Yahoo Used A Screenshot From This Popular Video Game In A Scientific Article About Saturn

A report from Yahoo about sustaining life on one of Saturn's moons has managed to find itself in the controversial crosshairs of video game media. Why? Because the article mistakenly used a screenshot from Bungie's Destiny for the scientific report.

Gamespot picked up the news from Eurogamer, who noted that the original Yahoo article had an image of Saturn from the game Destiny. Saturn is one of the many planets in the game that gamers can visit, and you get a decent look at the planet during some of the loading screens.

After reports went live pointing out that Yahoo had mistakenly included an image of Destiny into their article, they quickly amended the piece with an appropriate picture of the large planet.

The report itself actually had nothing to do with video games or Destiny. It was actually about Saturn's moon, Titan. The report discussed how some preliminary reports indicate that the moon may contain liquids such as ethane, methane and hydrogen cyanide.

Researchers are Cornell University, led by Martin Rahm, are currently looking into the chemical structures of Saturn and the possibility that the Titan moon could potentially sustain life. There's still a lot of guesswork involved but the research looks promising.

These advancements lead themselves well to the idea that human space exploration could see humankind moving beyond Mars and toward the moon's of Saturn at some point in the far future.

Nevertheless, none of that detracts from the fact that for such a serious article about the potential future of space research the editors at Yahoo picked a header image that featured Destiny.

As silly as that is, at least Activision and Bungie have received some free publicity out of the matter. This also likely helps them a ton given that they're gearing up for the release of yet another expansion pack for Destiny this September called the Rise of Iron.

The new expansion will see players venturing to new locations while taking on all new quests, new abilities and an increase in the light level for Guardians.

Some people are already criticizing the expansion because it won't feature the wolves as pets that the promotional trailer and art have been depicting so prominently.

Many suspect that this will be the last big expansion pack for Destiny before Bungie moves on to start working on Destiny 2... or they may have already started work on Destiny 2 because some rumors are suggesting that the official sequel will be launching in 2017. Of course, that's a long ways off and for now we do know that they're gearing up to release the latest expansion, Rise of Iron, this September for the Xbox One and PS4. That's right, no more support for the PS3 or Xbox 360... the decade-old seventh generation home consoles.

At least on the road to release Destiny managed to pick up some free publicity by being attached to an actual report about the possibilities of sustaining life on one of Saturn's moons. I'm sure Bungie was flattered that the editors at Yahoo thought the game looked good enough to headline the story about such a significant discovery.