Firaxis came out of nowhere today to announce that Civilization VI — the next iteration in the classic Civilization franchise that’s probably responsible for enough cumulative productivity drops to match the GDP of a small island nation — will be released on October 16, 2016. For those who don’t follow Civilization or have only done so intermittently, it’s known as a 4X game (eXpand, eXplore, eXploit, and eXterminate). These types of titles are almost always turn-based and offer gamers the ability to begin as the ruler of a small city-state at the dawn of human history. Discovering new technologies and advances unlocks everything from world wonders (expensive projects that deliver a significant advantage once completed) to alternate forms of government.
2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution was hailed as a strong reboot for the classic franchise that, while not without some issues, still captured much of what made the original Deus Ex great. Its sequel, Mankind Divided, is set to launch in August, and a new six-minute gameplay trailer manages to both fill in the backstory of what’s happening in protagonist Adam Jensen’s world as well as showcase the different ways the game can play out. The Deus Ex franchise has always focused on two things: Shadowy government and corporate conspiracies, and flexible, player-directed gameplay. Want to crawl through ducts, become invisible at will, and stealth-murder your way through secret labs? Deus Ex allows it.
Seagate is now shipping its 10TB helium-filled hard drive in volume, and it’s hit this target without using performance-penalizing technologies like SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). While early high-capacity drives used SMR (a technology in which part of each track is overlaid atop the other, resembling shingles), it penalizes drive writes compared with non-shingled perpendicular recording. SMR boosts densities, but it hurts read performance, and more recent drives from all vendors have moved back towards conventional perpendicular recording. Image by Seagate. The new 10TB drives don’t use this method, but the illustration of SMR is too good to pass up.
Over a decade ago, Koei announced a game based on an unproduced Kurosawa script called “Oni.” The game was shown off in the mid-aughts as “Ni-Oh,” Koei merged with Tecmo, and then an entire console generation slipped by. We went long stretches without hearing much of anything about this game, but it was evidently put under the tutelage of Team Ninja at some point. 2015 rolled around, and it finally showed up as “Nioh” at the Tokyo Game Show. As it turns out, this game really does exist, and a demo was released exclusively on the PS4 earlier this week.
Studying the universe in x-ray wavelengths has allowed astronomers to peer inside clouds of gas and probe the edges of a black hole’s event horizon, but there are a few mysteries yet to be solved. In fact, surveying x-ray sources occasionally results in entirely new, unexplained phenomena. For example, a pair of objects recently detected by researchers from the University of Cambridge. These ultra-bright x-ray sources are blasting out gas at more than a quarter the speed of light, far faster than should be possible. Most of the large x-ray sources in the sky are fairly well understood at this point.
The US Supreme Court has passed a to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, one of the main bodies of law that governs the powers and behavior of the FBI. Previously, Rule 41 stated that a judge may only hand out a warrant to be issued within the district they represent — but how do you work within that system when you’re tracking someone whose location has been technologically obscured? The new version of Rule 41, approved on Thursday, removes the requirement in cases where the suspect’s location cannot be realistically obtained. In practice, this means the FBI can ask for, and receive, warrants to hack suspects anywhere in the world.
Update: Intel’s alliance with Rockchip will continue, though the company has no information to share regarding future product launches or hardware developments. The two firms joined forces in 2014 to develop solutions for entry-level Android devices. Two and a half years ago, Intel dropped a bombshell. The company’s products were struggling to find their footing in the mobile market and Intel’s smartphone and tablet division wasn’t performing as desired. To address this, Intel would partner with rival TSMC to build smartphone and tablet chips on the latter’s 28nm process technology. Initially, these devices would be limited to 3G modems and budget products, but Intel planned to migrate to 14nm hardware and 4G modems in fairly short order.
Mapping the brain has come a long way. Far from phrenology and physiognomy, modern medical imaging has enabled things like of living, healthy human brains and parsing out images from dolphin vocalizations. Now, using voxel-based mapping, a team of UC Berkeley researchers have pinned down the : a . Da Vinci would be proud. Huth et al, 2016, via Nature Video Subjects in the experiments behind this semantic map had to sit in an fMRI for hours at a time, listening to The Moth Radio Hour, a storytelling podcast. Later, the researchers would painstakingly match up timestamped fMRI images with timestamped transcripts of the audio stream.
Looking for a powerful tiny PC on the cheap? Check out the Optiplex 5040 small form factor desktop PC from Dell. For a limited time, this quad-core machine is being discounted by a total of 42%, and Dell is also offering up a three year warranty at no extra cost. (List price: $1270 — Coupon codes: SAVE35 and EXTRA$100) On the inside, the Optiplex 5040 sports a sixth generation quad-core 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, integrated Intel HD Graphics 530, 8GB of DDR3L RAM (1600MHz), a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, and an 8x DVD burner. A wired keyboard and mouse combo are packed along for free, so all you’ll need is an HDTV or monitor to hit the ground running.
