I n rare quiet moments playing Marathon, you may find yourself overcome by the iridiscently pretty planet Tau Ceti IV. This fictional world seems to radiate a chemical glow: powdery pink skies and lurid green vegetation fill the screen alongside supermassive architecture emblazoned with ultra-stylish, neon graphic design. Yet enjoy the scenery for a split second too long and you might catch a bullet, causing your character to bleed an icky blue substance. In such moments, the camera locks - meaning you must stare down at their unceremonious expiry. Marathon's considerable beauty is matched only by its clinical brutality.

The revival of this 90s favourite is a retro-futuristic fever dream that is first incomprehensible, then thrillingly evocative. B ack in the mid-1990s, when I was a staff writer for Edge magazine, Marathon was our multiplayer shooter of choice. We all worked on Apple Macs, not PCs, so Bungie's sci-fi opus was one of the only networked shooters we could all play together. At the end of every day, staff from magazines around the company loaded it up and played for hours (usually with Chemical Brothers or Orbital blasting from the stereo). This was the era in which video games discovered club culture - Sony employed the legendary Sheffield studio the Designers Republic to create its box art and licensed the latest dance tunes for its marketing and game soundtracks.

A Hungarian man has set a new record for longest video game marathon by playing the rhythm-based music game Dance Dance Revolution for six days. Szabolcs Csépe, from Budapest, bopped to over 3000 songs and burned more than 22,000 calories in his quest to romp into the record books. The 34-year-old, known as GrassHopper on his gaming channels, said that preparation for the marathon took six months and included physical training, focusing on his legs and glutes, as well a a diet plan. Playing DDR is always fun for me, he told BBC News, so this challenge was best described as tediously joyful. His feat has been officially recognised by Guinness World Records.

The Atlantic CEO's new book,, examines his complicated relationship with the sport. On this week's episode of, he talks about the ways tech is helping him become a better runner. To most of the world, Nicholas Thompson is known as an editor, an AI enthusiast, or something of a LinkedIn influencer. But the former WIRED editor in chief, who is now CEO of The Atlantic, is often better known to colleagues as . On Tuesday, Thompson is releasing . As the title suggests, it's a book about his commitment to running--Thompson runs a ridiculously fast marathon and holds the American 50K record for the 45-49 age group. Ultimately, though, the book examines the complicated relationship between the sport, Thompson, and his father, who first took him on a run when he was just 5 years old. Tech obsessives, of course, will also get their fix: includes plenty of science-backed training guidance and documents Thompson's experience training with elite Nike coaches. On this week's episode of, I talked to Thompson (who was also my first boss; he hired me as an intern at WIRED in 2008) about his book, the interplay between running and addiction, and what he thinks AI can do for runners for writers. It is a joy to be here with you at Condé Nast at WIRED. I loved coming up those elevators. I love seeing you as the editor in chief. I'm thrilled that you're here. We're going to start this conversation the way we start all of them, which is with a little warmup, some rapid-fire questions. In honor of your new book,, I'm gonna make them entirely running themed. I mean, if your listeners don't wanna hear about running Trail run or track run? Worst running injury you've ever had. The one you wish people would stop talking to you about. You only need to run a 20-miler before a marathon. What do you need to run? Why do people die at mile 20? Because they only train for [marathons] with 20-mile-runs. I generally prefer people, but then you have to schedule it. Backup sport of choice if you could never run again.

The lifespan of a games console has extended a lot since I was a child. In the 1990s, this kind of technology would be out of date after just a couple of years. There would be some tantalising new machine out before you knew it, everybody competing to be on the cutting edge: the Game Boy and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1989 were followed by the Game Gear in 1990 and the Super NES in 1991. Five years was a long life for a gaming machine. The Nintendo Switch 2 will be released in a couple of weeks, more than eight years since I first picked an original Switch up off its dock and marvelled at the instant transition to portable play.

On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. "It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed," she says. "That pain was worse than childbirth." Rosenkranz's migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz's 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a "red beam behind her eardrums." It didn't occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses.

For many avid gamers, the idea of a gaming marathon sounds like heaven. But just how long is too long when it comes to a continuous session? One gamer has pushed himself to the limit after playing nearly 60 continuous hours of'World of Warcraft' to break the world record. But his impressive feat didn't come without its risks. Barnabás Vujity-Zsolnay admits he got bored 30 hours into the session, while he even started to experience'mild hallucinations' from hour 45!

Although there are currently many benchmarks available for evaluating the long context understanding and reasoning capability of large language models, with the expansion of the context window in these models, the existing long context benchmarks are no longer sufficient for evaluating the long context understanding and reasoning capability of large language models. In this paper, we have developed a fresh long context evaluation benchmark, which we name it Marathon in the form of multiple choice questions, inspired by benchmarks such as MMLU, for assessing the long context comprehension capability of large language models quickly, accurately, and objectively. We have evaluated several of the latest and most popular large language models, as well as three recent and effective long context optimization methods, on our benchmark. This showcases the long context reasoning and comprehension capabilities of these large language models and validates the effectiveness of these optimization methods. Marathon is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Lemoncoke/Marathon.

In a world where unmanned spacecraft have landed on Mars and artificial intelligence can read your mind, one would think someone would have figured out a precise way to measure how much athletes should drink while exercising. Hydrating, or replacing body fluids lost through sweating, exhaling, and eliminating waste, is essential. When 2 or more percent of body mass is lost through dehydration, the body can go haywire, with elevated cardiovascular strain, reduced aerobic exercise performance, and impaired thermoregulatory function. After losing 12 percent of body mass to dehydration, a human will die. It's rare for an athlete to exercise to the point of death by dehydration.

When I opened the email telling me I'd been accepted to run the London Marathon, I felt elated. Barely six months on from my last marathon, I knew how dedicated I'd have to be to keep running day after day, week after week, month after month, through rain, cold, tiredness, grumpiness, and hangovers. The marathon is the easy part. It's the constant grind of the training that kills you--and finding ways to keep it fresh and interesting is part of the challenge. Some exercise nuts think they've found a way to live their routines up: by using the AI chatbot ChatGPT as a sort of proxy personal trainer.