Technologies

Why the Ghost Particles Crashing Into Antarctica Could Change Astronomy Forever

About 1.2 miles beneath Antarctica, an underground observatory is hunting for «ghost particles.» What it finds could reveal the unseen heart of a distant galaxy.

About 47 million light-years from where you’re sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 spits out streams of enigmatic particles. They’re neutrinos — otherwise known as the elusive «ghost particles» haunting our universe while leaving little trace of their existence.

Immediately after coming into being, bundles of these invisible bits plunge across the cosmic expanse. They whisk by bright stars we can see and zip past pockets of space teeming with marvels we’re yet to discover. They fly and fly and fly until, occasionally, they reach Earth’s South Pole and drill themselves underground. The neutrinos’ journey is seamless.

But scientists patiently wait for them to arrive.

Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. And when any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube remains vigilant.

In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 «high-energy neutrino emissions» coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. «Neutrino astronomy,» scientists call it.

It’d be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot.

Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet’s atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube’s first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056.

With this newfound neutrino source, we’re entering a new era of the particle’s story. In fact, according to the research team, it’s likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can’t tell.

And if you wanted to stop a neutrino in its tracks, you’d need to fight it with a block of lead one light-year-wide — though even then, there’d be a fractional chance of success. Thus, harnessing these particles, NCG 1068’s version or not, could allow us to penetrate areas of the cosmos that’d usually lie out of reach.

Now what?

Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn’t even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe’s backstage.

They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we’re unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.

«The universe has multiple ways of communicating with us,» Denise Caldwell of the National Science Foundation and a member of the IceCube team, told reporters on Thursday. «Electromagnetic radiation, which we see as light from stars, gravitational waves that shake the fabric of space — and elementary particles, such as protons, neutrons and electrons spewed out by localized sources.

«One of these elementary particles has been neutrinos that permeate the universe, but unfortunately, neutrinos are very difficult to detect.»

In fact, even the galaxy NGC 1068 and its gargantuan black hole are typically obscured by a thick veil of dust and gas, making them hard to parse with standard optical telescopes and equipment — despite years of scientists trying to pierce its curtain. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope could have a leg up in this case due to its infrared eyes, but neutrinos may be an even better way in.

Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space.

«We are very lucky, in a sense, because we can access an amazing understanding of this object,» Elisa Resconi, of the Technical University of Munich and IceCube team member, said of NGC 1068.

It’s also notable that there are many (many) more galaxies similar to NGC 1068 — categorized as Seyfert galaxies — than there are blazars similar to TXS 0506+056. This means IceCube’s latest discovery is, arguably, a larger step forward for neutrino astronomers than the observatory’s seminal one.

Perhaps the bulk of neutrinos diffusing throughout the universe are rooted in NGC 1068 doppelgangers. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s far more to the merit of neutrinos than just their sources.

These ghosts, as Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an IceCube team member put it, are fit to solve two major mysteries in astronomy.

First off, a wealth of galaxies in our universe boast gravitationally monstrous voids at their centers, black holes reaching masses millions to billions of times greater than our sun’s. And these black holes, when active, blast jets of light from their guts — emitting enough illumination to outshine every single star in the galaxy itself. «We don’t understand how that happens,» Vandenbrouke said simply. Neutrinos could provide a way to study the regions around black holes.

Second is the general, yet persistent, conundrum of cosmic rays.

We don’t really know where cosmic rays come from either, but these strings of particles reach energies to and beyond millions of times higher than we can reach here on Earth with human-constructed particle accelerators like the one at CERN.

«We think neutrinos have some role to play,» Vandenbroucke said. «Something that can help us answer these two mysteries of black holes powering very bright galaxies and of the origins of cosmic rays.»

A decade to catch a handful

To be clear, IceCube doesn’t exactly trap neutrinos.

Basically, this observatory tells us every time a neutrino happens to interact with the ice shrouding it. «Neutrinos hardly interact with matter,» Vandenbrouke emphasized. «But they do interact sometimes.»

As millions of neutrinos shoot into the icy region where IceCube is set up, at least one tends to bump into a speck of ice, which then shatters and produces a flash of light. IceCube sensors capture that flash and send the signal up to the surface, notifications that are then analyzed by hundreds of scientists.

Ten years of light-flash-data allowed the team to pretty much map out where every neutrino seems to be coming from in the sky. It soon became clear there was a dense region of neutrino emissions located right where galaxy NGC 1068 is stationed.

But even with such evidence, Resconi said the team knew «it’s not the time to open the champagne, because we still have one fundamental question to answer. How many times did this alignment happen just by chance? How can we be sure neutrinos are actually coming from such an object?»

So, to make matters as concrete as possible, and really, truly prove this galaxy is spitting out ghosts, «we generated 500 million times the same experiment,» Resconi said.

Upon which, I can only imagine, a bottle of Veuve was popped at last. Though the hunt isn’t over.

«We are only beginning to scratch the surface as far as finding new sources of neutrinos,» Ignacio Taboada of the Georgia Institute of Technology and IceCube team member said. «There must be many other sources far deeper than NGC 1068, hiding somewhere to be found.»

Technologies

Invincible VS Is a Tag-Team Brawler Packed With Bloody Superhero Carnage

The Invincible franchise is heading to Xbox.

Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase had its share of surprises, including a new game from Pokemon developer Game Freak and the ROG Xbox Ally portable handheld. Another surprise is a fighting game featuring characters from the Invincible comic and show.

Invincible VS is a three-versus-three tag fighting game featuring characters from the Invincible universe. The trailer showed several characters from the show, including Invincible, Omni-Man, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, Bulletproof, and two Viltrumites — the powerful alien species Omni-Man and Invincible belong to.

The game itself has a comic book art style to it, but its action is more along the lines of Mortal Kombat. The fighting is very bloody, which is faithful to the comic and show, but no kind of fatalities were shown in the trailer. There are also a couple of familiar settings from the show. While we saw only a handful of characters in this first glimpse of Invincible VS, there is a wealth of heroes and villains that could be added to the game before it launches.

Robert Kirkman’s Invincible
started as a comic in 2003 and ended its run in 2018. In 2021, an animated series based on the comic made its debut on Amazon Prime Video. The show wrapped up its third season in March and has already been renewed for a fourth season.

Skybound Games is publishing Invincible VS with development handled by Quarter Up, an in-house studio led by members of the team that created 2013’s Killer Instinct.

Invincible VS will be released sometime in 2026 for PC and Xbox Series consoles.

Technologies

I Played With the ROG Xbox Ally, the Upcoming Xbox Handheld

The new handheld console was revealed during the Xbox Games Showcase, and I got to spend some time with my hands on it.

Microsoft revealed its long-rumored Xbox handheld console running Windows 11 during the Xbox Games Showcase — two models called the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X — and I spent a short time playing around with one soon after.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures or videos of the demo since the hardware we got to test wasn’t final. That became evident when our designated guide had HDMI connection issues with the unit. I was able to play around with the Xbox full-screen experience and the various settings menus and play the beginning minutes of Gears of War Reloaded, which comes out this summer.

The device is quite comfortable to hold, with slightly textured grips. The face buttons, triggers and analog sticks all felt familiar, very similar to what I’m used to on an Xbox controller.

What’s really exciting is that you can download your games, remote play from your Xbox or stream from the cloud, making this more useful than PlayStation’s Portal, which can only stream and play remotely. That’s one of the major benefits of being inside Xbox’s ecosystem: You can play a game on any of its devices, regardless of where you bought it, whether that be Xbox consoles, PC, cloud or this new handheld. This more open-platform approach makes the Xbox Ally closer in spirit to a Steam Deck compared with a Nintendo Switch, which can only run Nintendo games.

When it ships — expected in time for the winter holidays — you’ll be able to navigate via a full-screen Xbox app, which combines your Xbox game library with installed games from several other marketplaces into a single Xbox experience. The company specifically mentioned Xbox, Game Pass, battle.net (owned by Microsoft) and «other leading PC storefronts,» which I’m hoping includes Steam. Much like on an Xbox, each game has icons depicting which platform they’re from. In my demo, the only example of a different storefront was Hearthstone, which had a battle.net icon.

The Xbox Ally consoles use the Game Bar, and if you’ve used the Xbox app on PC, then you’ll find it familiar. In fact, pressing the new Xbox button opens an almost identical version of the guide when playing Xbox games on PC. However, there’s also a new Command Center tab on the far left to adjust settings for power consumption and performance, similar to what we’ve seen on Steam Deck.

In Game Bar, you can quickly jump to the home screen, your library, launch games, open apps, chat with friends, adjust settings and more. And this Game Bar works alongside Asus’s Armoury Crate overlay. This is a little worrisome, as Armoury Crate has usually felt more like unnecessary bloatware, but when we get to test the device later this year we’ll see if Asus has stripped it down to the relevant functions rather than just added more on top.

Since it’s a Windows 11 device, you’ll also be able to launch and use apps like Discord and Twitch and access game mods. The Xbox Ally boots directly into the «Xbox full screen experience» similar to how a Steam Deck launches into Big Picture mode. The full-screen experience is optimized specifically for handheld gaming, and Xbox told me the device minimizes background activity and allocates more system resources to gameplay like Game Mode does on Windows. This means more memory and potentially higher framerates for your games.

The ROG Ally and Ally X have been out for a bit now, but the Xbox models have some unique features. In addition to the Xbox button, the ROG Xbox Ally also has larger, contoured grips. The previous ROG Ally is more rectangular; the Xbox Ally is closer to the design of the PlayStation Portal, with dedicated, slightly separated hand grips that mimic the look and feel of a standard game controller. They also have upgraded components over the Asus versions.

The handheld comes in two options, a white Xbox Ally and the more powerful Xbox Ally X that comes in black. The lower-end Ally is powered by an AMD Ryzen Z2A processor, comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage, weighs 23.6 ounces (670 grams) and has a 60Wh battery. The Ally X has an AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor, 24GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, weighs a bit more at 25.2 ounces (715 grams) and has an 80Wh battery.

Both models are equipped with a 7-inch,120Hz 1080p screen, the same as on the original Asus versions of the devices. They also have RGB lights surrounding the analog sticks, something I hope I’ll be able to turn off when I spend some real time playing on the device. The Ally X did feel on the heavier side, but then again, the recently released Switch 2 and my Steam Deck OLED are also pretty heavy, so I think that’s just what handhelds weigh these days.

Xbox hasn’t yet revealed the pricing or release date, aside from «this holiday.»

Technologies

Everything I Suspect Will Be Announced at WWDC 2025 Monday

We could see new iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch software called iOS 26, MacOS Tahoe and WatchOS 26. Apple is rumored to overhaul all of its OSes with a unifying visual interface.

Apple’s developer conference, WWDC 2025, kicks off Monday at 10 a.m. PT. At its last two WWDC events, Apple launched itself into new territories, jumping into both AR/VR and generative AI. There’s pressure on the company to match, if not top, what it’s done in the past. CNET has editors and writers attending in person to report on live WWDC 2025 developments as they break.

There was the Vision Pro in 2023, and then Apple Intelligence in 2024. What big announcement is coming in 2025? With both the Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence having faced slow and heavily criticized starts, the big message at this year’s WWDC doesn’t seem clear at all. Apple might focus on operating system redesigns and gradual improvements across the board.

WWDC is usually a showcase for Apple’s future-forward ideas. It’s also where the company discusses its developer tools, as you’d expect. And it’s where previews of all the new OS versions are revealed, giving an early look at what’s coming to the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other Apple devices.

It’s possible Apple will reveal a new home device — a display-enabled HomePod — or even a new Apple Pencil with a calligraphy mode. But the biggest rumors so far suggest a new cross-OS redesign and renaming that could be Apple’s way of deflecting some attention away from not having big new AI features to show off.

OS by year: Will it be iOS 26?

Recent reports from Bloomberg’s often-correct Mark Gurman say Apple is going to ditch the existing numbered OS convention it’s used for years and instead go with another approach to naming: labeling all annual OSes by year number. Instead of iOS 19, we’ll have iOS 26. And iPadOS 26, and MacOS 26, and WatchOS 26, TVOS 26, VisionOS 26. Samsung made a similar move in 2020, jumping from the Galaxy S10 in 2019 to the Galaxy S20 in 2020.

Apple’s numbering has felt pretty disjointed as the numbers have gone ever-higher across multiple device categories. A yearly number would at least help people know if they’re on the current version.

Glass as the new look

The WWDC invites, featuring a hazy transparent ring, hint at a reported redesign of all the company’s software to a new «glass» look. Bloomberg’s Gurman reported on a large incoming cross-OS design shift, calling it a dramatic redesign and one of the biggest Apple’s done in years. The design may mirror the Vision Pro’s VisionOS feel, which has lots of frosted glass panes, layers of transparency and circular app icons. Front Page Tech’s Jon Prosser showed a preview of the expected design based on information from his sources, and it definitely looks VisionOS-esque.

Beyond a coat of paint, will the OSes start to feel more similar in function too? I’m particularly curious about how iPadOS and MacOS start to close in on each other even more. Apple’s iPad has slowly inched toward acting like a computer, with features like Stage Manager for multitasking, and it’s felt inevitable that the tablet line would eventually provide a comparable experience to the MacBook.

WatchOS should get Apple Intelligence, and the Health app may be part of it

One of the devices that’s missed out on Apple Intelligence so far has been the Apple Watch, and that should be changing soon. Apple is expected to put more AI on the next Watch OS, which could help with message summaries, translation and maybe even composing messages. It could also bring overdue health and fitness upgrades. Reports say Apple could be working on adding generative AI insights to its Health app data and even using AI as a medical service, with a launch target of 2026. Health could possibly get a paid subscription tier, similar to Fitness and what many of Apple’s current services are adding. This could be like what Google is doing with Wear OS, which has long used Fitbit Premium as a health subscription (a broader Gemini rollout is on the way too).

I like AI coaching and insights on a watch, but I don’t like subscriptions. We’ll see what happens, and if Apple gets into any of these future plans at this WWDC.

Battery life boosts

Another recent report (again, Gurman) says AI will help Apple improve battery life on its devices. How many devices? The iPhone, but hopefully the Apple Watch, too — these are the products in the lineup that I find I need to charge more than I’d like. For me, at least, iPads and Macs are mostly fine on battery life as is, but I’ll never refuse longer battery life for anything.

Apple has made gradual boosts to its battery features over time, but maybe there will be more intelligently applied power modes this time.

Game news?

Apple may be pushing the importance of games again, just as the Nintendo Switch 2 debuts. Bloomberg reports that the company could release a new app to act as a hub for games and game services including Apple Arcade, becoming an overdue overhaul of Game Center.

A number of game controller accessories, like Backbone, already have app hubs that function as game launchers, but Apple has never done much to help organize games on its devices in a way that feels more like what you find on a console. A new app seems like a good fit for those types of controllers, too.

Apple just acquired its first game studio: RAC7, the developers of hit Apple Arcade game Sneaky Sasquatch.

Apple could also have VR gaming news, if older reports come true: PlayStation VR 2 controllers have been expected to work with Vision Pro headsets, in a push to expand gaming on Apple’s VR/AR headset. Maybe that’ll be part of a push to get more developers onboard, as Apple could be readying a less expensive version of the Vision Pro in the next year. Right now the headset can’t compete with Meta’s more affordable Quest headsets in the gaming department.

AI: Live translation, and maybe Vision camera advancements

Apple opened up camera access to enterprise developers last year, and now it’s time for AI tools to emerge for everyone else — tools that could help describe what you’re seeing, or help you remember things too. Apple has already added assistive support for some camera-enabled functions on the Vision Pro and other products, suggesting more to come.

Though Apple’s WWDC keynote presentation isn’t expected to include many announcements of AI strides, the company still needs to compete with Google, Open AI, Perplexity and many others who are making such strides. Reports say live translation will come to some AirPods models, which would mirror what Google and Meta have been doing on glasses and earbuds and on phones.

The biggest VisionOS move I’d expect to see is some introduction of camera-aware AI. Apple Intelligence debuted on Apple’s VR/AR spatial computer headset earlier this year, but none of the AI can take advantage of the system’s cameras to «see» what you’re seeing. At least not yet. Google’s use of Gemini to access the cameras on upcoming headsets and glasses, and Meta’s support of camera access for Quest developers (and its expanding AI tools on Ray-Bans), suggest Apple needs to move this way now to begin paving a way for camera-aware AI to work on future headsets and eventually glasses.

Apple Pencil

We could see either a brand-new Apple Pencil or updated features that make the current device feel new, according to a report from Bloomberg. Expect to see a new a digital reed calligraphy pen feature unveiled. It’s unclear whether this new software will be for both the original Apple Pencil and the Apple Pencil 2, or if we’ll actually see a brand-new version of the stylus.

A new HomePod-slash-iPad?

There could be a new product emerging at WWDC: a look at a long-expected screen-enabled HomePod that may be part of a bigger push into smarter smart home tech. Reports suggest it’ll be something like a HomePod now — speaker-enabled, with an array of mics — but with a touchscreen. Would it be a screen big enough to act as a photo frame, or something more like a control panel? Where would this thing live, exactly? And what would it cost? Originally, reports of this device even suggested a robotic arm that would allow the screen to follow your face, but those plans seem to be off the table for now.

Of all the wild-card product ideas Apple could announce at this show, this seems the most likely.

WWDC/Gurman potpourri

There are, of course, a number of other rumors from Gurman. Here are some that caught our attention:

Messages app: iOS could get the ability to add backgrounds to chats and group chats.
iPadOS: Apple may reveal an iPadOS version of the Preview app.
iPadOS: MacOS-like multitasking might come to the iPad.
iPhone Camera app: The interface could get an overhaul focused on making it simpler to use.

We’ll know more soon

WWDC is happening June 9, with the keynote video presentation streaming at 10 a.m. Pacific. We’ll be there at Apple Park, too, covering it in person. We’ll know more about how all this software could be hinting at new products, and get a check-in on where exactly Apple is with its AI strategies. And maybe we’ll get a bit of product news, too — you never know.