Price: $5.49Vectronom is a unique mix of a puzzle game and a rhythm game. The game mechanics are mostly puzzle. You maneuver various levels and avoid various obstacles. However, those obstacles and levels pulse, move, and appear on a beat. Thus, you end up kind of dancing your way through these levels. The music is predominately electronic with a strong bass beat for easy identification of the beat for game mechanic purposes. It’s a neat mix of genres, especially for rhythm game fans. It runs for $5.49 with no additional in-app purchases.Price: Free / $4.99 per month / $49.99 per yearMusic Zen is a rare new sound app. It delivers a variety of sounds that many may find pleasing, relaxing, or otherwise euphoric. Some examples include bubble wrap pops, rain noises, slicing noises, aquarium sounds, and other such things. The app also has sleep app features, visual elements, and some other neat stuff. The app works like you would expect. You can listen to almost any sound at will and you can set things like sleep timers and all of that. It’s simple and it does what it says. The price is a bit steep for our tastes, but it’s up to you if you think it’s worth it or not.

Fortnite’s new map has arrived, though suspiciously, some parts of it look like the old map. My theory is that we are in a parallel universe version of the old map, one of many, possibility infinite, other parallel versions of the island, hence some of the things staying the same.Turns out you can visit the home of the man that caused all this, The Visitor. He arrived in our old island from this other dimension, I believe, and now that he’s home, you can see where he lives, and see that he’s brought some souvenirs with him. The Visitor’s home complex can be found as one of the 60+ landmarks on the new island, and it’s listed as “Camp Cod.” It’s in the very south east of the map where the desert zone would have been on the old map.The island is kind of a military base, it has a training course and shooting range, but it also has a house, and it seems like The Visitor has full run of this place. Once you get there, the fun begins as you start trying to find all the things that he’s brought back from the other island, and there are a lot of easter eggs everywhere here. I have seen this place tried to be looped into a larger theory about the new and old islands merging, but again, I just think this is another dimension.

In 1955, scientists behind the first AI research project believed it would take a 10-man team two months to develop thinking machines that could replicate the problem-solving capabilities of the human mind. But six decades, thousands of projects, and billions of dollars later, human-level artificial intelligence remains an elusive goal.The difficulty of achieving human-level AI has split the field into two subdomains: artificial general intelligence (AGI), the original vision of "thinking" machines; and artificial narrow intelligence, a limited but easier-to-achieve application now found in many industries.The more we make advances in AI, the more we come to appreciate the complexity of the human brain. But does that mean we should abandon the pursuit of artificial general intelligence?Many scientists have become disillusioned about cracking the code of AGI. In his latest book, Architects of Intelligence, futurist and author Martin Ford asked 23 prominent AI scientists and thought leaders how long it would take to achieve AGI. Five refrained from giving an estimate, and most of the remaining 18 preferred to guess anonymously. Their mean estimate for AGI was 2099—80 years from now.

Smart home enthusiasts in the U.S. who have been waiting impatiently for Ikea to release its affordable smart blinds need wait no longer. Despite a series of delays, the blinds are now available to purchase in the U.S., but only in selected stores.As part of its push into smart home technology, Swedish furniture company Ikea has been offering products like Sonos speakers and smart lights. But there have been even more smart home products available from Ikea stores in Europe, where customers can pick up the Fyrtur smart blinds. These blinds were set to arrive in the U.S. in April, but their launch was delayed for unspecified reasons.The arrival of the blinds to the U.S. was delayed once again at the start of this month, though the blinds did continue to be available in the U.K. store. But now, the blinds have appeared on Ikea’s U.S. website. They cannot be ordered online, however, so you’ll have to head to one of the selected physical stores if you want to purchase one. At the time of writing, those stores include locations in California, Colorado, Utah, Indiana, and Oregon.

Android Authority‘s Pixel 4 content is brought to you by MNML Case, makers of the world’s thinnest phone case. Save 25% on your Pixel 4 or Pixel 4 XL case using the discount code AAPixel4.The Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL are two of the most contentious smartphones to launch this year. The standout features are no doubt the dual-camera setup and the new 90Hz display, but both phones come with some significant downsides depending on what type of user you are. They lack robust video features, their storage and batteries aren’t all that impressive, and the new face unlock system has a questionable security feature. They’re pricey, too, at least compared to some other flagships that have recently gone on sale.That’s why we asked you if you were planning on buying the Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, or neither. Out of nearly 4,000 total votes, it’s clear Android Authority readers have some feelings about the new Google phones.

Mercedes-Benz car owners have said that the app they used to remotely locate, unlock and start their cars was displaying other people’s account and vehicle information.TechCrunch spoke to two customers who said the Mercedes-Benz’ connected car app was pulling in information from other accounts and not their own, allowing them to see other car owners’ names, recent activity, phone numbers, and more.The apparent security lapse happened late-Friday before the app went offline “due to site maintenance” a few hours later.It’s not uncommon for modern vehicles these days to come with an accompanying phone app. These apps connect to your car and let you remotely locate them, lock or unlock them, and start or stop the engine. But as cars become internet-connected and hooked up to apps, security flaws have allowed researchers to remotely hijack or track vehicles.

Exercise is essential for good health and quality of life, and that’s generally true even if your joints are stiff from arthritis. Whether they’re drop-in classes or extended programs, a growing number of fitness offerings are targeting a population that may think it can’t exercise — even though it can and should. “A lot of people have a fear of exercise, fear of pain, or fear of doing more damage,” said Marcy O’Koon, senior director of consumer health for the Arthritis Foundation in Atlanta. If you’re close to needing joint replacement surgery or have concurrent medical conditions, talk to your doctor before starting a joint-friendly fitness program, she noted. Otherwise, there’s no time like the present to start reaping the many physical and mental-health benefits of exercise.

On Oct 18, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch performed the first all-woman spacewalk. Koch & Meir replaced a faulty battery charge/discharge unit that failed to activate after a previous spacewalk. This was the fourth spacewalk for Christina Koch and the first for Jessica Meir.

In the search for Earth-like worlds among the stars, much of the focus has been on finding planets in the habitable zone of a star, where they are the right distance for liquid water to exist on the surface. But that's only one necessary ingredient for a truly Earth-like planet. Other factors [such as size](/blog/small-worlds/) come into play, for example. But more subtle aspects are important as well, such as a planet's geological composition. To be truly Earth-like, a planet should have a similar ratio of elements such as iron, oxygen, and carbon. This ratio affects everything from the formation of rocks and minerals to the internal composition of the planet. But studying the geology of exoplanets is beyond the ability of current telescopes. We are only just beginning to study things such as their atmospheres.

Twitch has started testing a new feature that allows streamers to watch Prime Video with their viewers -- as long as they're also subscribers. Travis Shreffler, a content creator and author, has tweeted an email he received from Prime Video, inviting him to test a new feature called Watch Parties. The invitation says streamers will be able to show a selection of Prime Video movies and TV series on their channels, so they can watch while chatting with their audience. Or, more accurately, their viewers who also have Prime. The current selection is pretty limited, but it includes the new season of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan,Mission Impossible: Fallout and Pokémon. Amazon promises to keep adding to the number of titles available for Watch Parties, though it looks like the feature will only be available in the US at launch time, if it does become accessible to everyone. Before a general release happens, Amazon plans to invite more Twitch streamers over time to test it out.

Samsung has spent millions on making its phones more secure, and on making sure customers know about it. You’d think all that money would be enough to fend off the threat of a $2 silicone case. Apparently not.If there’s ever an appropriate time to call a gigantic tech conglomerate “red faced,” it’s probably now. In a terse statement released yesterday, Samsung acknowledged some clear cases and screen protectors can be used to bypass the fingerprint sensors on the Galaxy S10, Galaxy 10 Plus, Galaxy S10 5G, Galaxy Note 10, and Galaxy Note 10 Plus.You don’t need a 3D printer, super-high-res camera, latex molds, or any cloak-and-dagger nonsense. A dirt-cheap phone case is all you need to unlock someone’s Samsung flagship.It’s hard to excuse this massive breach of trust, and it’s even harder to understand why Samsung has so far failed to apologize to customers. Yet, this embarrassing mishap isn’t that surprising in the scheme of things.

Want to finally cut the headphone cord and go truly wireless? Don’t want to spend $159 or even more on fancy earphones like AirPods or Powerbeats Pro? Don’t worry because we’ve got you covered. The SoundPEATS TrueFree True Wireless Earbuds are part of a very popular product line that always touts impressive sound, solid battery life, and a comfortable fit. Best of all, they’re shockingly affordable! Here are the bullet points from the product page: Follow @BGRDeals on Twitter to keep up with the latest and greatest deals from around the web. Quantities may be limited. Prices are subject to change without notice and coupons may expire at any time. Some deals may not be available to all customers. BGR may receive a commission on orders placed through this article.

Finally, some good news for NASA’s InSight lander, which has been struck on Mars due to a part of its drill called “the mole” becoming wedged in the soil. Back in March the drill stopped moving, in a problem that was at first thought to be because it had hit a rock. But further investigations led the scientists to conclude that the issue was more likely due to the composition of the soil that InSight had been digging into. The soil turned out to be unexpectedly tough, meaning the drill could not generate enough friction to cling on to and move itself through.With the drill stuck, there was no way to pick it up and move it to a different location. There is a support structure around the mole which can be moved, however, so the team used the robotic arm to remove the supports and get a closer look at the issue.

A U.S. Senator has called for a radical new approach to consumer privacy to be adopted following recent revelations about the sale and misuse of data by various technology companies. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has introduced a new bill as an even stronger update to his privacy legislation proposed last year.The new legislation, titled the “Mind Your Own Business Act,” would give significant powers to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to regulate the sale and sharing of data by companies. It would allow the FTC to establish privacy and security standards and to levy significant fines of up to 4% of annual revenue against companies which do not meet those standards. There would even be an option to impose criminal penalties onto company executives who knowingly lie to the FTC.The legislation would also create a Do Not Track system, allowing people to opt out of being tracked on the internet, and let them stop companies from selling or sharing their data. Plus companies would have to provide people with copies of their data for review and reveal with whom it has been shared or sold.

We've known for months that Google built its own controller for the upcoming Stadia game streaming service. But Popular Science recently got a behind-the-scenes look at the design process, including a glimpse of the "hundreds" of prototypes for the device. "We put out rigs of cameras and filmed roughly 6,000 hours of gaming time to observe how people were holding different controllers," Google design director Isabelle Olsson explains.

The new Pixel 4 phones might be loaded with the latest features and software care of Android 10, but Google is evidently still struggling in its push for Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging. Neither Verizon nor T-Mobile are supporting the new messaging standard for the Pixel 4, with Sprint the only clear carrier to support it, 9to5Google reports.SMS has been the standard for text messaging for a long time, but as far as features go, SMS is from the smartphone stone age. Chat apps like WhatsApp and iMessage have ever increasing feature sets that stack on top of the ability to send basic text messages. They include read receipts, typing indicators, and high-quality media. Google has pushed for RCS, looking to get carriers to use the system, as it brings many of the features of other messaging apps while still going through carriers. IT has even aimed to use its own servers for this to cut out the carrier middleman.

It seems that people are finally waking up to the threat of climate change. The most poignant sign of this for me was seeing an infographic I created adorning the main music stage at Reading Festival 2019.While the majority of those in the crowd may not have grasped its true meaning, or been in the frame of mind to understand it, it was a significant moment. A popular rock band publicly endorsed climate research and literally put it centre stage.The climate stripes illustrate the global average temperature for every year since 1850 in the form of a colored stripe. Shades of blue represent cooler years and red, warmer years. The overall effect is a striking trend towards hotter temperatures in recent decades, as a result of human-caused climate change.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a bit old-fashioned when it comes to phones. Everyone scoffs at my iPhone SE, but the truth is it’s the best phone Apple ever made — a beautiful, well designed object in just about every way. But damn is the iPhone 11 Pro ugly. And so are the newest phones from Samsung and Google, while we’re at it.Let’s just get right to why the new iPhones are ugly, front and back. And sideways. We can start with the notch. Obviously it’s not new, but I thought maybe this would be some kind of generational anomaly that we’d all look back and laugh at in a year or two. Apparently it’s sticking around.

One of the biggest complaints of parents is that their children are always glued to their smartphones; it’s almost as though the world now exists just as much digitally as it does physically. That hasn’t phased LEGO, though, despite being widely known as a manufacturer of toys – physical toys – and its latest kits now blur the boundaries of physical and digital play.Those kits are LEGO Hidden Side, a series of ghost-themed sets (that, notably for LEGO, aren’t based on a pre-existing franchise)... that take on a second life when you’ve made them. This second life is on a Hidden Side smartphone app, which lets you interact with the sets using augmented reality (AR).On the app, you have to solve puzzles by interacting with the set, by using your smartphone camera to scan the set and recognise the changes you make. Take a look at all eight Hidden Side sets on LEGO's website.

Entrepreneurs have a much higher prevalence of mental health conditions and are more vulnerable in a face of depression and substance abuse than others.

Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.COSMIC COMPUTERS AND INTERSTELLAR CATSIn 2036, any inhabitants of the HIP 4872 solar system in Cassiopeia will receive a strange visitor. Her name is Ella, and she enjoys playing Atlantic City blackjack, telling jokes, predicting fortunes, and reciting poems. These hobbies are not all that unusual for a human, but Ella isn't exactly human. She's a chatbot: a natural language processing algorithm that can reproduce human speech by analyzing patterns in large collections of text.Ella's software was included as part of the 2003 Cosmic Call message, and it remains the first and only artificial intelligence sent into interstellar space. Shortly before transmission, Ella, who was created by the software company EllaZ systems, won first place in the Loebner Prize Contest, an annual Turing test competition in which judges try to distinguish humans from chatbots by holding textual conversations (Copple 2008). By today's standards, when many of us have a phone with far more advanced language- processing algorithms in our pocket, Ella comes off as a very crude approximation of intelligence, but at the time the program was considered one of the "most human computers" in the world. We needn't worry ourselves too much that our first AI ambassador to the stars might come off as an incoherent gambling addict, however. Without a primer in the syntax of Visual Basic.NET, the programming language used to write Ella's software, there's a strong chance that extraterrestrials wouldn't be able to interface with the chatbot; but Ella's English language corpus, included with the software, could be a valuable reference material for them. Despite the shortcomings of "astrobot Ella," its transmission to Cassiopeia was a landmark event that pointed to a promising future for the use of AI in interstellar communication.

Hubble has captured an image of a comet that is believed to have traveled to our solar system from a different planetary system somewhere else in the galaxy. The comet, named 2I/Borisov, was first spotted in August by an amateur astronomer named Gennady Borisov and was subsequently imaged by astronomers from the Institute for Astrophysics of the Canaries. There has even been some preliminary analysis performed on the comet, suggesting that the gases it is giving off include cyanogen gas, which is a combination of carbon and nitrogen.Now it has been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, creating the clearest picture yet of this extraterrestrial visitor. In the Hubble image, you can see the solid core of ice that forms the heart of the comet, surrounded by a halo of concentrated dust. This has given astronomers a better view of the comet and allowed them to compare it to a previous object which visited from outside the solar system, ‘Oumuamua. And it has raised more questions about how and why the two objects are so different in terms of composition.

Late last night the Financial Times reported that HuffPost, arguably one of the crown jewels of Verizon Media Group’s remaining network of media properties (which includes TechCrunch), is up for sale.Verizon has been shedding media properties in a retreat from the strategy that it had begun to execute with the acquisition of AOL for $4.4 billion back in 2015. Through the AOL deal, then-chief executive Tim Armstrong became the architect of the telecommunications company’s media and advertising strategy.Armstrong’s vision was to roll up as much online real estate as he could while creating a high technology advertising architecture on the back-end that could better target consumers based on their media consumption (which the telecom company would also own).

It wouldn’t be Destinywithout someone finding a gamebreaking exploit over the course of the season, and here we are without first big problem that has now been discovered in the wake of people starting to pull enhanced mods from Iron Banner.I was turned on to this glitch/exploit by Chadlantis, who demonstrates what’s going on in the video below:Yes, it’s our old friend Telesto, back again to cause more problems. Players may remember that Telesto was causing issues in Blind Well, where every exploding bolt counted as an enemy kill, making clearing that activity a breeze. Bungie eventually patched that, but now the issue is cropping up again.This is a tiny bit more complicated than the old Telesto Well cheese, as you have to do more than just shoot the gun.You need an Enhanced Ashes to Assets mod, which drops from Iron Banner packages (I got one) among other pinnacle activities, I believe. That turns grenade kills into big super gains.

Why worry about losing your important files when you can trust Polar Backup? This deal is your chance to grab access up to 5TBof cloud storage forever. For just $99.99 you can secure all of your files in one place for as long as you’ll ever need them.Many cloud storage services boast that they have the most secure platform or the easiest way to find your files, but Polar Backup lives up to its word. It relies on Amazon Web Services and GDPR compliance to keep your data safe and accessible to only you.Polar Cloud Storage, based in Finland, draws on its experience of providing Software as a Service (SaaS) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) services to direct its cloud development. There’s a strong emphasis on cutting-edge technology, with duplication and redundancy to keep your data easily accessible.

<span>Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all.The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and more than $100 billion in purchases. Just in the past quarter, consumer spending exceeded $23 billion and installs topped 31 billion. It’s a fact: we spend more time on our phones than we do watching TV.This week, Chinese censorship is still a big topic, and one which sees Apple CEO sitting down with Chinese regulators to discuss. China was also found to have forced a spy app on its people, according to a code review. Meanwhile, TikTok got cloned in Russia. It also decided to bring in corporate lawyers to help it to figure out how to moderate its content and be transparent.

Oftentimes in the military, the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” becomes hard to argue. And in a world where threat actors from enemy nation states probe for any and every weakness, replacing a system that has been glitch and breach free for decades is a tough ask. So it is with the U.S. military’s decision to shift its Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) from 1970s tech to something more contemporary. As reported by defense news site C4isrnet, the highly secure U.S. military messaging services has finally “dumped the floppy disk.”The SACCS messaging system has been used with the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system, the land-based nuclear option operated by the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command. It is a network of hidden underground missile silos connected by endless secure cabling. All of which has been controlled by a 1970s computer system and those disks. “This is how we would conduct nuclear war,” one senior USAF operator explains, “on eight-inch floppy disks.”

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.Welcome to your weekend! This morning is a great time to catch up on all of Google's new hardware, our re-review of the Galaxy Fold and some exciting news items from Friday. That includes Nike's accessible Air Jordans and Google's parent company getting into the drone delivery business in the US.Drones will drop the orders in yards and driveways.Alphabet's Wing starts drone deliveries to US homesDuring a pilot program in Christiansburg, Virginia, drones will drop off packages from FedEx, Walgreens and local retailer Sugar Magnolia, which include over-the-counter medication, snacks and gifts. Alphabet says it's the first commercial drone delivery service to homes in the country.Make sure you didn't miss anything.Here's everything Google announced at the Pixel 4 event

Capcom has been riding high on some big successes recently, with Devil May Cry 5, Monster Hunter World and its Resident Evil 2 remake all receiving critical praise and selling well. Hoping to build on this success, the publisher has said that it’s looking to bring back some of its still-valuable franchises that have been “dormant” for a while, in addition to making the most of its current fan favourites. This news comes from Capcom's 2019 financial briefing for investors in which the company laid out its intentions to “continue to strengthen our development structure and promote further systemization to grow our pipeline of new titles geared toward the global market” by both “maximizing the revenue from current core IP” and “actively looking to utilize dormant IP. “The franchises Capcom is looking to bring back have, of course, not been revealed just yet. Whatever they are, though, Capcom will be sure that they’re “developed in-line with the highly stringent, world-class quality standards” that the publisher believes led to the success of Monster Hunter World, Devil May Cry 5 and Resident Evil 2.

HTC has just announced a new, more affordable version of its Exodus 1 smartphone — a device that comes with a built-in hardware wallet for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The new HTC Exodus 1s costs 219 euros (around $244) and allows owners to buy, sell, send, receive, lend, and borrow cryptocurrency directly from the device. The HTC Exodus 1s also boasts software tools that enable it to run a full Bitcoin node. This functionality is built atop a basic, budget Android phone.“We are providing the tools for access to universal basic finance; the tools to have a metaphorical Swiss bank in your pocket,” Phil Chen, decentralized chief officer at HTC said in a press release. “Full nodes are the most important ingredient in the resilience of the Bitcoin network and we have lowered the barrier to entry for any person to run a node, which is simply a computer, mobile in our case, participating in the global Bitcoin network that propagates transactions and blocks everywhere, which is the foundation and fundamental definition of a peer-to-peer cash system.”

AMD has had one hell of a 2019 so far – at least when it comes to its processor business – with great reviews and stellar sales that have seen it gobble up more market share than it has done in over a decade.While it’s undoubtedly been thrilling to see AMD claw its way back out of obscurity and become a real force to be reckoned with in the CPU industry again, it feels like a few too many of us have been overly hasty in writing off Intel.Sure, AMD’s been on a hot streak right now, and you’d be crazy if you didn’t think that has caused some rather worried discussions over at Intel, but you’d also be equally loopy if you thought that Intel’s vast dominance over the CPU market would be under any serious threat… for now.What AMD’s recent successes has done is put every move Intel makes under the spotlight, leading people to question everything it does – and wonder whether or not it is in response to AMD’s resurgence.

We’ve been waiting for Zombieland: Double Tap for 10 years, and it’s finally here. But the new zombie comedy has some serious competition at the box office this week. The Maleficent and Jay and Silent Bob sequels are also out this week, as is Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. On top of that, Joker might still have some juice left in its third week at the theater, even after obliterating the competition during the previous weekends.As for trailers, we have a couple of exciting flicks from Netflix, as well as a new trailer for the Lady and the Tramp live-action film that will launch on Disney+ in a few short weeks. We’ve also got a couple of other trailers that are targeting the younger audience: Frozen II and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway.

In just two-and-a-half hours, you’ll end your Zombieland: Double Tap–Road Trip experience. This isn’t necessarily because you’ll think it’s terrible–even though the game largely is–but in the time it would take you to watch Woody Harrelson make a much more enjoyable appearance in The Hunger Games, you’ll finish this ten-mission, cross-country tale.In my own playthrough, I didn’t die once as I endured its wafer-thin storyline, with little-to-no stress during the completion of its 15-minute-long stages. Along the way, its consistent lack of finesse underlined what appears to be a record quick development time.And yet, I still kind of enjoyed it. I’m not proud to admit that, but sometimes, mindless nonsense is exactly what you need, and daft, cheap games are good ways to get this.

We're all set for another round of Black Friday fun and games, which means TechRadar will be scouring the web for the very best deals and discounts, and you (hopefully) will be taking advantage – and we're here to tell you about one offer in particular that's worth looking into.It's called the Curry's 5% money back credit offer, and it works exactly as you might expect, given the name: every time you shop online or in-store using the Currys Flexible Credit plan, you get 5% back to spend on whatever you like from Currys Black Friday deals, as well as regular stock. It's simple to take advantage of, and we'll explain here everything you need to know.There's some small print, which we'll get on to in a moment, but that's the gist of it – and if you were planning to spread the cost of your Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas shopping anyway, then it makes sense to get a little bit of cash back at the same time.

Android Authority‘s Pixel 4 content is brought to you by MNML Case, makers of the world’s thinnest phone case. Save 25% on your Pixel 4 or Pixel 4 XL case using the discount code AAPixel4The Google Pixel 4 series represents the next step in Google’s quest to become a successful smartphone brand. Its latest phones seem to continue the trend of delivering fast updates and cutting-edge computational photography, but it’s clear that Google wants to be the Apple of the Android world.Behind the scenes: Google’s Pixel cameras aren’t trying to be cameras at allNow, there’s nothing wrong with looking to Apple for inspiration. We’ve seen the likes of Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi all do this to varying degrees over the years. But it’s clear that Google has been aping plenty of bad things about iPhones past and present with its Pixel 4 series.

Microsoft recent Surface launch was full of surprises, as the company took the wraps off a folding phone (the Surface Duo) and PC device (the Surface Neo).But alongside these headline-catching launches were the latest generation of the company’s Surface devices, with new additions to the Laptop, Book and Pro lines.But with so many new offerings coming to the market, how does Microsoft look to ensure it stays focused on its self-declared aim to “enable people to achieve more”?"As we release multiple generations of the products, we get a lot of feedback,” Aidan Marcuss, CVP, Devices Portfolio and Operations at Microsoft, told TechRadar Pro at a recent company media event.“We've taken a big step forward in growing and adding whole product lines that address customer feedback and customer needs.”

Fortnite has struggled with trying to balance a game that needs to be accessible to hundreds of millions of players, including children, while also trying to cultivate a pro esports scene and keep top streamers playing it at the highest level.Their last few experiments, nerfing building, introduced an overpowered mech so casual/lower skill players would have an easier time getting kills, were the subject of much frustration among the community. But now in Chapter 2 it seems Fortnite has stumbled onto a true solution that was staring them in the face the entire time. Bots. Fortnite, of course, did not invent the concept of bots, nor is it even the first battle royale to implement them, as PUBG has had them for a while now. But finally putting them in Fortnite seems to have cured the casual/hardcore divide to a certain extent, as it’s kind of a win-win concept for everyone.

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy news pertaining to startups and venture capital. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Revel, a recent graduate of Y Combinator that’s raised a small seed round.Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. document.getElementById('cloak9b63b7da26f2b6684217d48459c60a9c').innerHTML = ''; var prefix = 'ma' + 'il' + 'to'; var path = 'hr' + 'ef' + '='; var addy9b63b7da26f2b6684217d48459c60a9c = 'kate.clark' + '@'; addy9b63b7da26f2b6684217d48459c60a9c = addy9b63b7da26f2b6684217d48459c60a9c + 'techcrunch' + '.' + 'com'; var addy_text9b63b7da26f2b6684217d48459c60a9c = 'kate.clark' + '@' + 'techcrunch' + '.' + 'com';document.getElementById('cloak9b63b7da26f2b6684217d48459c60a9c').innerHTML += ''+addy_text9b63b7da26f2b6684217d48459c60a9c+''; or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.Uber the TV showIs anyone surprised Mike Isaac’s “Super Pumped” is set to become a TV show? Travis Kalanick’s notorious journey to CEO of Uber and subsequent ouster was made for television. This week, news broke that Showtime’s Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the creators and showrunners of “Billions,” would develop the project, with Isaac himself on board to executive produce. I will be watching.

TLDR: Learn the skills to be an Agile Scrum expert with this mastery bundle, now just $19.99.You may have heard the terms Agile and Scrum before, but unless you’re well-versed in the ultra-precise methodology of corporate level project management, you probably aren’t all that familiar with what it all means.But if you think this is one of those “ignorance is bliss” instances…well, it’s not. Whether you’re trying to break into the lucrative project manager field or if you’re just trying to coordinate major initiatives in your current organization, the principles of an Agile-based project management system can make all the difference between success and failure.You can get fully up to speed on this career-redefining training with the instruction in The Agile Scrum Mastery Bundle. It’s on sale now at over 90 percent off, just $19.99 from TNW Deals.

Volvo has unveiled its first fully electric vehicle, and with it, an important commitment to decarbonization. The carmaker says it will bring out a new electric model every year and reduce production of traditional combustion vehicles and hybrids, so that by 2025, half of its sales will be electric, and the other half will be a decreasing number of plug-in hybrids, with their non-electric motors produced outside the company.The launch and mass marketing of Volkswagen’s ID.3, the increased manufacturing capacity of market leader, Tesla, after opening a factory in China, and the efforts of other manufacturers to quickly electrify their catalog, leaves no doubt about where the motor industry is going: the transition to electric vehicles is no longer about when, but at what speed it takes place. If you were thinking of purchasing a new vehicle with an internal combustion engine, know that you are buying obsolete technology. A strike by GM workers over a production switch to electric vehicles, which will mean smaller workforces, says it all.

Drone technology has moved on so much you can get professional level equipment for consumer-grade prices. Just like the DJI Mavic Air drone kit.

It has been almost three weeks since the launch of Destiny 2’s Shadowkeep expansion and Season of the Undying. I have had nearly non-stop thoughts about it since then, what it does right, and what it does wrong, but I thought it was time for a larger posts. I talked about some potential issues with the expansion a while ago, but now that I’ve put (way too much) time into the past few weeks, I think I’m better able to more clearly discuss its issues.The season is still ongoing. There are more exotic quests coming, a dungeon, Vex Offensive story developments and so on. But for me, these are the five biggest problems with the game right now which don’t appear like they’re going to be solved any time soon without Bungie intervention.1. Pinnacle DropsThe new system of having drops between 950 and 960 for “pinnacle” activities always struck me as a bit weird in theory, but in practice, it’s kind of even worse than I thought. It’s not just that the opportunities for pinnacle drops seem pretty limited. The raid, IB, the Nightfall (and maybe Master Nightmare Hunts) are the only options. The core issue is how they drop.

After first teasing the device earlier this year, HTC has detailed its new, more affordable Exodus 1s blockchain smartphone. The highlight feature of the device is that it can function as a full node. This means the phone is able to validate and transmit Bitcoin transactions independent of a centralized third-party. In this way, you don't need to go through an exchange to buy and sell Bitcoin. Likewise, the phone can also be used to trade, lend and borrow the cryptocurrency. The way HTC puts it, what separates the 1s from other smartphones is that you can operate your own decentralized bank out of your pocket.At least that's the idea. While it's not as intensive as mining Bitcoin, running a full node still requires a lot of computing power. In fact, HTC recommends only using the feature while the phone is connected to WiFi and plugged into its power adapter. The company also plans to roll out full node support to the original Exodus 1, as well.

Hooligan flat track racing with everything from minibikes to electric motorcycles, surfing contests, local bands, motorcycle sidecar grills, and myriad expressions of two-wheeled automotive passion prevailed over sticky rules and regulations. Other long-standing events didn’t qualify this year, but the 3rd annual Roland Sands Design Moto Beach Classic is on at Bolsa Chica State Park in Huntington Beach, California, October 26 and 27.The first Moto Beach Classic in 2017 was a one-day fusion of music, surfing, motorcycle racing, and art. Roland Sands conceived the event that brings together and celebrates southern California passions for surfing, motorcycles, and music. Sands is a custom motorcycle designer and an avid participant and proponent of Hooligan racing, the amateur version of flat track racing. Roland Sands Design (RSD) is a preeminent motorcycle apparel and parts brand that blends classic style with edge-cutting function. As major sponsors for the first event, Bell Helmets presented a stunt riding show, BMW Motorrad ran drag racing competitions, and Indian Motorcycle built a track for flat track racing. Surfing apparel company Hurley runs the surfing competition.

Playing video games with someone in the same room is the best — but you need another controller to make it work. And here's an offer on one.

“Friday Night Lights” definitely took on new meaning this week in parts of the southeastern United States as spectacular pictures of sunsets flooded social media timelines. Many of them were juxtaposed with high school football games throughout the area. Meteorologists from across the region like Birmingham legend James Spann shared breathtaking snapshots from Friday evening. Friends were posting photographs throughout my social media timelines. The amazing “art show” in the sky caused people to reflect on the pace of their day, spiritual peace, or the pure beauty of the moment. Social media timelines can be an endless rehash of memes, political articles, and forgettable banter. However, the almost communal response of this particular sunset was different. Here’s the science behind why it happened.

There's a scant 68 days until Christmas is once again upon us, and 65 until Hanukkah begins. There are likely plenty of people left on your shopping list, including those few who are always impossible to buy for (looking at you, Dad) so we want to lend you a helping hand: If you find yourself stymied by gadget- or tech-related questions as you start shopping, give us a shout! Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. document.getElementById('cloak6fda6bc376db29f8df2bb3c87854b6b7').innerHTML = ''; var prefix = 'ma' + 'il' + 'to'; var path = 'hr' + 'ef' + '='; var addy6fda6bc376db29f8df2bb3c87854b6b7 = 'ask' + '@'; addy6fda6bc376db29f8df2bb3c87854b6b7 = addy6fda6bc376db29f8df2bb3c87854b6b7 + 'engadget' + '.' + 'com'; var addy_text6fda6bc376db29f8df2bb3c87854b6b7 = 'ask' + '@' + 'engadget' + '.' + 'com';document.getElementById('cloak6fda6bc376db29f8df2bb3c87854b6b7').innerHTML += ''+addy_text6fda6bc376db29f8df2bb3c87854b6b7+''; to get answers on everything from "What is the easiest home assistant to set up for my parents?" to "What will the teenager on my list actually appreciate?" Just don't ask us to wrap anything for you.

Whatever you might say about HTC (and believe me, there’s plenty to say), at least the company takes some fascinating chance. As newly minted CEO Yves Maitre admitted to me at Disrupt a couple of weeks back, the once mighty smartphone giant has lost the thread in recent years. But if nothing else, the Exodus project marks a glimpse at some potential smartphone future. With this weekend’s launch of the Exodus 1s at Berlin’s Lightning conference, HTC aims to make it clear that the project is more than just a one-off. The new device lowers the barrier of entry to €219 (~$244). All said, not a bad price for those looking to dabble in the technology. Oh, and obviously it’s available in all of the various equivalent cryptocurrencies.

Welcome to another weekend edition of our top daily deals roundups, which are just like the ones we run during the week but you can browse them from the comfort of your home instead of trying to sneak a peek at work. Highlights from Saturday’s list include the best-selling TP-Link Wi-Fi range extender on Amazon’s whole site for an all-time low of just $13.99, a Fire TV Stick for only $24.99 and a Fire TV Stick 4K for $34.99 (both the lowest prices since Prime Day), an extremely rare deal that gets you a $25 gift card when you buy a new upgraded Nintendo Switch console with better battery life, the hot just-released Roku Express HD for only $29, a massive $90 discount on Sony True Wireless Earbuds, the best deal we’ve ever seen on a Ring Video Doorbell, the Echo Dot for cars for only $19.99, $700 off a stunning Vizio 75-inch Quantum 4K TV, $41 off an awesome shiatsu foot massager, and more. See all of today’s top deals below.

AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X should be with us soon – with the chip expected to arrive in November, following a delay of a couple of months – and we just got a better idea of the sort of performance we can expect from the CPU.This comes courtesy of alleged Geekbench 5 results for the processor spotted by TUM_APISAK (a regular leaker of CPU and GPU info).The Ryzen 9 3950X actually appeared in two benchmarks, and in one case, the chip was nestled in an Asus Prime X570-P motherboard (backed with 64GB of RAM) where it recorded a single-core result of 1,276 and hit 15,401 in multi-core.The second benchmark in a Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro WiFi motherboard witnessed a slightly higher score of 1,314 for single-core, but a considerably lower result of 11,140 when it came to multi-core. While both PCs were seemingly using DDR4-3600 memory, note that in this latter case, there was a much smaller quantity of 16GB system RAM (which doubtless had a bearing on things).

More encouragement for those of you waiting for that rumored 16-inch MacBook Pro – images of what may well be the laptop has popped up in the code for the macOS Catalina 10.15.1 beta.French site MacGeneration spotted the icons, which look a lot like the icons for the current 15-inch models. The bezels around the display are thinner though, and there's a giveaway "16" reference in both of the filenames.Those thinner bezels would fit in with what we've heard so far about the laptop. The available colors, apparently, are the standard silver and space gray.Rumors about the new model in Apple's line-up – which would have the biggest screen yet on an Apple laptop – have been rumbling all year, and the consensus seems to be that a launch will happen before the end of the year.Notable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo started the excitement back in February with news that a new 16-inch MacBook Pro was on the way – complete with a redesigned look.

There’s a famous saying about Statistics being the art of misleading people into believing that, if two individuals had two chickens available and one person ate both, what actually happened is that they ate one each. I could not avoid thinking of that, when I came across the Oracle-commissioned "From Fear to Enthusiasm - AI is Winning Hearts and Minds in the Workplace" report, a couple of days ago. Research firm Future Workplace surveyed 8,370 employees, managers and HR persons across 10 countries, clever PR followed and it all translated into headlines such as "64% of people trust a Robot more than their Manager", "Four out of five think robots are better than their managers" or "Chinese workers trust robot coworkers more than their managers". But is this what the report says? Here things become a little problematic.

We’ve only just started to see the first wireless speakers that are designed to easily transition from whole-home Wi-Fi component to go-anywhere, battery-powered Bluetooth nomad, but Bose has already laid claim to this turf with its $350 Bose Portable Home Speaker.It’s light, has a built-in handle, and can deal with the elements and the occasional bump or tumble. It’s even a full-fledged smart speaker. But does it have the kind of sound quality and convenience we’ve come to expect of the Bose brand? Here’s our full review.Let’s be honest. You’re never going to hear amazing sound out of a speaker that’s small enough to fit in your purse. Size matters when it comes to sound quality, so the challenge when creating a portable speaker is to make it small enough to be portable, big enough that it sounds great, yet not so big that you don’t want to take it with you.

The education sector has long treated every student the same. However, every student is unique and has different learning capabilities. The use of computer vision in education can help to maximize students’ academic output by providing a customized learning experience based on their individual strengths and weaknesses. Benefits of computer vision in educationThe main advantage of computer vision in education is the ease and non-obstructiveness of the assessment process compared to traditional classroom education. Teachers can observe whether a pupil is motivated or disinterested in the class without interrupting their activities. Affective computing techniques, availability of low-cost cameras, and their widespread use in electronic devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets, allow educators to measure learners’ engagement levels using computer vision. Monitoring a student’s behavior continually is not possible. Computer vision eliminates the need for a teacher to continually monitor every student’s behavior, which proves to be highly beneficial. With computer vision technology, every student’s engagement in the classroom can be monitored easily. There is hope that computer vision will enhance the ability to detect, measure, and respond to individual students’ levels of engagement in the near future.

The LG G9 could be launching in early 2020, so we’d expect rumors about LG’s upcoming flagship to start rolling in soon.Once they do, you’ll find all of them below, but there are already a few things that we’ve heard or suspect, so read on for hints about the LG G9 release date, specs and features.Plus, we’ve also come up with a list of what we want – and in some cases what we don’t want – from the LG G9, to make it a substantial improvement on the LG G8.The LG G8 was announced at MWC 2019 on February 24, so there’s a high chance the LG G9 will land at MWC 2020, which runs from February 24-27. It may even be announced just before that, as sometimes big announcements are made before the show officially kicks off.For now that’s just a guess, as there aren’t any LG G9 release date rumors yet, but at the very least we’d expect it will be announced during the first half of 2020. However, there may be a few weeks or more between when it’s announced and when it goes on sale, based on past form.

Do you ever wish you could make studio-like sound adjustments to your music as you listen? Boom 3D puts you in the producer’s chair for only $12.99. This software retails at $39.99, way more affordable than building a sound studio!Boom 3D is a sound enhancement software package that enables you to add 3D effects to anything you listen to. Want a little more bass with your beats? Boom. Wish you could feel like you’re in the middle of the orchestra? Boom 3D can do that too.The abilities of Boom 3D go far beyond just music. It is fine-tuned with Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime video to make a whisper feel like it’s in your ear. Keep the bass up and feel yourself shake when a cannon goes off. You can control your very own surround sound just how you like it.If you’re a gamer and you feel like you never hear enemies sneak up behind you, Boom 3D can work for you too. You can carefully adjust your mix so that you hear every footstep but you aren’t deafened by the chaos of battle.

Regrettably, I know these people. More than likely, you do too. We’ve heard about them, worked with them, worked for them, and some of us (me included) have had the misfortune of hiring them. Weak leaders damage organizational culture. They demoralize high-performing teams, and they create chaotic and toxic work environments where every employee is asked to pay too high a price.We know them from their behaviors, and we know them for how they speak. Even if you’ve never worked for them, you can learn to spot weak leaders by just listening to how they speak and the phrases they use when communicating with others. If you’re attuned to the messaging, you can easily start to pick them out of the crowd or – better yet – spot the signs during an interview, and remove them from your candidate pool.

The update that added a photomode to Remedy's moody shooter Control also added some new headaches for PC players who purchased it from the Epic Games Store. Although the team says that changes made were intended to validate "future expansions," their actual impact removed Steam controller support and forced players to stay online.Overnight the company has released another update (v1.04.01) fixing the issue, which it says is not the fault of Epic, allowing players to both enjoy the new camera feature and get ready for DLC that will arrive in December.

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It turns out that how often you drink affects the chances of developing an irregular heartbeat known as atrial fibrillation (AFib) more than the amount or volume of alcohol consumed, according to the findings of a new study.The translation: having one to two drinks daily increases a person’s risk of developing Afib more than binge drinking on weekends.The research was published in EP Eurospace, the Journal of the European Society of Cardiology.'Recommendations about alcohol consumption have focused on reducing the absolute amount rather than the frequency,” said study author Dr. Jong-Il Choi, of Korea University College of Medicine and Korea University Anam Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea. 'Our study suggests that drinking less often may also be important to protect against atrial fibrillation.”

There are 10 questions in this quiz, each of which contains three statements regarding a specific high-end phone including the Galaxy Note 10 Plus, Pixel 4, and OnePlus 7T. Your job is simple: figure out which statement is true.Are you up for the challenge? Press the Start button below and show us what you got. And when you’re done, make sure to share your score on social media and challenge your friends to try and beat it.Note: If you don’t see a Start button, click here.This is the 59th quiz in our regular weekly series. You can take a few of the most popular ones via the links below or check out all of them by clicking here.Let us know which questions you thought were the hardest and share your result with others in the comments!

No vacation would be complete without posting a few shots of it on Instagram, though we can all agree that risking your life for that “special” image is never a wise move.A tourist in the Caribbean found this to her cost recently when she was kicked off a cruise ship for climbing outside of its railings to snap a selfie. The ship’s operator, Royal Caribbean Cruises, has since banned the woman from its ships for life.A fellow passenger spotted the woman perched precariously on the edge of the Allure of the Seas cruise ship — one of the largest in the world — as it travelled through the Caribbean earlier this week. He took a photo of the woman and showed staff, who, after consulting the captain, asked her and her companion to leave the ship at the next port of call in Falmouth, Jamaica.

The swish of autumnal winds welcomed community members and guests to an outdoor ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday. They had gathered for the official dedication of the Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina. The dedication took place almost two years to the day since Jordan and Novant Health announced his more than $7 million donation to develop two comprehensive medical clinics that expand access to healthcare for children and adults in underserved and at-risk communities of Charlotte.The newly-built medical clinic is located west of the Center City. Novant Health will deliver high-quality, affordable primary care and preventative care – including behavior health, physical therapy, social work, oral health and family planning – from real estate sited for close-in proximity to their patients' neighborhoods, on a business corridor easily accessible via public transit and next door to the county’s department of social services.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is currently in orbit around the red planet and is snapping photos of its surface using an instrument called the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). Recently, HiRISE imaged not just one but both of NASA’s missions which are on the planet right now.First up, HiRISE took the image above showing the most detailed aerial view yet of the InSight lander. The greenish speck in the middle of the image is the landing site in the Elysium Planitia region, and you can see the two circular panels that the lander uses to collect solar power. Just below the lander, you can see the dome of the heat shield covering the seismometer which is listening out for marsquakes.This animation shows the position of NASA’s Curiosity rover as it journeyed through “the clay-bearing unit” on Mars between May 31 and July 20, 2019. The HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took both images. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.About 373 miles (600 kilometers) away from InSight, the Curiosity rover is exploring, as you can see in the images above.

If there’s any streaming service that can legitimately compete with the juggernaut that is Netflix, it’s Disney+. Set to launch in just a few weeks, Disney+ will not only be extremely affordable at $7 a month, it will offer subscribers an absolute avalanche of media content. From beloved animation films of old to any Star Wars title you can think of, Disney+ will undoubtedly come out of the gate strong and will likely garner an impressive subscriber base in a relatively short period of time.Earlier this week, the official Disney+ Twitter account started tweeting out a list of all the movies and TV shows set to arrive on the streaming service in early November. And seeing as how Disney has been making movies since 1937, some of the titles Disney highlighted were so incredibly bizarre that it left many people wondering if Disney was trying to troll us. You’d be forgiven, after all, for thinking that titles like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Barefoot Executive were completely made up.

Kik Interactive may have chosen to focus on cryptocurrency, but its messaging app will apparently live on. In a new post on Kik's blog, MediaLab has revealed that it has acquired Kik Messenger from its creators and will continue developing the app. MediaLab owns other internet brands like Whisper, the anonymous secret-sharing social network. The messaging app's new owner says it'll concentrate on making it faster and less buggy, as well as on getting rid of spambots. It has to ditch a few features to be able to accomplish that and will be discontinuing the video chat toggle and the third-party bots platform for now. It doesn't sound like MediaLab intends to change the way Kik works, though, since it praises how the app can "[forge connections] through common interest."Kik Interactive announced that it was giving up on its messaging service in September in order to downsize and be able to afford its court battle against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The agency sued the company in June over its 2017 digital token sale, which raised $100 million and which SEC sees as an illegal, unregistered securities offering.

Facebook wants you to head to its site and apps for news coverage as well as memes that your friends and family are sharing: the social media giant has apparently struck a deal with news providers that will let it display headlines in a dedicated news tab.That's as per a report from the Wall Street Journal, which says licensing fees and other details have been worked out with the WSJ, the New York Post, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed News and Business Insider.Part of the negotiations involved working out how paywalls would be handled, the WSJ says – news providers aren't going to want to give away all their stories for free.According to inside sources, not all of the 200 or so news outlets will be paid, but for the biggest ones, the licensing fees could run into the millions of dollars per year.

The offer was first touted in mid-September and confirmed two weeks later—Huawei would be willing to license the company’s entire 5G platform to any U.S. business willing to pay the Shenzhen giant a hefty fee and invest time and resources to ready the tech for the U.S. market. A month later, and Reuters has reported Huawei exec Vincent Pang confirming “there are some companies talking to us,” albeit it still requires “a long journey to really finalize everything.” So could this be true? Could Chinese 5G kit really be on its way to the U.S. market despite everything?As I reported when the original licensing offer was made, despite other analysis to the contrary, this was not an attempt to make concessions to Washington. It was much more complex than that. Huawei leads the world for the quality and capabilities of 5G networking, notwithstanding allegations of Chinese state sponsorship and national security compromises. In offering to open its code to U.S. diligence, Huawei would make it impossible for security hawks to allege such hidden backdoors.

It’s beginning to look as if Greg Hardy can’t do anything without controversy. The polarizing and generally controversial UFC heavyweight showed improved poise in his performance against Ben Sosoli on Friday night in Boston. Hardy initially earned a unanimous-decision win over Sosoli, but that result was overturned after footage of the former using an inhaler between rounds was reviewed. That action is completely illegal and Hardy’s use of the device forced the fight to be ruled a no contest.The former NFL standout and current promising heavyweight contender has been involved with a few controversies since joining the UFC. Hardy was disqualified in his UFC debut for an illegal knee, and he is, of course, a man whose past brushes with the law surrounding domestic abuse accusations have made him the object of fan hate.

This article was originally published by Super Jump Magazine, an independent publication all about celebrating great video games and their creators through carefully-crafted, in-depth featured produced by a diverse team of games journalists, designers, and enthusiasts. Death Stranding, the long-awaited first game from Hideo Kojima after his split from Konami, is on its way. And with each …

One of the most important differences between the current and next generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft is that the PS5 and Project Scarlett will be equipped with very fast SSDs (solid state drives). Mark Cerny, the PS5’s lead architect, called the SSD “the key to the next generation”. That may sound like marketing hyperbole but he may be right. The advantages conferred by a lightning fast SSD could be game changers. However, putting one of these SSDs in a console may have downsides as well. In particular, players may quickly find they’ve run out of space for their games.The benefits of console SSDsThe most obvious benefit of having a fast SSD is that load times that are annoying at best and seemingly interminable at worst on current-gen consoles could be reduced to next to nothing. Cerny ran a demonstration for Wiredcomparing a fast travel event in Marvel’s Spider-Man on a PS4 Pro and a devkit for the PS5 that included one of Sony’s fast SSDs. The event took 15 seconds on the Pro and 0.8 seconds on the devkit.

The Ring Fit Adventure price is perfectly positioned towards holiday gifts, but prices running up to Christmas can get you on the right track for New Year's fitness resolutions early. Remember when Wii Fit was going to turn your Nintendo into a personal trainer? Ring Fit Adventure will do the opposite with your Switch. Instead of turning your game console into an everyday gym session, Ring Fit Adventure gamifies workouts with a surprisingly in-depth RPG world. For less than the original Wii Fit price, Ring Fit Adventure offers a brand new Ring-Con and Leg-Strap to slot your Joy-Cons into and track your real-world action and transform them into your onscreen protagonist's movements. Ring Fit Adventure uses your physical movements to progress through a lush game world, attacking enemies, restoring health and eventually defeating an evil bodybuilding dragon, all through simple exercises completed through the peripheral hardware. Plus, you can use the Ring-Con without your Nintendo Switch present to get some exercises in before syncing your progress with the game later.

Xbox One X and PS4 Pro players will have the ability to choose whether they want to prioritise performance or visual quality in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.Those who opt for “Performance” mode in the game will play with a higher frame rate of up to 60 frames per second, while those who opt for “Quality” will see the frame rate capped at 30 but will be able to enjoy better visuals. The resolution offered in either mode has yet to be confirmed. The two modes were confirmed by Fallen Order producer Paul Hatfield in an interview with We Got This Covered at a recent preview event for the game. During the interview, Hatfield also pointed out that while “Performance” mode will be aiming for 60 frames per second, it won’t always hit it.That the game offers these modes isn’t entirely surprising; they’re something we’ve seen quite a lot since the launch of PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. However, to have them confirmed will be welcome news to owners of those consoles looking to make the most of Jedi: Fallen Order. For standard PS4 and Xbox One users, it seems that the game will run at a standard 30 frames per second.

All across the Universe, trillions of galaxies can be seen, with each one typically containing billions and billions of stars. Here on Earth, life not only arose, thrived, and became complex and differentiated, but intelligent, technologically advanced, and even spacefaring, to a degree. But these last advances — taking us into the space and information ages — are extremely recent, and space is enormous. If an alien civilization saw us, would we even appear interesting from their perspective? Tayte Taliaferro wants to know, asking:I think these are great questions to ponder, and that science has an awful lot to say about what aliens would see by looking at Earth.In our Solar System, Earth is a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere that orbits our Sun in what we call the habitable zone: at a distance where liquid water, given an Earth-like atmosphere, can stably exist on the planet's surface. Mars and Venus may potentially lie in that region of space as well, but Venus is presently too hot and Mars is too cold (and with too thin of an atmosphere) for Earth-like life to thrive there.

While Mark Zuckerberg gives speeches about not wanting Facebook to be the arbiter of truth, the Wall Street Journal reports his company is setting up deals to launch its dedicated tab for news. In a post earlier this year, the CEO said "It's important to me that we help people get trustworthy news and find solutions that help journalists around the world do their important work." That will apparently take the form of a new section featuring human-curated Top News headlines (along with algorithmically-sorted subsections from "trusted publishers" that include those from WSJ parent News Corp, Buzzfeed News, the Washington Post and others. Its sources indicate that licensing fees could range from hundreds of thousands per year to millions for larger outlets. Facebook's recent troubles and a lack of trust in the company has stung its Libra cryptocurrency efforts, but paying publishers should help it fill out a news section that will compete with Apple's news package and Google's recently-readjusted news page.

There was a time that gamers knew Razer solely for its peripherals. How times have changed. Founded in 2005, the company jumped into the tablet business with the Razer Edge in 2013 followed by its first entries into the laptop space with the Razer Blade and the Razer Blade Pro several months later. Fast-forward to 2019, and Razer now sells three distinct laptop models to meet the budgets of every PC gamer, in addition to its own gaming phone series.Let’s jump in and take a look at the best Razer laptops worth buying in 2019.Editor’s note: We will update this list of the best Razer laptops as new devices launch.Razer dubs this laptop the ultimate gaming desktop replacement. The Blade Pro 17 sports a decent size for a 17.3-inch gaming laptop, measuring 0.88 inches thin. It’s currently one of the most expensive laptops in Razer’s portfolio with a starting price of $2,299. But the good news is that it definitely packs the punch you’d expect at that price.

Life is the last thing you would associate with the eternally dark craters of the lunar poles. But these craters could hold the key to explaining how complex, multi-cellular organisms evolved on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, affording unimaginable insights into our planet’s biological past.That’s because huge asteroid impacts, such as the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, happen frequently and launch thousands of tons of the Earth’s material into space – bacteria, worms, and all. Some of this has ended up on the moon and may have survived intact in craters. Sadly, though, if we push ahead with current moon exploration plans, we may end up destroying them.On Earth, DNA rarely, if ever, survives much longer than a million years. In principle, however, DNA kept at a few degrees above absolute zero and protected from harmful ionizing radiation could survive indefinitely.

If that image at the top of this post which late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel posted to his Twitter and Instagram feeds on Thursday doesn’t immediately look familiar to you, count yourself lucky. It means you somehow aren’t aware yet of the latest face app to take the internet by storm — it’s called Gradient, and thanks to influencers and other social media mavens helping it along, it’s been spreading across peoples’ feeds in recent days thanks to its pretty simple conceit: Matching your face to that of your celebrity doppelganger. It’s available for both iOS and Android devices, and it immediately calls to mind FaceApp — the app that launched earlier this year and similarly turned into a viral hit thanks to the way it took a photo of you and did a creepily good job imagining what you would look like as an old person. It was created by a group of Russian developers, so, of course, that was quickly seen as problematic.

More details are now available about Google Stadia, the cloud-based game streaming service set to take the gaming world by storm this Nov. 19.First off, the compatible devices. Google Stadia will work on all the Pixel phones, except the original model, meaning Pixel 2, Pixel 3, and the just-announced Pixel 4 are the only phones that can access Google's streaming service.Google sort of made the announcement by updating the "Stadia availability and requirements" page, which includes information on which laptop and tablet models can support Stadia as well. Google has yet to specify Stadia's technical requirements, but extending it to the Pixel 2 handsets seems promising.For the record, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL comprise that lineup, and both are powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chip. Perhaps this is the baseline requirement to run Stadia? Make sure to check back with Tech Times as we learn more.

Nanoleaf has always offered unique, interesting smart lighting with all of its products, but the company’s new Screen Mirror feature takes it to the next level. Screen Mirror takes the idea of ambient screen lighting and expounds on it. A simple LED setup can reflect the ambient light onto the wall behind the screen, but Nanoleaf’s Screen Mirror takes the colors and hues of your screen and transforms them into a light show that enhances the overall experience.Screen Mirror works with Nanoleaf Aurora and Nanoleaf Canvas light panels and features four different modes: Match, Palette, Melt, and Fade. Match is a “direct match of what you have on screen” — the colors on-screen are reflected in your light panels as accurately as possible. Palette is a fade-in of the colors on-screen that happens every few seconds.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the millions of folks with sleep disorders could be fixed by a simple intervention? That gaping mouth of your bed partner, accompanied by loud snoring, or even obstructive sleep apnea, results in poor sleep for anyone within a two-mile radius. If only the noisy sleeper would just shut their mouth and breathe through their nose, everyone would be perfectly rested after their nightly dream-filled slumbers. Our noses aren’t put on our faces simply to look cute. They really are meant for breathing. The front part of the nose, with mucus and tiny hairs, helps filter out the contaminants in the air we breathe, it humidifies the dry air, and warms it to body temperature before it makes its way to our lungs. The nasal airway is the most efficient, effective greenhouse there is. When you breathe through your mouth (try it right now), the dry air gets to your lungs all right, but there is no filtering, not much warming, and no humidification before the air hits our windpipe (trachea) to our lungs. It is not ideal.

Bogota is the administrative and political capital of Colombia, but look a little closer and you’ll see that its also a hot-bed of biodiversity.Earlier in 2019, as part of a global challenge, users of the iNaturalist scientific crowd-sourcing platform made 2,570 research-grade observations of 544 species, including the Green Dotted Tree Frog, Striped Lightbulb Lizard and Sparkling Violetear. This city of more than 8 million people home to hundreds of species of insects and plants – appropriate for the capital of the world's second most biodiverse country.Bogota also depends entirely on biodiversity to exist, as without the delicate paramo ecosystems on the city’s outskirts it would have little safe drinking water. The plants and mosses of the paramotrap moisture from the air, which eventually filters down as pure drinking water. Just one such paramo provides 70% of Bogota’s drinking water.

At this point, it’s overwhelmingly clear that the butterfly keyboard design Apple introduced on its late-2016 MacBook Pro marks one of the low points in Apple design. Though Apple would go on to make iterative improvements to the design, the bottom line is that the slimmer keyboard design proved to be unreliable and prone to breaking if even the slightest particle happened to lodge itself underneath a key.The good news is that Apple is reportedly planning to launch a slew of new MacBook models with the older scissor mechanism keyboard, including a revamped MacBook Pro with a 16-inch display. While rumors of a new MacBook Pro have been making the rounds over the past few weeks, we now have more concrete evidence that a refresh is on the horizon. Earlier this week, MacGenerationdiscovered a new icon in a recently released macOS Catalina beta which seems to corroborate rumors that Apple has been working on a new MacBook Pro model. The unearthed icon can be seen below:

Google is giving up on Daydream VR.On Tuesday, Oct. 15, the company confirmed that its latest flagship smartphone, the Pixel 4, will not support the virtual reality platform.This is the final nail in the coffin for the experiment. Earlier this year, Google also did not add support for the Daydream VR on its budget phone Pixel 3a, but many assumed that the company is saving the platform for its higher-end devices."There hasn't been the broad consumer or developer adoption we had hoped, and we've seen decreasing usage over time of the Daydream View headset," a spokesperson admitted in an e-mail to Variety.Not a single phone released in 2019 supports Daydream VR.Google will also cease the sales of Daydream View VR headsets although the spokesperson assured that the app, as well as the store, will continue to work for existing users.

The gaming industry suffered a schism earlier this year as multiple PC storefronts triggered the Store Wars, an escalating battle for exclusive games. Gamers were divided over the benefits of this, and the debate over it continues as more games come out as “exclusive” to a store. TNW got the chance to speak to Raph Koster, a legend in the industry, about the state of gaming.Koster’s previous credits include Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Koster recently revealed he’s working on a new MMO that’ll capitalize on modern technology to create more immersive worlds. “We haven’t seen the fruition of true alternate worlds that you can escape to,” he told TNW. While in the course of asking him questions about this new venture — and him being appropriately tight-lipped considering the game is early in development — I decided to pick his brain a bit about the current climate in gaming.

Black Friday 2019 is a massive opportunity for bargain hunters because it is war between retailers. Every year the deals increase, but tracking who has the best Black Friday sales is challenging. That’s why I’m squaring off the biggest retailers, starting with Walmart Vs Target, so you can be ahead of the curve come the big day… Note: you can find my Black Friday 2019 guides for Walmart (here), Target (here) Amazon (here), Best Buy (here) and Apple (here). Bookmark my page for daily updates. History plays a big part in comparing Walmart and Target so the best place to start is to look at last year’s deals on their most popular products:Where Walmart Black Friday Beat Target Black Friday Where Target Black Friday Beat Walmart Black Friday Interestingly, both stores matched their Samsung deals with £300 gift cards on the Galaxy Galaxy S8, S8+, S9, S9+ and Galaxy Note 9 with qualified activation.

California residents can now download a smartphone app that can issue an earthquake warning moments before the ground begins shaking.On Thursday, Oct. 17, the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services launched an early earthquake warning system that includes MyShake developed by the University of California, Berkeley. MyShake, which is now available through Google Play and Apple's App Store, will send an alert to areas that will be affected and potentially save lives."This app is at a place now where we're satisfied with the performance and the testing, which has been very well done, (so) that we think we're at a place where it's not perfect but we can keep people safe, and that's our ultimate threshold," said Brian Ferguson, the deputy director for crisis communication and public affairs at the Office of Emergency Services, to the SF Gate.

Oct.18 -- The week in tech from Bloomberg Technology. The best interviews and technology news highlights from the week are brought together in Best of Bloomberg West, a weekly long-form program, hosted by Bloomberg Technology Anchor Taylor Riggs.

You don't have to watch football if you want 5G coverage from Verizon (Engadget's parent company) while you're attending live sports. The carrier has switched on 5G coverage at three major basketball and hockey arenas, including San Francisco's Chase Center (home of the Golden State Warriors), Denver's Pepsi Center (Colorado Avalanche/Denver Nuggets) and Phoenix's Talking Stick Resort Arena (Phoenix Suns). Madison Square Garden is also on deck, although 5G is only slated as "coming soon."The network plans to have 5G coverage in 10 arenas by the end of the 2019-2020 season.These building-by-building expansions are necessary in part due to the limited reach of current 5G tech. As we've discovered first-hand, Verizon's ultra-wideband 5G doesn't reach far indoors -- the company can't just place cell sites outside. If it's going to help you share the big game at gigabit speeds, indoor sites are the only options.

I’ve been a digital nomad for a long time. In the 1990s, I began using one of the first wireless modems while publishing a technical newsletter and working on computer books. The signal was too weak to work from home, but the nearby Starbucks happened to be close enough to one of the transmitters that I could actually get by on my laptop. It unfortunately presaged a serious caffeine addiction that I’m still fighting today, but I loved the way that I could get several hours of productive work done a day without the hassle of thrice daily meetings, impromptu check-ins, and two hours a day spent navigating the highway just to get to my place of work.Over the next thirty years, I alternated back and forth between being office-bound and working remotely, though, save for a brief and fairly disastrous stint on site lasting about five months, I’ve pretty much become a permanent remote worker. It helps that most of the careers that I have had lend themselves well to remote work: writing, teaching, programming, design, journalism and so forth where the expectation is that you will likely end up spending several hours a day focused on intellectual tasks. This also requires a certain amount of discipline, as the online world in particular can prove to be particularly seductive at sapping away your attention.

The world's largest theater chain is entering the digital movie rental market. On Tuesday, Oct. 15, AMC announced its own video-on-demand service.AMC Theaters On Demand will offer more than 2,000 movies upon launch, including new releases such as Hobbs and Shaw from Universal Studios and The Lion King from Disney. Members will be able to rent or purchase individual movies to watch at home.The service builds off of the success of AMC's Stubs, a loyalty program with more than 20 million members."The addition of AMC Theaters On Demand, which extends our movie offerings for AMC Stubs members into their homes, makes perfect sense for AMC Theatres, for our studio partners and for our millions of movie-loving guests," Adam Aron, CEO of AMC Theaters, said in a statement.AMC Theaters On Demand is the theater chain's response to the streaming market which continues to lure viewers away from the big screen. In 2018, consumers spent $12.91 billion on streaming services and $11.99 billion at the box office.

Beyonce’s father, Matthew Knowles, recently went public with the announcement that he has breast cancer and carries a mutation in a gene called BRCA2. He joins Angelina Jolie as a celebrity who has shared his private medical and genetic history in order to raise awareness and potentially help millions of patients and health care providers.Knowles’s story has several unusual twists. First, he is a man with breast cancer. Many people still don’t realize that men can develop the disease, which affects approximately 1 in every 1,000 men every year. Because men, and their health care providers, are not as aware of the prevalence of the disease in men, male breast cancer is often diagnosed at later stages and is associated with a worse prognosis. Any male who has bloody nipple discharge, changes in the breast or nipple, or a lump in his breast, armpit, or chest wall, should bring these findings to the attention of his health care provider, and breast cancer should be considered in the differential diagnosis. Too often, both men and their health care providers ignore the signs that would immediately be explored and treated in a woman presenting with the same findings.

The wait for Netflix's live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebopwill be a little longer than expected, as Deadline reports production is shut down for seven to nine months. Unfortunately the pause is due to an unspecified injury suffered by lead actor John Cho on the show's set in New Zealand that will require surgery and rehabilitation.According to the report, the show was a few episodes into its 10-episode order when the incident occurred, and now things will wait until next year to resume filming. In a statement, a Netflix spokesperson said "Our thoughts are with John and he has our complete support as he recuperates from this injury."

One of the best things about the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max this year are the incredible battery life improvements they bring. Sure the new camera is great, but the iPhone 11 Pro gives you an extra 4 hours of battery life compared to last year’s iPhone XS, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max gives you an additional 5 hours of battery life compared to its predecessor. Those numbers are incredible, but battery life isn’t really worth paying $1,000+ for. Instead, keep your current iPhone X/XS, iPhone XS Max, or iPhone XR and get a Szresm 3,200 mAh iPhone Battery Case on Amazon for only $20! Here’s some additional information from the product page: Follow @BGRDeals on Twitter to keep up with the latest and greatest deals from around the web. Quantities may be limited. Prices are subject to change without notice and coupons may expire at any time. Some deals may not be available to all customers. BGR may receive a commission on orders placed through this article.

Machine learning and AI may be deployed on such grand tasks as finding exoplanets and creating photorealistic people, but the same techniques also have some surprising applications in academia: DeepMind has created an AI system that helps scholars understand and recreate fragmentary ancient Greek texts on broken stone tablets.These clay, stone or metal tablets, inscribed as much as 2,700 years ago, are invaluable primary sources for history, literature and anthropology. They’re covered in letters, naturally, but often the millennia have not been kind and there are not just cracks and chips but entire missing pieces that may comprise many symbols.

Here we go again—another popular Android app caught defrauding users on a huge scale. This is familiar territory now, although the numbers get bigger and more onerous. The app this time is SnapTube, a video downloader that lets users select YouTube and Facebook videos to play offline. The app’s developers claim more than 40 million users, and it has been installed many more times that that. The problem, it seems, is that while users are enjoying those videos, the app’s software is busy doing other things in the background—essentially defrauding both users and advertisers to generate material financial returns.The disclosure against SnapTube has been made by researchers at Upstream, who say that their Secure-D platform detected and blocked “more than 70 million suspicious mobile transaction requests” from SnapTube installs on 4.4 million devices. And this was all inside a six-month period. Such fraud tends to run in bursts, and the team seems to have been monitoring the app at the right time.

After a seven month delay, today NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir finally carried out the first all-women spacewalk. Unlike in March, they now had two spacesuits of the correct size at the space station. For some people, the spacesuit debacle has become symbolic of the inequality in space. After all, if there had been more women, there would have been earlier opportunities for two of them to need a well-fitting suit at the same time. But long before the current space mission, some artists already used space suits to point out that space exploration has never been equally accessible to everyone. Both Cristina de Middel and Yinka Shonibare have used spacesuits in their art to highlight that predominantly Western nations have been to space. On the surface, space suits look like the ultimate equalizer. They’re bulky, somewhat shapeless, and hide most of the astronaut. It seems like a uniform that everyone can wear - but in reality, not everyone has.

In a rare instance of bipartisanship overcoming the rancorous discord that’s been the hallmark of the U.S. Congress, senators and sepresentatives issued a scathing rebuke to Apple for its decision to take down an app at the request of the Chinese government.Signed by Senators Ron Wyden, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Congressional Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mike Gallagher and Tom Malinowski, the letter was written to “express… strong concern about Apple’s censorship of apps, including a prominent app used by protestors in Hong Kong, at the request of the Chinese government.”