Quest 3S is on sale for $250 again, and from Best Buy it comes with a $50 gift card, 1 month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

For Black Friday 2025, the 128GB model of the headset was on sale for $250 ($50 off its regular $300 price), and the 256GB storage model for $330 ($70 off its regular $400 price), in a sale that ended after December 2. On top of this, Best Buy was providing $110 of perks. Now, Meta has brought the sale back, and Best Buy has brought its deal back too.

You can find the deal for the 128GB base model of Quest 3S here, and for the 256GB model here.

Both deals end after 11:59 pm PT on January 3, giving plenty of time to order for a holiday season gift.

In both cases, you still get 3 months of the Meta Horizon+ subscription, as with all purchases of new Meta Quest headsets.

You could use the $50 Best Buy gift card to get the Elite Strap to make the headset more comfortable for just $20, for example, while during the 1 month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (normally $30) you can play popular flatscreen games like Call of Duty on a giant virtual screen.

As for The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, it's also normally $30, and it's widely considered to be one of the best VR games of all time due to its physics-based combat system, earning an 'Essential' score in our review.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Review - The Best Zombie Apocalypse To Date

With two big updates under its belt, there’s never been a better time to get into The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. Read on for our 2021 The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners review! Note: This is an updated review based on The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners after its second free

UploadVRJamie Feltham

While Quest 3S can run all the same content as Quest 3, and has the same fundamental capabilities (including the same XR2 Gen 2 chipset and 8GB RAM), if you have the funds we always recommend Quest 3 over Quest 3S. The proper Quest 3 features Meta's advanced pancake lenses which are clearer and sharper over a wider area, have a wider field of view, and are fully horizontally adjustable, suitable for essentially everyone's eyes. These pancake lenses also enable Quest 3 to be thinner, which makes the headset feel slightly less heavy.

Still, at $250 and with $110 worth of perks Quest 3S is hard to say no to, and it could be an impulse gift for the holiday season to bring a friend or loved one into VR and mixed reality.

An international team of researchers has discovered a new mechanism that can trigger the formation of bubbles in magma – a major driver of volcanic eruptions. The finding could improve our understanding of volcanic hazards by improving models of magma flow through conduits beneath Earth’s surface.

Volcanic eruptions are thought to occur when magma deep within the Earth’s crust decompresses. This decompression allows volatile chemicals dissolved in the magma to escape in gaseous form, producing bubbles. The more bubbles there are in the viscous magma, the faster it will rise, until eventually it tears itself apart.

“This process can be likened to a bottle of sparkling water containing dissolved volatiles that exolve when the bottle is opened and the pressure is released,” explains Olivier Roche, a member of the volcanology team at the Magmas and Volcanoes Laboratory (LMV) at the Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) in France and lead author of the study.

Magma shearing forces could induce bubble nucleation

The new work, however, suggests that this explanation is incomplete. In their study, Roche and colleagues at UCA, the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), Brown University in the US and ETH Zurich in Switzerland began with the assumption that the mechanical energy in magma comes from the pressure gradient between the nucleus of a gas bubble and the ambient liquid. “However, mechanical energy may also be provided by shear stress in the magma when it is in motion,” Roche notes. “We therefore hypothesized that magma shearing forces could induce bubble nucleation too.”

To test their theory, the researchers reproduced the internal movements of magma in liquid polyethylene oxide saturated with carbon dioxide at 80°C. They then set up a device to observe bubble nucleation in situ while the material was experiencing shear stress. They found that the energy provided by viscous shear is large enough to trigger bubble formation – even if decompression isn’t present.

The effect, which the team calls shear-induced bubble nucleation, depends on the magma’s viscosity and on the amount of gas it contains. According to Roche, the presence of this effect could help researchers determine whether an eruption is likely to be explosive or effusive. “Understanding which mechanism is at play is fundamental for hazard assessment,” he says. “If many gas bubbles grow deep in the volcano conduit in a volatile-rich magma, for example, they can combine with each other and form larger bubbles that then open up degassing conduits connected to the surface.

“This process will lead to effusive eruptions, which is counterintuitive (but supported by some earlier observations),” he tells Physics World. “It calls for the development of new conduit flow models to predict eruptive style for given initial conditions (essentially volatile content) in the magma chamber.”

Enhanced predictive power

By integrating this mechanism into future predictive models, the researchers aim to develop tools that anticipate the intensity of eruptions better, allowing scientists and local authorities to improve the way they manage volcanic hazards.

Looking ahead, they are planning new shear experiments on liquids that contain solid particles, mimicking crystals that form in magma and are believed to facilitate bubble nucleation. In the longer term, they plan to study combinations of shear and compression, though Roche acknowledges that this “will be challenging technically”.

They report their present work in Science.

The post Will this volcano explode, or just ooze? A new mechanism could hold some answers appeared first on Physics World.

Trip the Light is a VR dancing game that recently entered early access on Quest.

Developed by Dark Arts Software, Trip the Light is a dancing game that uses both fully immersive VR environments and mixed reality passthrough to see your own surroundings. First appearing last month on the wider Quest platform, the game lets you work with a digital partner to learn new dance routines, complete challenges, score points, and gradually build up combos.

In its current early access build, Trip the Light aims to teach you Salsa using virtual instructors that the studio states are based on real-life professionals. There's also a 'Rhythm Challenge' mode that tests you to follow solo dance styles like hip-hop, line dancing, and club moves.

More dance styles are promised to be coming soon, and buying the early access release grants you the 'First Dance Edition.' It's not clear what further features can be expected for the full release, though Dark Arts Software confirmed that early adopters will receive “all of the basic modes, features, and assets that we build between now [and] then.”

Trip the Light is out now on the wider Meta Quest platform.

En cette fin d'année, Signify lance une mise à jour pour tous les utilisateurs de Hue qui fait parler d'elle au sein de la communauté. Les nouveautés donnent l'impression d'être l'une de ces rares démarches où l'on se rend compte que les développeurs ont vraiment écouté les utilisateurs.

Der Beitrag Cette dernière mise à jour concerne les utilisateurs de Philips Hue erschien zuerst auf nextpit.

Academics who switch to hybrid working and remote collaboration do less impactful research. That’s according to an analysis of how scientists’ collaboration networks and academic outputs evolved before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (arXiv: 2511.18481). It involved studying author data from the arXiv preprint repository and the online bibliographic catalogue OpenAlex.

To explore the geographic spread of collaboration networks, Sara Venturini from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues looked at the average distance between the institutions of co-authors. They found that while the average distance between team members on publications increased from 2000 to 2021, there was a particularly sharp rise after 2022.

This pattern, the researchers claim, suggests that the pandemic led to scientists collaborating more often with geographically distant colleagues. They found consistent patterns when they separated papers related to COVID-19 from those in unrelated areas, suggesting the trend was not solely driven by research on COVID-19.

The researchers also examined how the number of citations a paper received within a year of publication changed with distance between the co-authors’ institutions. In general, as the average distance between collaborators increases, citations fall, the authors found.

They suggest that remote and hybrid working hampers research quality by reducing spontaneous, serendipitous in-person interactions that can lead to deep discussions and idea exchange.

Despite what the authors say is a “concerning decline” in citation impact, there are, however, benefits to increasing remote interactions. In particular, as the geography of collaboration networks increases, so too does international partnerships and authorship diversity.

Remote tools

Lingfei Wu, a computational social scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study, told Physics World that he was surprised by the finding that remote teams produce less impactful work.

“In our earlier research, we found that historically, remote collaborations tended to produce more impactful but less innovative work,” notes Wu. “For example, the Human Genome Project published in 2001 shows how large, geographically distributed teams can also deliver highly impactful science. One would expect the pandemic-era shift toward remote collaboration to increase impact rather than diminish it.”

Wu says his work suggests that remote work is effective for implementing ideas but less effective for generating them, indicating that scientists need a balance between remote and in-person interactions. “Use remote tools for efficient execution, but reserve in-person time for discussion, brainstorming, and informal exchange,” he adds.

The post Remote work expands collaboration networks but reduces research impact, study suggests appeared first on Physics World.

There are 12 questions in total: blue is your current question and white means unanswered, with green and red being right and wrong. Check your scores at the end – and why not test your colleagues too?

How did you do?

10–12 Top shot – congratulations, you’re the next John Hopfield

7–9 Strong skills – good, but not quite Nobel standard

4–6 Weak performance – should have asked ChatGPT

0–3 Worse than random – are you a bot?

The post How well do you know AI? Try our interactive quiz to find out appeared first on Physics World.

Sur les emballages de médicaments, la notice imprimée devrait bientôt disparaître complètement. L'UE mise sur les codes QR et les informations numériques pour informer les patients. Voyons ce que cela implique pour vous, et ce qu'il en est pour ceux qui n'ont pas de smartphone.

Der Beitrag La fin des notices en papier dans l’UE erschien zuerst auf nextpit.

Vous aussi, vous en avez assez des écrans de chargement en plein milieu de vos parties de jeu VR ? Ces développeurs ont peut-être la solution ! En réalité virtuelle, rien ne casse plus violemment l’expérience que les écrans de chargement. En quelques secondes, le joueur quitte un monde crédible pour se retrouver dans un ... Lire plus

L’article Les écrans de chargement, l’ennemi numéro 1 de l’immersion est apparu en premier sur RealiteVirtuelle.com.

This quiz was first published in February 2025. Now you can enjoy it in our new interactive quiz format and check your final score. There are 18 questions in total: blue is your current question and white means unanswered, with green and red being right and wrong.

The post International Year of Quantum Science and Technology quiz appeared first on Physics World.