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An Army soldier wears conceptual "future soldier" armor at the Detroit Auto Show in 2012. If the Special Operations Command's TALOS project is successful, soldiers may wear armored exoskeletons for urban combat in the near future. (credit: US Army)

At this week's Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) cracked the door open a bit on its Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) program—an attempt to create a powered, armored exoskeleton for use by special operations forces such as the Navy's SEALs and the Army's Green Berets. TALOS is the system that led President Barack Obama to announce in 2014 that "we are building Iron Man.”

Navy Commander Anthony Baker of USSOCOM's Joint Acquisition Task Force unveiled the initial list of requirements for TALOS, which is intended to enhance the "comprehensive ballistic protection, situational awareness, and surgical precision and lethality" of special operations troops, particularly in urban combat.

Launched by then-commander of USSOCOM Admiral William McRaven in 2013 as a joint project with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the TALOS program is the latest evolution of "super troop" research that has been underway in secret for decades but has only become practical within the last few years. Initial prototypes demonstrating some of the technologies for TALOS were developed by MIT under the USSOCOM/DARPA program in 2014, and USSOCOM is now on course to produce a full advanced prototype of TALOS by August of 2018.

(credit: Xiaomi)

Chinese company Xiaomi continuously pumps out low-cost electronics, and now it has released an upgraded fitness tracker. The Mi Band 2 is the first activity tracker the company has made with an OLED display, allowing the device to show step count, time, and heart rate. According to Forbes, the Mi Band 2 will cost 149 RMB ($23) in China once it's available.

This is Xiaomi's third fitness tracker: the company's ultra-cheap $13 Mi Band 1 debuted two years ago, and following that was a pulse-monitoring device called the Mi Pulse. The Mi Band 2 keeps the simplistic design of the previous two devices, featuring a thin silicone band and a oval-shaped module, but it adds the .42-inch OLED display, an "upgraded pedometer algorithm," and a 20-day battery life. It also has a single button at the bottom of the screen that will let you scroll through different displays.

In addition to tracking steps, the Mi Band 2 will monitor sleep, and it will vibrate to let you know if you've been sedentary for too long. Still, the display and optical heart rate monitor are key to this device. The display makes it easier to glance down at the device to either check the time or view your step progress, which is something many fitness trackers can do now (though some, like Misfit's products, still go the way of design simplicity). The heart-rate monitor is important not because it's unique technology but because at $23, the Mi Band 2 will be the cheapest device to include one. Most trackers with built-in heart rate monitors, including those from Fitbit and Garmin, are priced at $100 or more.

(credit: M. Phillips/Getty Images)

Following Vivendi's shareholder-backed hostile takeover bid for mobile gaming developer Gameloft, Ubisoft co-founder and Gameloft CEO Michel Guillemot may be about to resign. "A person familiar with the matter" has confirmed Guillemot's pending resignation to Bloomberg, saying that Guillemot will join his brother (and Ubisoft CEO) Yves Guillemot in protecting Ubisoft from a similar Vivendi takeover.

Vivendi has been slowly buying up shares in Ubisoft as far back as October 2015, when it purchased a 6.6 percent share of the company (roughly 7.36 million shares at $161 million (£111 million)). It later upped its stake to 10.39 percent. Ubisoft–which remains a family run business—called the moves "unsolicited and unwelcome" at the time, but Vivendi continued undeterred, purchasing 30 percent of sister company Gameloft.

Vivendi finally convinced shareholders to part with their remaining stock by offering 50 percent over market value. The French media giant is now the majority shareholder at Gameloft, controlling around 56 percent of the vote.

If you're a fan of DRM-free gaming service GOG, but have a large library of games locked away on Steam, you're in luck. GOG has launched GOG Connect, a program that allows users to add DRM-free versions of some previously purchased Steam games to their GOG libraries at no extra cost.

To transfer games, you have to install GOG Connect, connect your Steam account, and let the app do the rest. You'll even be given the choice of using standalone installer for your games, or downloading them via the GOG Galaxy Client.

If the service sounds too good to be true, there is one slight catch: not all games will work. Currently, just over 20 games are part of GOG Connect—including The Witness, FTL: Faster Than Light, and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. The company promises more games will be added to the service at a later date.

(credit: Mashable)

On Wednesday night Elon Musk grandly told audiences at the Code 2016 conference that we might be living in a simulated universe. That comment has certainly sparked attention, but he said something else that's still got us scratching our collective head: when asked about self-driving cars, Musk said that he considers it a "solved problem," and that "we are probably less than two years away" from safe autonomous driving.

This timeline is consistent with one that he gave Ars in 2015, but the head-scratchy bit is that every other expert we've spoken to thinks true self-driving cars (Level 4 autonomy according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) are at least a decade out. NHTSA defines a level 4 autonomous car as one that "is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip. Such a design anticipates that the driver will provide destination or navigation input, but is not expected to be available for control at any time during the trip. This includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles." Even Google's experimental self-driving cars are classed as Level 3 by the agency.

Autonomous driving experts we've consulted at Audi, BMW, Ford, Mercedes, and Volvo (all of which have extremely active self-driving research programs) have consistently told us the same thing: it's comparatively easy to make a car drive itself on a highway where every car is going the same direction and there's no pedestrian traffic. But a car that can drive itself through a busy urban interchange—think Manhattan or Mumbai at rush hour—is closer to 2030 than 2020. Even sensor OEM Mobileye, which supplies Tesla with some of its autopilot hardware, won't have its Level 3-ready EyeQ5 system on a chip ready until 2020.