This week Valve unveiled a next-gen Steam Machine that blurs the lines between a gaming PC and a game console, a new Steam Controller, and a new VR headset called the Steam Frame. While each device is interesting, the Steam Frame in particular packs a …
This week Valve unveiled a next-gen Steam Machine that blurs the lines between a gaming PC and a game console, a new Steam Controller, and a new VR headset called the Steam Frame. While each device is interesting, the Steam Frame in particular packs a bunch of surprises. It’s designed as a streaming-first device that […]
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UK facing one of worst flu seasons in history—and the US is next.
Health officials in the United Kingdom are warning that this year’s flu season for the Northern Hemisphere is looking like it will be particularly rough—and the US is not prepared.
The bleak outlook is driven by a new strain of H3N2, which emerged over the summer (at the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s season) sporting several mutations. Those changes are not enough to spark the direst of circumstances—a deadly pandemic—but they could help the virus dodge immune responses, resulting in an outsized number of severe illnesses that could put a significant strain on hospitals and clinics.
In the UK, the virus has taken off. The region’s flu season has started around five weeks earlier than normal and is making a swift ascent.
Text scam ringleader warned operations were disrupted on Telegram, Google says.
The day after Google filed a lawsuit to end text scams primarily targeting Americans, the criminal network behind the phishing scams was “disrupted,” a Google spokesperson told Ars.
According to messages that the “ringleader” of the so-called “Lighthouse enterprise” posted on his Telegram channel, the phishing gang’s cloud server was “blocked due to malicious complaints.”
“We will restore it as soon as possible!” the leader posted on the channel—which Google’s lawsuit noted helps over 2,500 members coordinate phishing attacks that have resulted in losses of “over a billion dollars.”
Abxylute has been selling handheld game consoles for the past few years, but the company has also branched out by selling game controllers and other accessories. And this summer abxylute introduced an unusual smartphone game controller that snaps magne…
Abxylute has been selling handheld game consoles for the past few years, but the company has also branched out by selling game controllers and other accessories. And this summer abxylute introduced an unusual smartphone game controller that snaps magnetically to the back of your phone to turn it into a T-shaped gaming device. Imagine a […]
The post Abxylute M4 magnetic snap-on game controller hits Kicsktarter for $39 and up appeared first on Liliputing.
Tariffs, component volatility, and Valve’s tolerance for losses all lead to uncertainty.
If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.
At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.
DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”
Tiny chips can be powered by infrared light if they’re near the brain’s surface.
Standard brain implants use electrodes that penetrate the gray matter to stimulate and record the activity of neurons. These typically need to be put in place via a surgical procedure. To go around that need, a team of researchers led by Deblina Sarkar, an electrical engineer and MIT assistant professor, developed microscopic electronic devices hybridized with living cells. Those cells can be injected into the circulatory system with a standard syringe and will travel the bloodstream before implanting themselves in target brain areas.
“In the first two years of working on this technology at MIT, we’ve got 35 grant proposals rejected in a row,” Sarkar says. “Comments we got from the reviewers were that our idea was very impactful, but it was impossible.” She acknowledges that the proposal sounded like something you can find in science fiction novels. But after more than six years of research, she and her colleagues have pulled it off.
In 2022, when Sarkar and her colleagues gathered initial data and got some promising results with their cell-electronics hybrids, the team proposed the project for the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. For the first time, after 35 rejections, it made it through peer review. “We got the highest impact score ever,” Sarkar says.
Ars chats with particle physicist Daniel Whiteson about his new book Do Aliens Speak Physics?
Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t have enough common ground for that to even be possible? An alien species is bound to be biologically very different, and their language will be shaped by their home environment, broader culture, and even how they perceive the universe. They might not even share the same math and physics. These and other fascinating questions are the focus of an entertaining new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality.
Co-author Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, who has worked on the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He’s also a gifted science communicator who previously co-authored two books with cartoonist Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame: 2018’s We Have No Idea and 2021’s Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe. (The pair also co-hosted a podcast from 2018 to 2024, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.) This time around, cartoonist Andy Warner provided the illustrations, and Whiteson and Warner charmingly dedicate their book to “all the alien scientists we have yet to meet.”
Whiteson has long been interested in the philosophy of physics. “I’m not the kind of physicist who’s like, ‘whatever, let’s just measure stuff,'” he told Ars. “The thing that always excited me about physics was this implicit promise that we were doing something universal, that we were learning things that were true on other planets. But the more I learned, the more concerned I became that this might have been oversold. None are fundamental, and we don’t understand why anything emerges. Can we separate the human lens from the thing we’re looking at? We don’t know in the end how much that lens is distorting what we see or defining what we’re looking at. So that was the fundamental question I always wanted to explore.”
Steuerfahnder im Bundesland Sachsen suchen mit KI und einer neuen Software nach unversteuerten Kryptogewinnen. (Bitcoin, Studien)
Bis 2027 sollen 50 Prozent aller Firmenwagen elektrisch fahren, bis 2030 sogar 90 Prozent. Kritik kommt von der Autoindustrie und Leasingfirmen. (Elektroauto, Auto)
Bis 2027 sollen 50 Prozent aller Firmenwagen elektrisch fahren, bis 2030 sogar 90 Prozent. Kritik kommt von der Autoindustrie und Leasingfirmen. (Elektroauto, Auto) Ghoulish Elvis impersonators are the least of Lucy’s problems as the wasteland prepares for war.
We got our first glimpse of the much-anticipated second season of Fallout (adapted from the popular video game franchise) in August when Prime Video released an extended teaser. We now have the official trailer, with all the deadpan humor, explosions, and mutant atrocities one could hope for—including ghoulish Elvis impersonators in New Vegas.
(Spoilers for S1 below.)
As previously reported, in S1, we met Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a young woman whose vault is raided by surface dwellers. The raiders kill many vault residents and kidnap her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), so the sheltered Lucy sets out on a quest to find him. Life on the surface is pretty brutal, but Lucy learns fast. Along the way, she finds an ally (and love interest) in Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire masquerading as a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel. And she runs afoul of a gunslinger and bounty hunter known as the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a former Hollywood actor named Cooper Howard who survived the original nuclear blast, but radiation exposure turned him into, well, a ghoul.
Steuerfahnder im Bundesland Sachsen suchen mit KI und einer neuen Software nach unversteuerten Kryptogewinnen. (