The Morning After: Monday, September 18th 2017
Not ready.
Monday is back, with a vengeance. Over the weekend, people have unearthed NES games inside the Switch, and MIT researchers are cramming a bunch of vaccines into a single jab. So, this morning it's a little bit of the past and a wee bit of the future, all tied up in a bow.
Nintendo's Switch is secretly hiding a copy of NES 'Golf'
Nintendo has promised to revive the NES Classic Edition in 2018, but that Switch console of yours might offer some gaming moments of yesteryear to pass the time until then: Nintendo's latest console may carry a NES emulator. Hackers have found the system wrapped around an existing game hidden inside the Switch. The title in question is dubbed FLOG, and it looks just like Golf (the 1984 sports sim for the NES).
'Battleborn' is winding down months after going free-to-play
Battleborn's move to a free-to-play model wasn't enough to keep things going. Gearbox has revealed that it's winding down work on the hero-based team shooter as the studio shifts its focus to a "highly anticipated" (but unnamed) project. No more content, including skins and balance patches, is planned after the upcoming fall update, creative director Randy Varnell says. The servers will stick around "for the foreseeable future," so you can still play -- it'll just remain relatively static. Mostly likely, you can blame Overwatch.
A Chinese tech giant tried to buy Spotify
Spotify allegedly rejected a buyout bid from Tencent, the Chinese internet giant behind WeChat, earlier in 2017. Reportedly, Tencent saw Spotify as an opportunity to expand its streaming music influence beyond China, where it thrives through its own streaming services.
It can release doses in a child's body months or even years later.
Dream of a single childhood jab and all the vaccine benefits? A team of MIT engineers is working on it. They've created a method that allows a single injection to carry enough doses for the first one to two years of a child's life, with each dose released at a specified time. The secret is microscopic 'coffee cups' made of PLGA, a biocompatible polymer used in prosthetics.
