Tech Digest daily round up: Nintendo announces Pikmin mobile game

Nintendo has announced a new Pikmin mobile game from the developers of Pokémon Go. Created by Niantic, the Nintendo game will make use of similar AR features to bring the adorable, brightly-coloured Pikmin critters into the real world. Slated to launch later this year, the fun app will “include gameplay activities to encourage walking and make walking more delightful,” in much the same way that the Pokémon Go craze sent people doing laps of their neighbourhood outdoors in the hope of hatching a Ponyta from a 5km egg. Pink News 

Elon Musk has signed up telecoms mast company Arqiva to provide ground stations that will let him spread his satellite broadband service across Britain. The SpaceX billionaire’s satellite internet service, Starlink, will use ground infrastructure provided by the Crawley headquartered company for its communications, a space industry insider said. Arqiva has large ground station dishes across the home counties with sites at Chalfont Grove in Buckinghamshire as well as Bedfordshire, Suffolk and Hampshire. An Arqiva spokesperson declined to comment. SpaceX provides a direct to consumer internet service through a satellite dish. Customers in the UK have already signed up for trials of Mr Musk’s venture, with the first buyers receiving their dishes earlier this year. Telegraph 

Terms such as “hope”, “hug” and “prayer” reached a record high on Google search in 2020, offering a snapshot of the national mood a year on from the UK’s first lockdown. Searches for “panic attack”, “hypochondriasis” and “how to help” also saw a new high, according to Google Trends data, while interest in “party”, “travel visa” and “festival” dipped to a record low as a result of lockdown restrictions. A surge in people looking up “puppy”, “barbecue”, “books” and “hot tub” gives a sense of the types of things users sought out to cope during the pandemic. Yahoo! News 

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva have spotted an unusual signal in their data that may be the first hint of a new kind of physics. The LHCb collaboration analysed 10 years of data on how unstable particles called B mesons, created momentarily in the vast machine, decayed into more familiar matter such as electrons. The mathematical framework that underpins scientists’ understanding firmly maintains that the particles should break down into products that include electrons at exactly the same rate as they do into products that include a heavier cousin of the electron, a particle called a muon. But results released by Cern on Tuesday suggest that something unusual is happening. The B mesons are not decaying in the way the model says they should: instead of producing electrons and muons at the same rate, nature appears to favour the route that ends with electrons. Guardian.