Latest Technology Content

A team of researchers in China has successfully mixed DNA cells of a monkey with a pig embryo, creating the first every 'pig-monkey'.

In a new report by NewScientists, scientists and researchers from State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology located in Beijing have created the very first pig-monkey chimera. If you aren't sure what a 'chimera' is, it's an organism that contains living cells of another organism. A natural example of this would be a human fetus absorbing its twin in the womb.

A not so natural example of a chimera is pig monkeys. The team of researchers took cells of a monkey and combined them with pig embryo's; they then placed those embryo's in female pigs and observed their growth. Out of the 4,000 embryos that were being tested, only ten pigs managed to be successfully grown and birthed. Out of those ten pigs that were birthed, only two of them were actually chimeras, and those two died just a week later. Scientists haven't yet determined their cause of death.

Coca-Cola is getting behind this month's release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and what better way to celebrate the launch than with light-up Star Wars-themed Coca-Cola bottles.

Coca-Cola took to their Instagram account to release a video showcasing their new line of Star Wars-themed Coca-Cola bottles. So what's so special about this? These Rey and Kylo-Ren Coca-Cola bottles light-up when their label is touched, triggering the OLED lights and activating the lightsabers.

The labels were designed by a German company called Inuru, who have equipped each label with a built-in printed battery. When a user touches the label, the circuit that is connected to the OLED's is completed, sending electricity to the lightsabers. Inuru says that each label can be used a minimum of 500 times before the battery runs out. Unfortunately, Coca-Cola is only releasing 8,000 of these limited edition bottles, and they are only available in Singapore between December 6th to December 22nd.

The National Geographic Channel has announced that Emmy winning series 'Cosmos' will be returning for a third season in March next year.

Neil deGrasse Tyson will host the third season of the show, which Ann Druyan, the creative director of NASA's Voyager interstellar message project, says is "our boldest [season] yet". The third season is said to take viewers through topics such as humanity's future on distant planets, extinction, and a general look at the history of our universe.

Season 3 will first be aired on the National Geographic Channel, and then it will appear on Fox sometime in the Summer of the same year. Druyan says, "The 'Ship of the Imagination' will carry us places we never dared to venture before: lost worlds and worlds to come, deep into the future and straight through that hole in the curtain masking other realities". Cosmos season 3 will be aired on March 9th, 2020. Get excited about science!

If you haven't been keeping up with the Witcher TV show news, critics have said that the fight scenes in the show 'make Game of Thrones fights look awful' -- now we can take a look for ourselves.

Netflix has released an extremely short teaser clip of Geralt of Rivia doing what he does best, hunting and killing victims. The video can be seen above, and from what we can see, it appears Geralt, played by Man of Steel's Henry Cavill, is in a courtroom, and something goes badly wrong. What appears to be the ruler of the courtroom orders her men to kill Geralt and his friend, and that's where she made a mistake.

Choreography wise, Cavill has got Geralt's graceful yet brutal fighting style down packed - this an extremely important part for Witcher fans as Geralt and Witchers, in general, have a particular fighting style. Geralt cuts through the men that approach him like a warm knife going through butter. After seeing this fight scene hype has increased even more for the shows expected arrive on December 20th.

So far Halo: Reach is a janky, but still-enjoyable experience on PC. It's far from perfect and needs a lot of work, but for $10 it's passable and addictive.

Right now Halo: Reach is far from the optimized experience that 343 Industries promised. It's got some rough edges like bad sound design, a barebones UI, a boring and unrewarding armor unlock progression system, input lag/bad hit detection, and some connectivity issues. It's not a complete package and is missing many important features, like co-op campaign matchmaking, split-screen play, and basic progression schemes.

But when it works, it transports you back to 2010. It's not a full total recall type of situation--you have to squint past a bunch of flaws--but it's good enough to keep you playing for hours and not realizing it.

Starbreeze Studios is no longer at risk of immediate financial ruin, and now has five years to pay back its debt.

Today Swedish creditors approved Starbreeze's request to pay back its $40 million in debt across a five-year period. The company entered reconstruction in 2018, and jettisoned all of its non-essential branches including StarVR while also selling rights to games like System Shock 3 as well as studios (for example, Starbreeze sold its majority stake in Dhurva Interactive to Rockstar Games). Starbreeze shut down all of its branches except for game development, and halted dev on all projects except for the Payday franchise.

To pay back its debt, Starbreeze expects to sign a big publishing contract in 2020 to fund a new Payday game, give more financial buoyancy, and set the Payday franchise up for long-term sales. Payday 3 is the key to Starbreeze's debt payoff and it's betting everything on the sequel--if Payday 3 doesn't take off, they could have to sell the IP and liquidate other assets. Payday 3 is due out by 2022 and will be optimized for PS5 and Project Scarlett next-gen systems.

Famous ill-tempered Twitch streamer Dr. Disrespect is getting his very own TV show.

The show itself is being produced by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman's Skybound Entertainment, and is goes in a very meta direction by exploring Dr. Disrespect's origin story. It'll be a narrative-driven show that chronicles the macho mullet-earing Blockbuster video game champion's rise to fame. Guy Beahm, the streamer who plays the character, says it'll expose "how the doctor became the doctor."

Right now the project is in very early stages of development and it could animated or live-action. Every Dr. Disrespect stream is basically a show in of itself, so this shouldn't be anything new for Beahm.

Lockhart, the dialed-down next-gen Xbox SKU, will apparently have significantly less RAM than its ultra-powerful sibling.

So what exactly is Lockhart, and how does it fit in with Project Scarlett?

Microsoft has two next-gen Xbox consoles planned for 2020: Lockhart, a cheaper, disc-less mid-grade system that's basically a successor to the Xbox One S, and Anaconda, the higher-end enthusiast Xbox One X successor to counter the PS5. Anaconda is the console that Microsoft touted at E3 2019 with insane specs like 4x power than the Xbox One X, 8K playback, and it "eats monsters for breakfast".

Lockhart was originally reported on in 2018, then dismissed around E3 2019 when Microsoft talked about Project Scarlett, which made it seem like only one console.

A selection of Sony's first-party PS5 launch games will be next-gen exclusive and won't be held back by last-gen PS4 hardware.

Some of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 launch games will be exclusive to the next-gen console, giving developers total freedom to push the PS5's beefy Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU tech to their limits.

Developer sources tell Kotaku's Jason Schreier that a portion of the PS5's first-party launch games won't be be cross-gen, and won't be playable on the PlayStation 4.

"I've heard some of the PS5 launch titles will be PS5-only. Some of the stuff I've heard about is PS5 only," Schreier said in a recent Kotaku Splitscreen podcast.

A new Sony patent was discovered by LetsGoDigital, who suggests it's for a PlayStation 5 controller. But the patent strongly indicates it's more of a family-friendly solution that connects to a home computer, not a dedicated games console.

For intents and purposes, the device is used as a kind of Remote Play receiver, but don't expect major PlayStation games to be playable on it. The patent apparently only plays mini-games and won't connect to a games console for remote game streaming.

It can connect to a host computer, and the patent mentions host computers can download games from the internet or play them via DVD ROMs, but don't expect this to be a DualShock 5/PS Vita hybrid. It won't play PS4 or godforbid PS5 games on the go. Everything about the patent suggests it's a barebones consumer product, not a gaming product.