gshc2020.com

Reports of layoffs at 1047 began to surface last week. "A bunch of us, 'the crew' aboard the 1047 train, are getting off on this post-Empulse station," QA director Igor Krinitskiy wrote at the time. "It has been an interesting ride, bumpy at times, narrowly avoiding derailment and with everyone working hard to keep that 1047 train going."

More recent messages also point to multiple cuts across the studio. UI engineer Iannis Stefan Palaczkos wrote that "the studio has been sadly hit by another wave of layoffs, and I got caught in that wave," while concept artist Jonathan Kuo said separately that "as of the end of this week, it will be my last day at 1047 Games due to the third wave of studio layoffs."

1047 Games found fast success several years ago with Splitgate: Arena Warfare, a 'Halo with portals' mashup that was an immediate hit. That success prompted a $100 million funding round in 2021 and big ambitions about becoming "the next Riot Games," but nothing has clicked since. Splitgate 2 was a mess, leading to a rollback and layoffs just a couple months after it went live; it was resurrected as Splitgate: Arena Reloaded a few months later but hasn't attracted anywhere near the players of its predecessors.

Empulse, announced earlier this year, also made a positive early impression but hasn't drawn big player numbers. Unlike Splitgate, which is free to play, Empulse will cost you $20 to get in, which is no doubt a factor in those smaller numbers. But even in that context, sub-1000 concurrent player counts on Steam aren't great. Studio CEO Ian Proulx said in 2025 that "the goal is to grow over time, not aim for a massive splash on day one"—he was speaking of Splitgate 2's relaunch, but it's a philosophy he'll have to apply more broadly if Empulse (and, by extension, 1047 itself) is to have any future.

I've reached out to 1047 Games for comment on the layoffs and will update if I receive a reply.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill. %!s()

Mama's Night Off is a Princess Donut-inspired flash game created in collaboration with Maeve Chocolate. The game features a cartoon Princess Donut shooting magic missiles at falling cherries. Each shot is accompanied by an audible "Pew!" voiced by the audiobook narrator Jeff Hays himself. As flash games go, it's pretty straightforward, but the addition of terrific voice acting makes it worth checking out.

The game launched about a week ago on the Maeve Chocolate website and was announced via a post on the Dungeon Crawler Carl Reddit. Mama's Night Off is meant as a way to promote the company's new Virgin Dirty Shirley chocolate bar, which was inspired by Princess Donut's favorite drink. Here's the official synopsis of the candy bar directly from the Maeve Chocolate website:

"The bar is inspired by Princess Donut’s favorite drink, the Virgin Dirty Shirley. It starts with sustainably sourced, delicious dark chocolate, melts into a creamy white chocolate center, and is packed with sweet, dried cherries and popping candy that crackles with fizzy magic. Or, as Donut herself would probably say: 'Carl, if my chocolate doesn’t sparkle, what are we even doing here?'"

While this is the first playable Dungeon Crawler game, it's definitely not going to be the last. The upcoming Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG is set to arrive in December 2026 and has already been extremely popular. It was first launched as a crowdfunding campaign in collaboration with Renegade Studios and raised an absurd amount of money via Backerkit. Since then, the core rule book and miniatures have gone up for preorder on Amazon where it remains one of the best-selling tabletop games on the site. %!s()

Based on previous forecasts, those figures could be conservative.

BloombergNEF’s new estimate for electricity demand in 2035 is 83% higher than what the consultancy predicted in December. Other organizations have raised their forecasts, too. EPRI, an electrical industry nonprofit, has more than doubled its 2024 estimate, while S&P’s forecast rose by more than a third between October and April. The revisions reflect the fevered pace of data center development across the U.S.

In the coming decade, BloombergNEF expects the majority of new data centers to hit electrical grids that are already strained. The PJM Interconnection, which spans Virginia to Illinois, will see 34% of its electricity go to data centers, while ERCOT, which covers most of Texas, will have to devote 22% of its generating capacity. 

PJM, which already hosts a large number of the country’s data centers, has struggled to cope with connection requests from both large generators and large loads. It paused applications for new sources to connect to the grid for four years, putting it in a precarious position as demand continued to grow.

Though PJM reopened the queue to new generating sources in April, the situation has grown so dire that one utility, American Electric Power, has threatened to pull out of the interconnection. The supply-demand imbalance has pushed electricity prices up 76% over the past year.

Even with the congestion, data centers still want to connect to PJM — they represented 38% of charges in the grid manager’s most recent capacity auction.

Despite the U.S. claiming a majority of AI compute, data centers will continue to grow elsewhere. By 2033, if AI adoption continues along an aggressive trajectory, data centers will create 1,935 terawatt-hours of new electricity demand worldwide, nearly as much as India uses annually.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.

De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.

You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing [email protected].

View Bio %!s()

The project has been in development since Amazon acquired MGM back in 2022. Peter Ocko (Moonhaven, Lodge 49) was brought on to the series in 2024 as writer, showrunner, and co-executive producer alongside Wan.

Wan is best known for his work in the horror genre, having famously co-created the Saw and Insidious franchises before launching The Conjuring universe, which currently stands as the highest-grossing horror IP of all time. Ock boasts over three decades in the industry as a writer and producer for several major TV series, including Pushing Daisies, The Office, Elementary, and Black Sails, to name just a few.

Blumhouse Atomic Monster, the independent horror studio that merged Blumhouse Productions and James Wan’s Atomic Monster, will handle production, with Michael Clear and Rob Hackett also attached as co-executive producers.

Staunch Robocop fans will be happy to know the project is in good hands, with the 1987 movie’s co-creators and co-writers Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner joining the list of executive producers on the show.

As for what fans can expect from the series, its official logline doesn’t deviate too much from what we already know about Robocop: “A giant tech conglomerate convinces the city to place a powerful robot on its police force – a robot implanted with the consciousness of a beloved, fallen officer.”

As told in a press release, Wan excitedly admitted that he’s been a “massive” Robocop fan “forever,” saying it was a “dream” to breathe new life into the iconic IP.

“What Paul Verhoeven created in 1987 was decades ahead of its time, and its questions about technology, identity, and who corporations really serve have only grown more urgent,” he said. “With Peter’s distinctive vision and bold approach to storytelling, and alongside Ed and our partners at Amazon MGM Studios, we’re working to honor what made the original iconic and highlight its relevancy in this modern, tech-driven world, while building something unmistakably new for a global audience.”

Peter Friedlander, Amazon MGM Studios’ Head of Global Television, described Robocop as “not just an action spectacle, but a sharp, provocative mirror of our relationship with technology and power.”

“Peter Ocko has crafted a vision that honors the soul of what made the original so enduring while building something entirely fresh and urgent for today. Paired with the cinematic sensibility of James Wan and the team at Blumhouse Atomic Monster, we believe this series will captivate a whole new generation of fans on Prime Video," Friedlander said.

Thus far, no official release date has been set for the show, but fans itching for more RoboCop content can play through RoboCop: Rogue City, a first-person shooter that released in November 2023 with a standalone expansion in 2025. IGN gave the game a 7/10, with Justin Koreis describing it as “the video game equivalent of a B movie in the best way.”

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze. %!s()

When volcanoes erupt, one can observe streams of liquid lava cool and solidify into rock formations at the bottoms of volcanoes. The same physical process—a liquid changing into a solid phase upon cooling—can be observed when lakes start freezing during cold winters. These phase changes always come with changes in the physical properties of the material, such as the density or refractive index that govern how sound and light move through it.

This fundamental physical process is also used during the melting of glass preforms to loosen their structure while drawing optical fiber. These fibers then guide light through their cores, allowing the transmission of information via light very quickly over long distances, which is why they are widely used for telecommunications applications.

For more specialized applications, such as fiber lasers, fiber endoscopes or fiber sensors, other types of optical fibers have been developed. Hollow-core fibers, for instance, can be filled with different gases or liquids to measure temperature distributions or act as microscopic chemistry labs.

Freezing the fiber core

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of the Science of Light (MPL) in Erlangen, Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) and the Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technologies (IPHT) in Jena have developed a new type of optical fiber by freezing such liquid-core optical fibers (LiCOF) in nitrogen at -196°C (-321°F), leading to a phase change in the fiber core from liquid to solid. The research is published in the journal Optica.

"The key point is that the frozen section of the LiCOF retains its ability to guide light. Not only that, but both the liquid and the frozen sections of the fiber also guide hypersonic sound waves," says Simon Seiderer, one of the three lead authors of the article and a researcher in the "Quantum Optoacoustics" research group of Dr. Birgit Stiller, who leads the project.

The researchers use the extremely efficient coupling between light and sound in their new fiber, an effect known as Brillouin-Mandelstam scattering. The effect is already well known in traditional optical fibers. However, with the phase transition to the frozen LiCOF, the researchers create an extreme, highly confined and dense environment.

Stronger light-sound interactions

Here, the optoacoustic coupling becomes more than 1,000 times stronger than in standard optical fibers. By harnessing this efficient coupling, the researchers demonstrated optoacoustic memory. This fundamental building block for photonic neuromorphic computing in fibers works by using the drastic differences in velocities between light and sound waves. Information is transferred from the fast light wave to the much slower sound waves and later converted back into light. The efficient optoacoustic coupling in the frozen LiCOF opens new avenues for drastically reducing the energy consumption of photonic computing architectures.

The project was possible thanks to established cooperation with Markus Schmidt and Mario Chemnitz from IPHT Jena, who pioneered research with liquid-core optical fibers. With the additional step of freezing the LiCOF's core, higher nonlinearities became possible.

"By freezing the liquid core, we have created an entirely new physical platform that provides extreme nonlinearities while being easy to handle," says Stiller. "While demonstrating a highly efficient optoacoustic memory is a fantastic first step, this level of light-sound coupling not only opens up exciting new possibilities for neuromorphic computing, but also for quantum information processing, microwave photonics and high-precision sensing."

Publication details

Simon Seiderer et al, Giant Brillouin gain in frozen CS 2 capillaries, Optica (2026). DOI: 10.1364/optica.600056

Journal information: Optica

Who's behind this story?

Lisa Lock

BA art history, MA material culture. Former museum editor, paramedic, and transplant coordinator. Editing for Science X since 2021. Full profile →

Robert Egan

Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language. Full profile →

Citation: Frozen fiber couples light and sound 1,000 times more strongly than standard glass fibers (2026, July 21) retrieved 22 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-frozen-fiber-couples-strongly-standard.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. %!s()