William Green named director of MIT Energy Initiative

William Green named director of MIT Energy Initiative

MIT professor William H. Green has been named director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

In appointing Green, then-MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber highlighted his expertise in chemical kinetics — the understanding of the rates of chemical reactions — and the work of his research team in reaction kinetics, quantum chemistry, numerical methods, and fuel chemistry, as well as his work performing techno-economic assessments of proposed fuel and vehicle changes and biofuel production options.

“Bill has been an active participant in MITEI; his broad view of energy science and technology will be a major asset and will position him well to contribute to the success of MIT’s exciting new Climate Project,” Zuber wrote in a letter announcing the appointment, which went into effect April 1. 

Green is the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor of Chemical Engineering and previously served as the executive officer of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering from 2012 to 2015. He sees MITEI’s role today as bringing together the voices of engineering, science, industry, and policy to quickly drive the global energy transition.

“MITEI has a very important role in fostering the energy and climate innovations happening at MIT and in building broader consensus, first in the engineering community and then ultimately to start the conversations that will lead to public acceptance and societal consensus,” says Green.

Achieving consensus much more quickly is essential, says Green, who noted that it was during the 1992 Rio Summit that globally we recognized the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, yet almost a quarter-century passed before the Paris Agreement came into force. Eight years after the Paris Agreement, there is still disagreement over how to address this challenge in most sectors of the economy, and much work to be done to translate the Paris pledges into reality.

“Many people feel we’re collectively too slow in dealing with the climate problem,” he says. “It’s very important to keep helping the research community be more effective and faster to provide the solutions that society needs, but we also need to work on being faster at reaching consensus around the good solutions we do have, and supporting them so they’ll actually be economically attractive so that investors can feel safe to invest in them, and to change regulations to make them feasible, when needed.”

With experience in industry, policy, and academia, Green is well positioned to facilitate this acceleration. “I can see the situation from the point of view of a scientist, from the point of view of an engineer, from the point of view of the big companies, from the point of view of a startup company, and from the point of view of a parent concerned about the effects of climate change on the world my children are inheriting,” he says.

Green also intends to extend MITEI’s engagement with a broader range of countries, industries, and economic sectors as MITEI focuses on decarbonization and accelerating the much-needed energy transition worldwide.

Green received a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and a BA in chemistry from Swarthmore College. He joined MIT in 1997. He is the recipient of the AIChE’s R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering and is an inaugural Fellow of the Combustion Institute.

He succeeds Robert Stoner, who served as interim director of MITEI beginning in July 2023, when longtime director Robert C. Armstrong retired after serving in the role for a decade.

Seizing solar’s bright future

Seizing solar’s bright future

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

A Brief Hades II Spoiler-Free Starter Guide

Hades II has launched into Steam Early access, and it’s also Game Informer’s next cover story (which launches on May 14).  Whether you’re a returning fan or a newcomer, it may take a few runs to get your bearings as Hades II sports new progression systems, resources, and new layers to existing mechanics. It can be a lot to dig into, given the game more or less tosses you into the deep end without context for how things work, at least initially. Instead of spending several runs figuring things out, here’s a short, spoiler-free primer explaining some core new features to get you going on the right foot. 

What Are Ashes? 

A Brief Hades II Spoiler-Free Starter Guide

Ashes are a currency used for unlocking Arcana cards. They serve a similar purpose as Darkness from the first game. They often appear as a reward for completing a room, but you can also purchase more from the Wretched Broker’s shop. 

What Are Arcana Cards, Grasp, And Psyche?

These are unlockable character perks found at the Altar of Ashes, located in The Crossroads. Fans can draw a similarity to the Mirror of Night from Hades 1. Examples of Arcana card effects include gaining two health points every time you exit a location or starting each run with 200 gold. Arcana cards require spending a certain amount of Ashes to obtain (and some require an additional resource). Cards consume portions of your Grasp. 

Grasp of the Arcana (or just Grasp for short) is a meter dictating how many Arcana cards a player can have active at once. Every Arcana card consumes a certain number of Grasp bars. If the Grasp meter has 10 bars, then equipping cards that consume 5, 3, and 2 bars would max it out. If you’re a Transistor fan, this system is similar to how managing Functions worked in that game. 

By spending a large amount of Psyche, another currency obtained by completing rooms, you can increase the limit of your Grasp. For example, instead of having only 10 bars, it could have 12 or 16. This way, you can have more cards active or use more powerful cards that consume a larger portion of Grasp. 

What Are The Purple Bones?

This is another resource/currency called Ancient Bones. It’s a reward for completing encounters and is primarily used to purchase resources from the Wretched Broker’s shop. 

How Do I Mine Ore, Fish, And Compel Shades?

During runs, you’ll come across metal ores prompting you to mine. In the first area, Erebus, you’ll find piles of silver crescent moons, for example. Additionally, certain shades prompt you to “compel” them, and you’ll also encounter fishing holes. 

These situations require one of Hades II’s Gathering Tools. Mining ore requires a pickaxe, fishing holes need a respective rod, and compelling shades require a magical tablet. You gain Gathering Tools at the Cauldron, but you’ll still need to trade specific resources to unlock them fully.

How Does The Cauldron Work? 

The Crossroads features a giant cauldron situated in front of Hecate. This is where you’ll bring resources/currencies gathered during runs to perform “incantations,” which are permanent upgrades for The Crossroads and general quality-of-life perks. 

For example, one incantation summons the Wretched Broker, allowing him to permanently set up shop in the Crossroads. Another unlocks the aforementioned Gathering Tools. One incantation even allows you to view the recipes for other incantations in the menu (before unlocking this, you can only view these recipes at the cauldron itself). One particular incantation is called Fated Intervention; without spoiling, prioritize unlocking this one. It likely won’t have an immediate effect, so be patient. 

One incantation that becomes available early (that you should unlock as soon as it does) is called Divination of the Elements. It allows Melinoe to perceive the elemental affinities of Olympian boons. 

What Are Elemental Affinities?

Olympian boons now have one of four elemental properties tied to them: fire, water, air, and earth. After unlocking Divination of the Elements, you’ll see small icons indicating each element on every boon you encounter. Demeter’s frost-based boons are generally (but not always) water types, while Hestia’s tend to be fire. 

The elemental affinity matters because there are now boons that can only be used if you possess enough boons of a certain elemental type. One may require you to have three wind-based boons in exchange for a powerful ability, for example. This adds another layer of strategy to selecting boons, as you’ll be torn between chasing a long-term investment or short-term power gain. 

Hades II is available now in Early Access on Steam and in the Epic Games Store. Be sure to check out our cover story hub below for exclusive Hades II stories and videos throughout the month. 

Cover Reveal – The Making Of Hades II

This month, Hades II graces Game Informer‘s cover. After playing several hours of the Early Access build (which is publicaly available as of today), we traveled to Supergiant Games’ studio in San Francisco to interview several of the core team members – creative director Greg Kasavin, studio director Amir Rao, art director Jen Zee, composer Darren Korb, and voice actor Logan Cunningham – to get the full story of the game’s creation. The cover story reveals why Supergiant decided to create its first sequel, how it chose a new protagonist in Zagreus’ sister, Melinoë, along with her mythological origins, and how the team is changing its approach to early access and the content it has planned for the future. It also features an in-depth breakdown of Hades II’s new features and our impressions of the game so far. 

We want our cover story on Hades II to be a celebration of the game and a peek behind the curtain at Supergiant, with the hope that anyone who reads it will have a more exciting and informed experience when they play the much-anticipated sequel. If you’re a fan of the original game or this new installment, we suspect you’ll read about what we learned and discover even more about what makes the franchise so special.

The stunning cover art is an original piece by Supergiant’s famed artist, Jen Zee. It depicts Melinoë, princess of the Underworld, as her mentor, Hecate, gazes at the moonlit horizon. 

Other features appearing in issue 366 include an interview feature with Digital Eclipse’s Chris Kohler about how the studio conceived its Gold Master Series consisting of The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. Nolan Good discusses the history and continuing legacy of the long-running MMO, Final Fantasy XI. To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, editor-in-chief Matt Miller visited Wizards of the Coast to preview its upcoming set of new rule books aimed at evolving the tabletop game. Wesley LeBlanc flew across the globe to Seoul, South Korea, to get an in-depth look at Nexon’s upcoming free-to-play looter shooter, The First Descendant. For soon-to-be graduating students, cash in that success with your parents using our annual graduation gift guide. In addition, we have previews for titles including Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, The Rogue: Prince of Persia, Monaco 2, and Still Wakes the Deep. 

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ScalaHosting Review: The Best High-performance Host for Your Website?

As a website manager and digital marketer, I’ve had to evaluate diverse hosting providers to find the perfect fit for my client’s websites. And in my experience, I have discovered that it’s rare to find a reliable web host that offers fully managed, robust cloud hosting…

President Sally Kornbluth and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discuss the future of AI

President Sally Kornbluth and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discuss the future of AI

How is the field of artificial intelligence evolving and what does it mean for the future of work, education, and humanity? MIT President Sally Kornbluth and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman covered all that and more in a wide-ranging discussion on MIT’s campus May 2.

The success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language models has helped spur a wave of investment and innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT-3.5 became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history after its release at the end of 2022, with hundreds of millions of people using the tool. Since then, OpenAI has also demonstrated AI-driven image-, audio-, and video-generation products and partnered with Microsoft.

The event, which took place in a packed Kresge Auditorium, captured the excitement of the moment around AI, with an eye toward what’s next.

“I think most of us remember the first time we saw ChatGPT and were like, ‘Oh my god, that is so cool!’” Kornbluth said. “Now we’re trying to figure out what the next generation of all this is going to be.”

For his part, Altman welcomes the high expectations around his company and the field of artificial intelligence more broadly.

“I think it’s awesome that for two weeks, everybody was freaking out about ChatGPT-4, and then by the third week, everyone was like, ‘Come on, where’s GPT-5?’” Altman said. “I think that says something legitimately great about human expectation and striving and why we all have to [be working to] make things better.”

The problems with AI

Early on in their discussion, Kornbluth and Altman discussed the many ethical dilemmas posed by AI.

“I think we’ve made surprisingly good progress around how to align a system around a set of values,” Altman said. “As much as people like to say ‘You can’t use these things because they’re spewing toxic waste all the time,’ GPT-4 behaves kind of the way you want it to, and we’re able to get it to follow a given set of values, not perfectly well, but better than I expected by this point.”

Altman also pointed out that people don’t agree on exactly how an AI system should behave in many situations, complicating efforts to create a universal code of conduct.

“How do we decide what values a system should have?” Altman asked. “How do we decide what a system should do? How much does society define boundaries versus trusting the user with these tools? Not everyone will use them the way we like, but that’s just kind of the case with tools. I think it’s important to give people a lot of control … but there are some things a system just shouldn’t do, and we’ll have to collectively negotiate what those are.”

Kornbluth agreed doing things like eradicating bias in AI systems will be difficult.

“It’s interesting to think about whether or not we can make models less biased than we are as human beings,” she said.

Kornbluth also brought up privacy concerns associated with the vast amounts of data needed to train today’s large language models. Altman said society has been grappling with those concerns since the dawn of the internet, but AI is making such considerations more complex and higher-stakes. He also sees entirely new questions raised by the prospect of powerful AI systems.

“How are we going to navigate the privacy versus utility versus safety tradeoffs?” Altman asked. “Where we all individually decide to set those tradeoffs, and the advantages that will be possible if someone lets the system be trained on their entire life, is a new thing for society to navigate. I don’t know what the answers will be.”

For both privacy and energy consumption concerns surrounding AI, Altman said he believes progress in future versions of AI models will help.

“What we want out of GPT-5 or 6 or whatever is for it to be the best reasoning engine possible,” Altman said. “It is true that right now, the only way we’re able to do that is by training it on tons and tons of data. In that process, it’s learning something about how to do very, very limited reasoning or cognition or whatever you want to call it. But the fact that it can memorize data, or the fact that it’s storing data at all in its parameter space, I think we’ll look back and say, ‘That was kind of a weird waste of resources.’ I assume at some point, we’ll figure out how to separate the reasoning engine from the need for tons of data or storing the data in [the model], and be able to treat them as separate things.”

Kornbluth also asked about how AI might lead to job displacement.

“One of the things that annoys me most about people who work on AI is when they stand up with a straight face and say, ‘This will never cause any job elimination. This is just an additive thing. This is just all going to be great,’” Altman said. “This is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, and this is going to change the way that a lot of current jobs function, and this is going to create entirely new jobs. That always happens with technology.”

The promise of AI

Altman believes progress in AI will make grappling with all of the field’s current problems worth it.

“If we spent 1 percent of the world’s electricity training a powerful AI, and that AI helped us figure out how to get to non-carbon-based energy or make deep carbon capture better, that would be a massive win,” Altman said.

He also said the application of AI he’s most interested in is scientific discovery.

“I believe [scientific discovery] is the core engine of human progress and that it is the only way we drive sustainable economic growth,” Altman said. “People aren’t content with GPT-4. They want things to get better. Everyone wants life more and better and faster, and science is how we get there.”

Kornbluth also asked Altman for his advice for students thinking about their careers. He urged students not to limit themselves.

“The most important lesson to learn early on in your career is that you can kind of figure anything out, and no one has all of the answers when they start out,” Altman said. “You just sort of stumble your way through, have a fast iteration speed, and try to drift toward the most interesting problems to you, and be around the most impressive people and have this trust that you’ll successfully iterate to the right thing. … You can do more than you think, faster than you think.”

The advice was part of a broader message Altman had about staying optimistic and working to create a better future.

“The way we are teaching our young people that the world is totally screwed and that it’s hopeless to try to solve problems, that all we can do is sit in our bedrooms in the dark and think about how awful we are, is a really deeply unproductive streak,” Altman said. “I hope MIT is different than a lot of other college campuses. I assume it is. But you all need to make it part of your life mission to fight against this. Prosperity, abundance, a better life next year, a better life for our children. That is the only path forward. That is the only way to have a functioning society … and the anti-progress streak, the anti ‘people deserve a great life’ streak, is something I hope you all fight against.”

PlayStation Walks Back Helldivers 2 Changes, PSN Account Linking No Longer Required

Update, 5/6/2024:

PlayStation will not be requiring Helldivers 2 players to link their Steam accounts to PlayStation Network accounts following widespread backlash from the game’s community. This follows days of turmoil amongst players, leading to Helldivers 2 on Steam dropping from a “Mostly Positive”-rated game to “Mixed” for all reviews and “Mostly Negative” for recent reviews. Even the first Helldivers started receiving bad reviews as a result of this, according to developer Arrowhead Game Studios’ CEO Johaan Pilestedt. 

“Helldivers fans – we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update,” a post made today on X (formerly Twitter) reads. “The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward. 

“We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans.” 

Following this news, Pilestedt took to X to thank PlayStation for the change while noting how impressed they are with the Helldivers 2 community. 

With this change not moving forward, the Helldivers 2 community can hopefully return to killing bugs and automatons in the name of democracy, with no need for linked accounts or review bombing. 

The original story continues below…

Original story, 5/3/2024:

Developer Arrowhead Game Studios and Sony Interactive Entertainment have announced that Helldivers 2 on Steam will soon require a PlayStation Network account to play. All new players from May 30 will have to link their Steam account to a PSN account, and all current players will have to do so by June 4. 

Up until this point, a PSN account was not required to play Helldivers 2 on PC via Steam, and with the sudden switch-up, players have taken to the game’s Steam reviews to express their frustration. Admittedly, the game’s rating is still “Very Positive,” with roughly 80% of user reviews falling into this category, but that 80% is lower than it has been in the weeks prior. And now, if you look at the game’s recent reviews, you’ll find plenty of negative ratings over the required PSN account change. 

PlayStation Walks Back Helldivers 2 Changes, PSN Account Linking No Longer Required

SIE says due to “technical issues at the launch of Helldivers 2, we allowed the linking requirements for Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network account to be temporarily optional. That grace period will now expire.” That expiration begins on May 6 for new players and June 4 for current players. 

While frustration is understood, it’s important to note a PlayStation console is not required to create a PSN account – creating one is free and can be done online, no PlayStation 5 required. SIE encourages players to do so ahead of the June 4 change. 

“We understand that while this may be an inconvenience to some of you, this step will help us continue to build a community that you are all proud to be a part of,” the announcement reads. 

For more, read about the Democratic Detonation premium Warbond that drops into Helldivers 2 this week, and then read about how the latest Helldivers 2 update increased the level cap, added blizzards and sandstorms, and more. Check out Game Informer’s Helldivers 2 review to find out why we think it’s a must-play game. 

What do you think about these changes? Let us know in the comments below!

PSN Account Required For Ghost Of Tsushima’s Multiplayer Mode On PC, But Not Single-Player Story

PSN Account Required For Ghost Of Tsushima’s Multiplayer Mode On PC, But Not Single-Player Story

Ghost of Tsushima, the hit 2020 PlayStation-exclusive samurai game, rides onto PC on May 16, and ahead of the game’s launch there, developer Sucker Punch Productions has revealed players will not need a PlayStation Network account to play through the game’s single-player story mode, as reported by VideoGamesChronicle. However, a PSN account will be required to play through Ghost of Tsushima’s multiplayer Legends mode, or if you want to use the new PlayStation PC overlay to acquire trophies and more. 

This follows news from last week where PlayStation announced (and later walked back) that Helldivers 2 players will soon be required to link a PSN account to their Steam account, leading to widespread anger in the game’s community. It seems Sucker Punch is looking to get ahead of this by revealing its PSN plans ahead of the game’s launch in 10 days. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, it’s a standalone multiplayer experience that allows you and up to three other players to fight enemies in special missions, defeat waves of foes, and complete raids. A PSN account will be required to play Legends, but if you want to play through the game’s story (and Iki Island expansion), you won’t need one. 

Ghost of Tsushima hit PlayStation 4 on July 17, 2020, before launching on PlayStation 5 with a Director’s Cut on August 20, 2021. This is the version of the game hitting PC in 10 days on May 16, 2024.

For more about the game, read Game Informer’s Ghost of Tsushima review, and then read about why the Director’s Cut of Ghost of Tsushima is a must-play for fans. 

[Source: VideoGamesChronicle]

Are you going to play Ghost of Tsushima on PC? Let us know in the comments below!

MIT astronomers observe elusive stellar light surrounding ancient quasars

MIT astronomers observe elusive stellar light surrounding ancient quasars

MIT astronomers have observed the elusive starlight surrounding some of the earliest quasars in the universe. The distant signals, which trace back more than 13 billion years to the universe’s infancy, are revealing clues to how the very first black holes and galaxies evolved.

Quasars are the blazing centers of active galaxies, which host an insatiable supermassive black hole at their core. Most galaxies host a central black hole that may occasionally feast on gas and stellar debris, generating a brief burst of light in the form of a glowing ring as material swirls in toward the black hole.

Quasars, by contrast, can consume enormous amounts of matter over much longer stretches of time, generating an extremely bright and long-lasting ring — so bright, in fact, that quasars are among the most luminous objects in the universe.

Because they are so bright, quasars outshine the rest of the galaxy in which they reside. But the MIT team was able for the first time to observe the much fainter light from stars in the host galaxies of three ancient quasars.

Based on this elusive stellar light, the researchers estimated the mass of each host galaxy, compared to the mass of its central supermassive black hole. They found that for these quasars, the central black holes were much more massive relative to their host galaxies, compared to their modern counterparts.

The findings, published today in the Astrophysical Journal, may shed light on how the earliest supermassive black holes became so massive despite having a relatively short amount of cosmic time in which to grow. In particular, those earliest monster black holes may have sprouted from more massive “seeds” than more modern black holes did.

“After the universe came into existence, there were seed black holes that then consumed material and grew in a very short time,” says study author Minghao Yue, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “One of the big questions is to understand how those monster black holes could grow so big, so fast.”

“These black holes are billions of times more massive than the sun, at a time when the universe is still in its infancy,” says study author Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “Our results imply that in the early universe, supermassive black holes might have gained their mass before their host galaxies did, and the initial black hole seeds could have been more massive than today.”

Eilers’ and Yue’s co-authors include MIT Kavli Director Robert Simcoe, MIT Hubble Fellow and postdoc Rohan Naidu, and collaborators in Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and at North Carolina State University.

Dazzling cores

A quasar’s extreme luminosity has been obvious since astronomers first discovered the objects in the 1960s. They assumed then that the quasar’s light stemmed from a single, star-like “point source.” Scientists designated the objects “quasars,” as a portmanteau of a “quasi-stellar” object. Since those first observations, scientists have realized that quasars are in fact not stellar in origin but emanate from the accretion of intensely powerful and persistent supermassive black holes sitting at the center of galaxies that also host stars, which are much fainter in comparison to their dazzling cores.

It’s been extremely challenging to separate the light from a quasar’s central black hole from the light of the host galaxy’s stars. The task is a bit like discerning a field of fireflies around a central, massive searchlight. But in recent years, astronomers have had a much better chance of doing so with the launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has been able to peer farther back in time, and with much higher sensitivity and resolution, than any existing observatory.

In their new study, Yue and Eilers used dedicated time on JWST to observe six known, ancient quasars, intermittently from the fall of 2022 through the following spring. In total, the team collected more than 120 hours of observations of the six distant objects.

“The quasar outshines its host galaxy by orders of magnitude. And previous images were not sharp enough to distinguish what the host galaxy with all its stars looks like,” Yue says. “Now for the first time, we are able to reveal the light from these stars by very carefully modeling JWST’s much sharper images of those quasars.”

A light balance

The team took stock of the imaging data collected by JWST of each of the six distant quasars, which they estimated to be about 13 billion years old. That data included measurements of each quasar’s light in different wavelengths. The researchers fed that data into a model of how much of that light likely comes from a compact “point source,” such as a central black hole’s accretion disk, versus a more diffuse source, such as light from the host galaxy’s surrounding, scattered stars.

Through this modeling, the team teased apart each quasar’s light into two components: light from the central black hole’s luminous disk and light from the host galaxy’s more diffuse stars. The amount of light from both sources is a reflection of their total mass. The researchers estimate that for these quasars, the ratio between the mass of the central black hole and the mass of the host galaxy was about 1:10. This, they realized, was in stark contrast to today’s mass balance of 1:1,000, in which more recently formed black holes are much less massive compared to their host galaxies.

“This tells us something about what grows first: Is it the black hole that grows first, and then the galaxy catches up? Or is the galaxy and its stars that first grow, and they dominate and regulate the black hole’s growth?” Eilers explains. “We see that black holes in the early universe seem to be growing faster than their host galaxies. That is tentative evidence that the initial black hole seeds could have been more massive back then.”

“There must have been some mechanism to make a black hole gain their mass earlier than their host galaxy in those first billion years,” Yue adds. “It’s kind of the first evidence we see for this, which is exciting.”