamics. Her group focuses on dynamics in membrane proteins, particularly photosynthetic light-harvesting systems that are of interest for sustainable energy applications. Following a postdoc at Stanford University, Schlau-Cohen joined the Department of Chemistry faculty in 2015. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical physics from Brown University in 2003 followed by a PhD in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley.

Robert Metcalfe ’69, a research affiliate of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, won the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for “his pioneering role in the design, development, and commercialization of Ethernet, an interface for networking and file sharing between computers.” MetCalfe is a graduate of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and is a former president of the MIT Alumni Association.

Mary Boyce SM ’84, PhD ’87 won the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering for “transformative contributions to our understanding of the physical behavior of polymers, materials made of long chains of molecules, leading to innovative product development of rubber and other soft materials.” A longtime MIT faculty member and former head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boyce is currently a professor of mechanical engineering and provost emerita of Columbia University.

Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, a graduate of MIT’s Department of EECS and the current president, CEO, and chair of AMD, won the Bower Award for Business Leadership for “her transformational leadership of AMD, a leader in high-performance and adaptive computing and one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in the world.”

Switch Successor Targeting March 2025, According To New Report

Japanese outlet Nikkei is reporting that the Switch successor, or “Switch 2” as it’s been dubbed colloquially within the games industry, is targeting a March 2025 launch, according to VideoGamesChronicle. This report follows earlier reporting from VGC and other outlets like Eurogamer that Nintendo’s next console was originally targeting a 2024 launch before being pushed internally to the first quarter of 2025, which lines up with Nikkei’s latest reporting.

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VGC reports that Nikkei writes, “Priority was given to ensure the initial inventory of the successor console and a lineup of software titles at the time of its launch” to curb the possibility of a stock shortage similar to what the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S experienced back in 2020. Following previous reports, Nikkei also writes that Nintendo’s next console will be a hybrid home console-portable device like the Switch with a larger screen.

Finally, Nikkei writes the internal target is March 2025 but that the Switch 2 could slip beyond that depending on manufacturing and the software available for the console’s launch at that time, according to VGC. If it does launch in March of next year, it’d follow in the Switch’s footsteps, which launched in March of 2017.

It’s important to note that all of this should be taken with a grain of salt as these delays remain internal for the time being. The Switch’s successor hasn’t even been publicly revealed yet, so there’s no telling when to expect it officially. In the meantime, though, read about how Nintendo reportedly demoed the Switch successor to developers at Gamescom last year.

[Source: Nikkei via VideoGamesChronicle]

Do you think March of next year is a good time for a new Nintendo console? Let us know in the comments below!

Reynatis, That Cool Looking Action Game Shown During Last Week’s Japanese Nintendo Direct, Hits The States This Fall

During last week’s Nintendo Direct: Partner Showcase, we learned Grounded and Pentiment, two Xbox titles, are coming to Switch, Disney Epic Mickey was getting the remaster treatment, Penny’s Big Breakaway is now available, and more. You can check out our full rundown of everything announced during the Partner Showcase here. However, Reynatis, a really cool-looking action game set in a modern-day Tokyo, was not shown.

It appeared during the Japanese version of the Partner Showcase, though, and the game quickly picked up steam online, thanks to its cool visual style, over-the-top action, and music by Final Fantasy XV composer Yoko Shimomura. Despite its absence on the English version of the Partner Showcase, we now know Reynatis is coming West later this year.

Specifically, it’s due out this fall on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC via Steam, as reported by Gematsu.

Check out the Reynatis reveal trailer for yourself below for a glimpse at what to expect:

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“Fantasy meets reality in Shibuya, Tokyo, where magic is something to be feared,” the game’s description on Steam reads. “In this action RPG, a young wizard seeks freedom through strength, and an officer seeks to control magic and restore order. When their paths cross, a darkness that will transform the world descends.”

Elsewhere on Steam, developer Furyu Corporation and publisher NIS America write that Reynatis is set in 2024, and the Criminal Magic Response Act is an order that bars citizens from going out at night – few enforce the rule though.

“Marin Kirizumi is a wizard who grew up oppressed by others due to his magic,” the game’s description reads. “‘If you become the strongest, you’ll be set free.’ Following these words left by his father, he arrives in Shibuya at night.

“When Sari Nishijima discovered her magic, she decided to use her powers to maintain order. She follows her own sense of justice to protect Shibuya from forces with dangerous ideals and illegal drugs that turn people into monsters. Marin, who seeks liberation. Sari, who treats the oppression of wizards as justice. The story of Reynatis begins when the two meet in Shibuya, a place where cultures and ideas mix.”

Reynatis is due out this fall on PS5, PS4, Switch, and PC. It will support Japanese audio with English text.

[Source: Gematsu]

What do you think of Raynatis? Let us know in the comments below!

Until Dawn, Little Nightmares III Developer Supermassive Games Is Laying Off 90 Employees

Supermassive Games, the developer behind Until Dawn, The Quarry, and the upcoming Little Nightmares III, is laying off roughly 90 employees, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The publication reports that 150 staff members at the British studio were informed today they are “at risk” of being laid off in accordance with U.K. labor laws that require companies to give notice ahead of layoffs.

Shortly after Bloomberg’s report went live, the studio tweeted the following statement:

It’s no secret that the games industry is currently facing significant challenges, and unfortunately we aren’t immune to this.

After much deliberation and with deep regret, we are therefore undertaking a reorganization of Supermassive Games. As a result, we are entering into a period of consultation, which we anticipate will result in the loss of some of our colleagues.

This is not a decision that’s been taken lightly, with many efforts made to avoid this outcome.

We are all too aware of how unsettling and difficult this process is going to be for all our employees and will be working closely with all those involved to ensure the process is conducted as respectfully and compassionately as possible.

We’re committed to focusing our efforts on our core strength and upcoming titles to ensure the continued sustainability of the company.”

Bloomberg reports that Supermassive is made up of 300 employees, meaning laying off 90 people would equal a roughly 30 percent reduction in staff. Despite developing PlayStation exclusives like Until Dawn, Supermassive is part of Nordisk Games.

Last month, PlayStation announced that an Until Dawn remake is coming to PS5 and PC later this year, although UK developer Ballistic Moon is the primary team working on that. Supermassive is, however, developing Little Nightmares III, which is due out this year.

These job cuts join a string of other disheartening 2024 layoffs, which total more than 5,500 in just the first two months of the year. At the end of January, we learned Embracer Group had canceled a new Deus Ex game in development at Eidos-Montréal and laid off 97 employees in the process. Also in January, Destroy All Humans remake developer Black Forest Games reportedly laid off 50 employees and Microsoft announced it was laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax teams as well. Outriders studio People Can Fly laid off more than 30 employees in January, and League of Legends company Riot Games laid off 530 employees.

We recently learned Lords of the Fallen Publisher CI Games was laying off 10 percent of its staff, that Unity would be laying off 1,800 people by the end of March, and that Twitch had laid off 500 employees.

We also learned that Discord had laid off 170 employees, that layoffs happened at PTW, a support studio that’s worked with companies like Blizzard and Capcom, and that SteamWorld Build company, Thunderful Group, let go of roughly 100 people. Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive also reportedly laid off 45 people, too.

Last year, more than 10,000 people in the games industry or game-adjacent industries were laid off.

In January of last year, Microsoft laid off 10,000 employees amidst its ongoing $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which it completed in October.

Striking Distance Studios, the team behind 2022’s The Callisto Protocol, laid off more than 30 employees in August of 2023. That same month, Mass Effect and Dragon Age developer BioWare laid off 50 employees, including long-time studio veterans. The following month, in September, Immortals of Aveum developer Ascendant Studios laid off roughly 45% of its staff, and Fortnite developer Epic Games laid off 830 employees.

In October of last year, The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog laid off at least 25 employees, and Telltale Games also underwent layoffs, although an actual number of affected employees has not yet been revealed. Dreams developer Media Molecule laid off 20 employees in late October.

In November, Amazon Games laid off 180 staff members, Ubisoft laid off more than 100 employees, Bungie laid off roughly 100 developers, and 505 Games’ parent company, Digital Bros, laid off 30% of its staff.

In December, Embracer Group closed its reformed TimeSplitters studio, Free Radical Design, and earlier in the year, Embracer closed Saints Row developer Volition Games, a studio with more than 30 years of development history. A few weeks before the winter holidays, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering owner Hasbro laid off 1,100 employees.

The games industry will surely feel the effects of such horrific layoffs for years to come. The hearts of the Game Informer staff are with everyone who’s been affected by layoffs or closures.

[Source: Bloomberg]

How The Developers Of Unicorn Overlord Are Making A Return To Fantasy

Vanillaware makes excellent games, from GrimGrimoire to Odin Sphere to Dragon’s Crown. However, it wasn’t until its 2019 release, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, that the developer’s name became synonymous with “you should play this team’s games.” It’s hard to tell what, exactly, made 13 Sentinels the breakout title for Vanillaware, shipping more than 1 million copies worldwide as of August last year, making it the studio’s best-selling title. The easy answer is probably its beloved story, both in how it plays out and how it’s infused into the game’s real-time strategy mech combat.

Publisher Atlus and Vanillaware released it in 2019, so when the team announced its latest title, Unicorn Overlord, last September, it was easy to conclude that this was the studio’s next big focus. And it is, but curiously, I learned in an exclusive preview of the game Vanillaware conceived it during the development of 13 Sentinels, with its creation handled in parallel with that game, albeit with a different team and director.

How The Developers Of Unicorn Overlord Are Making A Return To Fantasy

“[It] was not a change of genre, but rather a team effort to create a worldview that was originally based on the premise of a fantasy,” lead game designer Wataru Nakanishi tells me over email after I watch roughly an hour of live Unicorn Overlord gameplay. Notably, the game isn’t a response to the sci-fi modern action of 13 Sentinels as I expected; the team wanted to make another fantasy game, which checks out considering that’s where its roots lie, dating back to its debut game, 2007’s GrimGrimoire. Looking at Vanillaware’s history, it’s 13 Sentinels that stands out as the oddball fit, with most of the studio’s games falling into the fantasy camp.

Nakanishi says Unicorn Overlord is Vanillaware’s spin on the tactical fantasy RPG, and that’s immediately clear in the opening hour. Protagonist Alain is around 10 years old in the prologue, when he and the Queen of Cornia, Ilenia, witness a rebellion at the hands of one of her trusted generals. Worried about the kingdom’s fate and bloodline, her most trusted knight, Josef, is tasked with spiriting the prince away to safety. The main game’s story picks up 10 years later; Crown Prince Alain is around 20 years old, living on the island of Palevia, where he’s grown up since the rebellion. While sparring with his friend Lex, a ship flying Zenoiran colors sails into the harbor and it’s clear they mean no good.

Immediately, I’m in love with the score, which oscillates between medieval choruses and an orchestral mix of horns, winds, and other instruments typical of the genre. Nakanishi tells me the independent music group Basiscape, who scored 13 Sentinels under the direction of composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, is returning to create the musical soundscape of Unicorn Overlord, this time under Mitsuhiro Kaneda, who also worked on 13 Sentinels’ score. Nakanishi says Kaneda’s score has a “newness that befits the name, ‘Rebirth of tactical fantasy RPGs,’” which is something the team mentions various times when discussing the game. The statement is a bold one and, taken at face value, almost arrogant. But Nakanishi clears it up humbly.

“[That statement] reflects the fact that this is a challenging title created in the tactical RPG genre, which we have always loved, with new challenges, and that we want to convey this to our players in a straightforward and correct manner,” he says. “We are making various efforts to make the game accessible to people who have never played this genre before.”

After my hour of gameplay, that’s a somewhat tall order. The genre is historically one of the more complex to get into, and my initial impression of Unicorn Overlord is that newcomers might find it overwhelming, perhaps even odd at first. You don’t necessarily control the individual fights that happen in combat encounters – instead, you determine where you want to move on the “tactical battle map.” Bumping into an enemy makes battle inevitable, but before said battle takes place, you can essentially look into the future to see how it plays out by checking unit formation, which skills they have set up, and more.

After all checks are in place, and after checking with a statistic measure that tells you how they might fair in battle in a Fire Emblem-esque way, the battle begins; you do not participate but instead, watch what happens. Success comes from active skills, which use points regenerated between skirmishes, and passive skills, which trigger in combat when certain conditions are met. For example, one passive skill I see heals a unit’s character at the end of a battle, a critical tool as health does not regenerate between bouts.

Back on the beautifully illustrated tactical battle map, I watch a complete battle stage, which features its own win-loss conditions, play out. The player first interacts with the Command Post, where they deploy units based on Valor points they have available to spend. Vanillaware tells me liberating towns and fortresses and defeating enemies earns more of these. You can also spend these points on special Valor Skills, which apply unique buffs inside and outside combat. From here, Unicorn Overlord plays almost like a board game, where you must tactically place your various units on the map – each comprised of different characters and companions with their own use case – and move them accordingly.

Admittedly, it’s all quite confusing as I’m thrown directly hands-off into the mix, but I do witness many tutorial messages and screens we skip over for the sake of time. Nakanishi assures me Unicorn Overlord features a lot of in-game support, including “tutorials, recommended composition examples, automatic equipment, strategy settings, and switching difficulty levels so that as many people as possible can enjoy the most exciting parts of the game […] without becoming overwhelmed.”

Once an encounter begins, either by your own unit running into an enemy or vice versa, an initiative order determines when combatants attack, and the entire battle continues until the enemy (or you) are defeated or all combatants run out of action points. In the latter scenario, the side with the most health remaining claims victory. The more of it I see, the more I appreciate its cinematic approach – I, the player, set the pieces onto the board and then watch the strategic planning (or chaos) pay off, hopefully in a win. Nakanishi says the draw of this type of gameplay is immersion.

“[In] the case of tactical RPGs, the combination of a strategy element, in which you have a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and make precise, step-by-step moves, and the role-playing element, in which you become attached to the characters living in the world and fight alongside them, is a game genre that offers the greatest sense of immersion,” he says. “This is the main attraction, and the team places great importance on this kind of game experience.”

After a few fights in this preliminary stage early in the game’s opening hours, we liberate a Palevian town under Zenoira, switching it from a red flag to our blue flag, picking up two Valor points in the process. This newly liberated town is now a base from which we can deploy units. We advance through the stage, using Josef to cover extra ground as movement takes place in real time, and he moves the fastest, while swapping allies in and out of various units once two units are within the radius of a special green circle on the tactical battle map. Vanillaware says it’s essential to take advantage of this feature, as damaged allies might need to fall back while more adept ones, like a companion that uses magic (or magick as it’s called in the game), or another with high stamina indicated by the number on an on-screen shield, head to the front of a unit’s pack.

Within each unit is a player-created makeup of classes, too, which might determine how you advance them on the tactical battle map. Horseback cavalry are excellent against Infantry, a standard soldier, as are Knights. With their great shield, Hoplite classes offer high defense. They are suitable for protecting an area or unit, so countering with a high agility class is extra important when facing one.

Outside of fights, players can use items to heal or buff companions, change a loadout and equipment, and more. And all of this – the combat of Unicorn Overlord – is just one half of the experience, with the other being exploration.

“On the overworld, big goals are always clearly presented, and players decide on their own how to achieve them,” Nakanishi says. “Facilities such as towns and forts around the world are controlled by the main enemy called the New Zenoiran Empire, and while exploring the overworld, you can recruit allies, procure equipment and items, and make preparations while liberating towns. Various quests and events will occur along the way, but it is up to the player to decide in what order and how to complete them, so depending on the situation of the troops […], you may sometimes have to avoid them or postpone them.”

On that note, Vanillaware expects players to roll credits at 50 hours, but completionists can expect upwards of 100.

I’m not entirely sold on the combat and exploration, but that’s because I haven’t yet played it for myself. It looks interesting from a mechanical standpoint, and it’s certainly unique. If Vanillaware has made one thing clear in its portfolio, it’s that the studio has little regard for trends; it marches to the beat of its own drum within familiar genres, even if they’re niche.

“Games that we find interesting from the bottom of our hearts tend to be from genres that are considered niche,” Nakanishi says. “So rather than intentionally choosing those genres, it’s because we just happen to like them. However, no matter the genre, it is meaningless if the customers who purchase it cannot find it interesting, so we always focus on ensuring the game we’re producing is understandable and enjoyable to play.”

Niche or not, Unicorn Overlord is a treat for the eyes. Classic SNES RPGs of yesteryear inspire Vanillaware this time around, Nakanishi tells me, and the studio wants Unicorn Overlord to look like one of those games but on a modern platform, complete with a full suite of English or Japanese voice over. The art design, born from a single piece of concept art, is meant to evoke that period’s games, somewhere between retro and painterly. That piece of art is also the game’s title screen. “Based on this illustration, the character designs for battle were decided, battle backgrounds were drawn, and the overall art style came together,” he adds.

All of this only scratches the surface of what I saw in that first hour of Unicorn Overlord gameplay. There’s plenty of story crammed into it – a story not worth spoiling here since the narrative is a big draw for many Vanillaware fans – and an intense number of menus RPG fans will surely love digging into the minutiae of. There are more than 60 companions to recruit freely throughout the campaign, depending on how you tackle the game’s more open nature of progression, and lots of great music and visuals to accompany it if what I’ve already heard and seen is any indication. In short, there’s still a lot of game to uncover in Unicorn Overlord, and even after an hour and a lengthy interview, it feels as if I’ve barely wrapped my head around this tactical fantasy RPG experience. With little time to go until its release next month, I’m excited to see what Vanillaware can do with its return to the fantasy genre, where its history began almost two decades ago.

This article originally appeared in Issue 363 of Game Informer

EA Lays Off 670 Employees, Cancels Respawn’s Star Wars FPS

Electronic Arts is laying off 5 percent of its workforce, which accounts for roughly 670 employees. CEO Andrew Wilson issued a company-wide letter informing staff of the publisher’s restructuring, which will mean sunsetting some live service titles and ceasing the development of certain projects.

In his letter, Wilson states that EA is restructuring to become more streamlined in order to deliver “deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere that build community, shape culture, and grow fandom.” To that end, the company will be moving away from licensed IPs and shutting down certain titles to shift its development resources.

“We are also sunsetting games and moving away from the development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry,” says Wilson in the letter. “This greater focus allows us to drive creativity, accelerate innovation, and double down on our biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities — to deliver the entertainment players want today and tomorrow.”

Wilson then speaks to the extent of the layoffs and how it will work with affected employees:

“While not every team will be impacted, this is the hardest part of these changes, and we have deeply considered every option to try and limit impacts to our teams. Our primary goal is to provide team members with opportunities to find new roles and paths to transition onto other projects. Where that’s not possible, we will support and work with each colleague with the utmost attention, care, and respect.”

He states that this restructuring is expected to be completed by early next quarter. Last March, EA cut 6 percent of its global workforce. Studios such as Bioware and Respawn were also hit with internal layoffs.

EA Lays Off 670 Employees, Cancels Respawn’s Star Wars FPS

As reported by Video Games Chronicle, one confirmed casualty of this change is Respawn’s upcoming Stars Wars first-person shooter. First announced to be in development in January 2022, the unnamed game was led by Medal of Honor co-creator and Star Wars Battlefront veteran Peter Hirschmann. Recent rumors suggested that it may have starred a Mandalorian bounty hunter.

In a statement to VGC, EA Entertainment president Laura Miele said in part, “It’s always hard to walk away from a project, and this decision is not a reflection of the team’s talent, tenacity, or passion they have for the game. Giving fans the next installments of the iconic franchises they want is the definition of blockbuster storytelling and the right place to focus.”

EA’s other upcoming licensed projects include Motive’s Iron Man and Cliffhanger’s Black Panther. An EA representative confirmed to GameIndustry.biz that both projects are still in development.

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These job cuts join a string of other disheartening 2024 layoffs, which now total more than 8,000 in just the first two months of the year. PlayStation is laying off 900 employees across Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, and more, closing down London Studio in the process, too. The day before, Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games announced it is laying off 90 employees.

At the end of January, we learned Embracer Group had canceled a new Deus Ex game in development at Eidos-Montréal and laid off 97 employees in the process. Also in January, Destroy All Humans remake developer Black Forest Games reportedly laid off 50 employees and Microsoft announced it was laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax teams as well. Outriders studio People Can Fly laid off more than 30 employees in January, and League of Legends company Riot Games laid off 530 employees.

Last year, more than 10,000 people in the games industry or game-adjacent industries were laid off.

Study: Global deforestation leads to more mercury pollution

About 10 percent of human-made mercury emissions into the atmosphere each year are the result of global deforestation, according to a new MIT study.

The world’s vegetation, from the Amazon rainforest to the savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa, acts as a sink that removes the toxic pollutant from the air. However, if the current rate of deforestation remains unchanged or accelerates, the researchers estimate that net mercury emissions will keep increasing.

“We’ve been overlooking a significant source of mercury, especially in tropical regions,” says Ari Feinberg, a former postdoc in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and lead author of the study.

The researchers’ model shows that the Amazon rainforest plays a particularly important role as a mercury sink, contributing about 30 percent of the global land sink. Curbing Amazon deforestation could thus have a substantial impact on reducing mercury pollution.

The team also estimates that global reforestation efforts could increase annual mercury uptake by about 5 percent. While this is significant, the researchers emphasize that reforestation alone should not be a substitute for worldwide pollution control efforts.

“Countries have put a lot of effort into reducing mercury emissions, especially northern industrialized countries, and for very good reason. But 10 percent of the global anthropogenic source is substantial, and there is a potential for that to be even greater in the future. [Addressing these deforestation-related emissions] needs to be part of the solution,” says senior author Noelle Selin, a professor in IDSS and MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Feinberg and Selin are joined on the paper by co-authors Martin Jiskra, a former Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow at the University of Basel; Pasquale Borrelli, a professor at Roma Tre University in Italy; and Jagannath Biswakarma, a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. The paper appears today in Environmental Science and Technology.

Modeling mercury

Over the past few decades, scientists have generally focused on studying deforestation as a source of global carbon dioxide emissions. Mercury, a trace element, hasn’t received the same attention, partly because the terrestrial biosphere’s role in the global mercury cycle has only recently been better quantified.

Plant leaves take up mercury from the atmosphere, in a similar way as they take up carbon dioxide. But unlike carbon dioxide, mercury doesn’t play an essential biological function for plants. Mercury largely stays within a leaf until it falls to the forest floor, where the mercury is absorbed by the soil.

Mercury becomes a serious concern for humans if it ends up in water bodies, where it can become methylated by microorganisms. Methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin, can be taken up by fish and bioaccumulated through the food chain. This can lead to risky levels of methylmercury in the fish humans eat.

“In soils, mercury is much more tightly bound than it would be if it were deposited in the ocean. The forests are doing a sort of ecosystem service, in that they are sequestering mercury for longer timescales,” says Feinberg, who is now a postdoc in the Blas Cabrera Institute of Physical Chemistry in Spain.

In this way, forests reduce the amount of toxic methylmercury in oceans.

Many studies of mercury focus on industrial sources, like burning fossil fuels, small-scale gold mining, and metal smelting. A global treaty, the 2013 Minamata Convention, calls on nations to reduce human-made emissions. However, it doesn’t directly consider impacts of deforestation.

The researchers launched their study to fill in that missing piece.

In past work, they had built a model to probe the role vegetation plays in mercury uptake. Using a series of land use change scenarios, they adjusted the model to quantify the role of deforestation.

Evaluating emissions

This chemical transport model tracks mercury from its emissions sources to where it is chemically transformed in the atmosphere and then ultimately to where it is deposited, mainly through rainfall or uptake into forest ecosystems.

They divided the Earth into eight regions and performed simulations to calculate deforestation emissions factors for each, considering elements like type and density of vegetation, mercury content in soils, and historical land use.

However, good data for some regions were hard to come by.

They lacked measurements from tropical Africa or Southeast Asia — two areas that experience heavy deforestation. To get around this gap, they used simpler, offline models to simulate hundreds of scenarios, which helped them improve their estimations of potential uncertainties.

They also developed a new formulation for mercury emissions from soil. This formulation captures the fact that deforestation reduces leaf area, which increases the amount of sunlight that hits the ground and accelerates the outgassing of mercury from soils.

The model divides the world into grid squares, each of which is a few hundred square kilometers. By changing land surface and vegetation parameters in certain squares to represent deforestation and reforestation scenarios, the researchers can capture impacts on the mercury cycle.

Overall, they found that about 200 tons of mercury are emitted to the atmosphere as the result of deforestation, or about 10 percent of total human-made emissions. But in tropical and sub-tropical countries, deforestation emissions represent a higher percentage of total emissions. For example, in Brazil deforestation emissions are 40 percent of total human-made emissions.

In addition, people often light fires to prepare tropical forested areas for agricultural activities, which causes more emissions by releasing mercury stored by vegetation.

“If deforestation was a country, it would be the second highest emitting country, after China, which emits around 500 tons of mercury a year,” Feinberg adds.

And since the Minamata Convention is now addressing primary mercury emissions, scientists can expect deforestation to become a larger fraction of human-made emissions in the future.

“Policies to protect forests or cut them down have unintended effects beyond their target. It is important to consider the fact that these are systems, and they involve human activities, and we need to understand them better in order to actually solve the problems that we know are out there,” Selin says.

By providing this first estimate, the team hopes to inspire more research in this area.

In the future, they want to incorporate more dynamic Earth system models into their analysis, which would enable them to interactively track mercury uptake and better model the timescale of vegetation regrowth.

“This paper represents an important advance in our understanding of global mercury cycling by quantifying a pathway that has long been suggested but not yet quantified. Much of our research to date has focused on primary anthropogenic emissions — those directly resulting from human activity via coal combustion or mercury-gold amalgam burning in artisanal and small-scale gold mining,” says Jackie Gerson, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Michigan State University, who was not involved with this research. “This research shows that deforestation can also result in substantial mercury emissions and needs to be considered both in terms of global mercury models and land management policies. It therefore has the potential to advance our field scientifically as well as to promote policies that reduce mercury emissions via deforestation.

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.