Amazon Prime Video's adaptation of the Fallout franchise of video games is entering production this year, and its two lead writers have been named, according to reports in Deadline and Variety. Ars Technica reports: It was previously known that Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (who worked together on HBO's Westworld) would be executive producers, and Variety and Deadline both report that Nolan will direct the first episode of the show. But Nolan and Joy will not be the primary creative leads on the series. Rather, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner have been attached as showrunners. Robertson-Dworet wrote the screenplays for the superhero movie Captain Marvel and the 2018 Tomb Raider film adaptation. She is also writing a future Star Trek film planned for release in 2023. Wagner is best known as one of the main writers on the sketch comedy series Portlandia and for work on modern sitcoms like The Office, Silicon Valley, and Baskets. Robertson-Dworet brings the science fiction and action/adventure credentials, and Wagner brings the comedy, covering two foundations of the Fallout franchise's narrative style.

For those unfamiliar, Fallout is a long-running video game franchise set in a post-apocalyptic alternate future where a cold war between China and the United States turns hot, leaving the world in a brutal nuclear winter with mutated creatures and violent bandits. Despite the grim setting, the series is known for its sense of humor as much as its darkness, with pop culture references, a 1950s aesthetic, heavy influences from pulp science fiction, and biting satire of American capitalism. The series originated as a slow-paced, top-down role-playing game on the PC in the 1990s, but the intellectual property was later bought by game publisher Bethesda Softworks.

Amazon is touting a major milestone for Fire TV, claiming it has sold more than 150 million of the streaming devices worldwide. And it announced deals with Ford Motor Co and Stellantis to bring Fire TV to the automakers' in-car entertainment systems. From a report: For comparison, Roku reported 56.4 million active streaming accounts across its family of devices as of the end of the third quarter of 2021 -- although that's a different metric than total devices sold. At the end of 2020, Amazon last reported having more than 50 million active Fire TV accounts. Amazon touted momentum for its connected-TV push, calling out the introduction last fall of the first Amazon-built TVs -- the Amazon Omni and 4-Series -- and a new, more powerful version of the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. According to the ecommerce giant, Fire TV Stick ranked as the top selling product on Amazon on Black Friday among all Amazon products, and customers purchased a record number of Fire TV smart TVs on Amazon.com the week of Black Friday, including models from Insignia, Toshiba, and Pioneer and the Amazon Fire TV Omni and 4-Series.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Cold War couldn't stop gaming from thriving in the Eastern Bloc. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a generation of young people living behind the Iron Curtain designed and released their own video games and arcade cabinets. Now, you can play English translations of some of these lost classics of early gaming. One is a text adventure where a Soviet military officer hunts and kills Rambo. The translated games all come from Slovakia and are a collaboration between the Slovak Game Developers Association and the Slovak Design Museum.

According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."

Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Whether it's cigarettes or alcohol, many governments have legislated that companies must warn consumers of the negative effects of their products. This is often achieved on packaging or required in advertising. France is now intending to bring such measures to the automotive industry, forcing carmakers to supplement ads with messages about greener transport alternatives, as reported by CTV News. Coming into force on March 1st, the legislation is the product of years of lobbying from French environmental groups. The law requires the mention of one of three statements in any given advert. Roughly translated, these are "For short journeys, walk or cycle," as well as "think about carpooling" and "Take public transport daily."

These messages must be included in all advertising, whether in print, online, or broadcast on radio or TV. The messages must be clearly visible on screen, or in the case of radio ads, be spoken aloud after the ad proper is finished. A hashtag, #SeDeplacerMoinsPolluer, is also required to be displayed in certain contexts, which translates to "Move without pollution." Fines for non-compliance can range up to $56,450. It's part of a wider push to cut down on transport emissions in France, with private cars making up a full 15 percent of the country's greenhouse gas output. The country has already pledged to end the sale of gas and diesel-powered cars by 2040, while the city of Paris has banned older, more polluting vehicles from the city center.

All 2021 and 2022 LG smart TVs will be equipped with a health education and telehealth app from the senior-focused health platform Independa, the company announced today. The platform will allow users to set up and have telehealth appointments through their TV. From a report: While telehealth visits via apps on smartphones and computers have become normal for many patients during the pandemic, using a TV-sized screen to see a doctor can be helpful for people with eyesight issues, says Kian Saneii, Independa's founder and CEO. It also makes it easier for doctors to ask people to stand up or show more of their body during the visit. "You can't hold your phone out far enough to show the right thing," he says. "Versus on the TV, you can walk around, you can bend your arm -- the actual engagement becomes more effective." Users have to set up separate accounts with the on-demand doctor and dentist services on the Independa platform, and they're prompted to do so through a QR code. Some people might be able to have their visit covered by insurance, but right now, most patients will pay a flat fee -- $75 for a dentist's call and around $55 for a doctor, Saneii says. That could be a barrier to some users. On-demand telehealth programs also often don't connect back to patients' medical records, which could make it difficult to pass information from those visits back to their regular doctors. Further reading: Samsung is Putting NFTs in Its Smart TVs.

Sony is setting some pretty grand expectations with its 2022 TV lineup -- led by the introduction of the world's first consumer QD-OLED TV. From a report: The company's current and well-regarded OLED sets use panels from LG Display that are tuned with Sony's own processing. But the new flagship Bravia XR A95K TV will include a QD-OLED (quantum dot organic light emitting diode) panel manufactured by none other than Samsung Display. It'll come in 65-inch and 55-inch sizes, with both coming in at 4K resolution. It was rumored that Samsung Electronics might announce a QD-OLED 4K TV at CES 2022, but that hasn't panned out so far. So it's Sony that gets the prime spotlight instead. Samsung Display has been developing QD-OLED for a number of years, and the display technology could become something of a middle step between standard OLED and the MicroLED displays that only Samsung is selling right now -- for ungodly sums of money. QD-OLED is designed to combine the best traits of OLED (perfect blacks, infinite contrast, etc.) with benefits of quantum dot LED TVs like improved brightness and more vivid color reproduction at higher brightness levels. It's not a major new approach like Micro LED, but more of a progression from where things have stood for a few years.

The new version of Samsung's Eco Remote features "RF harvesting capabilities that let the remote preserve its charge by 'collecting routers' radio waves and converting them to energy,'" reports The Verge. It can also be charged with solar energy. From the report: Aside from the new RF harvesting option, the Eco Remote can be charged from both outdoor and indoor light or (for the fastest results) over USB-C. Samsung says it's introducing a white model of the remote this year, which the company says is meant to better complement its "lifestyle" TVs like The Frame, Serif, and Sero. As with the original remote, the intention here is to ditch AAA batteries. Samsung has previously estimated that switching to solar-powered remotes could avoid 99 million discarded batteries over the course of seven years. It has also explored other ways of self-charging the internal battery such as "harnessing the kinetic energy that's created when the remote is shaken" and "using the vibrational energy that's created when the microphone picks up sounds." But this time around it settled on adding RF harvesting as another way to keep the clicker functioning whenever you need it.

The top eight US media groups plan to spend at least $115bn on new movies and television shows next year in pursuit of a video streaming business that loses money for most of them. From a report: The huge investment outlays come amid concerns that it will be harder to attract new customers in 2022 after the pandemic-fuelled growth in 2020 and 2021. Yet the alternative is to be left out of the streaming land rush. "There is no turning back," said media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. "The only way to compete is spending more and more money on premium content." The Financial Times calculated the planned expenditures based on company disclosures and analyst reports. One entertainment executive called them "mind-boggling." Most of the companies -- a list that includes Walt Disney, Comcast, WarnerMedia and Amazon -- are set to rack up losses on their streaming units. Including sports rights, the aggregate spending estimate rises to about $140bn. Disney's investment in streaming content is likely to grow 35-40 per cent in 2022, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley. The company's spending on all new movies and TV shows is expected to reach $23bn, though the number rises to $33bn including sports rights -- up 32 per cent from its total content spending in 2021 and 65 per cent from 2020.

What are some books that you read this year that you enjoyed reading? Doesn't have to be those that released this year -- though if possible, mention any recently published books.

Further reading: Ask Slashdot: What's a 2021 Movie or TV Show That You Enjoyed Watching?

LG is having a busy CES 2022 and the show hasn't even started. The company already revealed two bizarre OLED concepts and a pair of odd TVs, but today it made its most significant announcement yet by debuting OLED EX, the next generation of its OLED display technology. From a report: OLED EX (the EX stands for Evolution and eXperience, unfortunately) promises to boost maximum brightness, enhance picture quality, and allow for smaller display bezels. The underlying technology -- millions of individual self-lit pixels -- hasn't changed, but the use of an isotope called deuterium combined with algorithmic image processing can increase brightness by up to 30% over conventional OLED displays, LG claims. As boring as that may sound, the science behind it is actually pretty fascinating. LG found a way to extract deuterium, a rather scarce isotope (there is one deuterium atom in 6,000 hydrogen atoms) that's twice as heavy as hydrogen from water, then applied it to its TV's OLED elements. LG says stabilized deuterium compounds let the display emit brighter light while improving efficiency over time. Moving to the second change, LG is using a "personalized" machine learning algorithm that predicts the usage of each light-emitting diode (on up to 8K TVs) based on your viewing habits, then "precisely controls the display's energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The HDMI standards are a mess. HDMI 2.1, in particular, is a uniquely frustrating mess, with haphazard support among TV manufacturers, cable makers, and devices that make setting up, say 120Hz gaming on a PS5 or Xbox Series X a uniquely harrowing experience. Fortunately, the HDMI Forum is swooping in ahead of CES with its latest revision to the HDMI specification stack, HDMI 2.1a, which is here to make everything better and simpler... I'm kidding, of course. It's gonna make things more complicated. It's a new HDMI standard, what on earth did you expect?

Let's start with the good: HDMI 2.1a is an upcoming revision to the HDMI 2.1 stack and adds a major new feature, Source-Based Tone Mapping, or SBTM. SBTM is a new HDR feature that offloads some of the HDR tone mapping to the content source (like your computer or set-top box) alongside the tone mapping that your TV or monitor is doing. SBTM isn't a new HDR standard -- it's not here to replace HDR10 or Dolby Vision. Instead, it's intended to help existing HDR setups work better by letting the content source better optimize the content it passes to the display or by removing the need to have the user manually calibrate their screens for HDR by having the source device configure content for the specific display. Other use cases could be for when there's a mix of content types, like for streamers (who could have an HDR game playing alongside a window of black and white text), displaying each area of content.

The ransomware attack that crippled the IT systems and live streams of Cox radio and TV stations earlier this year was the work of Iranian hackers, The Record has learned. From the report: The attack has been attributed to a threat actor tracked under the codename of DEV-0270, a group linked to several intrusions against US companies this year that have ended in the deployment of ransomware. While the intrusion at the Cox Media Group came to light on June 3, when the attackers deployed their ransomware and encrypted some internal servers, the group had actually breached and been lurking inside the company's internal network for weeks since mid-May. The attack did not impact all Cox Media Group radio and TV stations but managed to cripple the ability of some stations to broadcast live streams on their sites. The Cox Media Group initially tried to play down the attack. Local reporters who shared details about the ransomware incident on Twitter were admonished and told to delete tweets. The company did, however, formally confirm the attack in October, four months later, but without mentioning any details about the Iranian hackers.

Luke Plunkett writes via Kotaku: Justin Kan, a co-founder of Twitch and the dude Justin.TV was named for, last week decided to launch a site called Fractal. It was to be a 'marketplace' where in-game items could be bought and sold as NFTs. Later, in Fractal's Discord server, a link appeared advertising a drop of 3,333 NFTs. You may have guessed what happened next. As Twitch reporter Zach Bussey has detailed, the message, which appeared legit since it was coming from inside the house, had actually been posted by someone gaining access to Fractal's Discord bot, pointing towards 'Fractai', not Fractal. The scammers managed to "sell" 3,294 NFTs before the plug was pulled. There were of course no actual NFTs being sold at all, just money being straight up stolen -- over $150,000 -- though you'd be forgiven for wondering what the difference is.

In response, the Fractal team issued a statement acknowledging the breach, along with a promise they are "going to make this right." [...] ractal say they are "planning to fully compensate these 373 victims," before adding the extraordinary warning, "We must use our best judgement as there's no 'undo button' in crypto," making the entire post read like a textbook example of showcasing why this is such a shitty space. Meanwhile, Kan issued a short video statement of his own, alongside warnings that this Discord scam had been perpetrated on other NFT communities as well.

"YouTube TV's battle with Disney is over almost as soon as it began," reports Engadget. "The two have struck a deal that restores access to ESPN, FX and other Disney channels on YouTube's streaming service..." As is often the case with disputes like this, each side blamed the other. Disney claimed YouTube TV "declined to reach a fair deal," while YouTube maintained that it was advocating on "behalf" of viewers...

It's not just that channels like ESPN remain a major draw for live TV services â" it's that Disney could easily have siphoned some of those customers to its equivalent Hulu offering. YouTube may have decided that any increased costs (and possible rate hikes) were less painful than losing viewership.
The base subscription rate is returning to $65 per month, but Reuters reports YouTube TV promised that "all impacted members" would still receive a one-off $15 discount.

The World Science Fiction Society has selected this year's winners for their prestigious Hugo award.

The best novel award went to Network Effect, the fifth book in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which also won this year's Hugo award for best series. (And Network Effect also won 2021's Nebula award for best novel, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.) Here's how publisher Tor.com begins their description: You know that feeling when you're at work, and you've had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot.

Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you'll read this century.
The best novelette award went to Two Truths and a Lie by Sarah Pinsker — available now for free reading online (which also won a Nebula award). The best novella award went to The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. (Both were also published by Tor.com.) Also available for free reading online is the Hugo winner for best short story, "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" by T. Kingfisher. (And Kingfisher won a second Hugo this year — the Lodestar award for best young adult book for A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking — which also won a Nebula award.)

A special award for "Best Related Work" went to Beowulf: A New Translation. ("Maria Dahvana Headley's decision to make Beoulf a bro puts his macho bluster in a whole new light," wrote the New York Times.) And the Best Graphic Story award went to Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, written by Octavia Butler and adapted by Damian Duffy...

Netflix won a Hugo award for The Old Guard ("Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form"), while the final 53-minute episode of NBC's TV show The Good Place won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Shortform. (The episode also won this year's "Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation".)

And there were also awards for best fan podcast, best fan writer, and best fanzine, as well as special one-off Hugo award for best video game, which went to the game Hades.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has banned seven firms it says used its platforms to spy on some 50,000 unsuspecting targets, including human rights activists, government critics, celebrities, journalists and ordinary people in more than 100 countries. These "surveillance-for-hire" companies were linked to around 1,500 accounts on Facebook and Instagram that were used to collect information on people and try to trick them into handing over sensitive personal information so that the firms could install spyware on their devices, according to a report released on Thursday by Meta, formerly known as Facebook.

"Each of these actors rely on networks of fake accounts on our platforms that are used to deceive users and mislead them," Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta's head of security policy, told NPR. Some firms also used Meta's WhatsApp to infect targets' phones with malware. The surveillance was also carried out over other internet services, from email and text messages to Twitter and YouTube. The goal, Gleicher said, is to "spy on people or snoop on them without them knowing about it." Gleicher's team spent months investigating surveillance activity before taking action against the seven companies for violating Meta's community standards and terms of service. Four of the firms are based in Israel, and the other three in China, India, and North Macedonia.

They include Black Cube, an Israel-based intelligence group reportedly used by Harvey Weinstein to dig up dirt on his accusers and journalists. Meta said Black Cube created fake accounts posing as graduate students, human rights workers and film and TV producers and tried to set up phone calls and get email addresses for a wide range of targets, from Palestinian activists to people working in medicine, mining and nonprofit organizations to figures involved in Russia's tech, finance, real estate and media sectors. [...] Another Israeli firm called Bluehawk CI tried to trick government opponents in the United Arab Emirates by pretending to be reporters for Fox News and Italy's La Stampa, Meta said. Meta also took down accounts connected to "an unidentified entity in China" that, Meta says, made tools used by Chinese law enforcement to spy on minority groups in Xinjiang, Myanmar and Hong Kong. "Meta has banned the companies from its platforms, removed the accounts it linked to them, and sent them cease-and-desist warnings," adds NPR. "It is notifying around 50,000 people whom it believes were targeted, and shared its findings with security researchers, other tech companies and policymakers."

Alphabet's Google is facing potentially heavy fines in Russia after a court ruled it must unblock the YouTube account of a TV channel owned by a sanctioned ally of President Vladimir Putin. From a report: The Moscow Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld an April ruling that ordered the U.S. technology giant to restore the Tsargrad account or face a daily fine, the channel said in a statement Thursday. Settlement talks between the two sides failed to yield a deal in August. Russia has stepped up confrontation with foreign social media and internet companies in what the government calls a campaign to uphold its digital sovereignty. Regulators have levied fines and slowed content in a bid to force companies including Google and Twitter to delete posts encouraging unauthorized protests and other material deemed illegal. In September, Google and Apple removed a protest-voting app from their Russian stores as parliamentary elections got underway after the authorities threatened to imprison their local staff. Google now faces a daily fine of 100,000 rubles ($1,360), which will double each week that the company refuses to comply. Tsargrad said the court capped the total fine at 1 billion rubles in the first nine months and then it will be allowed to grow further. Under Russian law, there's no upper limit on the potential fines.

YouTube TV yesterday warned that it could lose all Disney-owned channels after Friday because of a contract dispute and said it will temporarily reduce its price by $15 a month if that happens. Ars Technica reports: "We're now in negotiations with Disney to continue distributing their content on YouTube TV so you can continue watching everything from your favorite teams on ESPN to The Bachelor to Good Morning America. Our deal expires on Friday, December 17, and we haven't been able to reach an equitable agreement yet, so we wanted to give you an early heads up so that you can understand your choices," the Google-owned YouTube wrote in a blog post.

"[I]f we are unable to reach a deal by Friday, the Disney-owned channels will no longer be available on YouTube TV and we will decrease our monthly price by $15, from $64.99 to $49.99 (while this content remains off our platform)," the blog post said. YouTube noted that users can pause or cancel their YouTube TV subscriptions at any time and subscribe to the Disney Bundle for $13.99 a month.

YouTube's statement that it wants "equitable" terms indicates that it is seeking a most-favored-nation (MFN) clause from Disney. "Our ask to Disney, as with all our partners, is to treat YouTube TV like any other TV provider -- by offering us the same rates that services of a similar size pay, across Disney's channels for as long as we carry them. If Disney offers us equitable terms, we'll renew our agreement with them," YouTube wrote. When contacted by Ars, Disney said that the contract is scheduled to expire on Friday at 11:59 pm ET and covers "the ABC Owned Television Stations, the ESPN networks, the Disney channels, Freeform, the FX networks, and the National Geographic channels." In an email to Ars, Disney expressed confidence that the companies can get a deal done: "Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution has a highly successful track record of negotiating such agreements with providers of all types and sizes across the country and is committed to working with Google to reach a fair, market-based agreement. We are optimistic that we can reach a deal and continue to provide their YouTube TV customers with our live sporting events and news coverage, plus kids, family, and general entertainment programming."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years running, we've been jazzed by the potential of HDMI 2.1 -- the relatively new video connector standard that can provide variable refresh rates (VRR), automatic low latency connections (ALLM), and of course, a giant pipe with 48Gbps of bandwidth (and fixed rate signaling) to deliver up to 10K resolution and up to a 120Hz refresh rate depending on your cable and compression. But today, I'm learning that not only are all of those features technically optional, but that the HDMI standards body owner actually encourages TV and monitor manufacturers that have none of those things -- zip, zilch, zero -- to effectively lie and call them "HDMI 2.1" anyhow. That's the word from TFTCentral, which confronted the HDMI Licensing Administrator with the news that Xiaomi was selling an "HDMI 2.1" monitor that supported no HDMI 2.1 features, and was told this was a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. It's infuriating.

It means countless people, some of whom we've encouraged in our reviews to seek out HDMI 2.1 products, may get fooled into fake futureproofing if they don't look at the fine print to see whether features like ALLM, VRR, or even high refresh rates are possible. Worse, they'll get fooled for no particularly good reason: there was a perfectly good version of HDMI without those features called HDMI 2.0, but the HDMI Licensing Administrator decided to kill off that brand when it introduced the new one. Very little of this is actually news, I'm seeing -- we technically should have known that HDMI 2.1's marquee features would be optional for a while now, and here at The Verge we've seen many a TV ship without full support. In one story about shopping for the best gaming TV for PS5 and Xbox Series X, we characterized it as "early growing pains."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report by Gizmodo, written by Isaac Schultz: The Dark Matter Radio project is attempting to detect hidden photons in a specific frequency range by methodically turning the dial, in what amounts to a patient, sweeping search of the wavelengths where such a particle could sound off. Later generations of the radio will hunt axions. [...] The current Dark Matter Radio experiment is the prototype, or Pathfinder, for larger projects down the line. It consists of a liter-volume cylinder made of superconducting niobium metal, around which is tightly wound niobium wire. It looks a bit like someone wound guitar string on a spool's vertical axis instead of its horizontal axis. That's the Pathfinder's inductor. If a hidden photon resonating at the frequency the Pathfinder was tuned to passed through it, the change in magnetic field would induce a voltage around the contraption's inductor. "The null hypothesis is that there shouldn't be any radio waves inside of that box unless, in this case, hidden photons, which are our particular flavor of dark matter," said Stephen Kuenstner, a physicist at Stanford University and a member of the DM Radio team. Hidden photons "can pass through the box and they have some probability of interacting with the circuit in the same way that a radio wave would," Kuenstner said.

To amplify any signal the Pathfinder picks up, there's a hexagonal shield of niobium plates sheathing the aforesaid components that acts as a capacitor. That amplified signal is then transported to a quantum sensor called a SQUID (a Superconducting QUantum Interference Device), a technology invented by the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s. The SQUID lives on the bottom of the radio and measures and records any signals picked up. The smaller the expected mass for the axion becomes, the more elusive the particle is, as its interactions with ordinary matter are proportional to its mass. So it's important that the next generation of DM Radio becomes more sensitive. The way the experiment is set up, "the frequency on the dial is the mass of the axion," [said Kent Irwin, a physicist at Stanford University and SLAC and the principal investigator of Dark Matter Radio]. Convenient! The mass of these particles doesn't even compare to the smallest things you might think of, like atoms or quarks. These particles would be somewhere between a trillionth and a millionth of an electronvolt, and an electronvolt is about a billionth of a proton's mass.

The helium Pathfinder uses is gaseous, and remains a relatively warm 4 kelvin (in other words, four degrees above absolute zero), but the next experiment -- Dark Matter Radio 50L -- will use liquified helium, cooled to less than one degree above absolute zero. All the better for hearing dark matter with. DM Radio 50L sits in the corner of a large room in the Hansen Experimental Physics Lab at Stanford. The room looks a little bit like the TV room in Willy Wonka's factory; it has high ceilings, lots of inscrutable equipment, and is glaringly white. Two 6-foot-tall dilution refrigerators on one side, abutting a deep closet, are the radio. The two machines are fed gaseous helium sitting in tanks in the next room, which they then cool down into liquid helium of a frigid 2 kelvin. Magnets inside gold-plated copper and aluminum sheathes will do the job of converting any detected axions into radio waves for physicists to interpret. "The particle physics community is -- the analogy is often said -- just like a battleship. It takes a while to turn and it has a lot of momentum," Irwin said. "So even though I think that there's a lot of reasons to believe that these radio-like dark matter signals are more attractive -- the axionic signals -- than [Weakly Interactinv Massive Particles (WIMPs)], there's still a lot of giant experiments searching for little things, which is good." The team behind the Dark Matter Radio is "currently working with the Department of Energy on a next-next-generation experiment that will look for axions in a cubic meter, hence its name of DM Radio-m3," adds Gizmodo. "In the more distant future, Irwin and his team have aspirations for a project called DM Radio-GUT, which would be closer to the scale of some of the largest physics experiments on the planet."

"All told, Irwin said, the favored area for axion mass could be searched in the next couple of decades using larger experiments -- though the team could simply find an axion before then, potentially ending the hunt for dark matter in its entirety. With enough listening, we might have an entirely new particle for the textbooks. Or maybe there'll be radio silence."