When The Super-talented And The Super-rich Are Super-stupid

Enlarge / Is this an aspirational image for mass shooters? (credit: Activision) The families of multiple victims of the 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde's Robb Elementary School are suing Activision in a California civil court, alleging that the company's Call of Duty games act as a "training camp for mass shooters." The lawsuit (as obtained by Polygon) compares Activision's Call of Duty marketing to the cigarette industry's use of now-barred spokescartoon Joe Camel, putting the gaming company "in the wildly lucrative business of training adolescents to become gunmen." The Call of Duty games "are chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters," the lawsuit alleges, and in Uvalde, the games "knowingly exposed the Shooter to the weapon, conditioned him to see it as the solution to his problems, and trained him how to use it." Meta platforms is also a party to the lawsuit for "explicit, aggressive marketing" of firearms to minors via Instagram.

Enlarge / Processed image of Venus captured by the Akatsuki spacecraft. (credit: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Kevin M. Gill) JAXA, the Japanese space agency, confirmed Wednesday that it has lost communication with its Akatsuki spacecraft in orbit around Venus. In its update, the space agency said it failed to establish communications in late April after the spacecraft had difficulty maintaining its attitude.

A field of sand dunes in the Martian springtime. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona) Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope.

The adventure no one needs this summer is having their car run out of gas — or battery charge for hybrid and electric vehicles. As the state adds more charging stations strategically placed along scenic byways, electric vehicle drivers have more chances to see Colorado scenery. As of February, 65% of the Centennial State’s historic and scenic byways are “electrified.” The Colorado Department of Transportation’s Scenic & Historic Byway Commission announced that 17 of Colorado’s 26 byways have electric charging stations within 100 miles.

EnviroSpark started recruiting as soon as the Supercharger team dissolved. Hours after former Tesla employees started sharing the news that Elon Musk had laid off the company’s Supercharger team, a smaller EV charging company started to reach out to them.

Enlarge / The Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro and the Unistellar Odyssey Pro. (credit: Tim Stevens) It's been 300 years since Galileo and Isaac Newton started fiddling around with lenses and parabolic mirrors to get a better look at the heavens. But if you look at many of the best amateur telescopes today, you'd be forgiven for thinking they haven't progressed much since. Though components have certainly improved, the basic combination of mirrors and lenses is more or less the same.