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Astronomers have located three Earth-sized planets which are orbiting a neighboring star that is about 12 light-years away.

The scientists estimate that all three of the discovered planets are to be at least 1.4 to 1.8 times the mass of Earth, and that they orbit their star every three to 13 days. To give a digestable example of how short this is, in our solar system, Mercury has the shortest orbit of our Sun at just 88 days. The most interesting part of this three planet discovery is the planet that has been titled as 'planet d', scientists are most interested in this planet because it falls within the star's habitable zone with the possible chance of water existing on the surface.

Ignasi Ribas, a co-author on the new paper and a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain said "We are now one step closer [to] getting a census of rocky planets in the solar neighborhood". It is extremely difficult to determine if 'planet d' harbors the requirements for life to exist, as scientists need to account for the past of the star its orbiting. It could be possible that the star has ejected large amount of radiation at 'planet d', essentially ruining any possible chance of the planet having a habitable atmosphere.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare isn't far away, so to keep us hyped N-Gamz has released a new 24-minute gameplay video from the PC version of the game. Check it out below:

It is labelled as ray tracing, but it is not using RTX at all. The video of COD: Modern Warfare was run on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card, and I'll give you a warning -- this person is not very good at playing the game, at all. I think I just grinded away a layer of my teeth cringing at this. Still, a good 24-minute look at the game nonetheless.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will support RTX-based ray tracing features (which NVIDIA detailed more of at Gamescom 2019 this week), which looks absolutely awesome -- highlighting the power of the GeForce RTX line of graphics cards. The game will also feature uncapped framerates, an FOV slider, advanced controls, HDR, and so much more.

It looks like YouTube algorithms are going on the fritz, with its automated system flagging and taking down a bunch of videos of robots fighting and mistaking it for animal cruelty.

Some of the videos, of which included BattleBots contestants, were taken down with a message that read: "Content that displays the deliberate infliction of animal suffering or the forcing of animals to fight is not allowed on YouTube".

It's funny... a robot (AI) thinking that two robots (like itself) fighting is animal cruelty. Does this mean YouTube's AI is growing empathy, and doesn't like to see one of its own being battled to the death? Maybe.

Engadget talked with a YouTube spokesperson who explained: "With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it. We also offer uploaders the ability to appeal removals and we will re-review the content".

Samsung might have delayed its first foldable smartphone until September, with the re-release of the Galaxy Fold but that doesn't mean the South Korean giant is not forging ahead with more foldable smartphones.

In a bunch of newly-surfaced patents we see a new foldable smartphone with a 'sliding mechanism' shown off by Samsung, which the great folks at LetsGoDigital turning them into color renderings. These renderings give us a bet ter look at what to expect, with that sliding mechanism looking like it could be a real game changer for foldable smartphones.

It seems you will be able to adjust your display height in multiple stages, depending on the task at (or is that in) your hand. You can have it in half like a clam shell, down a little lower if you're listening to music and want to use the rear-speaker (this is a kick ass idea on its own).

The screen can be pulled up higher on the sliding mechanism for video calls, where you want the screen a bit bigger - but if you want it 'all the way' big then you will surely have a gigantic large candybar-style phone. I love the design of this over the current Galaxy Fold... and I hope it's something we start to see more of in 2020.

Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has been placed on leave abruptly from the secretative AI-focused division of Google, with the reason being controversy "over some of the projects he led".

WTF was Suleyman working on for him to be placed on leave, from DeepMind of all places?

Suleyman, until he was ejected from the company, was working on the "applied" division of DeepMind. This division looked for practicval uses for DeepMind's research into health, energy, and other industries. Suleyman was a big public face for DeepMind, with a DeepMind spokeswoman explaining: "Mustafa is taking time out right now after 10 hectic years".

He co-founded DeepMind back in 2010 with CEO Demis Hassabis, and within 4 years they attracted the bank accounts of Google which acquired DeepMind for $500 million. Google acquired DeepMind for its work into AI, and then post-acquisition DeepMind was pushing into health care research which led to the company opening a dedicated division to the health care industry. DeepMind Health was created out of this with a staff of 100.

Valve has just kicked the door down in China, teaming with Perfect World on developing Steam China -- yes, Steam... in China. It's quite self-explanatory. Check out the crazy Steam China Press Demo video below:

Steam China being co-developed with Perfect World gets around some of these Chinese censorship, as the platform has been created from scratch with Chinese consumers in mind. The games on Steam China will be localized, the content servers for downloading games will be based in China, with the entire application complying with all Chinese laws.

Chinese law dictates which games can be sold, hosted, and played in the country -- with Steam China launching with a very limited amount of titles when it launches. Just 40 games are expected, with some of them including Two Point Hospital, Dead Cells, Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIV, and FTL.

AMD has had a super-successful year this year with the launch of its next-gen Zen 2 architecture and it powering the next wave of CPUs from the company in the form of the Ryzen 3000 series and just-released EPYC 'Rome' server CPUs with up to 64C/128T.

Not only that but the company has pushed out the new Navi-based GPU with the Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards, with all of the new Zen 2-based CPUs and Navi-based GPUs made on the 7nm node. One of the things absent from the new RX 5700 series cards is multi-GPU support, something that Vega could do with CrossFire, but Navi can't.

In a recent chat with the press at the Hot Chips press conference, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su replied to a question regarding the future of multi-GPU technology. She said: "To be honest, the software is going faster than the hardware, I would say that CrossFire isn't a significant focus".

So there you have it... CrossFire is not a significant focus for AMD, while NVIDIA continues to make at least half of its graphics cards with SLI/NVLink support. I've done some testing on the RTX 2070 SUPER in NVLink, the RTX 2080 SUPER in NVLink, and RTX 2080 Ti in NVLink and there are some games that really eat up all that GPU horsepower.

It was just yesterday that we reported on the V-shaped PlayStation 5 developer kit that was teased through a patent, and now game developer Matthew Stott has confirmed it.

Stott said in a tweet linking to the V-shaped PS5 that "it's a dev kit we have some in the office", referencing the new PlayStation 5. Stott says he has some in the office, meaning if he has a few that bigger developers would have the same if not many more.

Just how many PS5 developer kits are in the wild right now? I wonder if Sony will force him to take his tweet down, but the internet being the internet means it's here forever. It looks like the V-shaped PS5 is indeed real, let's hope that style continues through to the final design, because I think it looks rad.

Unlike every other publisher and big developer out there, CD Projekt RED won't try to force online multiplayer in Cyberpunk 2077. It'll only be included if it fits, and only if it doesn't negatively effect singleplayer.

Most games these days are built around live services, online multiplayer, and engagement. But Cyberpunk 2077 is built from the ground up as a wholly singleplayer experience, and CDPR isn't about to jeopardize that by jamming in a MP component if it doesn't mesh well. Cyberpunk 2077's multiplayer has been in the works for years now, but there's a chance it could get scrapped.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, CDPR dev Marthe Jonkers said multiplayer will only be included if it's absolutely perfect. "If you add multiplayer functions it has to be right. Immersion is super important for us and we have to make sure everything fits together. The single-player experience, it all fits together. We're not just going to slap some feature in and that'll be it."

Gamescom 2019 - The return of TMNT knock-offs Battletoads caused lots of excitement at E3 2019, especially after the huge years-long silence at Microsoft. But maybe this one should've died off.

Battletoads is coming back this year, but it's not the same hard-as-nails beat-em-up platformer mashup from your NES childhood. It's something different, something that looks like a cheap imitation, a nostalgic cash grab the world might be better off without. It's a 3-player beat-em-up that stars Rash, Pimple and Zitz, sporting a kind of drawn animation that reminds me of Stick It To the Man. Overall the visuals are just too busy and the enemies blend way too easily with the backgrounds.

The new Gamescom 2019 trailer shows brings up some significant worries. The hit detection looks atrocious, and the enemies are just...it's like they've already quit before the game started. The punches and attacks are delayed and combat itself just looks very, very off. It looks like you fight the game itself more than you fight enemies.