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Apex Legends Season 24, matchmaking and anti-cheat updates detailed Apex Legends Season 24, matchmaking and anti-cheat updates detailed Respawn has detailed Apex Legends Season 24, as well as various changes it’s making to the game in response to player feedback. Following the game’s sixth anniversary on Monday, Apex Legends Season 24: Takedown will launch on February 11. In a developer update video, which is viewable below, Apex Legends design director Evan Nikilich said Season 24 will bring back fan favorite modes like Three Strikes and Solos “with a twist”, alongside quality of life changes and some new features. “First we are thrilled to announce we are partnering with our community in a whole new way. This means your favorite creators in the Apex community will help us curate challenges and the rewards for completing those challenges, including the returning Legendary weapon skin selected by the creator for that Takeover.” Nikilich said “major meta shifts will be the focus for us this season and beyond”, with Season 24 introducing a new weapons system called Arsenals, featuring weapon stations which offer every weapon of a single ammo type. “Arsenals take the guessing game out of looting and get you into the action faster. Arsenal stations are located across the map, letting you choose which weapons and ammo types you want to run.” Apex Legends game director Steve Ferreira also detailed a number of planned anti-cheat and matchmaking updates, which are outlined on the game’s website too. “As we approach our 24th season, we want to thank our community for the last six years,” he said. “With this milestone we want to assure our players that we are listening. And have a renewed focus on the things that matter most to you. “This year, you will see us taking action on the things that we have heard you say matter the most, like matchmaking, anti-cheat and competitive integrity, while also bringing a mix of brand new content and features that make it easier to play with your friends as we find new ways to evolve and refresh the Apex experience.” On Monday, the boss of Respawn owner Electronic Arts said the company is now planning a “*******, more meaningful update” for Apex Legends, or “an Apex 2.0”, several months after playing down the idea of a sequel. However, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that any significant Apex Legends release would not arrive until after the next Battlefield game, which is planned to launch sometime before April 2026. Source link #Apex #Legends #Season #matchmaking #anticheat #updates #detailed Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

What that charts say is next for the U.S. dollar and how that could help stocks What that charts say is next for the U.S. dollar and how that could help stocks The U.S. Dollar’s future path could have significant implications for U.S. equities. While many investors don’t trade the dollar or other currencies, we should all be paying attention to the foreign exchange markets. First, let’s assess the dollar’s current technical state. Here is a long-term, 20-year monthly chart of the ICE U.S. Dollar Index , which compares the greenback to a basket of other currencies. A few things stand out: First, the dollar has been attempting to break out from a multi-year trading range for just the third time in the last 20 years. The U.S. dollar’s marginal loss in January broke its modest three-month winning streak. So far, however, it remains above the two-year trading range that it broke out from in December 2024. The last two major pattern breakouts led to extreme overbought readings in the following months. While the dollar’s recent strength has been impressive, it is not yet comparable to what we saw in late 2014–2015 and 2022. It could eventually reach that level in the coming months, but for now, this breakout hasn’t exhibited the kind of intense and immediate extension seen in recent history. This suggests that the recent move above the $107 zone could be a false breakout. Many times, a false move in one direction leads to a sharp move in the opposite direction. If the breakout ultimately fails, it could set the stage for the next downturn instead. Since the start of 2022, there have been three distinct tops in the dollar: September 2022, September 2023, and April 2024—and potentially another in January 2025. This is significant because USD tops preceded key trading lows in the S & P 500 each of those prior three times. While the S & P 500 only declined 5.5% from its early December peak this time, as we discussed in our analysis of the RSP Equal Weight S & P 500 ETF two weeks ago, many non-growth sectors experienced official 10% corrections from late 2024 through early 2025. Many of these sectors began rebounding last month — just as the dollar started to stall. From that perspective, reversals in both the dollar and the broader equity market don’t seem far-fetched at all. While it’s clear that the S & P 500 and the U.S. dollar have had a negative correlation the last three years, particularly at key inflection points, the 10-year Treasury yield and the U.S. Dollar have moved in near lockstep. Even casual market observers recognize this relationship but seeing both overlaid on a chart really emphasizes the connection. Conceptually, this is all about inflation expectations. If inflation is expected to rise, investors demand higher yields on bonds to compensate for the decrease in purchasing power. At the same time, a stronger dollar can be a response to inflation expectations if the Federal Reserve raises rates to control inflation. This makes sense given the softer-than-expected inflation reports of late. It also aligns from a technical standpoint, as both the dollar and the 10-Year Yield have returned to the upper bounds of their respective three-year trading ranges. If both are indeed due to retrace their recent advances, the stock market could benefit again — just as it did during the three prior instances since 2022. — Frank Cappelleri Founder: DISCLOSURES: (None) All opinions expressed by the CNBC Pro contributors are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC, NBC UNIVERSAL, their parent company or affiliates, and may have been previously disseminated by them on television, radio, internet or another medium. THE ABOVE CONTENT IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY . THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND DOES NOT CONSITUTE FINANCIAL, INVESTMENT, TAX OR LEGAL ADVICE OR A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY ANY SECURITY OR OTHER FINANCIAL ASSET. THE CONTENT IS GENERAL IN NATURE AND DOES NOT REFLECT ANY INDIVIDUAL’S UNIQUE PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES. THE ABOVE CONTENT MIGHT NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUR PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCES. BEFORE MAKING ANY FINANCIAL DECISIONS, YOU SHOULD STRONGLY CONSIDER SEEKING ADVICE FROM YOUR OWN FINANCIAL OR INVESTMENT ADVISOR. Click here for the full disclaimer. Source link #charts #U.S #dollar #stocks Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

How a trade war with the U.S. could hit Canada’s medicine supply – National How a trade war with the U.S. could hit Canada’s medicine supply – National Despite a pause in U.S. tariffs, there is looming uncertainty and concern about how a potential trade war could hit Canada’s medicine supplies. Canada has been given a 30-day reprieve from U.S. tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump, but that has done little to allay fears in the pharmaceutical realm. “I think there’s a concern here that any sort of tariff war on this space could send ripples throughout the supply chain,” said Mina Tadrous, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. Tadrous told Global News the concern stems from the fact that the supply chain for medications is so global that the production of each drug crosses multiple borders before Canadians get the finished product from their local pharmacy. “So, the structure of how tariffs work can have [an] add-on effect to how the drug pricing works,” he said. Story continues below advertisement 4:11 Trump postpones tariffs, where does that leave Canada? In Canada, prices of pharmaceutical products are controlled by federal bodies. The prices of patented, brand-name drugs are monitored by the federal government’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) and negotiated by the pan-********* Pharmaceutical Alliance (pCPA), which negotiates on behalf of Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial governments. For non-brand name drugs, “reimbursed prices of generic prescription medicines are negotiated by the pan-********* Pharmaceutical Alliance and set by provincial or territorial governments on their drug benefit plan formularies,” said Jeff Connell, vice-president of corporate affairs at the ********* Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA). Get weekly health news Receive the latest medical news and health information delivered to you every Sunday. “These negotiated prices also apply to ********* patients who have drug coverage through their employer’s plan, or pay for their prescription drugs out-of-pocket,” he told Global News. Can Canada weaponize medications in a trade war? Canada is “heavily” reliant on other countries like the United States, India and European nations for active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished dose products, according to a 2022 report prepared for the CGPA. Story continues below advertisement “Almost all [active pharmaceutical ingredients] used to manufacture medicines in Canada come from abroad,” the report said. “There are concerns when Canada relies predominately on a handful of foreign countries to secure sufficient supply in order to manufacture medicines domestically.” It’s not yet clear if drugs will be exempt from Trump’s paused threat of across-the board 25 per cent tariff on ********* goods, minus energy which would face a 10 per cent tariff. More on Canada More videos Canada’s list of counter-tariffs on the U.S. does not include pharmaceuticals. Tadrous is hoping drugs and medicines, especially critical ones, are excluded from a trade war so patients don’t end up paying the price for it. Trending Now Canada seeks new trade deals amid Trump tariff threats, inks Ecuador pact Trump says Iran would be ‘obliterated’ if it assassinated him “At the end of the day, we just want to make sure that the patients that need the medications get them,” he said. As tariff tensions between Canada and the U.S. simmer, a growing “buy *********” movement is gathering steam, with consumers ditching U.S. products for local ones. Story continues below advertisement 2:01 ‘Buy *********’ movement gains momentum among merchants, shoppers Daniel Trefler, professor of economics and international trade and competitiveness at the University of Toronto, said while focus during a trade war might be on items like groceries and consumer goods, pharmaceuticals make up a big part of trade, too. “We tend to think about the world in terms of consumer-facing goods like the blueberries we eat, like the clothes that we wear. But that is a small fraction of the entire economy, and it’s a small fraction of how we interact with the United States,” he said. “The big things that we interact with the United States, for example, are pharmaceutical companies and all of those social media platforms and Google search engines, etc.” “That’s where the big bucks are for Americans,” he told Global News. To make a tangible impact, he advised Canadians to ask for a local alternative for generic medicines on their next trip to the pharmacy. Story continues below advertisement If a trade war does start, Tadrous said Canada can’t rely on self-sufficiency for thousands of different pharmaceutical products. He said more than 80 per cent of all drugs in Canada and the U.S. are produced outside of their own borders, and added if tariffs are imposed on medicines, public payers and insurance companies across both sides of the border will have to adjust how they cover the cost of these drugs. “I think in the short term, we don’t anticipate that there’s going to be any major pressure on drug prices, but I think in the long term, it can have some serious effects on our supply of drugs,” he said. &copy 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc. Source link #trade #war #U.S #hit #Canadas #medicine #supply #National Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Afghanistan photo misrepresented as deportation flight under Trump – Yahoo! Voices Afghanistan photo misrepresented as deportation flight under Trump – Yahoo! Voices Afghanistan photo misrepresented as deportation flight under Trump Yahoo! VoicesMigrants Are Deported to India on U.S. Military Plane The New York TimesAmritsar: More than 100 Indian migrants deported by the US arrive home The Associated Press‘Were following all the American laws, didn’t commit any serious offence’: Gujarat’s ex-deputy CM expresses sympathy for US deportees The Indian ExpressHaryana families fear ruin as USA deports ******** immigrants, fear for children’s future The Times of India Source link #Afghanistan #photo #misrepresented #deportation #flight #Trump #Yahoo #Voices Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

How a trade war with the U.S. could hit Canada’s medicine supply – National How a trade war with the U.S. could hit Canada’s medicine supply – National Despite a pause in U.S. tariffs, there is looming uncertainty and concern about how a potential trade war could hit Canada’s medicine supplies. Canada has been given a 30-day reprieve from U.S. tariffs threatened by President Donald Trump, but that has done little to allay fears in the pharmaceutical realm. “I think there’s a concern here that any sort of tariff war on this space could send ripples throughout the supply chain,” said Mina Tadrous, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. Tadrous told Global News the concern stems from the fact that the supply chain for medications is so global that the production of each drug crosses multiple borders before Canadians get the finished product from their local pharmacy. “So, the structure of how tariffs work can have [an] add-on effect to how the drug pricing works,” he said. Story continues below advertisement 4:11 Trump postpones tariffs, where does that leave Canada? In Canada, prices of pharmaceutical products are controlled by federal bodies. The prices of patented, brand-name drugs are monitored by the federal government’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) and negotiated by the pan-********* Pharmaceutical Alliance (pCPA), which negotiates on behalf of Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial governments. For non-brand name drugs, “reimbursed prices of generic prescription medicines are negotiated by the pan-********* Pharmaceutical Alliance and set by provincial or territorial governments on their drug benefit plan formularies,” said Jeff Connell, vice-president of corporate affairs at the ********* Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA). Get weekly health news Receive the latest medical news and health information delivered to you every Sunday. “These negotiated prices also apply to ********* patients who have drug coverage through their employer’s plan, or pay for their prescription drugs out-of-pocket,” he told Global News. Can Canada weaponize medications in a trade war? Canada is “heavily” reliant on other countries like the United States, India and European nations for active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished dose products, according to a 2022 report prepared for the CGPA. Story continues below advertisement “Almost all [active pharmaceutical ingredients] used to manufacture medicines in Canada come from abroad,” the report said. “There are concerns when Canada relies predominately on a handful of foreign countries to secure sufficient supply in order to manufacture medicines domestically.” It’s not yet clear if drugs will be exempt from Trump’s paused threat of across-the board 25 per cent tariff on ********* goods, minus energy which would face a 10 per cent tariff. More on Canada More videos Canada’s list of counter-tariffs on the U.S. does not include pharmaceuticals. Tadrous is hoping drugs and medicines, especially critical ones, are excluded from a trade war so patients don’t end up paying the price for it. Trending Now Canada seeks new trade deals amid Trump tariff threats, inks Ecuador pact Trump says Iran would be ‘obliterated’ if it assassinated him “At the end of the day, we just want to make sure that the patients that need the medications get them,” he said. As tariff tensions between Canada and the U.S. simmer, a growing “buy *********” movement is gathering steam, with consumers ditching U.S. products for local ones. Story continues below advertisement 2:01 ‘Buy *********’ movement gains momentum among merchants, shoppers Daniel Trefler, professor of economics and international trade and competitiveness at the University of Toronto, said while focus during a trade war might be on items like groceries and consumer goods, pharmaceuticals make up a big part of trade, too. “We tend to think about the world in terms of consumer-facing goods like the blueberries we eat, like the clothes that we wear. But that is a small fraction of the entire economy, and it’s a small fraction of how we interact with the United States,” he said. “The big things that we interact with the United States, for example, are pharmaceutical companies and all of those social media platforms and Google search engines, etc.” “That’s where the big bucks are for Americans,” he told Global News. To make a tangible impact, he advised Canadians to ask for a local alternative for generic medicines on their next trip to the pharmacy. Story continues below advertisement If a trade war does start, Tadrous said Canada can’t rely on self-sufficiency for thousands of different pharmaceutical products. He said more than 80 per cent of all drugs in Canada and the U.S. are produced outside of their own borders, and added if tariffs are imposed on medicines, public payers and insurance companies across both sides of the border will have to adjust how they cover the cost of these drugs. “I think in the short term, we don’t anticipate that there’s going to be any major pressure on drug prices, but I think in the long term, it can have some serious effects on our supply of drugs,” he said. &copy 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc. Source link #trade #war #U.S #hit #Canadas #medicine #supply #National Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

New Albany, Ohio, mass shooter arrested on ******* charge. What to know about the shooting New Albany, Ohio, mass shooter arrested on ******* charge. What to know about the shooting The suspect in a New Albany, Ohio, mass shooting has been arrested following a 12-hour manhunt, according to police. Here’s what to know about the shooting. What happened in New Albany, Ohio mass shooting? According to police, one person died and five were wounded in a mass shooting at KDC/ONE in the 8000 block of Smith’s Mill Road in far western Licking County at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday. About 150 people were present. Four of the wounded victims received medical treatment at Mount Carmel East, according to a hospital spokesperson. The suspect, Bruce Reginald Foster III, was arrested after 10 a.m. Wednesday at an apartment complex at 50 E. 7th Ave. on Columbus’ North Side, according to Columbus police. Who is Bruce Reginald Foster III? New Albany police Chief Greg Jones said during a press conference Wednesday morning that Foster was an employee at the New Albany warehouse and had been at work for “some time” and called the shooting a “targeted attack.” “All of the victims work there,” he said. Jones said police don’t have a clear motive for the shooting What kind of gun was used? A handgun was recovered at the scene, according to police. But we don’t know what kind. Are there two or more suspects in the New Albany mass shooting? There was a rumor that police were looking for two or more suspects. However, Jones dispelled that. Foster is considered the lone suspect. However, he likely received a ride taking him away from the scene of the crime. This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: New Albany, Ohio, mass shooter arrested. What to know about shooting Source link #Albany #Ohio #mass #shooter #arrested #******* #charge #shooting Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

What the new field of women’s neuroscience reveals about female brains What the new field of women’s neuroscience reveals about female brains There is a huge hole in our understanding of the brain. A gaping, woman-shaped hole. While neuroscience has given us countless insights into how our minds work, history reveals a major oversight: most of those studies were performed on both men and women without considering that there might be differences between their brains. Only recently have we begun to realise the impact of this blind spot. For example, research has now shown that the brain is dramatically remodelled after giving birth, while another study found that the fluctuations of the menstrual cycle affect how the brain works. This oversight not only leaves us in the dark about how reproductive stages affect the brain, but calls into question many other, broader conclusions in neuroscience. It is also what inspired neuroscientist-turned-entrepreneur Emilė Radytė to co-found a start-up called Samphire Neuroscience, where she is using non-invasive brain stimulation to transform our understanding of conditions that predominantly affect women, from premenstrual syndrome and ******* pain to postpartum depression. New Scientist asked Radytė how a better understanding of women’s neuroscience could change the way we treat mental health issues – and about the implications of this emerging field for everything we previously thought we knew about the human brain. Helen Thomson: You trained as a neuroscientist. How did you come to use that expertise to develop a brain stimulation device? Emilė Radytė: Throughout my undergraduate degree, I worked as an emergency medic. I realised that about 50 per cent of our cases were actually psychiatric emergencies. You think about paramedics helping someone who is bleeding or having a heart attack, but I was seeing addiction, suicide,… Source link #field #womens #neuroscience #reveals #female #brains Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Fortnite delays its most exciting feature…again Fortnite delays its most exciting feature…again Epic Games has worked hard to improve Fortnite and UEFN, but some things just haven’t gone according to the plan. Source link #Fortnite #delays #exciting #feature…again Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Palantir’s valuation appears detached from reality when compared to the rest of the S&P 500 Palantir’s valuation appears detached from reality when compared to the rest of the S&P 500 While the overall stock market this week is treading water on President Donald Trump’s tariff back-and-forth, Palantir is showing animal spirits are alive and well on Wall Street by trading at a valuation that appears detached from fundamental reality. Shares of the mysterious government contractor and AI play are trading at a 62 forward price-to-sales ratio, the highest of any company in the S & P 500 — and it’s not even close. The next closest nonfinancial stock in terms of forward price-to-sales is Texas Pacific Land Corp. at 32 times estimates for sales over the next year, according to FactSet data. Take a look at the top 10 nonfinancial S & P 500 stocks by forward price-to-sales ratio: Calling all value investors (chortle): Nvidia trades at a relatively tame 15 forward price-to-sales ratio. Palantir’s eye-popping valuation comes after a 24% jump in shares on Tuesday, as the company reported a 36% increase in sales for the last quarter and raised its sales forecast for the full year. Strong results for sure, but it appears that Palantir is trading in another stratosphere in terms of valuation, as retail traders have found their new favorite toy. It attained this new status through a 340% jump last year to lead the S & P 500. For the analysts not willing to abandon math at this stage, Palantir’s stock price is not sustainable, even if it does become a primary contractor for a U.S. government currently looking to modernize and grow more efficient under the tutelage of Elon Musk. PLTR ALL mountain Palantir since IPO “Fundamentals remain robust, but PLTR would have to accel growth to 50% for 4 years and trade at 13.5x CY28E rev just to hold its stock price,” wrote Jefferies software analyst Brent Thill in a note after the earnings. Thill’s price target is $28 a share. Palantir is currently trading for $100 a share. Even on a relative basis to its respective industry, Palantir’s valuation is unusual. We searched the S & P 500 for the stocks with the largest forward price-to-sales ratio relative to the industry average. Palantir doesn’t top this list but it’s near the top. Another stock many think is detached from reality as well is on this list: Tesla . The retail investor is betting Tesla and Palantir are the future of the American economy as robotics, artificial intelligence and Trump policies take hold. One day, the companies’ bottom lines will need to justify these valuations or this rally will be looked at as a time of misplaced retail trader enthusiasm typical of late-inning bull markets. Source link #Palantirs #valuation #appears #detached #reality #compared #rest Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Tops 1 Million Copies Sold In A Single Day Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Tops 1 Million Copies Sold In A Single Day Developer Warhorse Studios is “beyond grateful” after Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has seen a stellar start since launching yesterday. The open-world RPG has already surpassed a million copies sold across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The impressive sales milestone for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was announced by Warhorse Studios on X. It’s led to the developer calling the game a “triumph,” especially after the RPG’s enormous start on Steam as well. The game has already had over 155,000 concurrent players on Valve’s service, and this obviously doesn’t consider people playing on consoles. Since getting into the hands of players, they’ve sniffed out a pretty funny feature for the RPG. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has an odor system that can cause issues for stealth mode, as foes can literally smell protagonist Harry if he’s too stinky, even without seeing him. Looking ahead, Warhorse has a post-launch roadmap for the sequel, including a new hardcore mode and a Brushes With Death quest coming in the summer. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has also seen praise from fellow RPG makers. For instance, Baldur’s Gate 3 director and Larian boss Swen Vincke congratulated Warhorse on the game’s release on X. The official Witcher account did the same on the social media site, even posting a picture of Geralt and Henry linking arms. For more, check out GameSpot’s glowing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II review. Additionally, there’s a guides hub that offers information spanning from campaign length to quest chains. Source link #Kingdom #Deliverance #Tops #Million #Copies #Sold #Single #Day Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

7,000-Year-Old Arrow Poison Found in South Africa, Shows Ancient Hunting Skills 7,000-Year-Old Arrow Poison Found in South Africa, Shows Ancient Hunting Skills A 7,000-year-old femur bone belonging to an antelope, discovered in a South African cave, has revealed the earliest confirmed use of a multi-component arrow poison. Three modified bone arrowheads were found embedded within the marrow cavity, and a recent scientific analysis has identified a mixture of plant-based toxins. This discovery provides new insight into the pharmacological knowledge and hunting practices of early humans, highlighting the complexity of their technological advancements and understanding of toxic substances. Scientific Analysis of the Poisonous Compound According to the reports published in The Conversation, Justin Bradfield, Associate professor at University of Johannesburg along with other researchers examined the femur using micro-CT imaging. The sediment-like substance inside the marrow cavity was found to be foreign matter rather than natural deposits. Chemical analysis confirmed the presence of digitoxin and strophanthidin, toxic cardiac glycosides that disrupt heart function. Ricinoleic acid, a derivative of ricin, was also detected, suggesting the use of multiple plant sources to create a potent poison. Implications for Ancient Trade and Knowledge Systems As per the research, the plants containing these toxic compounds are not naturally found near Kruger Cave, where the femur was originally discovered. No remains of these plants have been identified in previous archaeobotanical studies of the region. This suggests that early humans either travelled long distances to acquire these materials or engaged in an organised trade network for toxic plant ingredients. Such findings highlight the extensive knowledge early societies had regarding medicinal and toxic plants and their application in hunting strategies. Historical Context of Poison Use in Hunting Previous evidence of poison use dates back approximately 60,000 years, coinciding with the development of projectile hunting technology in Africa. While chemical verification of such early poison use remains unconfirmed, the newly analysed femur provides the first concrete proof of a deliberately mixed poison for arrows. The application of plant-based toxins to hunting weapons marks a significant evolutionary step in the efficiency of ancient hunting techniques, demonstrating a sophisticated level of planning and knowledge transfer among early human groups. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who’sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. February 2025 Planet Parade: How to See Five Planets Align in the Sky Lenskart Phonic Smart Glasses With Bluetooth Audio, Voice Assistant Support Launched in India: Price, Specifications Source link #7000YearOld #Arrow #Poison #South #Africa #Shows #Ancient #Hunting #Skills Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Nvidia DLSS4, MFG, and full ray tracing tested on RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 Nvidia DLSS4, MFG, and full ray tracing tested on RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 have arrived, and coupled with a new testbed and a revised test suite, not to mention new drivers and a host of other changes, our initial benchmarks had to gloss over a few areas. One of the biggest selling points for the Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs — according to Nvidia, at least — is DLSS4 with Multi Frame Generation (MFG), an AI-based technology that offers further “performance” improvements over DLSS3 and framegen. But there are other changes as well. As we discussed prior to the Blackwell hardware paper launch, DLSS4 and neural rendering technologies make direct comparisons between the new RTX 50-series GPUs and their 40-series predecessors a bit more complex. And by “complex” we mean you can’t just take any of the published numbers at face value. MFG in particular requires a far more nuanced approach. As pointed out in our RTX 5090 testing in Cyberpunk 2077, there’s far more going on than a simple “******* number is better” approach can convey. The easiest way to show this is to think about what some theoretical performance numbers might mean. Take a game running at 50 FPS baseline, without frame generation. That’s a decent result but not totally smooth. Now turn on a perfectly executed framegen algorithm and say it gets 100 FPS. That’s twice as many “frames” delivered to your monitor each second, but user input sampling happens at the same 50 FPS as before. It looks smoother but it doesn’t actually feel much different. Double that again with MFG4X mode and it’s 200 FPS, still with the same 50 input samples per second. (And note: At times I may say “FPS” when referring to input samples per second; it’s a shortcut because most of our readers are familiar with FPS as a measurement.) (Image credit: Nvidia) As with the original framegen, it’s more about smoothing out the visuals than providing a true boost to performance. And on some level, games can and do feel better with a big enough increase in the number of frames being sent to your display. Visual smoothness and “feel” are linked in our brains (or at least, they are in my brain), so a game spitting out 100 frames in a second but sampling just 25 times per second will still feel better than the same game running at 30 FPS with 30 input samples per second. Usually, anyway — it varies by game and other factors still play a role. How much better framegen is compared to non-framegen traditional rendering is a much harder question to answer. And not only does it vary by game, but it also varies by individual. One person might find framegen delivers a totally acceptable experience, while another might hate that exact same experience. Personally, what I find is that single frame generation — meaning, what we had with DLSS3 and FSR3 — needs to boost the “FPS” by at least 50% to have a decent chance at feeling better. That would mean as an example taking 40 FPS native and turning it into 60 FPS or more with framegen. But there are also limits to how far you need to go. Boosting 100 FPS to 150 FPS via framegen doesn’t represent a true 50% improvement in performance, but the latter gets beyond a 144Hz display refresh rate and is so fast that, even though the input sampling rate is lower (75 compared to 100 samples per second), it might still look and feel “better” to some people. But what if the base framerate is 100 FPS and framegen only increases that to 130 FPS? That’s something we’ve seen in certain cases. Or what if it’s a change from 50 FPS to 65 FPS? The latter in particular can feel worse, as the input sampling rate drops from 50 down to just 32.5, which can be quite sluggish as far as responsiveness goes. And what about MFG, interpolating multiple frames between two rendered frames? With a perfect algorithm, MFG4X can double the frames to monitor rate compared to framegen, or quadruple the native framerate. But does it feel twice or four times as fast? No. Not even close. But it can still feel “better” — again, it’s subjective and varies by game and user. That’s the preamble to a far more fuzzy and indistinct topic than raw performance. It’s why we focus primarily on native non-upscaled, non-framegen performance for our reviews. It’s one thing to say that 50 FPS is faster than 40 FPS when using traditional rendering. It’s quite a different story if we’re talking about 50 FPS with framegen versus 40 FPS without, or 80 FPS with MFG versus 40 FPS native. For this deeper dive into MFG and DLSS4, and regular framegen as well, I’ve picked five of the most demanding ray tracing games currently available, three of which now have native support for Nvidia’s DLSS4 and MFG. All of the games also feature higher levels of ray tracing, with four of the games supporting full ray tracing (aka “path tracing”). This should in theory provide some of the best-case scenarios for the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 to strut their stuff. The test hardware is the same as we used before, with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and all the bells and whistles. We have 32GB of low latency DDR5-6000 memory, a 4TB PCIe 5.0 SSD, a high-end motherboard, and a powerful 1500W PSU. Full specs are in the boxout. Let’s get to the test results, in alphabetical order. We have four charts for each game: 4K ultra, 4K ultra plus framegen, and then mostly for reference we have 1440p and 1080p ultra as well. And “ultra” means various things here, but you’ll get that from the charts. Note that we are not running strictly apples to apples comparisons here, as the AMD GPU doesn’t support Nvidia’s DLSS algorithm, nor does it support Ray Reconstruction. It’s present mostly as a point of reference, and the image quality of FSR3 is provably inferior. The 40-series GPUs also don’t support MFG but should otherwise be similar in capabilities and image quality to the 50-series GPUs. Alan Wake 2: DLSS4 and MFG (Image credit: Remedy) Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) Alan Wake 2 kicks things off with a brutally punishing full RT mode that brings lesser GPUs crashing to their knees. The 4080 Super, even with DLSS Quality mode upscaling — and we’re using the new Transformers mode here — only manages 26 FPS. The “new and improved” RTX 5080 bumps that all the way up to… 29 FPS. Yup, it’s not much faster in terms of raw performance potential. And AMD’s RX 7900 XTX stutters along at just 12.5 FPS. The 4090 manages a more respectable 37 FPS, which is playable if not amazingly smooth. RTX 5090 kicks that up to 48 FPS, a significantly better overall experience. They’re both fast enough at base performance that frame generation could actually prove useful. So what does framegen and MFG do to the standings? First, let’s note that Alan Wake 2 only supports FSR2, so AMD doesn’t get any framegen help. This is one of the continually frustrating things with upscaling and frame generation: There are a lot of games that primarily support only one vendor solution. Even those that do support AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and Nvidia DLSS don’t always treat them equally, as seen here. FSR3.1 should be basically drop-in compatible with FSR2, at least for upscaling, and it also offers framegen as a potential help. It won’t look as good as DLSS, but just about anything is better than 12.5 FPS at 4K on AMD’s fastest GPU. Looking to Nvidia’s 40-series parts, the RTX 4080 Super gets a bump to 49 FPS, an 86% improvement over the baseline FPS. That means that, even though it does have a slightly lower input sampling rate of 24.4 instead of 26.2, overall it does feel better in my opinion. It also helps that Alan Wake 2 tends to be a more methodical game so having a super responsive experience isn’t required. The 4090 sees a similar bump of 85% to 68 FPS, which again is a better overall experience in my opinion. What about the RTX 50-series GPUs? The 5080 gets an 87% improvement with MFG2X, about the same as the 40-series. But then it also has options for MFG3X that’s 2.71X faster than the baseline rendering, and MFG4X that’s 3.49X faster than baseline. Each progressively higher level of frame generation does increase latency slightly, but the scaling is otherwise nearly linear. The 5090 sees similar gains: 1.84X with MFG2X, 2.66X for MFG3X, and 3.44X using MFG4X. Those are slightly lower in all three cases than the 5080, so perhaps other factors like CPU speed are slightly limiting performance, but each additional frame generated by MFG provides about an 80% boost to the frames to monitor rate. But here’s the important bit: MFG4X doesn’t feel like it’s running anywhere near twice as fast as MFG2X. It looks smoother, and feels a bit better subjectively, but if you were to hide the settings and ask me what the game feels like? I’d guess somewhere in the 65~80 FPS range. That’s better than the 42 samples per second on the input, but far lower than the 166 “FPS” results would suggest. MFG2X feels like it’s running at perhaps 55~65 FPS, but definitely not as responsive as what you’d get from native rendering at 89 FPS. And again, these numbers are all very fuzzy. We can measure how many frames get sent to the monitor, and use that to calculate how many input samples are taken, but the actual feel lands somewhere in between. Where exactly it lands? That’s far more subjective and will depend on the game and user. Alan Wake 2 also happens to be the best-case scenario for framegen and MFG in my experience, as it’s far slower paced. The main characters have two speeds: a meandering saunter and a slightly faster brisk walk. It’s not a fast-paced game, in other words. ****** Myth: Wukong: DLSS3 and Framegen (Image credit: Game Science) Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) Next up is ****** Myth: Wukong, also running full RT effects but this time without DLSS4 or ray reconstruction on Nvidia GPUs. That means no MFG, for now — though we suspect an upgrade and patch are in the works, or at least an Nvidia App override. (There’s no option to override ****** Myth: Wukong settings right now.) The baseline performance at 4K with quality mode upscaling is again quite terrible on AMD’s 7900 XTX, at just 9.2 FPS. The 4080 Super is already almost four times as fast, but the 5080 is only 13% faster than its predecessor. The 4090 sits at 48 FPS, and the 5090 beats it by 31% at 62 FPS. This time, we have FSR3 support for framegen and that gives AMD a 92% improvement to the frames to monitor rate — which at just under 18 FPS is still far from playable (and still feels like 9 FPS). The 4080 Super gets a 62% boost via DLSS3 framegen, and there’s a similar improvement for other RTX cards. The 5080 gets a 65% improvement, 4090 nets a 62% increase, and the 5090 improves by 67%. This time, the benefits of frame generation are less pronounced. DLSS3 relies on fixed function hardware and doesn’t tend to scale as well as the new DLSS4 algorithms, so the 4090 as an example goes from a playable 40 FPS with input sampling also happening 40 times per second, up to 66 FPS with framegen but with input sampling dropping to 33 times per second. It looks smoother but feels less responsive, and the same goes for the 5080 and 4080 Super. The 5090 benefits by simply being more powerful. Yes, input sampling sees a similar drop, from 62 samples per second without framegen down to 52 samples with framegen. But both results are high enough that, at least for me, it feels “smooth enough” that I’m not bothered by the experience. But I do look forward to seeing MFG and DLSS4 support, as that should hopefully provide a similar 80~85 percent improvement on all the 40-series and 50-series GPUs, with MFG4X potentially providing even better frame smoothing. Cyberpunk 2077: DLSS4 and MFG (Image credit: CD Projekt Red) Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to get official native DLSS4 support. It also lets you choose between the old DLSS CNN models and the newer DLSS Transformer models for upscaling, if you’re okay with sacrificing quality to get more of a performance boost. For these tests, however, I stuck to using DLSS Transformers in all cases. The RT-Overdrive preset uses “path tracing” (full RT) and again destroys all but the fastest Nvidia GPUs at 4K. Ray Reconstruction may or may not provide much of a performance benefit, but it does look better than the default path tracing mode, so we used that for all the Nvidia GPUs — so again, not apples to apples. AMD’s 7900 XTX chokes at 4K with quality mode upscaling at just 16 FPS. The 4080 Super doubles that with 32 FPS, and the 5080 again shows only a minor 12% improvement over its direct predecessor. The 4090 is playable at 43 FPS, while the 5090 delivers 37% higher performance at 59 FPS. (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) With frame generation, AMD gets a nearly perfect 94% improvement to 31 FPS, though it’s still not particularly playable. You can also see the very noticeable artifacts caused by FSR3 framegen in the above image. The 4080 Super and 4090 see an 85% and 90% increase in frames to monitor rates, nearly matching AMD’s benefit — and this is yet again why DLSS4 feels much better now than DLSS3. And then there’s the 50-series parts. The 5080 gets a 1.83X boost with MFG2X, 2.64X with 3X, and 3.38X with MFG4X. The 5090 sees improvements of 1.82X, 2.61X, and 3.30X. Input latency does increase slightly at each additional level of MFG, but it’s not terrible: 40ms without MFG on the 5090, 47ms with 2X, 50 with 3X, and 53 with 4X. It’s also not better. The 5080 went from 55ms latency, increasing to 67ms with MFG2X, 70 with 3X, and 74ms with 4X. Does MFG make the 5080 as an example feel faster than an RTX 4090? The frames to monitor rates suggest it’s much faster — up to 122 “FPS” compared to only 82 “FPS.” But the input sampling rate of 30.5 samples per second versus 40.8 samples per second makes things far less clear. Subjectively, I’d say it felt more like equal, at best, rather than a 50% advantage for the RTX 5080. I suspect a lot of gamers would end up preferring the 4090 2X framegen experience over the 5080 with MFG4X. Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Hogwarts Legacy: DLSS4 and MFG (Image credit: Warner Bros. Games) Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) Hogwarts Legacy also has a public update that enables DLSS4 with ray reconstruction and MFG support. If you thought it would be “more of the same,” relative to the above two MFG examples, it’s not. And the problems are systemic for the game engine, as far as I can tell. Simply put: Maxing out the ray tracing options right now makes Hogwarts Legacy a worse experience. There’s a lot of microstuttering, and the overall performance gets massively reduced compared to running the game without RT. The issue seems to be inherent to virtually all Unreal Engine 4 games with lots of ray tracing. It just doesn’t handle RT effects well, no matter the hardware. Hogwarts Legacy becomes CPU limited on the 9800X3D to around 60 FPS, give or take — slightly higher on the 7900 XTX than on the fastest Nvidia GPUs. And again, it’s not apples to apples since we’re running DLSS4 vs FSR2 — yes, FSR2 again, so no framegen for non-Nvidia GPUs. On the one hand, being so CPU limited means we should see very good scaling from framegen and MFG for the Nvidia GPUs. The 4080 Super gets an 80% boost from framegen and the 4090 sees a similar 81% improvement. MFG2X yields an 82% increase on the 5080, and a “better than perfect” 106% boost on the 5090. But all the microstuttering remains a perceptible artifact, even after frame generation. That goes for higher levels of MFG as well. The 5080 runs 2.61X faster with MFG3X and 3.23X faster with MFG4X. It does look smoother, and feels a bit better, but the irregular frametimes can still be felt. The routine hitching makes overall performance feel closer to the listed 1% low FPS rather than the average FPS. The 5090 meanwhile continues to see exceptional scaling for whatever reason. It’s 3.05X faster with MFG3X and 4.01X faster using MFG4X. It probably has something to do with the poorly running RT plus ray reconstruction (turning off ray reconstruction only boosts performance by around 10%), but framegen really shouldn’t provide more than a 100% improvement at each level. Fundamentally, though, the inconsistent base performance creates a problem. The 5090 starts with an average of 55 FPS but 1% lows of just 33 FPS. That’s a pretty big disparity that’s very noticeable when playing the game. You see similar average and minimum FPS results for all the RTX cards at 1440p and 1080p. MFG attempts to smooth things out, but the uneven pacing seems to throw the algorithm off, so that a single frametime spike in the base rendering still shows up as a spike with MFG enabled. Turn off ray tracing completely and baseline performance basically doubles at 4K, with significantly higher performance at 1440p and 1080p. That makes framegen and MFG less important to begin with, and certainly the benefits of MFG4X pulling over 300 FPS feel exaggerated. The 5080 as an example manages 115 FPS average, 62 FPS on the 1% lows, and an input latency of 24ms at 4K with DLSS Quality Transformers and no MFG. Turn on MFG4X and it gets 296 “FPS” with 1% lows of 113 FPS, and an input latency of 34ms — which means a base rendering speed of 74 FPS. The net result, again, is that even if MFG4X perhaps looks smoother, the overall experience isn’t noticeably improved. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: DLSS3 and Framegen (Image credit: Bethesda) Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware) Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is our final test for DLSS upscaling and framegen. It’s a Vulkan Ray Tracing game, using Nvidia RT extensions that apparently only fully work on RTX cards if you want to enable the full RT mode — which we did. That means no AMD card this time. And it’s possible to use the Nvidia App to force the use of DLSS Transformers, but you can’t force DLSS4 frame generation right now. That’s not supported for this game. (Even if you could, as you can in about 75 other games, it’s a pain as far as testing goes: Launch Nvidia App, set overrides, start and test the game, then exit the game and repeat the process. It’s better if you’re not trying to run benchmarks, of course.) The baseline at 4K ultra with full RT using the maximum “very high” setting ends up being quite good for all four of the GPUs we tested. The 4080 Super gets 60 FPS, 69 FPS for the 5080, 81 FPS on the 4090, and 102 FPS on the 5090. That should provide for some useful improvements with framegen… except this ends up being a terrible result with DLSS3 framegen. The 5090 “improves” to just 138 FPS, a 36% increase in the frames to monitor rate. Except the base rendering rate drops to just 69 FPS. Going from a native 102 FPS to a framegen 69 FPS is not a great experience. Unfortunately, FrameView didn’t give us an input latency result for Indiana Jones — probably for the best (from Nvidia’s perspective) as it would certainly be substantially worse with framegen enabled. The RTX 4090 gets a 37% increase from framegen as well, going from 81 to 110 FPS, but with the base rendering rate dropping to 55 FPS. As for the RTX 5080 and 4080 Super, with the current public build and without forcing DLSS4 through the Nvidia App, they both run out of VRAM and effectively fail to work at 4K with quality upscaling and framegen. The 5080 just locked up the game completely and we had to kill the process manually, while the 4080 Super dropped to a slideshow 18 FPS. That’s another “thanks but no thanks” to frame generation with the current public release of the game, if you’re keeping track. Nvidia sample of DLSS performance improvements over time. (Image credit: Nvidia) Nvidia DLSS4 and MFG: Closing Thoughts After testing five of the heaviest games available right now, and also poking around at one game without using ray tracing, the net takeaway for DLSS4 MFG and frame generation hasn’t radically changed compared to DLSS3 framegen. That doesn’t mean DLSS4 in general isn’t important, but the MFG marketing for the 50-series wildly overstates the performance and end-user experience. DLSS4 Transformers look better, often correcting some of the most egregious rendering errors caused by upscaling. It’s still not perfect but the artifacts are mostly things that can be ignored. With an RTX 40-series or 50-series GPU and a game that supports DLSS Transformers either natively or via Nvidia App overrides, it’s a welcome addition. Performance is slightly slower but quality is improved, so that potentially you could use DLSS Transformers with Balanced (3X) upscaling to deliver comparable visuals and higher performance than DLSS CNN with Quality (2.25X) upscaling. Ray Reconstruction sees similar improvements from the use of Transformers instead of a CNN network, but here the number of games that support DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction is so limited as to make this a far less important feature. You can check the full Nvidia list of DLSS games, but here’s the summary for DLSS 3.5 RR showing just five games. (Image credit: Nvidia) As for MFG, it’s not a bad option to have, but it’s no universal panacea, certainly not in the current implementation. Of the games we tested that support the feature, the experience ranged from being akin to lipstick on a pig (Hogwarts Legacy, with or without ray tracing) to decent (Cyberpunk 2077) to pretty good (Alan Wake 2). What it mostly comes down to is the speed of the gameplay and the base level of performance. MFG4X certainly smooths out the frame pacing to your monitor. The best use case seems to be streaming at 120 FPS, where you could potentially have a game that only runs at 30~45 FPS get a boost to 120 for viewers. (Not that many streamers even use that mode.) It would still feel closer to the base framerate, but for those watching it would look smoother and more fluid. But it can’t work miracles so if you have a game with inconsistent frame pacing (looking at you again, Hogwarts Legacy), even after MFG smoothing it will still feel inconsistent — a bit less so, but definitely still perceptible. If on the other hand you have a game that already delivers a consistent experience, in terms of frame pacing, MFG and framegen tend to work better. In other words, it’s about taking a good experience and making it slightly better, rather than taking a mediocre or poor experience and making it good. Really, the biggest issue with frame generation technologies is the marketing. I’ve used the phrase “frame smoothing” repeatedly throughout this analysis, and for good reason. The AI-powered “generation” of “new” frames is really just a more sophisticated take on interpolation and frame smoothing, something we’ve seen in TVs for over a decade with varying levels of quality. Putting that technology into real-time games ends up being less beneficial than it is for viewing passive content like TV broadcasts and movies. Nvidia has said that AI and frame generation technologies aren’t going away, and we believe it. The company will continue to push for more efficient ways to boost the number of frames that get sent to your monitor. But we are quickly approaching — and probably well past in the case of MFG4X — the point of diminishing returns. Inserting one generated frame between two rendered frames can smooth things out. Generating two or three frames? The experience definitely doesn’t scale linearly. It’s disingenuous of marketing to pretend that 200 FPS using MFG4X is anything like 200 FPS with regular framegen, or 200 FPS without framegen. It’s equally laughable to suggest that an RTX 5070 with MFG4X is “as fast as an RTX 4090” with normal framegen. It’s not. In either case, the base rendering speed and input sampling rates are critical and interlinked factors. A base rendering rate of 200 FPS on a 200 Hz (with adaptive sync) monitor feels completely different than a base rendering rate of 50 FPS quadrupled to 200 “FPS.” And if Nvidia continues with the hubris and tries for RTX 60-series GPUs in a couple of years that generate up to seven frames between two rendered frames, it will be laughably transparent. In such a scenario, “400 FPS!” while rendering at a base 50 FPS would ultimately still feel probably closer to 80~100 FPS. Subjectively, it’s almost impossible to give an answer to how much better (or worse) things are with frame generation enabled. Sometimes it works well, other times it works okay, and still other times it can look slightly better but end up feeling worse. It’s all about the base rendering speed, which generally needs to be above 40 FPS in my experience to achieve a decent generated result. And the higher the base rendering speed, the less frame generation techniques make it feel sluggish — and the less necessary framegen is in the first place. What we really need for frame generation is a way to link it to new user input. Something like Reflex 2 with its warping and in-painting combined with frame projection — the prediction of future frames. That’s more complex, but if that can be done, games could actually feel more responsive rather than merely looking smoother. And that’s probably where we’re headed with DLSS 5 in the future. When and if that can be made to work effectively remains to be seen. Source link #Nvidia #DLSS4 #MFG #full #ray #tracing #tested #RTX #RTX Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

USPS, in reversal, resumes accepting packages from China and Hong Kong – The Washington Post USPS, in reversal, resumes accepting packages from China and Hong Kong – The Washington Post USPS, in reversal, resumes accepting packages from China and Hong Kong The Washington PostUSPS Reverses Decision to Halt Parcel Service From China The New York TimesOrder from SHEIN or Temu? You could still be impacted after USPS’ China package reversal USA TODAYUS Postal Service restores delivery of incoming parcels from China and Hong Kong after briefly suspending them CNNTrump Tariffs Live Updates: USPS Does A U-Turn And Says It Will Continue Accepting Packages From China Forbes Source link #USPS #reversal #resumes #accepting #packages #China #Hong #Kong #Washington #Post Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Steam introduces warning to Early Access titles with no new recent updates Steam introduces warning to Early Access titles with no new recent updates Steam is introducing a warning to users interested in Early Access titles, warning users if the game has seen no new recent updates. It seems to be an automatic thing, though, as even confirmed dead games are being slapped with the warning. Spotted by SteamDB on Bluesky, the warning simply informs users that the game hasn’t seen any new updates recently and that the dev timeline may be out of date. Now, it’s worth pointing out that this seems to not be perfect. While it seeks to inform people of potentially unstable or abandoned games, it also sends off false positives sometimes. Pirate Software’s Heartbound, for example, is still in Early Access, but had an update just days ago, but is slapped with the warning that it hasn’t been updated in 13 months. Meanwhile games like Kerbal Space Program 2, which hasn’t seen an update in seven months, remain without that warning. It likely falls into an automated warning after 12 months. It’s likely not counting the Heartbound updates as the updates have been going through Steam Betas. Gabriel Stanford-Reisinger Editor-in-Chief Gabe has been a gamer since he was young, playing games like Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, Guitar Hero, and whatever looked cool on GameFly. Ever since 2018, he’s been infatuated with the inner workings of the gaming and entertainment industries, covering a wide range of topics from video games to TV and film. Starting as a contributor for PSX Extreme, he’s worked his way up to its Managing Editor. Using what’s he learned over the years, he founded Smash Jump to remind everyone to smash jump. Source link #Steam #introduces #warning #Early #Access #titles #updates Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

The superconductivity of layered graphene is surprisingly strange The superconductivity of layered graphene is surprisingly strange An illustration representing the ultra-thin material graphene Science Photo Library/Alamy Why do cold thin sheets of carbon offer no resistance to electric currents? Two experiments are bringing us closer to an answer – and maybe even to practical room-temperature superconductors. Kin Chung Fong at Northeastern University in Massachusetts was stunned when another physicist, Abhishek Banerjee at Harvard University, told him a number over dinner. They were studying different aspects of graphene – sheets of carbon only one atom thick – but both made the same estimate about how hard it should be for an electric current flowing through graphene to suddenly change. Past experiments have shown that very cold stacks of two or three layers of graphene can superconduct, or perfectly conduct electricity without resistance and energy loss, if some of the sheets are rotated by a special angle. But why this happens remained mysterious. The two physicists thought the property they estimated at dinner, called kinetic inductance, might illuminate the answer. “The feeling was like when you are in a wood hiking [through] the forest, and suddenly you find, well, wait a minute, I’m not the only person in this deep forest,” says Fong. Together with other colleagues, they turned their idea into two experiments. One group measured kinetic inductance for two layers of stacked-and-twisted graphene; a second group focused on three layers. Joel Wang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was in the group that worked on two-ply graphene, says that measuring kinetic inductance had previously been prohibitively difficult. Because multilayer graphene can only be produced in very small pieces, standard techniques for measuring its superconducting currents – such as exposing it to particles or magnetic fields – produced excessively weak signals. Instead, both teams had to innovate a setup where the tiny graphene flakes were exposed to microwaves while the researchers slowly varied properties like temperature, which must be kept very low for superconductivity to occur at all. We know that multilayer graphene superconducts because the electrons inside of it pair up, and these pairs flow in currents more easily than individual particles. But electrons typically repel each other. How exactly the particles come together and what properties these pairs have is still not understood. “Theory is [running] behind experiments here,” says Miuko Tanaka at the University of Tokyo, who was also in the two-ply group. For two layers of graphene, her team found that the superconducting current is much “stiffer” – it resists change more – than is predicted by any conventional theory of superconductivity. They traced this anomaly back to something called quantum geometry. Specifically, the shape of the electrons’ wavefunctions, which encode all their properties and possible behaviours, seemed to drive this exotic type of superconductivity. In trilayer graphene, researchers found surprising similarities between the kinetic inductance of their sample and the behaviour of a family of completely different superconductors – ones that maintain their special properties at much higher temperatures. Because of this, both Banerjee and Tanaka say these experiments may do more than shed light on why graphene superconducts – they could also reveal key properties required for room-temperature superconductors. Physicists have been searching for such materials for decades in the hope that using them could radically decrease the energy consumption of many devices. “We are finding interesting laws which seem to emerge in both these material systems. Maybe what we are uncovering is something deeper,” says Banerjee. Both teams are planning on performing similar experiments with other very thin superconductors. “Recently, there have been so many new two-dimensional superconductors that are interesting, surprising and kind of unusual,” says Zeyu Hao, also at Harvard University, who was on the team researching three-layer graphene. For example, earlier this month a different team published research showing that two-layered crystals of a material called tungsten diselenide exhibit superconductivity when the layers are twisted relative to one another. In the meantime, Hao’s colleague Mary Kreidel, now at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, already has an application in mind for stacked-and-twisted graphene. She is working on particle detectors for space missions, many of which use superconductors. They could be made smaller and lighter – a crucial advantage in space flight – if they were made from multilayer graphene, she says. Source link #superconductivity #layered #graphene #surprisingly #strange Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Carney says Canada ‘must change’ major trade partners amid Trump threats – National Carney says Canada ‘must change’ major trade partners amid Trump threats – National Liberal leadership contender Mark Carney wants Canada to look beyond the United States to bolster its roster of trade partners amid ongoing tariff threats from President Donald Trump. He also teased tax cuts for middle-class Canadians and accelerated plans to meet NATO defence spending targets if his campaign to become Liberal leader and the next prime minister is successful. Carney, speaking in Windsor, Ont., in front of the Gordie Howe International Bridge on Wednesday, said Canada should remain “closely integrated” with the U.S. in sectors such as automotive, energy and security where the North American neighbours have strong ties. But he said, “now that U.S. priorities are shifting, we need to change our priorities in ways that work best for Canada.” “We know we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket,” he said. “We can and must change our major trading partners.” Story continues below advertisement Carney said Canada ought to diversify its trading relationships with countries that “share our values,” and named the United Kingdom, the European Union and “leaders in Asia.” He cited emerging industries such as clean energy, critical minerals and artificial intelligence as sectors where Canada can install itself as a trusted partner for overseas economies. He said Canada should expand existing supply chain infrastructure, such as ports, railways and trucking corridors, to help reach more global markets. The calls come amid looming threats of a trade war with the U.S., Canada’s largest trading partner. 4:24 Trump hits pause on tariffs, but experts say Canada will still feel the economic fallout Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday that Canada had secured a 30-day pause on Trump’s pending tariffs, which had been set to take effect on Tuesday. Story continues below advertisement Canada has reiterated pledges for $1.3 billion in spending to secure the border and promised to install a “fentanyl czar” to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. Get weekly money news Get expert insights, Q&A on markets, housing, inflation, and personal finance information delivered to you every Saturday. Former Liberal cabinet ministers Chrystia Freeland and Karina Gould, two of Carney’s opponents in the Liberal leadership race, have called for a “Buy *********” response to offset the impact of looming tariffs. Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla, another candidate for the Liberal leadership, has called for diversified trading relationships with China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and others to “reduce reliance on a single market.” Carney on Wednesday also emphasized the need to increase trade ties within Canada, calls echoed by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and other ********* officials. Federal Trade Minister Mary Ng said this week that Canada’s freshly inked trade agreement with Ecuador is proof that Ottawa’s trade diversification strategy is already paying dividends. Carney teases tax cut, restoring EV incentives Trending Now Should Canada ban X and Tesla? Why calls are growing Made in Canada vs. Product of Canada: Know the difference to ‘Buy *********’ Carney on Wednesday also promised a “new approach to federal budgeting” that would “save precious taxpayer dollars” while also incentivizing business investment in Canada. Story continues below advertisement He teased that, in the coming weeks, he would unveil a “middle-class tax cut” and a plan to boost young Canadians’ incomes. The former central banker did not provide details on how he would fund tax cuts, but suggested that his government would not cut existing Liberal programs for dental and child care, nor would he accelerate public spending. “It’s about where we go from here looking forward and more of an emphasis on policies that catalyze business investment,” he said. Gould has pledged to trim the federal GST to four per cent for a year if she becomes Liberal leader. Carney also pledged to meet NATO spending targets of two per cent of GDP by 2030, two years ahead of the Trudeau government’s schedule. Canada’s longtime failure to meet the two per cent target has been a criticism of Trump’s in past negotiations. Last week, Carney unveiled a plan to end the consumer price on carbon and replace it with a plan that will see industrial polluters pay for incentives to reward Canadians for taking eco-friendly actions. 1:57 Carney vows to remove carbon tax, introduce green rebate incentives if he becomes Liberal leader Freeland and Dhalla have indicated they would scrap the consumer carbon price, while Gould has pledged to freeze the program; former Liberal MP and businessman Frank Baylis has said he would “fix” the carbon price program if he becomes leader. Story continues below advertisement Carney was asked Wednesday whether he would reinstate incentives for electric vehicle purchases under his environmental plan — federal funding for EV rebates stalled last month after the program’s proceeds were fully committed, months ahead of schedule — and Carney suggested that those funds could fuel a similar program. “Certainly my government would be looking at that going forward,” he said. More on Money More videos &copy 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc. Source link #Carney #Canada #change #major #trade #partners #Trump #threats #National Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Palestinians defiant over Trump plan Palestinians defiant over Trump plan Yolande Knell Middle East correspondent Rushdi Abualouf Gaza correspondent BBC Mahmoud Bahjat, who is living in a tent camp in central Gaza, says he and other Palestinians refuse to be resettled elsewhere For most Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip there is already a painful history of forced displacement that is at the heart of their response to US President Donald Trump’s plan to take over the war-torn territory. Speaking to the BBC, residents of a tent camp in the central town of Deir al-Balah expressed shock and defiance at the idea of being permanently resettled outside. “Even if it costs us our souls, we will not leave Gaza,” said Mahmoud Bahjat, who is from the north. “We are against Trump’s decision. He ended the war but displacing us would end our lives.” On the other hand, many Israelis have been expressing satisfaction at the radical ideas from the White House, particularly those on the far-right who seek to resettle Gaza. Reuters Thousands of displaced Gazans are making their way back to what’s left of their homes in the north Since a ceasefire took hold in Gaza – on the eve of Trump’s inauguration last month – there have been dramatic scenes of Palestinians returning to what is left of their homes. Families have piled up possessions into cars and donkey carts or walked long distances along the coastal road, often just to reach piles of rubble. According to the UN, at least 1.9m people, or about 90% of the population, across Gaza became displaced during 15 months of war. The scenes of Palestinians on the move have echoed ******-and-white footage from 1948 and the mass evacuations that took place during fighting before and after the creation of the state of Israel. More than 700,000 people were then forced from their homes. The majority of Gazans are descendants of those original refugees. Jamalat Wadi says Gazans “want to remove the rubble and live on the land” Standing between rows of plastic sheeting in the Deir al-Balah camp, Jamalat Wadi says that her family has now sacrificed enough and that they are determined to build a new home. “We endured a year and half of war. When [the Israeli military] finally withdraw from here, we want to remove the rubble and live on the land.” “After the US made Israel destroy our houses in Gaza, he is telling us that Gaza is destroyed and we have to leave?” Ms Wadi goes on. “If there is only one drop of blood left in our children, we won’t go out of Gaza. We won’t give up on it!” Many Palestinians we spoke to called on Jordan and Egypt – which Trump is pressing to take displaced Gazans – and for Saudi Arabia – which he wants to normalise relations with Israel – to hold out against US pressure. Since its establishment, Israel has rejected the right of ************ refugees to return to their historic homeland, as this would have left the Jewish people as a ********* within its borders. Today, there are about 5.9m Palestinians registered by the UN, with most living in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Israel has long argued that those who were dispossessed should be absorbed by Arab countries, pointing out that thousands of Jews left these to come to Israel during the regional turmoil after it became a state. Israeli officials suggest that by proposing to take over war-torn Gaza, creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” after resettling Palestinians elsewhere, the Trump administration is offering fresh thinking on a long-running conflict. Reuters Settler group Nachala is calling for settlements in Gaza that Israel evacuated two decades ago to be re-established (file photo) While Trump notably did not back the re-establishment of settlements in Gaza, settler leaders have reacted enthusiastically to the idea of displacement, calling on the Israeli government to act immediately. Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war and began constructing settlements in both that are widely seen as ******** under international law. In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza, although the UN still regards it as Israeli-occupied territory. “Assuming Trump’s declarations about transferring Gazans to other countries throughout the world actualise, we need to move quickly and build settlements throughout the Gaza Strip,” stated the Nachala settlement organisation, which claims it has hundreds of activists ready to move there. “No part of Israel should be left unsettled by Jews. If we leave any area desolate it is liable to be overtaken by our enemies,” Nachala added. In contrast, the Israeli anti-occupation NGO, Peace Now, dismissed the Trump plan. It backs the creation of an independent ************ state alongside Israel as part of the long-standing international formula for peace in the region, known as the two-state solution. Peace Now said there was “no feasible way to transfer two million Gazans” outside. “It’s time to stop fantasising about ethnic cleansing and forced displacement in Gaza and face reality – there is only one solution that can guarantee security and stability in the Middle East: two states for two peoples and an end to the Israeli-************ conflict,” it commented. EPA The UN estimates that almost 70% of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed Many Israelis and Palestinians are concerned about what the latest announcements could mean for the current talks on extending the Gaza ceasefire. The next stage of the deal is meant to see the return of some 60 remaining Israeli hostages – not all of whom are alive – and a more permanent end to the fighting. However, the brother of one Israeli hostage held by ****** told us: “I don’t take what Trump says too seriously. It’s not realistic. He’s shooting for the stars.” He added that this was “like with Canada” – referring to the US leader’s suggestions that it should become his country’s “51st state”. Some Gazans did acknowledge that they felt one aspect of President Trump’s declaration was based on reality – his comments that the small coastal strip has become “unliveable”. Last month, a UN damage assessment showed that clearing over 50m tonnes of rubble left in Gaza as a result of the heavy Israeli bombardment could take 21 years and cost up to $1.2bn. Bilal al-Rantisi, a former customs worker, is in shock after arriving back in Gaza City with his wife and four children having spent more than a year displaced in the south. “We have returned to a catastrophe, the worst in history,” he said despondently. “I found neither my home nor my siblings’ homes were standing. Trump doesn’t speak in vain. He knows that Gaza is no longer a place fit for human habitation.” He said he was hoping to sell his car and his wife’s gold jewellery to raise funds. “I will leave Gaza at the earliest possible opportunity. Yes, all Gazans oppose displacement but putting emotions aside, if people were given the chance, many would choose to leave.” Source link #Palestinians #defiant #Trump #plan Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Helldivers 2 Secondary Weapon Wish List Helldivers 2 Secondary Weapon Wish List Future secondary weapons in Helldivers 2 can further explore Elemental damage types and offer distinct new buildcrafting tools. Source link #Helldivers #Secondary #Weapon #List Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Ancient relative of geese is the earliest known modern bird Ancient relative of geese is the earliest known modern bird Vegavis iaai was an ancient relative of ducks and geese, but it dived for fish like grebes or loons Mark Witton A 69-million-year-old skull found in Antarctica has been identified as a relative of geese and ducks, making it the oldest known modern bird. It belongs to a species that was first identified two decades ago named Vegavis iaai, which lived in the late Cretaceous ******* alongside the last dinosaurs. But because only fragments of skulls had been found previously, scientists had been unable to agree what kind of bird it was or whether it was instead a bird-like, non-avian dinosaur. The fossil skull was discovered in 2011 on Vega Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. However, it was encased in rock so hard that excavators had to spend hundreds of hours chipping away at the surrounding stone before it could be scanned to reveal its internal details. Patrick O’Connor at Ohio University, who worked on the analysis, says two features of the almost complete skull only ever occur in modern birds. First, the upper beak is primarily comprised of a bone called the premaxilla, while a second bone, the maxilla, is greatly reduced in size and contributes to only a small portion of the bony palate. Second, in modern birds, the forebrain is massive relative to the rest of the brain; in pre-modern birds and near-bird dinosaurs like Velociraptor, these areas are proportionally much smaller. While Vegavis has features that clearly mark it as being in the same group of waterfowl as ducks and geese, it would have looked very different, says O’Connor. The bird’s beak shape, jaw musculature and hind limbs suggest it was highly specialised for diving in pursuit of fish. “It would probably be easily mistaken for modern grebes or loons, which are only distantly related to ducks and to each other,” he says. Jacqueline Nguyen at the *********** Museum in Sydney says this ancient species has been subject to a lot of debate among avian evolutionary scientists, but the new research helps settle the argument. “Together, [the evidence] suggests that Vegavis looked and foraged quite differently from its duck and geese relatives, and that this may have been an ‘evolutionary experiment’ in the early history of this group of birds,” she says. Topics: Source link #Ancient #relative #geese #earliest #modern #bird Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Google Cloud revenue soars as Alphabet continues to ride AI wave Google Cloud revenue soars as Alphabet continues to ride AI wave Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has committed to continue investing in its cloud arm, as the firm’s fourth-quarter results confirmed Google Cloud’s revenue increased by 30% to $12bn in the three months to 31 December 2024. The year-on-year uptick in Google Cloud’s quarterly revenue was “led by growth” in the company’s core cloud infrastructure offerings, as well as growing demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and generative AI (GenAI) propositions, said Alphabet in its financial statement. The company previously forecast that it would end 2024 with its combined Cloud and YouTube divisions on an annual revenue run rate of more than $100bn, but the performance of both has exceeded expectations, said Pichai. “Our AI-powered Google Cloud portfolio is seeing stronger customer demand, and YouTube continues to be the leader in streaming watch-time and podcasts,” said Pichai, in a statement. “Together, [Google] Cloud and YouTube exited 2024 at an annual revenue run rate of $110bn … we are confident of the opportunities ahead, and to accelerate our progress, we expect to invest approximately $75bn in capital expenditure in 2025.” On a conference call, to discuss the company’s financial results in more detail, Pichai said the company was rolling out products to the market “faster than ever before”, which is reflected in the growing product usage and revenue it is seeing. “Our sophisticated global network of cloud regions and datacentres provides a powerful foundation for us and our customers, directly driving revenue,” he said, in comments transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “We have a unique advantage, because we develop every component of our technology stack, including hardware, compilers, models and products. This approach allows us to drive efficiencies at every level, from training and serving, to developer productivity.” The knock-on effect of this is that the company was able to build 11 new cloud regions and datacentre campuses in the US and the rest of the world in 2024, while making incremental improvements in the performance of the hardware that sits within these facilities during this time *******. “Google datacentres deliver nearly [four times] more computing power per unit of electricity compared to just five years ago. These efficiencies, coupled with the scalability, cost and performance we offer, are why organisations increasingly choose Google Cloud’s platform,” Pichai continued. “In fact, today, cloud customers consume more than [eight times] the compute capacity for training and inferencing compared to 18 months ago. We’ll continue to invest in our cloud business to ensure we can address the increase in customer demand.” On that point, Pichai said the number of “first-time commitments” it received from new Google Cloud customers in 2024 was more than double the number it got in 2023. “We also deepened [our existing] customer relationships,” he added. “Last year, we closed several strategic deals over $1bn, and the number of deals over $250m doubled from the prior year.” Lee Sustar, principal analyst at IT market watcher Forrester, said the way Pichai flagged the performance of Google Cloud and YouTube in its results suggests he is trying to signal to the market and investors that Alphabet’s fortunes are not solely dependent on the company’s search advertising business. “If Google Cloud were a separate company, its AI-driven earnings growth would simply please investors and confirm to customers that the company is a long-term and innovative player for the enterprise IT market,” said Sustar. “However, Google Cloud is part of a complex feedback loop to the rest of the Alphabet portfolio that also requires big investments in AI, such as the ad-driven Search business and YouTube. “That’s apparently why Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai packaged Cloud and YouTube as a combined success story, citing an annual run rate of $110bn – a message to investors that Alphabet is less dependent on search advertising than in the past. “Enterprise business customers looking for long-term bets on AI cloud services will have to take a closer look and assess the investment plans for Google Cloud and is competitors,” added Sustar. Source link #Google #Cloud #revenue #soars #Alphabet #continues #ride #wave Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Grangemouth staff sent redundancy letters ahead of closure Grangemouth staff sent redundancy letters ahead of closure PA Media The oil refinery is expected to close later this year Some workers at the Grangemouth refinery have been sent redundancy letters by their employer Petroineos. The site, which is Scotland’s only oil refinery, is set to close by the summer with the loss of more than 400 jobs. It is understood the majority of workers have agreed voluntary redundancy deals, and job losses will be spread out over the next 18 months. Union leaders had hoped that the central Scotland facility could remain open for longer to provide time for a greener fuel alternative to be established at the site. The Unite union said the move was a “national disgrace” and accused the *** and Scottish governments of being “missing in action” as the closure takes effect. Petroineos said the closure of Grangemouth was due to it being unable to compete with sites in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The company said the decision would “safeguard fuel supply for Scotland” by converting the site into a terminal able to import petrol, diesel, aviation fuel and kerosene into Scotland. The shift is expected to keep around 65 of the roughly 500 jobs on the site. Sharon Graham, general secretary of trade union Unite, said the closure was a “needless act of industrial vandalism”. “There is a clear plan for the future of Grangemouth in place,” she said. “Yet the *** and Scottish governments are missing in action.” Ms Graham suggested Grangemouth could be used to produce sustainable aviation fuel. “Just last week the *** government announced the expansion of Heathrow and said that sustainable air fuel (SAF) will be needed,” she said. “Well, Grangemouth can produce SAF – where is the joined up thinking? “This the moment for the government to lead and stand up to Petroineos in the national interest. Petroineos must allow the transition to SAF and biofuels.” Workers held a rally at the refinery last summer in protest at the plans The *** and Scottish governments have been approached for comment. New distribution hub Petroineos said it expected the new distribution hub for finished fuels to open by early summer. A spokesman said: “The process of safely transitioning the site from a refinery into an import terminal is under way and will continue over a number of months. “Fully winding down and dismantling the refinery is anticipated to take around five years in total, so the new terminal business will operate in parallel with this process.” The Grangemouth refinery was opened by BP in 1924 and expanded into petrochemicals in the 1950s, It is the main supplier of aviation fuel for Scotland’s airports and a major supplier of petrol and diesel ground fuels across the Central Belt. Ineos acquired the site in 2005 and is responsible for the entire plant, while the the refinery itself is owned by Petroineos – a joint venture between Ineos and PetroChina. Source link #Grangemouth #staff #redundancy #letters #ahead #closure Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

WWE 2K25, Like Cody Rhodes, Explores What Comes After You Finish The Story WWE 2K25, Like Cody Rhodes, Explores What Comes After You Finish The Story WWE 2K20 was, in no uncertain terms, an abject disaster. For a series so often insulated in its wrestling fandom bubble, it was trending on social media for a ******* in late 2019 after it launched because of how severe and sometimes hilarious the bugs were. The game was so poorly received that the series actually took a year off. This is practically unheard of in the world of annualized sports (and sports entertainment) games. Since then, WWE 2K has rebounded incredibly over the course of several games. You could argue the WWE 2K series, like Cody Rhodes, finished its story last year, with a great game that does most of what it wants to do very well. Now, like WWE’s poster boy is learning week in and week out, heavy lies the crown. Where does the series go from here? To a great extent, the goal has already been achieved. The belt is around the game’s waist. At the same time, “the story” continues unabated when the next game is perpetually coming down the pipeline, so there’s no opportunity to pause and enjoy the fruits of your labor. After several hours with WWE 2K25, this next chapter seems like another step up, even as what might ultimately conclude the next chapter hasn’t yet been revealed in full. In an annualized video game, like in pro wrestling, the story is never truly over. WWE 2K22 was a “comeback year,” lead combat designer Derek Donahue told me. “We had extra time. There was no 2K21. We also rebuilt the game. We redid so many core systems, but we still hadn’t been able to redo everything we wanted. I think you could look at [2K22], and it’s almost unrecognizable from the engine and the tools that we were working with back on 2K20, especially. But it’s taken many, many years to get to a point where now this feels like our game and the way that we’ve always envisioned being able to work on it and build it.” Donahue spoke to how the last two games helped reshape the culture around the series. “[2K23] was a unique kind of challenge, in the sense that, now we have to do it in a year like we used to, right? We didn’t have the extra time. It was really, really gratifying to pull off what we did with [2K23], especially WarGames and all that. [2K24] was finally, like, ‘Can you repeat it?’ And I feel like we’re at the point where we’ve proven ourselves and said, ‘Hey, we can come back to this annual franchise, make huge improvements each year with the game on its own, standing alone as something that feels good.’ But it also, of course, ups the stakes, because expectations are higher than they’ve ever been, so it’s about meeting those expectations.” From the outside, the perception was that WWE 2K20 fell apart because Yuke’s, the Japanese studio making WWE games since 2000, left the series, and the team that remained wasn’t able to overcome that absence. Donahue told me that’s not exactly the case. More accurately, the team that would replace Yuke’s didn’t really exist yet. “Yuke’s made the game for, like, 20 years,” Donahue said. “It’s a huge amount of institutional knowledge they have. And the goals that we had when setting out from 2K20 and beyond were to modernize a lot of systems. I think when a game gets as big as ours is, it is an extremely hard challenge to take something that works now, but needs to be rebuilt to do something for tomorrow; it takes so many resources, and you have to pick and choose what you’re going to do, and to do that in an individual year just seemed insurmountable. “So it was a huge change in the way that we work on the game, and what goals we are setting, and what expectations we have for ourselves and for the product. To bring everything in-house was a massive effort. When we worked with Yuke’s, it was like 20-something people in our office, including designers, producers, some entrance cutscene animators, but almost everything else was happening across the world with the people who we spoke with and translated emails and had weekly meetings with, but it was so disconnected from our work and made it really challenging. Intergender matches are finally playable, so you can pit Rhea against Dom in any kind of match you prefer… or even all of them. “We always knew we wanted to be able to sit next to an engineer and work with somebody in the same office and collaborate in a way in which we knew we’d be able to do so much more. But the gulf between where we were and where we wanted to be was so vast, and so it’s really taken this time for us to finally get to this point.” One of the new features in this year’s game is the third-person camera controls. Whereas past games allowed you to present matches from the real-life hardcam angle or the retro-inspired entrance-facing camera, this year’s game also gives you the option to dynamically control the angle at any time using the right stick. In moments when you need the right stick to perform something in-game other than adjusting the camera, like pinning or turning an opponent, you just hold down the right trigger while you use it, like the shift key on a computer performing a secondary function. Since the right trigger wasn’t mapped to anything before anyway, the effect was a seamless new toy that enhanced the many matches I played, giving me directorial control of how each match was presented. It’s interesting to note that the team originally built this feature for entrances, but when they liked it so much, they decided to apply it to the matches themselves, too. The third-person camera is especially useful in backstage brawls, as I could swing the camera around a full 360 degrees and better see and utilize the space in settings new and old, like when I found I could climb up several structures in the WWE Archives and throw my opponent to the floor far below like he was doing a forced Mick Foley impression. I’d overlooked that space until I opted to change the camera settings during the match. With the camera’s aid, my match was better off for it, translating into more stars in the game’s Meltzer-like rating system. It’s not the exciting new feature the marketing team plans to lead with, assumedly, but in practice, I expect players to come to really appreciate it, and many will prefer it as their go-to option. It’s a subtle but satisfying change to a game building on a much sturdier foundation these days. However, the more broadly exciting additions to the game are–as they often are–the Showcase mode and new match types. I played three Showcase matches, which this year highlights the Anoa’i wrestling dynasty. This includes current superstars like Roman Reigns and Nia Jax, as well as past legends like The Rock and The Wild Samoans. Showcase is WWE 2K’s annual history lesson and reliably a great time. The Bloodline Showcase arrives just as Jacob Fatu’s meteoric rise feels like it’s hitting a new speed. I was disappointed to see the seamless transitions from gameplay to real-life stock footage from the matches have been removed, but I learned there are a few reasons for that. For one, the team said players largely didn’t like that feature–that’s absurd to me, but I can understand being in the ********* on that one means I won’t get my way. Another reason that aspect isn’t on display in 2K25 is because Showcase features some fantasy matches we never got to see in real life, like The Wild Samoans taking on The Dudley Boyz in a tables match. More noticeably absent from the Showcase mode is Brock Lesnar, who is such a major chapter in the story of cover star Roman Reigns that you can sometimes see the game skirting around his existence for the second year in a row, like when a cutscene tells the story of Seth Rollins’ famous cash-in at WrestleMania 31. Rollins pinned and had more of a feud with Reigns, but Lesnar was in that match, too, and he’s entirely missing from the cutscene–not to suggest I want him there. It’s just notable when the 2K team has to dodge-roll away from some of the wrestling company’s past scandals. Still, I’m greatly looking forward to this mode, as I found last year’s WrestleMania-focused match list to have filled in some of my knowledge gaps as a fan, and I have no doubt this year’s will do that with The Bloodline family tree, too. It also helps that it’s all narrated by Paul Heyman. Based on what I saw, Heyman is giving his fullest effort, not at all phoning it in. I don’t think the man even knows how. Though the new Showcase, new match types like Underground and Bloodline Rules, and other recently announced WWE 2K25 features all seem to build on last year’s game in ways players are going to appreciate, my most anticipated feature of this year’s game is rather simple: the addition of online multiplayer in GM mode. Equivalent to something like an Owner mode in NBA 2K or Madden, GM mode asks that you book shows, manage production, and run your roster–and to do it all so well that you actually defeat the competition–in this case, expressed as cross-company rivalries like Smackdown, Raw, and NXT, rather than something like AEW. Of those I saw while playing the game, character models look excellent and, in many cases, are clearly improved from last year’s. GM mode is already where I spend the majority of my time with the game. I love to make stars out of those who aren’t yet at that level in reality, putting my own stamp on the WWE Universe. The prospect of playing it with three others online likely ensures I spend even more time in the mode this year. I’m eager to see how things like drafts and trades are implemented, but if done well, WWE 2K25’s online GM mode might be my new favorite sports league I’m a part of–and there are already a few of those in my life. With another interesting Showcase subject, fun new match types, and subtly cool new camera controls, I really liked what I played of WWE 2K25. There’s a lot more to see, including several major modes like the narrative-driven MyRise, and the card-collecting MyFaction, and possibly the most impactful of them all: the new social space called The Island, so I’ll reserve my final opinion for when I review the game later this year. But what I played gives the community more of what they want on top of a much sturdier foundation than the series had just a few short years ago. I have more questions to answer for myself, and I’ll get to them before I’ve published my review, but as any patient wrestling fan would suggest, for now, I’ll let it play out. Source link #WWE #2K25 #Cody #Rhodes #Explores #Finish #Story Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

New type of brain cell may tell us when to stop eating New type of brain cell may tell us when to stop eating Manipulating a type of neuron may make snacks easier to resist 5m3photos/Getty Images Neurons in the brains of mice tell them to stop eating when they’ve had enough food – and since people probably have the same cells, we might one day manipulate them to help treat obesity. “The major question that we were seeking to answer was how the brain senses and responds to different signals,” says Alexander Nectow at Columbia University in New York. To learn more, he and his colleagues used a type of molecular profiling to distinguish between different cell types in the brains of mice. In the dorsal raphe nucleus – a part of the brainstem linked to functions including eating, mood and sleep – they came across cells that produce a hormone called cholecystokinin, which helps regulate appetite. To study what these cells are sensing to kick them into action, the researchers measured their activity as the mice went about their day. “Every time the animals went for a bite of food, the activity ramped up and then decayed,” says Nectow. “We are able to show that these neurons sense things like the smell and sight of food, the taste of food, the sensation of food in the gut and the neural hormones that are released in response to food in the gut, and leverage that information to actually terminate a meal.” Next, the researchers used a technique called optogenetics, which involves engineering the neurons so they could be switched on and off with light. When they used light to activate them, the mice slowed down their eating. The more intense the activation, the faster the animals slowed and then stopped. Because the neurons sit in the brainstem, an ancestral feature that is similar across vertebrates, Nectow thinks we probably also have them. “Even though we haven’t confirmed it, my guess would be that humans have these neurons, certainly.” The team also found that the mouse neurons could be activated by a compound called a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist, a type of drug used to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes, the most familiar being semaglutide, sold under brand names such as Ozempic and Wegovy. If these neurons have the same function in people, we could in theory modulate them to control eating habits in those with obesity or even combine this approach with GLP-1 based drugs, to achieve greater weight loss, says Nectow. “Understanding the circuitry that governs the cessation of eating is particularly important in environments of almost ubiquitous food availability,” says Jeff Davies at Swansea University, ***. “The authors used an elegant method to identify these important cell populations.” Topics: Source link #type #brain #cell #stop #eating Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

2 Solar Stocks Heating Up for a Major Industry Rebound 2 Solar Stocks Heating Up for a Major Industry Rebound With the Trump administration back in the White House, investors would believe that renewable energy would be a losing game under the “Drill, baby, drill” policies. Trump’s efforts to revoke Biden-era policies like the electric vehicle (EV) mandate assume the clean energy theme is doomed on Wall Street. On the contrary, solar stocks started the year with solid gains, even outscoring the computer and technology sector leaders. Some winners are not solar panels but devices that make them more efficient. Here are two solar stocks heating up for an industry rebound. 1. Nextracker: Intelligent Solar Trackers To Make Solar Panels More Efficient A weakness of solar panels (photovoltaic panels) angled in one stationary position in fixed-tilt systems is their inefficiency when the sun moves throughout the day. To help optimize energy production, Nextracker Inc (NASDAQ:) designs and manufactures utility-scale intelligent solar trackers that follow the sun throughout the day to increase the energy capture of solar panels by 20% to 30%. They are the global market leader in intelligent solar trackers augmented with their machine learning-optimized TrueCapture tracking software. Solid Beat and Raise as Backlog Swells to a Record $4.5 Billion On Jan 28, 2025, Nextracker reported fiscal Q3 2025 EPS of $1.03, crushing consensus analyst estimates by 45 cents. Revenues fell 4.4% YoY to $679 million, beating $646.02 million consensus estimates. The company increased its record backlog to $4.5 billion, driven by robust demand in all key regions with meaningful contributions from new products. Nextracker expanded its manufacturing and supply chain to over 70 partners operating over 90 facilities across 19 countries, totaling 50 GW of capacity annually. The company also shipped its first 100% U.S. domestically produced solar trackers. Sunny Days Ahead as Company Raises Guidance for Fiscal 2025 Nextracker raised their fiscal full-year EPS to $3.75 to $3.95, up from the previous guide of $3.10 to $3.30, versus $3.27 consensus estimates. The company issued upside fiscal full year 2025 revenue of $2.8 billion to $2.9 billion versus $2.85 billion. GAAP net income was raised from $467 million to $497 million, up from the previous forecast of $376 million to $408 million. Adjusted EBITDA was raised to $700 million to $740 million from $625 million to $665 million. Nextracker CEO Dan Shugar commented, “In the quarter, we successfully deployed several of our newly launched products and features at scale, expanding our total addressable market. In addition, we continue to increase our investment in R&D to drive rapid customer-centric innovation, ensuring our solutions remain at the forefront of solar technology while driving value for stakeholders worldwide.” 2. Array: An Underdog Bet for Solar Tracking Speculators While Nextracker is the dominant leader and gold standard in solar trackers, Array Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:) stands as a strong runner-up. The company’s sales are a third of Nextracker’s, but if Nextracker is any indication of the industry, then Array could also partake in the upswing. While Nextracker arrays use independent rows with a balanced mechanical design, Array’s DuraTrack is designed with a single-axis tracker with a centralized drive system, which can be more cost-effective for flatter terrains. The Other Side of the Coin On Nov 7, 2024, Array Technologies reported its fiscal Q3 2025 EPS of 17 cents, beating consensus estimates by 4 cents. Revenue fell a whopping 34% YoY to $231.41 million, missing consensus estimates of $232.69 million. Its backlog was at $2 billion, with 20% of the orders for OmniTrack. Interconnection and permitting delays are some of the headwinds in the United States, but the financing environment is improving in 2025. Array Technologies issued downside guidance for fiscal 2025 EPS of 60 cents to 65 cents versus 68 cents consensus estimates. Revenues are expected between $900 million to $920 million versus $945.06 million. Tariff-Proofed Solar Trackers Made in America Array Technologies CEO Kevin Hostetler reiterated their commitment to production in the United States, “Additionally, a significant portion of orders in our domestic order book includes customers evaluating domestic content, and we remain confident in our ability to provide 100% domestic trackers. Our high-probability pipeline remains robust, and we are greatly encouraged by the overall momentum in the business,” This makes their solar trackers basically tariff-proof under the Trump tariffs. Original Post Source link #Solar #Stocks #Heating #Major #Industry #Rebound Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Prisoners swapped as Ukraine says 45,100 troops killed Prisoners swapped as Ukraine says 45,100 troops killed Ukraine has brought back 150 troops from Russian captivity, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says in an announcement of the latest prisoner swap with Russia. “All of them are from different sectors of the front … Some of the boys were held captive for more than two years,” he said on Telegram. Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday exchanged 150 prisoners of war each after mediation by the United Arab Emirates, the Russian defence ministry said. It said all of the freed Russians were currently in Belarus, where they were receiving psychological and medical assistance. Prisoner exchanges have been running smoothly despite the lack of substantial talks on a peace solution to the war. Today is a good day for all of us. We are bringing home 150 of our defenders from Russian captivity. These are soldiers, sergeants, and officers – warriors of the Navy who were taken prisoner in Mariupol and the Zaporizhzhia region, warriors of the Air Force, Air Assault Forces,… pic.twitter.com/FScWB1303p— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) February 5, 2025 Ukraine had lost 45,100 soldiers on the battlefield since Russia’s all-out invasion began nearly three years ago, Zelenskiy said in an interview with *** journalist Piers Morgan published on YouTube. Zelenskiy put the number of injured soldiers at 390,000. The figures cannot be independently confirmed. While both Ukraine and Russia report enemy losses daily, they rarely disclose their own casualty numbers. It is generally accepted that both sides play down their own losses and exaggerate those of the enemy. US and European intelligence services estimate up to 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers and more than twice as many Russian soldiers have died in the conflict. In addition, there are thousands of civilian casualties, mainly on the Ukrainian side. Zelenskiy also said he is willing to enter into direct negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the interview with Morgan. In addition to Ukraine and Russia, the United States and Europe should also be involved in the talks, Zelenskiy said. It was unclear whether Zelenskiy was referring to the European Union or to individual member countries. “If this is the only way to bring peace to the people of Ukraine and to avoid further loss of life, we will definitely go to this meeting with these four participants,” he said. “I will not be nice to him, I consider him an enemy, and frankly I think he considers me an enemy too,” Zelensky said. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov quickly dismissed Zelenskiy’s comments as “empty talk,” telling the Russian state news agency TASS that the Ukrainian president had banned himself from negotiating with Putin. Peskov was referring to a decree signed by Zelenskiy in September 2022, after Russia annexed the four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. While the decree does not prohibit negotiations with the Russian leader, it states that they are impossible in view of the situation. Zelenskiy recently said the document was intended to prevent potential separatism because Russia was looking for unofficial communication channels with Ukraine at that time. Russian authorities said on Wednesday that a Ukrainian drone attack had set a fuel depot on fire in the southern Krasnodar region. Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev wrote on Telegram that the drone attack had been repelled but that debris fell on a tank and sparked a fire. Authorities said that the fire had been extinguished and there were no casualties. The Ukrainian general staff later confirmed the attack. with DPA Source link #Prisoners #swapped #Ukraine #troops #killed Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]