When the next-gen consoles go on sale later this year it will probably be tough to get one at launch, but Sony is planning to invite some dedicated gamers to be first in line for its PlayStation 5. To get on the list for one of the pre-order invites, go to the PlayStation website and submit your PSN username on the form.
If you’re one of the ones selected, “based on previous interests and PlayStation activities” then you’ll get an email invite allowing you to order one console, as well as a few accessories if you choose. According to Sony’s FAQ, pre-order reservations are limited to one console (regular or All-Digital Edition) per PSN ID. You’ll also want to move fast if the invite hits your inbox, as quantities will be limited and even an invite doesn’t guarantee you’ll get one.
Turns out that plugging a bunch of computers into our electrical grid that do nothing but draw current and hash through algorithms has had some negative environmental impacts. Recent studies suggest that Bitcoin-related power consumption has reached record highs this year — with more than seven gigawatts of power being pulled in the pursuit of the suspect digital currency.
A study from the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance released on Monday estimates that the global bitcoin mining industry uses 7.46 GW, equivalent to around 63.32 terawatt-hours of energy consumption. The study also notes that miners are paying around $0.03 to $0.05 per kWh this year. Given that a March estimate put the cost to mine a full bitcoin is around $7,500, the average miner still stands to make over $4,000 in profit from the operation.
According to Variety, Netflix doesn’t plan to produce a third season of Altered Carbon. Citing a source with “knowledge of the decision,” Variety reports Netflix canned the show for one of its usual reasons. The company didn’t see the series build enough an audience to justify its production budget. Netflix canceled another lavishly produced sci-fi series, the Wachowskis’ Sense8, for the same reason. Deadlineadds that the coronavirus pandemic, which played a part in the recent cancellation of The Society and I Am Not Okay With This, didn’t factor into the decision.
Netflix released the second season of the series, which stared Anthony Mackie as protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, in February following an almost two-year gap between the first season in 2018. In March, it also released an anime spinoff called Altered Carbon: Resleeved.
With most productions on hold thanks to quarantine, networks are starving for original content to fill out their fall lineups. In the case of CBS this means dipping into the well of anything that may have finished shooting before lockdown began — even if it was originally intended for streaming. This fall will see the network debut of the One Day at a Time reboot, as well as the return of Star Trek: Discovery to broadcast television.
The new version of One Day at a Time, following the adventures of a Cuban-American family in Los Angeles, has had a turbulent history. It started life as a Netflix series, before being cancelled by the streaming service when the third season didn’t pick up viewership quickly enough. A social media campaign involving producer-showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett (and Lin-Manuel Miranda) managed to get the series a slot on Pop TV, a cable network owned by CBS. Only seven episodes made it to air before filming had to be halted due to COVID. CBS was meant to pick it up once it had completed its cable run. Now the first six episodes will be on CBS sooner than expected, airing two episodes a week over the course of October starting on the 12th. Kellett suggested on Twitter that CBS viewership will be vital to the series getting a fifth season.
“Once upon a time, children’s music was restricted to lullabies and play-songs that were passed down from generation to generation — or sometimes recited by a cheerful purple dinosaur,” the company says. “These days, the choices are endless. Children’s music has undergone a dramatic shift. Now it’s just great music the entire family loves.”
According to the company, the Kids and Family genre is one of the fastest-growing on Apple Music. In the past four weeks, Apple has seen a 105 percent increase in the amount of time people have spent listening to associated content. So it’s easy to see why it has decided to furnish the section with attention. Moreover, Apple says it considers the update as a way it can help families cope with the ongoing effects of the coronavirus pandemic. We saw Apple try to do something similar earlier in the year when the company introduced its AI-generated Get Up! Mix. And then again when debuted its Come Together space, which collects all of the company’s upbeat playlists in one place.
Facebook’s takedowns come after two protestors were shot and killed Tuesday night by “a young White man carrying a rifle,” according to The Washington Post. It’s not clear if the shooter was part of the “Kenosha Guard” group.
The page was removed while I was writing the piece, but here are a few of the recent posts, for posterity. pic.twitter.com/qH8snPiVK0
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the company is investigating the incident. The social network announced last week that it would remove accounts and groups that discuss violence, including “militia organizations” as an expansion of its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy.” The crackdown resulted in the removal of hundreds of groups, pages and ads linked to militia groups and “those encouraging riots,” Facebook said at the time.
The latest removals aren’t the first time the company has cracked down on extremist groups linked to violence after a deadly shooting. The company banned “boogaloo” groups in June, after one supporter was charged with murdering a California security guard and sheriff’s deputy.
You’ll only be able to Mega Evolve Beedrill, Blastoise, Charizard and Venusaur at the outset. When you do, they’ll be much more powerful. They’ll amp up the attack power of allied Pokémon during raids too.
Only one of your Pokémon can be Mega Evolved at a given time. They’ll stay in that form until they run out of Mega Energy. After you Mega Evolve a Pokémon once, it’ll cost less Mega Energy to do so with that creature in the future.
Several Mega Evolution-themed events will take place in Pokémon Go throughout September. According to Polygon, Niantic will roll out the Mega Evolution update on Thursday on Android and iOS.
The robots themselves are only 5 microns thick, 40 microns wide and between 40 and 70 microns long, depending on the design. The brain and body consist of a silicon photovoltaic circuit while the legs are made from a quartet of electrochemical actuators.
“In the context of the robot’s brains, there’s a sense in which we’re just taking existing semiconductor technology and making it small and releasable,” McEuen told Cornell News. ““But the legs did not exist before. There were no small, electrically activatable actuators that you could use. So we had to invent those and then combine them with the electronics.”
Cornell University
The legs are layered from atom-thick strips of platinum with a titanium “cap” covering one end. When the platinum is exposed to an electric charge, negatively charged ions from the surrounding chemical solution absorb onto the platinum surface to neutralize the charge. That absorption causes the platinum leg to bend, though it’s thin enough to not break under the stress of repeated bendings. To encourage the robot to actually move, the team blasts the photovoltaics in its body with laser pulses. Each set of pulses targets a separate circuit which in turn controls a separate set of legs.
“While these robots are primitive in their function – they’re not very fast, they don’t have a lot of computational capability – the innovations that we made to make them compatible with standard microchip fabrication open the door to making these microscopic robots smart, fast and mass producible,” Cohen noted. “This is really just the first shot across the bow that, hey, we can do electronic integration on a tiny robot.”
And since they’re built using the same production method that semiconductors do, they can be mass produced the same way semiconductors are. In parallel and to the tune of roughly 1 million robots per 4-inch silicon wafer. The team envisions a day when swarms of these robots will swim through your bodily fluids, clearing plaques, repairing blood vessels, even probing into your grey matter.
“Controlling a tiny robot is maybe as close as you can come to shrinking yourself down. I think machines like these are going to take us into all kinds of amazing worlds that are too small to see,” Miskin concluded.
The question was asked for the same likely reason Activision has never greenlit a Call of Duty game dedicated to The Vietnam war: The US military’s actions in Vietnam were atrocious and widely regarded as a massive mistake.
Fueled by anti-communist sentiment, the US government aligned itself with South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, and the conflict functioned as a proxy war against the Soviet Union and China, both of whom backed North Vietnam. With the world’s most advanced military technology at its disposal, the US obliterated Vietnamese soldiers and civilians for 19 years, while making negligible progress against the North and seeding deep divisions at home.
In Vietnam, US orders were best summarized as, “kill anything that moves.” During the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968, US troops slaughtered more than 500 civilians over the course of four hours, stopping for a lunch break in the middle. US planes dropped the explosive power of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnamese military structures and villages. Throughout the conflict, US attack helicopters, carpet bombings and heavy artillery killed as many as 3 million Vietnamese people, 2 million of whom were civilians. By the end of US involvement, 58,000 American soldiers had died, many of them marginalized in everyday society and drafted against their will.
Activision
The US retreated from Vietnam in 1973, bloody, victoryless, and with a generation of traumatized soldiers to support — or, as was often the case, to completely ignore.
By nature, every war is gruesome, ruinous and inhumane, but Vietnam represents a particularly dark mark on US legacy. In Vietnam, this conflict is called the American War, or the Resistance War Against America.
Kraft, Cold War’s lead writer, acknowledged this history at the very beginning of the preview, saying, “We’re also going back to 1968, to a dark period of American history, the Vietnam war.”
If there ever was a moment for a non-lethal option in a Call of Duty game, the Vietnam war might just be it. It’s not like this is a new idea for the CoD squad — Infinity Ward implemented a non-violent option in the 2009 Modern Warfare 2 level “No Russian,” which allowed players to participate in a mass shooting at a busy airport. There’s also a Vietnam war level in the original Black Ops, also developed by Treyarch, and there’s no option to navigate that battlefield non-lethally.
Activision
It’s unclear just how much of Cold War takes place in this Vietnam war nightmare land, so perhaps it is laughable to consider letting players sneak their way through these scenes. Or maybe there’s a plot point tied directly to the number of Vietnamese soldiers that players gun down. After all, if Treyarch is aiming for authenticity, that would fit. As the US Army didn’t have a clear indicator of progress throughout the Vietnam war, it used body counts to measure the success or failure of any given mission.
Such a mechanic would be ridiculously tone deaf, even for Call of Duty. Overall, it seems Treyarch and Raven are approaching Cold War’s Vietnam storyline the same way they’d handle any other battle scene in any other installment: authenticity only to the point of entertainment. Discomfort isn’t the goal. Playability is.
To that end, the Vietnam scenes look engaging, lush and mysterious, with a surreal edge that makes them stand out from classic Call of Duty fare. History adds a twinge of unease to the scenes of US soldiers slaughtering Vietnamese people, but for the majority of players, it’ll pass unnoticed.
Activision
Besides, most people pick up Call of Duty every year for multiplayer, not the single-player campaign. To that end, Cold War will support cross-platform play, a new Zombies mode, and shared content with Call of Duty: Warzone, Activision’s battle royale franchise. Cold War and Warzone will have shared progression features as well — but that’s basically all Activision, Treyarch or Raven have confirmed for now. The Call of Duty Twitch channel will share more information about non-campaign things on September 9th.
There are three versions of Cold War available to pre-order today: the Standard Edition ($60), Cross-Gen Bundle ($70) and Ultimate Edition ($90). The Standard version unlocks the game on Xbox One, PS4 or PC, while the Cross-Gen and Ultimate bundles activate the game on next-gen console counterparts as well.
Treyarch and Raven were an unlikely pairing for Cold War. Sledgehammer Games was originally scheduled to create this installment with Raven Software, but that partnership fell apart in 2019 and Treyarch stepped in. This speed bump, alongside a global pandemic that’s shifted the business models of most industries, could’ve spelled disaster for Cold War. Instead, it seems Treyarch and Raven have firm control over their own version of the Cold War, and all of the atrocities they want to inflict on it.
Each year, an estimated 10 million people in the US take birth control pills. But remembering to take each pill can be challenging, and 80 percent of people miss at least one pill per month. That leads to an estimated one million unplanned pregnancies and may cause complications for those who take the pill for other health reasons. To address this, the company Emme has just launched a new smart case that reminds users to take their pill daily.
The $99 Emme Smart Case records the pills you take — and those you miss — and automatically updates a companion iOS app via Bluetooth. The app provides daily reminders — most pills are more effective when they’re taken around the same time every day — that auto-update when you change time zones. It also offers real-time guidance if you miss a pill, and you can track things like your mood and pill side effects.
