Latest News - Page 1803

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics is gearing up to pioneer some of the biggest technology leaps, from Intel saying they are going to be using 3D athlete tracking technology, to now automated buses for transport.

Toyota has announced that they will be supplying 20 of its e-Palette electric vehicles (which look like mini-buses) to both the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games. The e-Palette vehicles will serve as automated transportation for athletes, and will cruise through the athletes' village in a loop at a very reasonable 12 miles per hour.

Each of the vehicles will have a safety manager on board and Toyota also mentions that the vehicles have been equipped to house the needs of all of the athletes. According to the press release, Toyota say that the vehicle can transport up to 4 wheelchair passengers at once while also providing easy access via an electric ramp and large opening doors. The 2020 Tokyo Version of the e-Palette is specifically designed for mobility, and will serve as the best-friend to any athlete that needs it.

The censoring of anyone criticizing China right now is at an all-time high, with the world of gaming being thrown into the mix -- especially Blizzard, but now attention is being turned to the Chinese-owned social network TikTok.

US Senator Marco Rubio has sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchkin, asking for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to look into ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly, which then turned into TikTok. Rubio says there is "ample & growing evidence" that TikTok is censoring US material at the whim of the Chinese government and thus it is allowing it to "suppress freedom of speech" beyond the borders of China.

TikTok has reportedly requested its moderators to remove any mentions on sensitive Chinese topics like Tiananmen Square, Tibet's call for Independence, and anything else that questions the Chinese governments version of those events. A US-based spokespersron for TikTok talked with Reuters recently, saying that the Chinese government "does not request" censorship on TikTok.

UNICEF now accepts donations made in both Bitcoin and Ether, with the United Nations charity now accepting both cryptocurrencies moving forward -- and is the first UN organization to accept crypto.

There are no fees when donating cryptocurrency to UNICEF, which will be a plus for donors who would traditionally pay fees with other payment methods. UNICEF won't be cashing out its cryptocurrency holdings and making money at the top like traders and HODLers do, but will instead keep the Bitcoin or Ether, or send it as funds to a charity for them to use.

By using cryptocurrencies in Bitcoin and Ether it will see UNICEF being transparent with its transactions, and it will also see charities receiving more of the donations it receives without taking percentages away in normal transaction fees.

I'm not saying it was aliens... but this story, I don't even know what else could've caused this BUT aliens. Anyway, in remote eastern Oregon at the Silvies Valley Ranch, mutilated cattle were found with their tongues and genitals surgically removed, without a single drop of blood found.

No evidence of how the cattle were mutilated, or how they were able to be drained of blood without a single drop hitting the ground have been explained. Silvies Valley Ranch vice president, Colby Marshall, drove down one of the roads towards the mysteriously slain cattle, where he said: "Then we'll get out and take a little walk to where one of the bulls was found. And the carcass is still there".

The bulls, in the words of NPR, "looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out".

We all use lithium-ion batteries on the daily, whether it's our smartphones, tablets and other devices -- with some of the creators of the rechargeable battery technology being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

M. Stanley Whittingham, John Goodenough, and Akira Yoshino were part of the team that contributed towards the development of lithium-ion battery technology, and without them (and who they worked with, and those after) we would be stuck in the dark... and in some cases, literally. Especially with flashlights being part of a smartphone now thanks to the rear-facing camera and LED flash, all powered by lithium-ion batteries.

Experiments on replacing the then-used lead-acid batteries began in the 1950s and 1960s, with M. Stanley Whittingham partnering with Fred Gamble "showed in 1976 that lithium ions, after donating electrons to produce a charge, fit perfectly into a lattice of titanium disulfide - where they sit patiently (in their "van der Waals gaps") until an electron is provided during recharging. Unfortunately this design also used a lithium anode that could be highly reactive (think fire) if bent or crushed", reports TechCrunch.

PG&E is cutting power to hundreds of thousands of residents in California, in an effort to "prevent starting a wildfire with the windy and dry conditions projected in the weather forecast".

The power shutoffs could eventually hit millions of Californians, with 513,000 residents already without power after midnight on Wednesday. The power shutoffs could eventually extend to some of the most popular cities on California including Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside.

This move sees PG&E making the largest power shutdown for the company, ever -- with the company explaining its reasoning behind the power shutdown. Michael Lewis, PG&E's senior vice president of electric operations, explained: "The safety of our customers and the communities we serve is our most important responsibility, which is why PG&E has decided to turn power off to customers during this widespread, severe wind event. We understand the effects this event will have on our customers and appreciate the public's patience as we do what is necessary to keep our communities safe and reduce the risk of wildfire".

Amazon-owned Twitch recently hosted the livestream of the recent shooting in Germany, where the shooter streamed his attack live with 2200 viewers, but Twitch were quick to remove the stream in 30 minutes.

As for the shooting, two people were killed in Germany at multiple locations, including close to a synagogue in the city of Halle. Making things far worse, the shooting happened at three different locations on the Jewish religious festival of Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day of the year.

The video then went to Telegram, where over 15,000 accounts viewed the shooting and also Twitter where people tweeted alternative links to the shooting. So Amazon, Twitch (owned by Amazon) and Twitter all had the video circulating through their networks and out to untolds swaths of the population of the world.

It's an all-out detail war in the last few days when it comes to Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5, where Sony have officially confirmed it as the PlayStation 5 -- we now know it'll rock an 8C/16T chip from AMD, and now we're hearing about the next-gen PlayStation VR 2 headset.

The folks at LetsGoDigital don't seem to sleep, posting up details on the new PSVR 2 headset reporting that it will come with built-in cameras and even a transparent mode, something that is very, very interesting. This new patent is right in line with my previous report from July 2019, with the rumored wireless mode, head and eye-tracing technology, and more.

When it comes to the cameras, we're looking at what appears to be dual front-facing cameras and a single (and I'm sure wide angle) camera on the back. The new PSVR 2 controller will even come with a camera, with it all detailed in a recently-published patent that was approved, and published on October 3, 2019.

Now that the cat is out of the bag regarding Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5, we're slowly finding out more info (and confirming rumors) about the new console.

We're now seeing Japanese magazine Famitsu reporting that the PlayStation 5 does indeed include an 8C/16T chip based on AMD's new Zen 2 architecture. We have been hearing rumors of this for a while now, but it seems that specs are being solidified as developer kits reach game developers.

8C/16T in the next-gen PS5 is going to be a huge deal for game developers and gamers, as it will allow developers to build worlds far bigger than anything possible on current 8-core consoles. The 8-core CPUs in consoles is over a decade old now, whereas Zen 2 is fresh and made in 2019.

Blizzard plans to use huge Blizzcon 2019 announcements to take attention from the recent Hong Kong controversy.

Right now Blizzard is in the worst spot for a video game company to be in. It's embroiled in a political controversy stemming from suppression of Hong Kong liberation sentiments from its players.

After winning a big Hearthstone tournament, Chinese pro gamer Ng Wai "Blitzchung" Chung announced his support for the protests in Hong Kong. Blizzard responded by suspending Blitzchung for a year and taking away his winnings of $10,000. Two esports announcers were also fired.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is hands-down the best-looking game on PS4 and Xbox One. But it'll look even better on PC.

Today Rockstar showed a batch of 4K Red Dead Redemption 2 screenshots that illustrate the kind of eye-popping visuals we can expect on PC. There's impressive lighting, illumination, and ambient fog effects that're sure to push your PC to the max, complete immensely detailed clothing textures, facial expressions, environments (that water is incredible), and just about everything else. If you can see it, it'll look amazing on PC.

Rockstar isn't playing around with PC optimizations. The devs say Red Dead Redemption 2 will be the "ultimate version of Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang's open world epic," complete with high-level tweaks and enhancements to push enthusiast hardware to its limit. The game will support higher FPS, HDR and resolutions in 4K and beyond, with UltraWide and multi-monitor configurations also supported.

Corsair probably surprised a lot of people today when they unveiled their new Vengeance LPX RAM kit rated to run at 5000MHz.

For those interested, as of now, the kit is listed on the Corsair webpage at $1,224.99 which is about 4.08MHz per dollar, or we can look at it conversely at $75 dollars per gigabyte of RAM. Now I say this in jest as I know the trouble a memory manufacturer goes through to tightly screen IC's and come up with enough choice units to validate these sorts of speeds.

There are some other considerations to be had as well, you are going to want to check with Corsair and closely pick through their validated board list to ensure you are pairing this sort of kit properly. When considering a uber high-speed memory kit, you must remember that there is a large amount of moving parts in play that can cause hang-ups along the way. CPU IMC quality is part of it.

A new Predator VR game will do for intergalactic hunters what Batman: Arkham VR did for the Caped Crusader.

Predator VR aims to bring the suspenseful chaos of the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic to your HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Valve Index headset.

In development from Phosphor Studios and produced by FoxNext Games, Predator VR will offer three different modes: a campaign mode where you play as a soldier, an online PVP mode where one player hunts down soldiers as the Predator, and Predator Rampage, which sounds like a survival horde-style experience. The game will also give you bonuses for decapitating soldiers in the multiplayer mode (wicked!).

Have you joined the crowd of wireless headset users? Or are you still wired and waiting for the right headset to come around? We have used several headsets and have experienced several options from wireless units that last a mere few hours in heavy use, to those that can last days before being tethered to a cable. There are even options such as the Steelseries Arctis Pro Wireless, which has swappable batteries, so you are offline for seconds during a critical battery swap to keep on gaming.

Sennheiser has announced today what can only be described as a potential game-changer, and yes, that pun was intended and justified. The Sennheiser GSP 370 is the newest in the Sennheiser lineup and comes with quite a lofty promise of up to 100 hours of battery life.

The Sennheiser GSP 370 comes with a broadcast-quality microphone, and from my experience with Sennheiser in the past, you can bet while the claims may be lofty, the quality will do a good job of bolstering it.

G.SKILL today announced its new 32GB single DIMMs or memory modules. The new 32GB DIMMs allow for much higher memory density for your PC and more overhead for heavy task loading. As games and photoshop, along with other conventional usage models, increase, the need for more memory starts to become apparent. Let us not even get into the realm of Google chrome, and the fact that you would probably never need to close a tab ever again.

G.SKILL, however, is not merely releasing some low-speed kits to appease the masses; as you can see from the chart above, they have kits ranging up to 256GB at 3200MHz and up to 4000MHz at 128GB. This needless to say is insane speed but is possible with the right platform and some luck in your IMC. These new kits up to 4 DIMMs can be applicable for Ryzen 3000 platforms, but do be aware that with the extra stress of higher density DIMMs, some tuning may be required if your IMC is not playing nice with them. Also, we all know that Threadripper 3000 is coming soon, and so the kits you see demonstrated on X299 at up to 256GB will likely slot right over to working on the new better memory controller packaged on all Zen 2 chips thus far.

The G.SKILL supplied shot shows a Ryzen 9 3900X with a two-stick kit on an X570 Godlike from MSI. The board is running at full DDR4 3800 with 1:1 FCLK at 64GB (2x32GB) with CL18 and command rate 1. This in itself is impressive, and of course, YMMV, but with what we have seen on Ryzen 3000 up to now, this could be an easy feat to pull off.

DJI has made a significant push in reinforcing the importance of STEM. STEM for those who are not aware is the educational system focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Many schools have adopted STEM education and push forward on educating those interested in working in the science in engineering fields where many of these skills are valuable.

The Robomaster S1, as DJI has labeled the STEM learning kit, is, in essence, something you will need to build and program yourself. The Robomaster S1 looks like a mini version of a rover like we have sent into space to explore different planets. While this specific robot may not be tasked with exploring extraterrestrial bodies, it can explore and even attack terra firma here on Earth.

The Robomaster S1 comes in pieces (many of them), and you must assemble it to build your ground-dwelling or rolling, in this case, mobile robot soldier. Now as you can see the reason I say soldier or attack is that the Robomaster S1 may look cute and friendly, it comes with a gel bead firing blaster and even LED targeting lights to help map the projectile trajectories.

Modern Warfare will need a lot of hard drive space when it ships later this month. In fact, it'll require more space than Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC.

Today Activision revealed Modern Warfare's PC system requirements, and everything looks good...except for the massive 175GB of storage needed to play the game. Yeah, you'll need almost 200GB of free space on your PC for Modern Warfare.

This could mean one of two things: either it's the file size at the start, or the total sum of space needed for the finished game, complete with all DLC and extra content. Since Activision says Modern Warfare will have more DLC and updates than any other Call of Duty in history, I sure hope it's the latter.

Today Rockstar revealed Red Dead Redemption 2's PC spec requirements, and they're pretty lenient.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is coming to PC next month, and it could end up being the best-looking PC game of the year. But you won't need an insanely powerful setup to play it--in fact it's quite the opposite. The minimum spec requirements call for an Intel i5-2500K or an AMD FX-6300 CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 or AMD Radeon R9 280, 8GB of RAM, and 150GB of hard drive space (this likely for bottom of the barrel 720p Low settings gaming).

The recommended specs are likewise not too demanding. Intel Core i7-4770K or an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB VRAM or AMD Radeon RX 480 with 4GB of VRAM, and 12GB of RAM. You'll likely get Medium-ish settings at 1080p with these specs, with some ticked on High. Similar with GTA V, expect a huge level of tweakable settings. Take-Two and Rockstar want as many people to play as possible, and it looks like RDR2 on PC is pretty optimized.

If you played the PS2, Xbox or PC back in the early 2000's then you have no doubt heard, or even played The Simpsons Hit & Run. What a magical experience that games was at the time, but what if we could do it all over again in a fully remastered version?

While that idea sounds like a pipe dream of some sorts, its not entirely out of the question. According to the games producer, Vlad Ceraldi it's very possible for The Simpsons Hit & Run to receive a remaster, and this remaster would be for multiple platforms as well. Speaking to LADbible, Ceraldi said "I could see it on multiple different types of platforms as a remake or remaster."

He continued and said that for this to happen "It would have to take the parties who are in charge of the property to want that to happen and someone out there to decide that they were going to go out and do it. But absolutely, it would be fun to explore those characters and that universe again, that work again." This is fantastic news, The Simpsons Hit & Run is one of my favorite games of all time. My close childhood friends and I had countless hours wrecking havoc on Springfield and its citizens, and I'd very much like to do it all over again in the remaster.

Andy Rubin, one of the co-founders of Android has posted a picture online of a brand new mobile phone that's shape looks very much like a TV remote.

If you didn't know, Rubin created the company Essential which strives towards making technology simple and easily accessible for the user. According to their Twitter post, Essential have been currently working on the above phone which has been titled "ProjectGEM". Right off the bat we can definitely see that this a peculiar looking phone, especially considering that most, if not all the phones that are being released now days are getting bigger and wider.

Judging from Rubin's pictures, we can see the phone screen is about a thumbs and a bits worth in diameter, and would most likely measure from about the base of your palm to the top of your middle finger. UI wise, Rubin shows off Google Maps, weather, Uber and Calendar, all of which seem to be in working condition. Another thing that should be noted is the gloss finish for all of the colors, when looking at the device from different angles the colors change, quite an awesome touch.