Weekly Roundup

Real Big Fungi

While scientists around the world collaborate on a global map of underground fungal networks, Microsoft decides that employees aren't a necessary part of a functioning business.

Endeavorance

09 Jul 2026 — 9 min read

A Very Fungi Map

Do you like fungus? I sure hope so, because there now exists a world map of the underground fungal network that drives much of the growth in our world's ecosystems.

Stewart, J., Bisot, C., Cargill, R. et al.

Underground fungal networks are everywhere. It is estimated that there are 110 quadrillion kilometers of hyphal fungus under the soil. It's being framed as about 1 billion times the distance between the Earth and Sun, or at least two football fields.

These underground networks form a symbiotic relationship with 70% of all plant species, ferrying water, carbon, and other nutrients to and from the connected plants like a sort of flora-flavored conveyor belt sushi restaurant. But with fungus.

That giant fungal LAN party has been mapped out in density across the planet at a resolution of 1 square kilometer, allowing researchers to visualize the global network and its impacts at a level previously impossible. That said, the map measures only the top layer of soil, so there could be far more lower down that we're not even accounting for.

So… how'd they do it? A global team of scientists gathered more than 16,000 soil samples from varying ecosystems and farmlands. These samples were gathered over time for various research purposes. These researchers then analyzed the lengths of the hyphae (tendrils) in the samples, creating a large data set to hand over to a machine learning computer model which in turn produced a predictive map of the rest of the soil based on trends across the samples.

In doing this, these scientists have given us a huge leg up in environmental sciences, as research into the full scope of these networks' impacts is unfortunately limited. This data is available for public download, so if you are a data nerd who loves a good fungus spreadsheet, today is your day.

Before this map, the only global underground fungal map we had measured only the diversity of species of fungus along with mapping out diversity hot spots. Combining this information could yield some major leaps forward for conservation efforts.

Thanks, fungus.

Another Life Taken by ICE

ICE agents have—again—gunned down a civilian in the street and—again—claim that the killing was justified because the victim tried to ram officers with their car, making them "fear for their lives."

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is dead because of the Trump administration and the people who voted for them, thinking this was all just a meme. He lived in the Houston area and had been working and raising his family for more than 30 years in the United States.

He was driving to a work site with some coworkers when ICE agents accosted him in unmarked SUVs for a "targeted enforcement operation." The ICE agents surrounded Lorenzo's car at 6:50am. Emergency services were called for medical transport at 6:51am.

This is an established pattern. ICE claims they were in mortal danger, video of the incident is withheld, and it's not until either another angle of the moment comes out that we get the actual truth. They lost the benefit of the doubt ages ago.

Instead of harping on the details of the death of this man, I would like to highlight the words of his son:

"You [could] find him every evening after work, resting on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog. [...] I am deeply heartbroken to see that the man who taught me the value of hard work, family values, and education will no longer spend an evening on that porch. … He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.'"
—Ronaldo Salgado

The only acceptable next step for the entirety of ICE (and, indeed, the broader DHS) is a complete and total shutdown followed by investigations, convictions, and policy to ensure this never happens again. I won't hold my breath.

Xbox and Employees Don’t Mix

This Monday, Xbox and Microsoft announced yet another round of massive layoffs, this time impacting 3,200 Xbox employees and about 4,800 jobs at Microsoft in general.

The Xbox side of the layoffs were announced via memo by the recently anointed CEO, Asha Sharma. The cuts immediately hit thousands of workers and several studios, with more cuts coming down the road. Affected studios fall into one of three general categories: going private, selling to another buyer, or restructuring internally.

Asha Sharma at the 2026 XBOX Showcase in LA

Here's a bit about the affected studios and what'll be happening for each one:

Double Fine Productions
- Known for: Psychonauts, Brütal Legend
- Studio fate: Returning to independent management with a sum of cash from Microsoft to land a bit more softly
Compulsion Games
- Known for: We Happy Few, South of Midnight
- Studio fate: Same as Double Fine—going back to independent
Ninja Theory
- Known for: Kung Fu Chaos, Heavenly Sword
- Studio fate: Sold to a new owner, currently undisclosed
Undead Labs
- Known for: State of Decay franchise
- Studio fate: Sold to a new owner, currently undisclosed
Arkane Lyon
- Known for: Dishonored, Deathloop
- Studio fate: Unclear! This studio is based in France, which is a country with actual labor rights laws, and so the sudden closure of an entire studio must go through a workers rights review council before anything happens. Arkane's Austin, TX office has already been shut down in 2024 from a prior layoff round
Bethesda / ZeniMax
- Known for: Re-releasing Skyrim several hundred times
- Studio fate: Hit hard by layoffs, but remaining with Microsoft
Obsidian, id Software, and Activision all were similarly hit with layoffs, with full details still coming out

At time of writing, a lot of the details are still fuzzy aside from "big cuts to a lot of studios with some studios going private." According to Microsoft, the reason for this is because…

"Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses."
— Asha Sharma

They are referring to this as a necessary "reset" of the company, requiring the removal of several thousand employees on top of the more than 10,000 developers they've already cut from previous rounds of layoffs just over the past few years.

Just last week, I talked about how id Software unionized and Microsoft voluntarily recognized the union. I mentioned that it was somewhat out of character for Microsoft, and this is precisely why. The union at id Software did indeed happen, but without a formal contract negotiation, Microsoft can recognize your union with a little note on the bottom of your pink slip, it seems.

The analysis provided by Microsoft of their financial woes partly pins blame on Xbox Game Pass; the monthly subscription service from Xbox which allows users to play any game in a library of titles without having to explicitly purchase the game.

To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected.
— Asha Sharma

Game Pass has been leaking cash for Microsoft and publishers putting their titles in the library, seeing as much as an 80% drop in sales for games put into Game Pass. With titles like Call of Duty being essentially an annual drop, losing out on those sales is a big enough deal that they're playing around with the idea of delaying titles added to Game Pass so that people go back to purchasing more.

Unfortunately for everyone, everyone saw this coming.

Sharma had a bit of good press earlier in the year as she came into her role and dropped the price of Game Pass a bit, but her history is having been an executive at Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and president of product for Microsoft's CoreAI. She is an executive first, and her goal remains the same as any other CEO: make money for shareholders by any means necessary.

Microsoft itself has seen record earnings in the past few years, and recently increased the price of their gaming hardware across the board. Though, Xbox hasn't been the driving factor in revenue growth. Still, they join the seemingly endless march of gaming and tech industry names dropping employees by the thousands.

Truly an unimaginable amount of talent just thrown out the window because we gotta make sure the charts and graphs look good.

…product? What product?

Hamas Tests the Waters

Among all the wars currently going on (or, on-and-off-again), Gaza remains under siege and occupation by Israeli military forces, who still occupy 60% of Gaza despite the presumed ceasefire. Notably, Israel has been casually ignoring the ceasefire this whole time, with the UN estimating at least 1,000 Palestinians having been killed and thousands more injured by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations since the start of the "ceasefire" agreement. Israel's military has seen 4 deaths by comparison.

Recently, Hamas announced that they will be dissolving their governing body in Gaza, opening the way for the US-backed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) to take control of civilian life.

Hamas has taken a new step in that it will no longer be in charge of the Gaza Strip, in order to remove any pretexts for the occupation, which continues its aggression and war of extermination
— Hazem Qassem, spokesperson for Hamas

The NCAG is a 15-person team of Palestinian civilian governance experts backed by the US and UN to handle governance in Gaza while the rest of the peace deal plays out. Naturally, local outlooks on the new governing board are mixed, though anything in the direction of "ending this hell on Earth" is at least something.

Israel has been preventing the NCAG from entering Gaza this whole time, citing danger from Hamas, essentially stalling the peace deal by preventing the next step. It seems that Hamas wanted to call that bluff, and so they're not saying "come on in, NCAG, we're gonna step away."

Hamas is not disbanding and not disarming. They are just dissolving the governing body wing of their organization, instead remaining as a military security force for Gaza. This, of course, doesn't fly with Israel who has a hardline stance that Hamas must fully disarm and disband, or otherwise they won't stop the attacks.

From here, we're waiting to see if the NCAG actually enters Gaza. They've made a statement acknowledging Hamas' announcement, but stopped short of committing to any change in the current stalemate.

Hamas won a 2006 election to form a government in Gaza, then retained control throughout the years. The election having happened 20 years ago is significant. About half of the humans in Gaza are under the age of 18. More than half were not even alive when the election happened. That isn't to say that nobody in Gaza supports anything Hamas ever does, but it is important to know that Hamas is essentially its own separate structure from the civilians of Gaza and Palestine at large; a fact that Palestinian adversaries very much like to gloss over.

Back On Our War Grind

Half-dead conman and diaper stress tester Donald Trump recently decided that we're at war again, again, announcing new strikes on Iran.

At a NATO summit, Trump announced that he is ramping up strikes against Iran again, citing that "they are behaving very badly." He went on to say, "For me, I think it's over," which tracks pretty well with my ongoing assertion that Trump is legitimately bored with the war and would rather "just move on" despite the global impact of his own war of aggression.

The reason for restarting strikes is that there were ships attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, which is something that has been happening on and off during these peace talks. In the fog of war, it's difficult to say who exactly has done what. While it is entirely possible that we're just using the claim for cover to restart the war after a terrible (for Trump) ceasefire deal, it is similarly likely that infighting among Iranian domestic powers over the fate of the strait resulted in meaningful turbulence.

Whatever the reality, after the announcement that we're back on our shit, stocks tumbled and oil futures spiked. Our weekly "hey we're at war again" statement usually comes after markets close on a Friday to avoid such market reactions, but this time we're just watching in real-time as line go Very Down.