If you sit at the James E. Foy Information Desk in the Melton Student Center at Auburn University, answering the phones on a Wednesday night, you might be responsible for answering a question like this: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?”

A little later, the phone will ring again, and the caller might ask, “Who is the most famous person in the world?” Your next question: “How do you get the Super Serum in Call of Duty?” And finally, when you pick up the phone close to eleven o’clock, quitting time, you might hear someone blow a giant raspberry then hang up.

I spent the better part of two days and nights listening to students answer questions at the Foy desk, where phones have been ringing since 1953, when James E. Foy, Auburn’s then dean of stude

In the early-morning twilight on a cool Friday in April, a half dozen people gathered in a small parking lot in the San Diego neighborhood of City Heights. It was quiet, before the working-class neighborhood had come to life with the bustle of traffic, commuters, and the sounds of children walking to school.

One of the men there, Benjamin Prado, grabbed a bullhorn and a radio. “You all have your walkies, right?” he asked the others as he got into a car. Its rear bumper had a decal reading in bold Spanish, ‘Patrullas Comunitarias’ or ‘Community Patrol’. The group nodded. They agreed to meet back up later that morning before dispersing in several cars that disappeared in the predawn darkness to carry out their mission of patrolling the neighborhood in search of suspicious vehicles and activity.

Prado and his team aren’t law enforcement, private security, or even neighborhood watch, but members of Unión del Barrio (UdB), an independent Chicano political organization. The gro

On February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military arrested de facto head of state Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected politicians and declared a national emergency, giving absolute power to commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The coup marked a dramatic political backslide in a country that had been moving toward democracy for the past decade, and triggered widespread unrest. Peaceful protests erupted nationally, government workers launched a civil disobedience movement, and millions of students boycotted school.

Over the following months, soldiers and police fatally shot hundreds of protesters and jailed thousands of dissidents. In response, young people began heading to the forests and mountains by the thousands, seeking training in combat warfare.

One of them was Rupa, a recent high school graduate. She had been living with her parents in the central city of Pyin Oo Lwin at the time of the coup, waiting for schools to reopen after a year of COVID-19-related closures so she c

Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal—because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change.

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible.

Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people wi

I made a website. It’s called One Million Chessboards. It has one million chessboards on it.

Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards.

What

Well last year I made this game called One Million Checkboxes.

It was a pretty fun time! So I thought I’d do something like this again.

I worked really hard on this one. I hope you like it.

How

This was the most technically challenging thing that I’ve worked on in a long time. I’m going to save a full technical writeup until I see how my decisions pan out, since I think there’s a decent chance I’ll need to make a lot of changes.

But I’ll summarize a few things for you.

• Unlike One Million Checkboxes, I designed this for scale
• The game runs on a single server (!)
• The board is stored fully in-memory; it’s a 2D array of 64 million uint64s
• The backend is written in go. This is my first go project.
• I use a single writer thread, tons of re

Vultures have an image problem. Seen as ugly and associated with death, they are among the least loved animals in the world. But conservationists in Africa are trying to change that.

They’ve launched an effort to save endangered vultures by trying to put a dollar figure on their incredible value.

A recent report by the BirdLife International conservation organization estimated that vultures are worth $1.8 billion a year to certain ecosystems in southern Africa, which might surprise anyone not familiar with the clean-up, pest control and anti-poaching work performed by one of the most efficient scavengers on the planet.

“They are not up there on the pretty scale. And they are not popular. But we know they are very useful,” said Fadzai Matsvimbo, an extinction prevention coordinator at BirdLife International.

For many gamers, this week's release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it's provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven't gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its release.

I'm in that second group. While I've played a fair amount of Skyrim (on platforms ranging from the Xbox 360 to VR headsets) and Starfield, I've never taken the time to go back to the earlier Bethesda Game Studios RPGs. As such, my impressions of Oblivion before this Remaster have been guided by old critical reactions and the many memes calling attention to the game's somewhat janky engine.

Playing through the first few hours of Oblivion Remastered this week, without the benefit of nostalgia, I can definitely see why Oblivion made such an impact on RPG fans in 2006. But I also see all the ways that the game can feel a bit dated after nearly two decade

Najin and Fatu had two horns each—one large at the very front of the snout, and a smaller one behind it. But Fatu’s had been lightly trimmed, blunted, to prevent her from jabbing Najin, who is too elderly now to keep up with Fatu’s play. With two armed guards always by their side, the rhinos looked both inviolate and fragile.

But there is more to the lives of these two rhinos than meets the tourists’ eyes. Behind the scenes, veterinarians, cell biologists, and entrepreneurs are rushing to avert their imminent extinction through gene editing and in vitro fertilization. They believe it is still possible to restore the population of northern white rhinos to the African landscape by using surrogates of a closely related species (the southern white rhinoceroses) impregnated with lab-generated embryos from Fatu.

A partner in the rhino project is Colossal Biosciences, with a valuation of $10 billion, which made headlines this spring with its claim to have “resurrected” dire wolves,

Members of the Indigenous Waorani village of Kiwaro looked skyward as a helicopter hovered over the rainforest canopy in the center of Ecuador and landed in a nearby clearing. Out stepped government officials, there to inform the community about an impending auction of oil rights on their land.

The Ecuadorian government announced earlier, in November 2011 from the capital city Quito, that it would open up for drilling millions of hectares of Amazon rainforest—including the ancestral territories of Waorani communities like Kiwaro.

According to court documents, the officials’ time in the village was brief. There was no detailed explanation of what oil extraction entailed. No discussion about oil operations’ negative impacts. The community’s official leaders, known as pikenani, weren’t present at some meetings. And officials spoke in Spanish, not the community’s Waotetero language. Across the region slated for drilling, dozens of other consultation processes followed similar p

Seventeen years ago, I sat in a nondescript basement office with Sharon from personnel, filling out paperwork for my new job as an attorney for the trial court. Sharon turned to me and told me I needed to take the oath of office.

Startled, I raised my hand and repeated the solemn words.

I swore to support and defend the Constitutions of the United States and California against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to those documents, in words prescribed by the California Constitution. (Cal. Const. art. XX, § 3.) A second paragraph of the California oath referring to advocating the overthrow of the government by force or violence or other unlawful means was omitted, because it had been found to impermissibly infringe on the First Amendment. (Vogel v. Los Angeles Cnty., 68 Cal. 2d 18, 26, 434 P.2d 961, 964 (1967).)

The oath I took in 2008 began to carry new weight after the 2024 elections and their aftermath. Did the oath I swore require

Nine people have been killed and multiple others injured after the driver of a black SUV slammed into a crowd Saturday evening at a street festival in Vancouver celebrating the contributions of the Filipino Canadian community, police say.

It happened shortly after 8 p.m. PT, a few blocks from East 41st Avenue and Fraser Street, where the Lapu Lapu Day Block Party was winding down, after drawing up to 100,000 people through the day.

Interim Vancouver Police Chief Steve Rai says a 30-year-old Vancouver man is now in custody.

In a statement read Sunday morning, Prime Minister Mark Carney said more than 20 people were injured.

Carney said Canadians are heartbroken at what "police are describing as a car-ramming attack" that happened during "an occasion to gather and to celebrate the vibrancy of the Filipino-Canadian community."

Skype, the online video-calling service, is shutting down in May after more than two decades of service. For those of a certain generation, Skype changed everything.

Before it launched in 2003, making international calls 📱 was prohibitively expensive and few viable digital alternatives existed. Skype offered users a cheap and easy way to call anyone in the world, skirting the draconian landline industry. When Skype added video calls a few years later, it felt as if the future had arrived: Students used Skype to stay connected to families back home 🤙, international friendships were born 🤝, and a generation of cross-border relationships began ❤️ — or ended 💔 — over the service. By the late 2000s, Skype was so ubiquitous that its name became a verb, much like Xerox and Google. Its bouncy ringtones and audio notifications were iconic. 🎶

At its peak, Skype had about 300 million users around the world. But it was a product of the desktop era, and as users went mobile, Skype l

When the tenants come together, though, that is a different story. Recent years have seen a surge in tenant union organizing. Unions in places like Kansas City, Louisville, Los Angeles, Bozeman, Montana, and Chicago have formed and won concessions from landlords. Last year, many of the tenant unions came together to form a national Tenant Union Federation.

No one understands the potential for collective action better than tenants who are also members of labor unions. Christina Jackson is in that category. A home healthcare worker for 40 years, Jackson is a member of SEIU Local 105 and serves on the local’s standards board for home healthcare workers. “Once I became a member of SEIU, I found my voice,” she said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can delegate immigration enforcement duties to state and local police under a law enacted in 1996 and known as 287(g), after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

During the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term, through April 15 2025, the number of participants in the program more than doubled, a Markup analysis found. The Markup found use of the program was especially prevalent in Florida, where all residents live in a county where local police will be trained under the program. This database and visuals below are automatically updated with data from ICE.

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

If left unchallenged, a rising wave of white nationalism in many parts of the globe could threaten the progress that has been made in science — and broader society — towards a more equitable world1.

As scientists and members of the public, we must push back against this threat — by modifying approaches to genetics education, advocating for science, establishing and leading diverse research teams and ensuring that studies embrace and build on the insights obtained about human variation.

The maker of cryptic block-seeding puzzler Starseed Pilgrim has announced a new game in which you are invited to do the unspeakable and "kill gameplay". The End Of Gameplay will be an exploratory 2D platformer according to the tags on its Steam page but anyone who has played the work of creator Droqen might predict those labels to prove looser than a toddler's shoelace. Enjoyers of obscure and poetic wanderings in minimalist spaces will probably be happy with the trailer below.

The creator describes it as "like Starseed Pilgrim, but only all the parts that nobody told me they cared about". This is a strong pitch but in what direction I cannot tell. Starseed Pilgrim was a mysterious blockbuilding platformer released back in the hellsands of 2013, in which you had to plant various seeds and discover their effects to go... somewhere? I never quite got it, to be honest. But that's okay, I'm not alone.

We at RPS regularly and viciously kill the word "gameplay" every time it appear