Category: Science & Tech

NASA wants to find the men and women who will help forge the next chapter in the history of space exploration. On Saturday, the space agency put out the call for a new astronaut class, one that will build humanity’s first permanent lunar base.

What they’re saying:

“The people we select could walk on the Moon, live and work at the Moon Base, and help pioneer the systems and operations that will ultimately carry crews to Mars,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said. “Those missions will demand technical excellence, sound judgment, teamwork, and courage.”

NASA sets deadline

Timeline:

Anyone looking to become an astronaut has until Dec. 3 to apply. NASA intends to have its recruits picked by late next year, with the goal of beginning training in early 2028, the same year it hopes to return people to the moon for the first time since the days of the Apollo program.

By the numbers:

NASA only has 32 active astronauts and needs more for the coming missions. The last time NASA opened its doors to new astronauts was two years ago, and the agency was flooded with 8,000 applications. Ten of those applicants made the final cut, which was decided in Sept. 2025. 

Astronaut Applications

What you can do:

NASA is urging qualified individuals to apply here. Its announcement explained that the basic requirements include being a U.S. citizen and having a master’s degree in a STEM field from an accredited institution. There are also alternate pathways for those working toward certain STEM doctoral degrees, having qualifying medical experience, or meeting its pilot standards. 

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Scott Tingle, the chief astronaut and chair of the Astronaut Selection Board, described becoming an astronaut as “more than a career opportunity.”

What they’re saying:

“It is a chance to join a legacy of explorers who have pushed the boundaries of discovery and play a role in the missions that will shape humanity’s future in space,” Tingle said. “The next generation of astronaut candidates could help write history while inspiring future scientists, engineers, and explorers.”

What’s next:

In addition to recruiting the people who will occupy its planned bases on the Moon’s south pole, NASA officials also announced Saturday new awards and mission updates. In part, the agency selected eight companies, including Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX, that will compete for delivery missions. 

NASA also said it will move forward with the development of a nuclear-powered, six-wheeled rover that will be able to survey the land for missions, determining resource potential, identifying potential landing sites, and helping with future infrastructure and exploration activities. 

 

Air and SpaceScience

Fireworks AI is fine with helping companies run AI models in their own datacenters, though VP Rob Ferguson argues against doing so.

Ferguson told The Register in an interview that while Fireworks AI, a managed inference provider, supports on-prem AI, “we’re trying to push people more and more away from it because frankly, it’s just the economics.”

The GPU hardware is just so expensive that if you can’t keep it fully utilized, it’s a waste of money, he contends. Ten thousand GPUs, he said, represent a billion dollars of capital.

“You don’t want those things to be sitting idle,” he said.

For companies with particularly sensitive workloads, Ferguson said, Fireworks is happy to work something out – it offers a service called Sovereign for just that purpose and it has partners like Microsoft that can help. But most inference work probably doesn’t need that level of protection, he said.

“The state of the art for everyone is to have a portfolio of models,” he explained. “In fact, I think most people don’t know that the best model in the world’s not Astra. The best model in the world’s not Fable. The best model is literally a portfolio and we can prove it. You are always better routing between a few models than to do one singular model.”

That’s what Fireworks does through Nexus and its API, alongside competitors like Together AI, Baseten, and DeepInfra. As a managed inference platform, Fireworks AI routes inference tasks to whichever model, frontier model subscription, or API is best suited to handle them.

But the company is not just doing naive routing like an AI gateway. It’s evaluating tasks as they come in and directing them to the optimal model.

“We build custom routers,” Ferguson explained. “Our auto model is continuously updating so that we actually go through and we grade the difficulty of the task and we see if there’re affinities that the models have, like Kimi is slightly better at JavaScript than Python, things like this.”

The company’s competitive edge, he contends, is its crack engineering team, which follows from its founders’ work on PyTorch, a widely used open source machine learning library.

“We’re performance experts both on the training and inference side,” he explained. “People I think don’t understand how important, for example, numerics is. So when you use a model, it’s always called a mixture of experts – an expert is a different machine.

“And so you have all these different machines. It actually matters when you’re training that you go back to precisely the right machine, because if you don’t, the other machine will still answer the question, but it’ll answer in a slightly different way. So we have to know how to build the topology to write back the data to the right space. We have to understand floating point precision [to handle very small values]. We have to be able to do all this where we’re routing through a complex fabric through potentially more than one provider depending on what everything is. And so we’re really systems experts.”

Hyperscalers, he argues, will give you a GPU but then it’s your responsibility to put it to use. Fireworks’ advantage involves being able to maximize utilization at scale while maintaining model precision and speed.

Ferguson said AI keeps coming back to economics.

“People are just trying to figure out more and more things to use AI for and [to answer questions like] just how much more can I send to cached models, how much more can I send to open models, when do I need this specialization?” he said. “So we’re constantly working with customers to help them come up with their own evaluation criteria.”

One reason for this, Ferguson explained, is that frontier model companies are not transparent about their caching rates. He said Fireworks was working with a data science company and was caching about 90 percent of the tasks.

“We looked at [Anthropic’s] Opus and it was caching 30 percent of the time,” he said. “It was doing AI rework constantly. And with AI, rework is by far your biggest cost. If it’s not hitting a cache, then your costs are absolutely insane. And so the token cost is not the real cost. It’s the cost per task. And they’re hiding that from you. And so we always tell our customers to be tracking cost per task, because that’s the real number.”

Another factor that companies should consider in their cost calculations, Ferguson suggested, is the value of their data and whether they’re giving that data away for training.

“I think people grossly underestimate the value of their data,” he said.

Fireworks AI has a zero data-retention policy, “but a lot of times,” Ferguson said, “these other companies [do] not, and you should be getting paid for your data. Nobody really knew at the beginning of this current era that these models are memorizers. But now there’s plenty of evidence that these models are. So if they’re going to be using your data, then you should be getting value for it.”

But it’s not just about cost. Speed, said Ferguson, is underappreciated.

“Speed is the thing that people often don’t know they can ask for,” he said. “It’s such a game changer for me and how I work with AI is so different when the responses come back as fast as I ask them.”

What’s the advantage of model ensembling, as the company refers to its model routing activities? A bill that’s at least 50 percent smaller, Ferguson claims.

“So we say six to eight times cheaper,” he said. “The reality is that because a lot of folks have a preference in their tooling, we kinda guarantee that in the case where you’re still using a combo of closed and open models, we can always guarantee that your bill will drop by half right away. Like we’re sure about that. And then the question is can we just get you to use more stuff?” ®

During a recent podcast appearance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made some baffling comments that really hit a nerve on social media. The billionaire said that it didn’t make sense for individual people to run their own AI models at home and that all of their RAM chips were far better off being used inside the industry’s widely-reviled data centers.

“But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of [dynamic RAM] sitting in their own computer,” he said.

The bizarre missive drew a heated reaction, especially among PC enthusiasts who’ve watched in sorrow as computer parts have become unaffordable thanks to the AI industry’s unrelenting hunger for chips.

But now that Big Tech, which has spent years cozying up to the Trump administration, experienced a bruising defeat, Altman is suddenly singing a different tune. In an apparent attempt to save face, Altman went on X on election night to set the record straight — by arguing he didn’t say what he said.

“I actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is f***ing annoying that this was taken out of context,” he wrote. “I have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time.”

“I want you to have so much [RAM],” he replied to another user. “Let’s build more.”

It’s not hard to see a motive behind his original comments. If people can run their own AI models at home, it undercuts the industry’s push to sell expensive subscriptions to cloud-based services.

Besides his latest gaffe, Altman has plenty of other fires to put out as data centers have proven to be an enormous political liability, with plenty of moratoriums on the horizon. That could make increasing chip supplies an even bigger challenge in the future.

Chipmakers remain in crisis mode, with Intel experiencing its worst single day wipeout in market value since 1974 last week. Experts warn that major global chip disruptions could drag on for many years to come as AI leaders, including Altman, desperately reach out to international manufacturers for more.

The flap illustrates wildly diverging conceptions of AI. To the people leading the industry, it’s a technological revolution. To the disillusioned public — and especially furious PC enthusiasts — it’s an enormous waste of resources that could backfire in spectacular fashion as strained financial markets reach a breaking point.

More on Altman: Sam Altman Absolutely Hates the Idea of People Running Their Own AI Models at Home, Argues They Shouldn’t Own Computers

Few video game franchises have been as influential as Grand Theft Auto. When Rockstar Games released GTA III in 2001, it helped redefine what an open-world game could be, enabling players to explore a sprawling city, steal vehicles, carry out criminal missions and generally cause havoc at their leisure.

Its success inspired an entire generation of imitators, as developers scrambled to create their own versions of Rockstar’s blockbuster formula. The term “GTA clone” became a genre in itself, encompassing gangster adventures and increasingly ridiculous urban playgrounds.

While some were shameless copies, others introduced imaginative settings, inventive mechanics and memorable characters that helped the games to stand on their own. Several even improved on aspects of Rockstar’s games.

With Grand Theft Auto VI due to be released on November 19 for PlayStation and Xbox, it is a good time to revisit an era when seemingly every major publisher wanted a piece of the open-world crime genre.

Here are six of the best games to play while you wait.

Sleeping Dogs (2012)

If any game deserves to be remembered as the finest “GTA clone”, it is Sleeping Dogs. Developed by United Front Games, the 2012 release transports players to Hong Kong, where undercover police officer Wei Shen infiltrates the city’s dangerous Triad organisations.

The game brilliantly captures the thrill and intensity of Hong Kong kung-fu and action cinema, placing players in the middle of a violent gang war. Its martial arts combat system features spectacularly brutal environmental takedowns, while vehicle chases and gun battles evoke the elaborate action sequences of the genre’s greatest films.

Hong Kong itself is equally impressive, with bustling markets, neon-lit streets and densely packed neighbourhoods.

Originally conceived as part of the True Crime series, Sleeping Dogs also explores Shen’s increasingly complicated loyalties. It is an absorbing undercover police thriller that deserved a sequel.

Saints Row 2 (2008)

The Saints Row series often felt like a straight-faced parody of Grand Theft Auto, borrowing its criminal underworld and open-world chaos while pushing everything towards absurdity. Sometimes that was precisely what it took to stand out.

Released by Volition in 2008, Saints Row 2 arguably represents the creative peak of the series. Players return to the fictional city of Stilwater to rebuild the Third Street Saints gang and reclaim territory from rival organisations.

Activities include spraying buildings with sewage, committing insurance fraud by throwing yourself into traffic and taking part in spectacularly destructive rampages.

At a time when GTA IV was pursuing a more grounded approach to storytelling, Saints Row 2 enthusiastically embraced the ridiculous. Its extensive customisation, co-operative campaign and unpredictable missions made it a refreshing alternative to Rockstar’s increasingly cinematic ambitions.

Scarface: The World Is Yours (2006)

What if Tony Montana had survived the bloody conclusion of Scarface?

That question forms the premise of Radical Entertainment’s surprisingly ambitious 2006 video game, which rewrites the ending of Brian De Palma’s celebrated 1983 crime film.

Players take control of Montana as he attempts to rebuild his drug empire in Miami, reclaiming territory, buying businesses and eliminating rival gangs. Although its driving and shooting mechanics borrow heavily from Grand Theft Auto, the business management systems introduce an addictive layer of progression.

Money earned through drug deals can be invested in properties and extravagant possessions, giving players a satisfying sense that they are growing in power.

The game also captures the excess of the film, from its colourful characters and lavish surroundings to its memorable soundtrack. Few film adaptations have translated their source material into an open-world experience quite so successfully.

The Saboteur (2009)

One of the more unusual GTA clones replaces contemporary gang warfare with the French Resistance during the Second World War.

Developed by Pandemic Studios, The Saboteur follows Irish racing driver Sean Devlin as he wages a personal campaign against the Nazis in occupied Paris.

Its most striking feature is its visual presentation. Areas under German control are depicted largely in black and white, with colour gradually returning as players liberate neighbourhoods.

There is an impressive variety of activities, from planting explosives at military installations to climbing buildings, stealing vehicles and participating in street races.

Released shortly before Pandemic Studios closed, the game combined espionage, driving and open-world exploration in an imaginative way. More than a decade later, the sight of Paris slowly regaining its colour is still one of the genre’s most memorable visual ideas.

Watch Dogs 2 (2016)

By 2016, the GTA formula had become so familiar that developers needed increasingly inventive ways to distinguish their open worlds. Ubisoft found one answer in hacking.

Watch Dogs 2 takes place in a colourful recreation of the San Francisco Bay Area, following Marcus Holloway, a young hacker who joins the activist group DedSec to challenge powerful technology companies and their surveillance systems.

Its greatest innovation is the ability to manipulate the environment through connected technology. Traffic lights can be disrupted, security cameras hijacked and electronic devices remotely controlled, creating opportunities for elaborate mischief.

The game’s playful tone and lively recreation of San Francisco make exploration particularly enjoyable. Players can approach objectives through stealth, technological trickery or outright chaos, with the hacking mechanics encouraging experimentation that few other games in the genre have successfully replicated.

Mafia II (2010)

Few open-world crime games have captured the atmosphere of a particular period quite as convincingly as Mafia II.

Set in the fictional American city of Empire Bay during the 1940s and 1950s, the game follows Vito Scaletta, a war veteran who becomes increasingly involved in organised crime.

Developed by 2K Czech, the game pays particular attention to the smaller details that make its world believable. Period-appropriate cars, radio stations playing music from the era, as well as clothing and architecture, combine to immerse players in mid-century America. The changing seasons also contribute to the atmosphere.

It also takes a more restrained approach to the GTA formula, with fewer optional distractions and greater emphasis on storytelling and cinematic missions.

Driving through snow-covered streets in a vintage car with music playing on the radio can be as enjoyable as the game’s carefully constructed gangster drama.

The so-called “bluenami” that swept across the US on Tuesday is already hitting the breakwater.

With Democrats seizing a firm majority in the House along with the Senate, longtime party loyalist Hakeem Jeffries is poised to take up the mantle as speaker. But for all the progressive excitement around the bruising beatdown delivered to Donald Trump and the Republican party, Jeffries’ own backers include some of the most notorious power players in the tech industry, setting up immediate tension with voters who rallied around an anti-Silicon Valley message to push the Democrats back into power.

As collated by the investigative publication Sludge, Jeffries has a lengthy history of groveling to some of the most divisive tech and weapons corporations on the planet.

His donor list includes controversial figures like Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf and his COO Matthew Grimm, who together spent nearly $150,000 boosting Jeffries’ fundraising committees. Some might recognize Anduril as the AI weapons tech corporation co-founded by Palmer Luckey, a tech billionaire whose recent projects include a company working on genetically enhanced dogs for military purposes.

Another controversial donor includes Mehdi Allhassani, current head of government affairs at the AI surveillance company Palantir, from whom Jeffries received $44,300 this election cycle.

Jeffries also has the backing of cryptocurrency advocacy groups and investment executives at firms including Bain Capital, DE Shaw, and Renaissance Technologies, Sludge reports.

Beyond the incoming speaker, we know that the ultra-powerful tech industry lobbied Republicans and Democrats alike in the runup to the midterm elections. In fact, tech spending on the recent elections eclipsed any other private industry political funding in modern US history — emblematic of the fact that both ruling parties are, first-and-foremost, pro-business.

As lawyer and political consultant Briahna Joy Gray wrote on social, when it comes time to pander to the country’s supremely powerful corporate class, Republicans and Democrats are “two wings of the same bird.”

“The same corporate donors give to both sides,” Gray observed, “so they win regardless of electoral outcomes.”

More on US politics: Political Candidates Spending An Obscene Amount of Money on AI-Generated Election Slop

An automated optical inspection camera on a surface-mount line flags a circuit board. In NVIDIA’s reference example, software agents take it from there: a Visual Inspection Agent takes a second look, a robot carries the board to rework, and a Root Cause Analysis Agent works through the machine data until it can hand back a PDF report with the evidence and a recommended corrective action.

The example comes from the NVIDIA Factory Operations Blueprint, or FOX. It’s a reference architecture for putting a “factory manager agent” on top of the systems a plant already runs, with specialist agents underneath it.

NVIDIA frames the problem with a Siemens report estimating that unplanned downtime costs an average large plant in the surveyed sectors $253 million a year. Its diagnosis is about coordination more than data: whether the issue is a failed board or a rush order, teams have to gather evidence across systems, consult specialists and agree on the next step, and turning available data into a response takes substantial time.

For an electronics plant operations leader, the practical question is how much of the chain from alert to corrective action the agents get to finish on their own. FOX makes that a setting the plant writes.

A manager agent and its specialists

NVIDIA’s Nov. 4 technical blog lays out the build in three moves: developers connect their existing data and tools, configure specialist agents, and define which decisions require operator review. In daily.dev’s summary of the post, those existing sources are the plant’s MES, ERP and machine databases. The manager agent runs on a large language model such as NVIDIA Nemotron, with NemoClaw as the default agent harness and NVIDIA OpenShell isolating execution. Together they interpret tasks, keep persistent memory and enforce access policies.

Infraday reviewed NVIDIA’s Oct. 21 announcement and says FOX links operational signals to engineering and enterprise context, including CAD, product-lifecycle data, simulations and IT/OT systems.

Infraday’s broader read is that the release pushes industrial AI past isolated computer-vision models by letting agents correlate machine logs with visual findings. In the SMT example, that correlation is the handoff in the middle of the chain. The specialists each carry a distinct job:

• Visual Inspection Agent: calls NVIDIA Cosmos, a world understanding model, to compare a suspected defective component against the factory’s handbook using in-context learning, without fine-tuning.
• Root Cause Analysis Agent: uses Kumo Anomaly to scan time-series machine readings, such as reflow oven temperatures, for unusual patterns that could be contributing to defects.
• Fleet Management Agent: demonstrated with NVIDIA Isaac Sim and ROS 2, it coordinates the robots that handle physical moves like the trip to rework.

The no-fine-tuning detail deserves attention in a high-mix plant. If the inspection agent reads defect criteria from a handbook instead of a retrained model, updating it for a new product could be a documentation task more than a data-science project. That’s an inference from the described design, and early-access users will be the ones to test it.

The more consequential detail is the review line. In FOX, which decisions need an operator’s sign-off is something the plant writes into the configuration, right alongside its data connections and its specialist agents. A quality engineer who wants every rework dispatch approved, and a plant that lets the agent move boards but holds back process changes, are both describing configurations, not different products.

What Erlangen’s numbers measure

At Siemens’ Erlangen electronics factory, frequent changeovers for new products or orders make both production planning and inspection important.

According to daily.dev’s summary of NVIDIA’s post, the FOX-based order-planning agents at Erlangen can enable cost savings of up to 20%.

That figure comes from planning, not defect handling. When a rush order arrives, Nemotron-powered agents built on FOX run simulations through Siemens Intelligence Center X. The simulations weigh costs, existing orders, supply levels and line setups, so a planner no longer has to query each system by hand. Infraday adds that, according to NVIDIA, Siemens is integrating FOX-based agents into Intelligence Center X. A quality leader reading the headline should file the 20% under order planning, not under the defect-to-report chain.

The two 40% figures measure different things. According to daily.dev, the time-to-market figure applies when Siemens combines its PLM software and Process Preparation X with Cosmos and Omniverse, which can cut time to market by up to 40%. The second figure is about inspection: NVIDIA reports a 40% reduction in inspection-process calibration time at Erlangen. Infraday notes that the Process Preparation X work relies on Cosmos Data Factory tools to create defect images for inspecting circuit boards. Of the four figures, calibration is the closest to the inspection workflow in FOX’s reference example.

Infraday, reviewing the announcement, flagged the Erlangen results as vendor-reported, which is the right weight to give them: one site, one vendor pair, measured by the people selling it.

NVIDIA ran the same stack in its own data centers first

NVIDIA built its AI Factory Operations Agent to streamline its own internal DGX SuperPOD operations and reduce manual work for its site reliability engineers. The system correlates root causes across compute, network, hardware and scheduling layers.

The starting problem will sound familiar to anyone who runs a line. As GPU clusters scale, SREs often check multiple dashboards to work out why training performance dropped. NVIDIA’s answer splits the work among Job Recovery, Hardware, Observability, Research, Kubernetes and Cluster Management agents that talk to each other through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Engineers query them in natural language through a chat interface, switch between investigations and can track every action for auditability.

The parts list is where the heading earns itself. That system is built on the NemoClaw blueprint with OpenShell and runs fully on-premises with locally served Nemotron models across DGX H100, DGX B200 and DGX GB300 production clusters. Those are the same three components FOX’s manager agent uses, which suggests the factory blueprint’s harness has already carried production load in NVIDIA’s own operations. A server hall and an SMT line are still very different workloads.

The production lessons NVIDIA lists read like advice for a plant manager: draw clear boundaries between agents, start with read-only investigation to build trust, and show the reasoning so engineers can check the evidence before acting. NVIDIA points readers to the open source framework and code for that system on GitHub.

Two more lessons on NVIDIA’s list map onto the factory case. Cross-layer correlation caught root causes that isolated tools missed, and precise MCP tool definitions mattered. On a board line, a solder defect seen by AOI and a temperature drift in the reflow oven live in different systems, which is why the Root Cause Analysis Agent’s value would depend on joining them. For multi-tenant AI factories, NVIDIA also scopes agents, tools, sandboxes and Kubernetes permissions per tenant, with OpenShell enforcing kernel-level sandbox restrictions. That is the same discipline of limiting what each agent can see and touch that a plant exercises when it writes its review line.

The repository is moving quickly. It had 581 commits as of Nov. 6, and a Nov. 3 commit added an option to run inference on a single B200 GPU, which could lower the hardware bar for teams that want to study the pattern before FOX reaches them.

For plants where an agent’s recommendation can turn into a physical action, the read-only-first sequence matters more on the factory floor than in a server hall.

On-premises, early access, no ship date

FOX supports fully on-premises deployment on an NVIDIA DGX Station, keeping production records, images, prompts and investigation results inside the factory network. Per daily.dev, a fully on-premises setup requires every model and endpoint to stay within that network. In practice that means the manager agent’s language model would be served locally, and so would the specialists, including Cosmos for inspection and Kumo Anomaly for time-series analysis.

FOX remains in early access. Infraday calls it a developer blueprint in early access rather than a completed product for factory deployment, so results will vary with each implementation.

Developers request access through NVIDIA, which steers them to its Agent Toolkit for agent development and its video search and summarization (VSS) blueprint for building further specialist agents. FOX also arrived inside a wider Oct. 21 announcement that covered digital-twin applications in automotive, semiconductor, aerospace and process industries. Infraday’s verdict on who should be paying attention is specific: factory software teams and systems integrators who can now evaluate agent workflows linking visual inspection, machine logs and engineering data.

A documentary about BioWare was already being filmed when Electronic Arts announced the studio’s closure, and PC Gamer reports that the filmmakers now describe the finished work as a “profound valediction.” The BioWare documentary, titled Massive Effect: The BioWare Story, is aimed at a 2027 release. The announcement landed on Nov. 6, about two weeks after EA shut the Edmonton studio.

Most early coverage focused on the timing. Our earlier report on the production timeline covered how filming began two years before the October 21 closure. This piece looks at something else: who agreed to sit in front of the camera, what that list says about the film’s reach, and which details nobody has confirmed yet.

The roster is the story inside the story. Fifteen named interview subjects span the studio’s founders, its best-known writers and directors, a leading voice actor, a former EA chief executive, and a Lucasfilm Games executive. That mix suggests a film built to cover both the creative history and the corporate machinery that ended it.

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What the BioWare documentary announcement confirms

The confirmed facts are short and specific. The film is called Massive Effect: The BioWare Story. Akash Sherman writes and directs. Shane Fennessey and Adam Scorgie produce, through Fennessey Films and Score G Productions. The broadcaster is Super Channel in Canada, and the planned release year is 2027.

The closure itself is dated. EA announced it on October 21, 2026, and reports put the number of jobs cut at 400. Filming started two years before that date and kept going afterward, which means the crew captured both the final stretch of a working studio and the aftermath.

Those two facts, a two-year shoot and a sudden shutdown, change the film’s nature. A planned retrospective on a studio’s golden era became a record of an ending. Sherman said as much in his statement, and the outlets that picked up the news, including Game Informer, framed the project around BioWare’s final years rather than its peak.

Massive Effect: The BioWare Story and the team behind it

Director and producers

Sherman holds both the writing and directing credits. His own words explain his stake. In the announcement he called the BioWare founders his “hometown heroes,” a nod to the studio’s Canadian roots. That personal framing matters for tone. A director who grew up alongside the studio’s games will likely lean toward affection and craft over a cold business autopsy.

Fennessey and Scorgie share producing duties. Their companies, Fennessey Films and Score G Productions, are the production banners attached to the project. Neither the fact sheet nor the coverage we reviewed gives a budget, and we will not guess at one.

Super Channel as the Canadian home

Deadline described the project as a Super Channel feature documentary. Super Channel is a Canadian broadcaster, so the first audience is domestic. That fits a story about a studio that began in Canada and employed Canadian developers for decades. It also leaves an open question for US and global viewers, because no outlet has confirmed distribution outside Canada.

The 15 interview subjects, grouped

The confirmed interview list is long for a feature documentary on a game studio. The announcement named the participants, and the list adds up to exactly 15 people. We grouped them below by the categories the reporting uses.

One caution applies. The announcement confirms who sits for interviews, not how much screen time each person gets or what they say. A name on the list tells us the film sought that perspective. It does not tell us the film adopts it.

Group	People named	Count
BioWare founders	Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, Augustine Yip	3
Developers	Casey Hudson, Mark Darrah, David Gaider, Drew Karpyshyn, Aaryn Flynn, Mac Walters, Trent Oster, James Ohlen, Caroline Livingstone	9
Voice actor	Jennifer Hale	1
Former EA leadership	John Riccitello, former EA CEO	1
Lucasfilm Games	Douglas Reilly, vice president	1
Total		15

Nine of the 15 are developers, so the film leans on people who built the games. Three founders anchor the origin story. The other three voices come from outside the dev rooms: a performer, a former publisher chief, and a licensing partner. Each of those outsiders gives the film a vantage point the developers cannot.

Filming began two years before the closure

The two-year lead time is the detail that sets this project apart from a quick tribute. Documentaries made in a rush after a shutdown usually stitch together archive footage and a handful of fresh calls. This one had cameras rolling long before anyone outside EA’s leadership knew the studio was in danger.

That head start likely explains the size of the roster. Booking founders, former executives, and a Lucasfilm vice president takes months of scheduling. It is hard to see how a project started after October 21 could line up 15 people for a 2027 release. By contrast, a film already in production could simply add the closure as its final act.

Sherman’s statement confirms the pivot. In his words, “With the studio’s recent closure, the film is now a profound valediction.” The line comes from the same announcement Eurogamer covered under a headline about capturing BioWare’s final moments.

BioWare closure on October 21: the context

EA announced the closure on October 21, 2026. Coverage from The Verge, Engadget, CNET, and others said roughly 400 jobs were cut across a wider EA restructuring, and reports said EA also ended early work on the next Mass Effect game. Those reports described the move as part of a push toward fewer, larger projects.

We have tracked the fallout across several stories. Fans organized a petition that reached 1,662 signatures against a 500-signature threshold. Veteran designer Warren Spector criticized EA’s $38.65 million executive pay figure in the same news cycle. And the Canadian angle, covered in our look at how the shutdown hit Canada’s game industry, explains why a Canadian broadcaster stepped in.

The documentary does not undo any of that. It does give the closure a permanent record, and one that the people involved helped shape.

What the founders and director said

Four statements from Sherman define the film’s stance, per PC Gamer’s report. He called the BioWare founders his “hometown heroes.” He described the project as a “privilege and responsibility to share the journey of underdogs who came together to create deeply beloved storytelling.” He said the studio’s “golden era kindled a spark in me and in an entire generation.” And he called the film “now a profound valediction.”

Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk gave a joint statement, as reported by Playday. They said that when the production team asked for their blessing to tell the BioWare story, they were “honored and deeply moved.” They added that BioWare “was never just about the logo or the building,” but about “the stories brought to life by the amazing people on our dev teams, and the fans who defended those worlds, championed them and carried them forward.”

The founders’ blessing carries weight. Muzyka and Zeschuk are on the confirmed interview list, and their public endorsement signals cooperation rather than an outside critique. Their wording also steers the story toward people and fans, not corporate structure. That choice could shape how hard the film presses on EA’s decisions.

Why the interview list matters: three outside voices

Developer interviews are expected. The three non-developer participants are where the film can surprise. We read their inclusion as editorial signals, and the readings below are our analysis rather than anything the filmmakers have said.

John Riccitello, former EA CEO. Having a former chief executive of the parent company on camera means the film is not limited to the creative side. A publisher’s perspective on acquisitions, budgets, and expectations can put the closure in a longer corporate arc. Whether he defends or criticizes EA’s handling is unknown.

Douglas Reilly, Lucasfilm Games vice president. BioWare’s licensed work with another major entertainment brand gives Reilly a partner’s view. A licensor can speak to what it expected from the studio and what the collaboration produced.

Jennifer Hale, voice actor. Performers sit between developers and audiences. Hale can describe how scripts became performances, which is often where players feel a studio’s craft most directly.

What remains unconfirmed

The gaps are as informative as the facts. The reporting we reviewed leaves several basic details open. Treat any outlet that states them as fact with caution until the filmmakers or Super Channel publish them.

Detail	Status	What reporting says
Title	Confirmed	Massive Effect: The BioWare Story
Director and writer	Confirmed	Akash Sherman
Producers	Confirmed	Shane Fennessey, Adam Scorgie
Canadian broadcaster	Confirmed	Super Channel
Release year	Planned	2027
Exact premiere date	Unconfirmed	Not announced
Runtime	Unconfirmed	Not announced
Budget	Unconfirmed	Not announced
Distribution outside Canada	Unconfirmed	Not announced
Release format	Unconfirmed	Not announced

The distribution gap matters most for readers outside Canada. A Super Channel broadcast does not automatically mean a streaming release in the US, the UK, or Europe. Until a distributor is named, global fans should plan around a wait.

How BioWare’s ending compares with other studio losses

BioWare is not an isolated case. Our coverage this year has tracked a run of studio closures, hiring freezes, and ownership changes. The table pulls figures from those earlier reports so readers can see the pattern.

Studio or topic	Key figure from our coverage	Situation
BioWare	400 jobs reported cut	Closed by EA on October 21, 2026
Acquired studios overall	1 in 3 closed	Arkane Lyon flagged as at risk
Arkane (union complaint)	19-month hiring freeze	Union says Microsoft is sabotaging Blade
Double Fine	7 years under Xbox	Went independent
Nintendo (retention)	38 years of staff continuity cited	Aonuma argues for keeping veterans

Our analysis of acquired studios and the one-in-three closure rate shows why the BioWare film will resonate beyond fans of one franchise. The Nintendo contrast is sharp. When Eiji Aonuma talked about keeping long-term staff, he made the opposite argument to the one BioWare’s ending illustrates.

Historical context: from Edmonton to a final chapter

Closure coverage described a studio founded in Edmonton in 1995 that operated for more than 30 years. EA acquired BioWare in 2007. Its role-playing legacy includes Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Anthem.

The later years were rougher. Reports on the closure said Mass Effect: Andromeda in 2017 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024 drew mixed reactions and disappointed parts of the fan base. Sherman’s framing of an “underdogs” story and a “golden era” points the film toward the earlier decades, with the late years serving as the unavoidable final act.

For a deeper look at the games themselves, our piece on BioWare’s four RPG worlds walks through the franchises the documentary will need to cover.

Market and industry impact

A single documentary will not move EA’s stock or the console market. Its impact is cultural and reputational. When a publisher closes a studio with this much name recognition, the story tends to outlive the news cycle. A feature film guarantees a second wave of attention in 2027, timed to a release that EA does not control.

For the industry, the film adds a data point to a broader argument about consolidation. Studios acquired by large publishers carry the risk of closure when strategy shifts. A documentary featuring a former EA chief executive makes that risk concrete for developers weighing acquisition offers and for workers weighing job moves. We stress that this is analysis, since no outlet has quantified any effect on EA’s business from the film.

For Canada, the film is also a cultural-industry story. A domestic broadcaster funding and airing a feature on a Canadian studio signals appetite for local game-industry history. It may encourage more filmmakers to document game developers, a niche that has had far fewer features than film or music.

Where the film could land: three open questions

Three questions will decide whether the film becomes a defining record or a gentle tribute. First, how much room does it give to the late-era games that disappointed fans? A closure film that skips Andromeda and The Veilguard would feel incomplete, while one that dwells on them could overshadow the golden era Sherman wants to celebrate.

Second, how candid will the EA voices be? Having a former chief executive on the list opens the door to a direct account of corporate decisions, but interviews with executives often stay diplomatic. The film’s credibility with developers will hinge on whether that interview adds information or just polish.

Third, who gets the last word? The fact that the founders blessed the project suggests they will help frame the ending. Whether current and recently laid-off staff speak on camera is not confirmed, and their absence or presence will color the film’s final chapter.

Predictions: what to expect before and after release

• A trailer or premiere date before mid-2027. Productions with a named broadcaster and a stated release year usually reveal a date within months. This is our expectation, not a reported schedule.
• A distribution deal beyond Canada. A cast of recognizable names gives a distributor a clear pitch to fans outside Canada. No deal has been confirmed.
• EA stays quiet. The publisher has little to gain from engaging with a film about a studio it closed. We expect statements to come from the interview subjects instead.
• More closure-era projects. Other filmmakers and podcasters will likely chase similar retrospectives on shuttered studios, as the format now has a proven news hook.
• Renewed fan campaigns. The petition and community response may revive once the film gives fans a shared object to rally around.

What fans and developers can do now

Right now, the practical step is to watch for official channels. Super Channel and the production companies will announce dates first. Fans outside Canada should follow Sherman and the producers for distribution news and avoid unofficial streams that claim to be early copies.

Developers affected by the layoffs have their own resources. We have not verified a specific support program tied to BioWare, so check with former colleagues and local organizations rather than relying on rumors.

Players have a simpler option. The studio’s older games remain the best primer before the film arrives, and revisiting them will make the interviews land harder. Readers who want context on how fast the broader industry is shifting can also follow our reporting on Switch 2 sales and Sony’s results, which show where publisher money is flowing while studios like BioWare disappear.

For more of our reporting in this space, the gaming section collects the closure fallout, platform news, and industry analysis in one place.

FAQ: the BioWare documentary

What is Massive Effect: The BioWare Story?
It is a documentary about the history and closure of BioWare. Akash Sherman writes and directs, and Shane Fennessey and Adam Scorgie produce.

When will the BioWare documentary be released?
The planned release year is 2027. Reporting from Push Square and others did not give an exact date, and none has been confirmed.

Where can I watch it?
Super Channel in Canada is the confirmed broadcaster. Distribution outside Canada and the exact release format have not been confirmed.

Who is interviewed in the film?
Fifteen people are confirmed, including BioWare founders Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip, voice actor Jennifer Hale, former EA CEO John Riccitello, and Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly, along with nine developers listed in the table above.

When did EA close BioWare?
EA announced the closure on October 21, 2026. Reports put the number of jobs cut at 400.

Was the documentary made because of the closure?
No. Filming began two years before the closure announcement and continued afterward, so the closure became the film’s ending rather than its origin.

Do we know the budget or runtime?
No. Budget, runtime, and premiere date are all unconfirmed in the available reporting.

Elon Musk blew $447 million to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections — and almost every single cent of it went to waste.

But if you were about to break out a tiny violin to soundtrack the sorrows of the world’s first — and first former — trillionaire, you should consider acquiring an even tinier one, because those were just the beginning of his losses.

Shares of Musk’s businesses SpaceX and Tesla immediately tanked after Democrats swept the Senate, House, and governorship races — including in Texas, Musk’s base of operations. His automaker fell 3.3 percent, and his rocket-slash-AI company plunged by a full 3.8 , wiping out what Bloomberg reported was over $120 billion.

That did a number on Musk’s personal wealth, which in large part derives from his stakes in those companies. He is now, by the Financial Time’s estimate, some $30 billion poorer.

Despite the excess of egg on his face, Musk still managed to look through his post history on X and start deleting the ones about the election.

Trying to rally his followers, Musk tweeted “Vote red today!” on Tuesday morning. But it was removed after the reality of a blue tsunami came crashing at his doorstep. So was his pinned tweet from last week urging his followers to vote for Republican senators, which according to Forbes was taken down around the time Democratic candidate James Talarico declared victory in the senate race.

To his credit, he did make a few jokes at his own expense.

“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” he tweeted late Tuesday night.

For the most part, though, Musk seems eager to move on. Besides one post in which he claimed “Voter ID failed in California,” he’s gone back to his usual tweets promoting Grok and his various companies almost as if nothing happened. If we spent half a billion dollars trying to get candidates elect who all lost, and were now staring down the barrel of a Democrat-stacked government looking to get revenge on us, we would probably try to sweep everything under the rug, too.

More on industrialists: Elon Musk in Real Trouble After Humiliating Defeat

The search for computers that can process increasing quantities of information without a corresponding surge in energy consumption is pushing scientists beyond conventional semiconductor designs. One candidate is extraordinarily small, inherently magnetic and capable of behaving rather differently from the bits used by today’s computers.

These structures are known as magnetic skyrmions, nanoscale whirlpools of magnetisation that can form within certain magnetic materials. Their small size, stability and ability to be manipulated have made them attractive candidates for future memory, logic and neuromorphic computing technologies.

Now researchers have gained a particularly revealing view of how skyrmions behave collectively. Scientists have observed, in real time, the process by which an ordered lattice of skyrmions loses its structure and effectively ‘melts’.

The research is described in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Nanotechnology in the study Real-time observation of topological defect dynamics mediating two-dimensional skyrmion lattice melting, by Raphael Gruber and colleagues. The paper reports direct observations of the defect dynamics that govern the melting process in a two-dimensional skyrmion lattice. The work could ultimately help researchers develop devices in which information is represented and manipulated through magnetic states rather than relying solely on conventional electrical architectures.

What exactly is a skyrmion?

A skyrmion is not a physical particle in the ordinary sense. Rather, it is a stable configuration of spins in a magnetic material. The spins twist through space so that the overall structure resembles a tiny vortex. What makes this particularly interesting for computing is the structure’s topological character. In simplified terms, the magnetic configuration has a degree of robustness because changing it into a fundamentally different state requires reorganising the spins.

Skyrmions are being investigated within spintronics, a field that seeks to exploit an electron’s spin and associated magnetic properties alongside, or instead of, its electrical charge. This opens the possibility of storing information in extremely small magnetic structures and potentially moving or manipulating that information with comparatively low energy requirements.

Spintronics, which stands for “spin transport electronics” is a branch of electronics that exploits the intrinsic spin of the electrons and their fundamental electronic charge for the various functionalities in solid-state devices.

Modern computing faces a persistent problem in the relationship between processing power, data movement and energy consumption. As artificial intelligence systems become larger, reducing the energy cost of computation is becoming increasingly important. Brain-inspired, or neuromorphic, hardware is one proposed solution. Instead of simply making existing processor architectures faster, neuromorphic designs attempt to reproduce useful features of biological information processing.

Digital Journal has previously reported on another strand of this research, involving a cerebellum-inspired electronic device designed to process information more selectively and reduce unnecessary computation. That research illustrates the wider move towards hardware that performs computation differently rather than merely scaling conventional processors.

Watching a magnetic crystal lose its order

Skyrmions become especially interesting when they interact. Under suitable conditions, they can arrange themselves into regular two-dimensional lattices. The result is somewhat analogous to atoms forming an ordered crystal, except the repeating components are magnetic textures. Understanding how this ordered state breaks down is important both for fundamental physics and for engineering devices based on skyrmions.

The research team has now been able to watch this transition in real time while observing the behaviour of individual skyrmions. In the experiment, the transition from an ordered skyrmion lattice to a disordered state was mediated by topological defects within the lattice. This makes the research relevant to a much wider question in condensed-matter physics: how two-dimensional systems undergo phase transitions.

For computing applications, the significance is more practical. A technology based on skyrmions requires engineers to understand not only how to create and move the structures but how they interact, reorganise and remain stable when operating conditions change. The finer the control scientists can achieve over an individual skyrmion’s position, dimensions and interactions with neighbouring skyrmions, the more realistic it becomes to consider these structures as functional elements of future information-processing systems.

One of the study’s researchers, Asle Sudbø of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), has highlighted the potential implications for brain-inspired computing. “Skyrmions are small, magnetic vortices that can store information in a completely new way,” Sudbø explained in material accompanying the research.

The attraction extends beyond simply making a smaller magnetic memory. Biological brains are extraordinarily energy-efficient compared with conventional computing systems when tackling tasks such as sensory processing, adaptation and pattern recognition. This has driven growing interest in neuromorphic computing, in which hardware itself can mimic some of the dynamic behaviours found in neural systems.

Networks of interacting skyrmions are intriguing in this context because their magnetic states can respond collectively to physical stimuli. Instead of enforcing every computing operation through conventional transistor-based Boolean logic, researchers can explore whether the evolving physical state of magnetic systems can itself perform useful computation. This does not mean that a skyrmion ‘thinks’ like a neuron, nor that skyrmion computers are close to replacing silicon processors. The more defensible expectation is that their unusual dynamics could be exploited within specialised computing architectures.

Why lower-energy computing matters

Energy efficiency is becoming an increasingly important constraint on computing. Artificial intelligence has placed particular pressure on the traditional relationship between memory and processing. Conventional architectures frequently require information to be moved between memory and processors, and that data movement itself consumes energy.

Emerging approaches including spintronics, memristive devices and neuromorphic processors seek to reduce some of this burden by changing where and how computation occurs. Skyrmions could contribute to this transition because magnetic information can potentially be manipulated at very small scales. Their possible applications include high-density memory, unconventional logic and hardware capable of exploiting interacting physical states for computation.

The idea belongs to a wider effort to redesign computing at the physical level. Another emerging branch concerns quantum information systems. As Digital Journal has previously reported, researchers are also investigating artificial structures such as ‘giant superatoms’ as means of protecting and controlling quantum information. Skyrmions do not provide a simple bridge to a general-purpose quantum computer, but their topology makes them scientifically relevant to research into unusual magnetic and quantum phenomena.

There remains, however, a considerable distance between filming skyrmions in a laboratory and incorporating millions or billions of reliable magnetic elements into commercial computing systems. Practical devices would need methods for reproducibly creating, detecting and manipulating skyrmions, maintaining their stability under operating conditions, integrating them with semiconductor fabrication and controlling undesirable interactions. Any energy advantage would also need to survive when the full supporting electronics of a device are taken into account.

By directly watching an ordered skyrmion system break down, scientists can test theories about how these unusual magnetic structures interact and how defects move through the lattice. The research turns an abstract model of lattice melting into a process that can be observed at the level of its constituent magnetic structures. For Sudbø, this increased understanding could eventually feed into more efficient computing technology. The immediate achievement is consequently one of experimental physics rather than a new computer chip. Yet the longer-term proposition is: learn how to reliably control matter at the nanoscale, and some of the computing functions currently demanding large quantities of components and electricity might eventually be performed in fundamentally different ways.