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Civilization VI! Check out that art style.

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2K Games and Firaxis have just announced Civilization VI, the latest entry in the long-running 4X strategy franchise. There's only a small handful of info for now, but the most important piece is the release date: October 21, 2016, on PC.

One of the biggest changes is the art style, which is definitely more "cartoony" than Civ V or Beyond Earth. The land, buildings, and units are drawn in bright, primary colors. The terrain textures almost look like a painting with brush strokes as opposed to the realistic style depicted in Civ V. Longtime Civ fans might be having traumatic flashbacks to the console-only Civilization Revolution, but Civ VI looks like it will still keep the deep and addictive gameplay the series is known for.

On the gameplay side of things, Civ VI seems to keep Civ V's hexagonal tile layout. Players will still be warring over territories displayed via big, bright division lines that cut through the landscape. There will be some gameplay changes, though. The "One unit per tile" rule has been tweaked, with the press release saying that "support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry or a warrior with settlers." Similar units can also be combined together to form "Corps" units.

Google's Adwords platform includes rules to prohibit some advertising campaigns, and it employs a "limited," targeted approach for products and services that it deems "legally or culturally sensitive." Its list of outright banned topics grew one larger on Wednesday with a call from Google to ban all ads for payday loans and "related products."

The ban, which will go into effect on July 13, puts specific conditions on the types of loans that can be advertised on Adwords. To clarify the definition of a "payday loan," Director of Global Product Policy David Graff announced that an ad cannot be placed if the loan requires full repayment within 60 days or if its annual percentage rate (APR) is 36 percent or higher.

"When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users, so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that," Graff wrote in the announcement. After quoting a critic who opposed "predatory lending," Graff mentioned that the ban's effectiveness will be "reviewed" over time.

(credit: Ian Britton)

French police are investigating the suicide death of a woman who threw herself under a train Tuesday and live-streamed her death on Periscope. The woman was killed at the Égly station, just south of Paris on the C line of the R.E.R. train system.

The 19-year-old woman's name has not been released. "This person allegedly sent an SMS to one of her close relations, several minutes before her death, to announce her intentions," Eric Lallement, a local prosecutor, said in a statement. "Furthermore, she allegedly made statements to Internet users, via the Periscope application, to explain her act."

The woman is said to have named a person she claims had recently raped her before she committed suicide.

(credit: Blakegripling ph)

Allwinner, a Chinese system-on-a-chip company that makes the processor used in many low-cost Android tablets, set-top boxes, ARM-based PCs, and other devices, apparently shipped a version of its Linux kernel with a ridiculously easy-to-use backdoor built in. All any code needs to do to gain root access is send the text "rootmydevice" to an undocumented debugging process.

The backdoor code may have inadvertently been left in the kernel after developers completed debugging. But the company has been less than transparent about it: information about the backdoor was released and then apparently deleted through Allwinner's own Github account. The kernel, linux-3.4-sunxi, which was originally developed to support Android on Allwinner's ARM processors for tablets, has also been used to develop a community version. The kernel was also the basis for porting over various versions of Linux to Allwinner's processors, which are used in the Orange Pi and Banana Pi micro-PCs (developer boards compatible with Raspberry Pi) along with a number of other devices.

The way Allwinner has distributed its Linux kernel has been frustrating to many developers. The company has not encouraged or participated in community development and has been accused of numerous violations of the GPL license for the Linux kernel. The kernel "drops" by Allwinner include a number of binaries that are essentially closed source, as well as code released under other licenses—largely to support the graphics engines of its processors.

NASA's SOFIA observatory in red skies above Earth, not Mars. (credit: NASA)

Mars today is a cold, dead world because it lost its magnetic field more than 4 billion years ago. Once the magnetic field was gone, the solar wind began stripping away a Martian atmosphere that was once as thick as that of Earth. Even today the red planet loses about 100 grams of its thin atmosphere each second.

In the 1970s, the Viking lander measured what was left of the Martian atmosphere after billions of years of being ravaged by the solar wind, and it found a composition of 95 percent carbon dioxide, with tiny amounts of nitrogen and oxygen, as well as traces of argon, hydrogen, and other gases. But because these amounts are so small they haven't been measured again until now.

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a modified Boeing 747 aircraft that makes observations at up to an altitude of 45,000 feet, has again detected oxygen in the upper atmosphere of Mars. "To observe the far-infrared wavelengths needed to detect atomic oxygen, researchers must be above the majority of Earth’s atmosphere and use highly sensitive instruments, in this case a spectrometer. SOFIA provides both capabilities," said Pamela Marcum, a project scientist with the research aircraft.

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