Tag Archives: annihilation

Review of Avowed: Where Annihilation Collides with the Intricacy of a Rich and Diverse Fantasy World

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eYou need to switch between fantasy realms. Who am I again? What do I do here? Who are all these people? It’s been a golden age for fantasy recently, and inhaling Dragon’s Dogma 2, Metaphor: Rifantagiothe seasons of Dragon House and all seasons of Rebecca Jaros are beginning to blur the details of one kingdom with another, less than a year later.

Avowed’s Fantasy Universe is ready-made from other Eternity Games pillars of developer Obsidian. The lore is dense, the in-game text is rich and the characters are redundant, but thankfully the land between them is fascinating to see the territory of Eora, full of political tensions and cool monsters. I remember valuable names and historical details, but I remember some of my experiences with this game – big enough for a crazy priest to build as a huge automaton inside The view from the rattle road hugging the walls of an underground cave and the secrets of the skin crawling I discovered in the basement of my fellow family homes. The appearance is annihilation and obliv with fungal and floral details that embroidery the structures and people you encounter, embroidering the ever-present tension between organic and rot.

The land in between is destroyed by a disturbing plague that angers people before it is consumed by mushroom-like growth. You, an envoy from the distant centre of the Empire, have been sent to investigate. You are like God, touched immortal, through this strange place, by the sacred voice in your head and the various native companions I felt truly enlightened. You will be guided. Avowed has many choices and self-direction, and it is a game that always respects your intelligence. The characters are interestingly written (densely) and there are many ways to respond to them. That’s far less than the Whedon-esque man/bad guy/joker reaction, as the cries echoes other games force you out of you.

I was hoping for a lively adventure of Obsidian sci-fi comedy The Outer Worlds for 20 hours, but readers, this is it’s not. This game is immeasurable. We spent some time in the opening area of Dawnshore and spent some old time familiarizing ourselves with spider-equipped caves (there are a lot of these, but this is not an Arachnophovictic game). Booty. (This is because I’m stagnant in the main quest, and I forgot about the important information that was displayed once in the text tutorial for about 5 seconds.) Only after 15 hours on this comfortable coastal land, I’d say I met one of my central antagonists. A memorable and terrifying warrior dressed in intricate armor and a mask with smoldering eyes. Then I found myself in a densely rotten jungle swamp filled with amazingly cheerful necromancers, and it big From Dawn Shore. When I arrived at my third new location about 30 hours later, I realized that there was no measure of this world at all.

Unfortunately, AVOWED is better It was 20 hours long. I’ve always been lost on strike from town and have come across something interesting like Skyrim and Fallout. However, there are two stickiness issues that suck fun over time. The first is common to many open world games. Once you arrive at a new location, all the quests and battles are a little difficult. After hours of quests, exploring weapons and armor, and upgrading, it hits a short sweet spot that all feels challenging but conquering. Then you start to feel like everything is too easy and empowering yourself, and it’s like a box-chic movement. This pattern repeatedly eroded my patience in the game.

The second problem is that the combat in Avowed is not as fun as it thinks. A lot of it. There are an impressive number of weapons and techniques, including Grimoire and Staff for spells, giant two-handed axes, bows and pistols, maces, shields, and more. But no matter what you choose, it feels inaccurate and boring, and the likelihood of success is determined by invisible numbers rather than skills. Make sure to take on enemies above your level, and how well you dodge the Great Sword path, or how cleverly you combine your magical effects to freeze undead skeletons. It hardly matters whether to grind it. The key is the quality of the gear. This should be continuously and painstakingly upgraded with random materials from warehouses that are found in every chest or lockbox. I was extremely tired of destroying R2 and firing magic projectiles, hacking tree monsters with my sword, and being so determined that I was missing from hit points. My companions either didn’t feel particularly useful in the fight.

All the diversity and textures in the fiction here are lacking in combat and loot. The end of the most interesting quests is home to unique swords and trinkets, but the fun of exploration is rarely found outside the scenery or characters. If you come across a powerful enemy, you may be losing your strength for the fight. If you find an appetizing, glowing breast in a cave, it can be filled with pennies, chunks of iron, and some fur.

Avowed began as Obsidian’s answer to Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, reminding me of many oblivion and Skyrim in an exciting moment when I tripped over something unexpected in the wild. But it also shares a tendency to repeat those games and a sense of weightlessness in their fight. My first 15 or so hours on the land felt potentially rich, but I was tired of it long before the end.

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Source: www.theguardian.com

Physicists suggest that the capture and annihilation of dark matter could reignite dormant neutron stars

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A team of particle physicists from the University of Melbourne, Australian National University, King’s College London, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has discovered that the energy transferred when dark matter particles collide and annihilate inside a cold neutron star. They calculated that the star could be heated rapidly. Previously, this heating was thought to be irrelevant because this energy transfer takes a very long time, in some cases longer than the age of the universe itself.

An artist’s impression of a neutron star.

A number of recent studies have focused on trapping dark matter in neutron stars as sensitive probes of the interaction of dark matter with ordinary matter.

This could potentially be used to test dark matter interactions in a way that is highly complementary to experiments on Earth, especially since dark matter is accelerated to relativistic speeds during a fall into a neutron star. there is.

In some cases, neutron star technology may be able to probe interactions that are difficult or impossible to observe with direct dark matter detection experiments. These include dark matter, which is too light to leave a detectable signal in nuclear recoil experiments, and interactions where non-relativistic scattering cross sections are momentum suppressed.

It was recently pointed out that an isolated old neutron star near the Sun could be heated by the capture of dark matter, increasing its temperature by 2000 K.

Once older than 10 million years, an isolated neutron star is expected to cool to temperatures below this unless reheated by standard matter accretion or internal heating mechanisms.

As a result, observations of local neutron stars may place severe constraints on dark matter interactions. Importantly, neutron stars with temperatures in this range produce near-infrared radiation that could be detected by future telescopes.

“Our new calculations show for the first time that most of the energy is stored in just a few days,” said Professor Nicole Bell from the University of Melbourne, lead author of the study.

“The search for dark matter is one of science’s greatest detective stories.”

“Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, but we can’t see it.”

“It doesn’t interact with light. It doesn’t absorb, reflect, or emit light.”

“This means that even if we know it exists, we can’t directly observe it with our telescopes.”

“Rather, its attraction to an object that we can see tells us that it must be there.”

“Predicting dark matter theoretically and observing it experimentally are two different things.”

“Earth-based experiments are limited by the technical challenges of building a large enough detector.”

“But neutron stars act as huge natural dark matter detectors, collecting dark matter over astronomically long timescales, so they are a good place to focus our efforts.”

“Neutron stars form when supermassive stars run out of fuel and collapse,” Professor Bell said.

“They have a similar mass to our sun and are squeezed into a sphere just 20km wide. If they got any denser, they would become black holes.”

“Dark matter is the main type of matter in the universe, but it is very difficult to detect because it interacts very weakly with normal matter.”

“In fact, dark matter is so weak that it can pass straight through the Earth and even the Sun.”

“But neutron stars are different. Because neutron stars are so dense, dark matter particles are much more likely to interact with the star.”

“If dark matter particles collide with neutrons inside a star, they lose energy and become trapped.”

“Over time, this will lead to an accumulation of dark matter within the star.”

“We expect this to cause old, cold neutron stars to heat up to a point where they can be observed in the future, or even cause the star to collapse into a black hole,” said the University of Melbourne doctor. candidate Michael Vilgat, co-author of the study.

“If the energy transfer happens quickly enough, the neutron star will heat up.”

“For this to happen, the dark matter would have to collide within the star many times, transferring more and more of the dark matter’s energy until all the energy is stored in the star.”

“Until now it was unknown how long this process takes, because as dark matter particles become less and less energetic, they become less and less likely to interact again.”

“As a result, it was thought that it would take a very long time to transfer all the energy, in some cases longer than the age of the universe.”

Instead, the researchers calculated that 99% of the energy is transferred in just a few days.

“This is good news, because it means dark matter can potentially heat neutron stars to detectable levels,” Birgat said.

“As a result, observations of cold neutron stars will provide important information about the interactions between dark matter and ordinary matter and shed light on the nature of this elusive matter.”

“If we are to understand the ubiquity of dark matter, it is important to use every technology at our disposal to understand what the hidden matter in our universe actually is.” .”

of study Published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

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Nicole F. Bell other. 2024. Thermalization and extinction of dark matter in neutron stars. JCAP 04,006; doi: 10.1088/1475-7516/2024/04/006

Source: www.sci.news