Sony Releases Teaser for New PlanetSide 2 CGI Trailer
Teaser trailers are nothing new in the world of video games or movies. However, what is new is the practice of releasing a teaser trailer of a trailer to get even more excitement built up. We have seen it some already this year, and now Sony is doing the same with the latest PlanetSide 2 trailer. There will be a new CGI trailer of PlanetSide 2 on July 25th, but to get our mouths watering Sony Online Entertainment has released a teaser trailer of the upcoming CGI trailer. The full trailer looks to be called "Death Is No Excuse," and in this teaser we get a de-saturated glimpse of what to expect in PlanetSide 2. The game itself is looking to be pretty colorful from gameplay footage, but the CGI trailer tones that down to possibly give a grittier take on the warfare. "Size always matters" in warfare, so I imagine the 2,000 player battles will go a long way towards fulfilling that in PlanetSide 2.
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ADATA Announces XPG Gaming v2.0 Memory Series ADATA has announced a new line of memory products, the Xtreme Performance Gear (XPG) Gaming v2.0 Series. This new memory features DDR3 modules that run at frequencies up to 2400MHz. The XPG series was designed for the third generation Intel Core processors that run on the Z77 platform. The dual channel memory uses two 4GB sticks and is XMP v1.3 certified. Thermal Conductive Technology helps to dissipate the heat produced by the 1.65V memory. The 8GB kit will retail with an MSRP of $89.99. Read More ...
Synology Announces DiskStation Manager OS 4.1 Synology is a company known for its products in the home and small business Network Attached Storage (NAS) market. The company has announced that version 4.1 of the DiskStation Manager operating system is now in public beta. Included in the new release are a number of upgrades as well as some new features. The biggest new feature is the Video Station package, which will allow users to organize their video collections and will features support for USB tuners and iOS integration. Also included will be VAAI certification to improve VMWare performance, bandwidth controllable by protocol per user, and improved logging for historical and real-time statistics. Read More ...
Exercising Lab-Grown Muscle Tissue Improve Effectiveness The body is pretty good and repairing minor damage or loss of muscle tissue, but for more major loses, either due to injury or disease, the body cannot replicate the cells needed. To address this, surgeons will normally take muscle from another part of the body to replace what was lost, but this just means there is another part of the body missing muscle it cannot repair. Now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found a new solution that does not require transferring cells like that, but is still very effective. Previous research has shown it is possible to extract muscle cells from a sample, and then grow them into implants on top of a biocompatible material. These implants are able to provide a structure the body can grow new cells on, which accelerates the repair process. What the researchers have done is found a way to accelerate this further and have the repair processes last longer. Simply stretching and contracting the implants to train them for what they will undergo in the body, increased their effectiveness. When tested in lab mice that had part of a muscle in the back removed, those that did not receive any implant were only able to produce 30% of the force they could before the muscle was removed. Those with the exercised implants reached 70% of their original force, which is a significant difference. This could prove to be invaluable to surgeons and human patients as muscle can be regrown without having to remove it from elsewhere. Read More ...
Kojima Calls Comic-Con Rumors of Metal Gear Solid 5 'Completely Fake' The San Diego Comic-Con was this past weekend, which is a great time to check out new games, TV shows, movies, and more. There are usually some reveals from Comic-Con, but one of them is nothing more than a fabrication. A title screen of Metal Gear Solid 5 found its way online that was supposely shown during Comic-Con, but the creator of the MGS series, Hideo Kojima, called the image "completely fake." Kojima himself has confirmed the existence of Metal Gear Solid 5, however he did not show any of it during the convention. The image was said to be from a private screening during Comic-Con, but it is all just an elaborate ruse. It was suggested that MGS5 was Kojima's Project Ogre, which is still a mystery, but both Kojima and Konami have said this is all just a rumor. However, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski tweeted he had seen "some crazy new stuff" of Kojima's during Comic-Con, but that is another mystery. Eventually Kojima will reveal MGS5 and Project Ogre in full, just it was not during Comic-Con. Read More ...
New Amplifier Design Reaches for Perfection Weak signals, like those used to or found when studying the Universe and quantum mechanics, are not very useful to scientists because they are too weak to analyze. To solve this problem, amplifiers are used to make the signals bigger, but there is a risk when amplifying a signal of also introducing noise. Transistor amplifiers, which operate on a wide range of frequencies, have this problem, but parametric amplifiers produce a minimum of noise. Unfortunately parametric amplifiers only respond to a small range of frequencies. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have created a new kind of amplifier which combines the best of these two amplifier designs, and hope it will reshape how we view the Universe on its largest and smallest scales. By using superconductors, the researchers were able to create a parametric amplifier that responds to a frequency range 10 times greater than comparable amplifiers, without destroying the signal with noise. The focus was just on frequencies used to detect astronomical objects like distant galaxies and black holes, but the researchers are confident the design can be tweaked to shift the frequency range to other areas, like those used for quantum mechanical experiments. The potential for this amplifier truly cannot be known until people start using it as amplifiers are required for so much already. The use of superconductors may keep these out of the home for a while though, as few homes will have the technology needed to keep temperatures low enough to maintain superconductivity. However, technologies like quantum computers that are still being developed in laboratories may benefit from this. Read More ...
Battlefield 4 Beta Set for Next Fall; DICE Still Committed to BF3 Recently an image on EA's Origin service appeared saying if you pre-order Medal of Honor: Warfighter you would gain access to the Battlefield 4 beta. The only problem with that is Battlefield 4 had never really been mentioned as releasing any time soon nor even being in development. DICE has been working on various DLC for Battlefield 3, so why would there be a sequel so soon? Well, EA has gone ahead and confirmed all those rumors by saying Battlefield 4 does exist and the beta will begin next fall. There was no mention of a release date for the full game, just the beta for BF4 will begin next year. DICE issued a statement saying it is still committed to Battlefield 3 and its focus is on the current game for the time being. The studio said it is not ready to talk about BF4 just yet, which can be a good sign. Then again, you have to wonder if future Battlefield games will follow the same path, where a game comes out and then barely two years later the beta arrives for the sequel. Read More ...
Magnetic Heat Engine Possibility in the Future Many of the technologies we use every day put out heat as they operate, which wastes a great deal of energy. It should not be surprising then that researchers have been trying for some time to develop heat engines that will convert heat into something more useable, whether that be kinetic energy or electrical power. Now researchers at Ohio State University have discovered the "giant spin-Seebeck" effect, as they call it, which is a more powerful form of the spin-Seebeck effect which converts heat into electricity via magnetism. First discovered in 2008, the spin-Seebeck effect, which is not well understood at the moment, occurs when heat induces a spin-current within a material. A spin-current is the transfer of spin states from one electron to another; similar to how an electric current is the transfer of energy from one electron to another. The induced spin-current generates a voltage which can be passed through a circuit then to do work. The giant spin-Seebeck effect is similar to the spin-Seebeck effect but, well, bigger. The OSU researchers measured a voltage roughly 1000 times greater than the regular spin-Seebeck effect would produce. While this is definitely good news for the potential creation of a heat engine using this effect, there are some issues. The material the OSU researchers observed this in, a non-magnetic semiconductor, had to be cooled to between 2 K and 20 K and placed in a 3 Tesla external magnetic field, which is similar to that produced by an MRI machine. Neither of these conditions make the discovery immediately useful, but this could lead to new research to better understand the spin-Seebeck effect. We still may see a magnetic heat engine someday. Read More ...
Ruthless HK-51 Companion Droid Soon to Arrive for Star Wars: The Old Republic One of the best companions from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic RPG was the lethal droid HK-47, a ruthlessly efficient killing machine who was also surprisingly witty, in a deadpan sort-of-way. So how can BioWare manage to squeeze in this terrific ally for Star Wars: The Old Republic? Enter HK-51. "Buried deep beneath the icy surface of Belsavis rests an army of the deadliest, most feared machines in the known galaxy." We'll soon be able venture into this previously unknown location, and when the smoke clears HK-51 should now become a powerful new ally. Will the new HK-51 be just as deadly serious and unintentionally quick-witted as HK-47? Get a preview of what's to come from the reveal below.
Platinum May Need Replacing as a Catalyst For a long time platinum has been used as a catalyst for a variety of reactions. This is because it works for these different reactions and works reasonably well, but researchers have been looking for a replacement to the metal because of how expensive it is. Now researchers at Case Western Reserve University are suggesting that platinum needs to be replaced not just to bring down costs, but because it is holding back the efficiency of reactions. Traditionally researchers have believed the reason platinum catalysts have not achieved the maximum theoretical efficiency is because of impurities on their surfaces. The Case researchers call this surface-poisoning explanation "lame" and describe it as a result of improperly using a statistical tool for comparing catalysts. When they did their own tests with platinum at the cathode of a fuel cell, the researchers found it was producing only 0.93 V instead of the theoretical maximum 1.23 V. Though the researchers' analysis of platinum has been published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics and in Electrocatalysis, they can offer no better catalyst at this time. Copper laccase, a catalyst found in trees and fungi, should be able to produce more voltage according to the researchers' work, but is unstable, which makes it unusable as a catalyst at this time. Hopefully something with the performance of copper laccase and stability of platinum can be found. Read More ...
Valve Updates Progress for Steam on Linux; Launches Blog Earlier this year Valve announced it was at work on bringing Steam over to Linux. At the time the company announced it would launch Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux first and then look into other games, but there has been little word since then. Yesterday, Valve created a new Linux blog to update everyone on the status of Steam on Linux. The good news is there has been a lot of progress made, as the goal is to get a "fully-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04." Left 4 Dead 2 has been ported over successfully as well, as it runs natively on Ubuntu 12.04. Valve is still tweaking L4D2 to ensure the Linux version runs just as well as the Windows version, and will update with the progress at a later date. If you happen to run a different Linux distribution, do not worry as Valve is focusing first on Ubuntu and will then look towards other distributions. The company wants to make sure everything works perfectly on one specific distribution and will look at others depending on the success of the Ubuntu client. Valve will be updating the Linux blog fairly regularly, and you are free to email the team or leave comments on the blog. The company is encouraging communication from the community to make sure everything with the Linux version works how it should. Read More ...
Minecraft Servers Hacked Over the Weekend; No Information Taken It nearly seemed like the weekly occurence of a game website or service being hacked had disappeared, but that was not the case. Over the weekend, some people decided to hack the Minecraft servers and block people from enjoying Mojang's insanely popular world-building game. The hackers were able to login as any person, including Notch, which prompted Mojang to take down the servers. The developers then went to work on fixing the exploit and were able to bring the servers back up before long. The best news from all of this, is that no information was taken during the hack. The hackers did not take any passwords or personal information, according to Mojang, so everything is once again running smooth as silk. Hopefully this will be the last time hackers decide to mess with anything, but I imagine that is a small hope, sadly. Read More ...
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