Watch the OnePlus 5 launch event live — June 20 at 12:00 p.m. ET!

It’s tough to wait — but we’re almost there.

We’re ever-so-close to the launch of the OnePlus 5, and we’ll be able to see it all unveiled via an online-only launch event on June 20. The whole thing kicks off at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET / 4:00 p.m. GMT, and you can watch it live below.

As the event comes to a close, be ready to check out the OnePlus website for details on pre-ordering the phone, as they’re likely to announce availability information during the event.

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Raids are coming to Pokémon Go, here’s what you need to know!

Pokémon Go Gyms are dead. Long like Pokémon Go Gyms!

Niantic is killing the Gym system in Pokémon Go, and replacing it with a more complex and interactive system. The actual Gym locations aren’t going anywhere, but it’s clear you’re going to be spending a lot more time to stay at the top of the increasingly complicated (and cooperative) system in place.

Here’s what we know so far about the new Gyms, and the more interesting Raids system coming to live on top of them.

Meet the new Pokémon Go Gym

First things first — Pokémon Go Gyms will now also have PokeStop discs on them, meaning every five minutes you can spin them for more items to use in the game. This is especially good news for rural areas, where Pokémon Go content is more spread out and less easy to walk to.

The days of stacking five Blissey on a Gym to ensure your team maintains control are over. Niantic has removed that system from the game entirely, and a new system will take its place shortly. In this new system, only one version of any Pokémon can live at a Gym simultaneously. If you put a Tyranitar on a Gym, no one else will be able to as long as it is there.

Gym battles are changing as well. Instead of fighting Pokémon from lowest CP to highest, you’ll be fighting in the order they were placed at the Gym. In theory, this means you might fight the strongest Pokémon placed at a Gym first, which would make taking down a Gym by yourself a bit more challenging.

Perhaps most important, Gyms will now give you badges for continued participation.

Every time you defeat any one Pokémon, however, that creature loses something called Motivation. As Motivation decreases, the CP of that Pokémon temporarily decreases as well. Trainers can keep Pokémon motivated by feeding berries, which means trainers can interact with a Gym remotely instead of needing to be right there. When Motivation is completely lost, that Pokémon returns to its trainer.

Finally, and perhaps most important, Gyms will now give you badges for continued participation. These badges can be leveled up based on your continued participation, and the badges will offer rewards based on the current level.

Raids are coming

The whole reason Niantic is retooling Gyms is to prepare for Raids. If you watched the initial launch trailer for Pokémon Go, you saw a section where multiple Pokémon Trainers were working together to fight a MewTwo. That obviously doesn’t exist in the game right now, and Raids are how this is being addressed. Here’s what we know so far!

• Raid Bosses clear a Gym: When a Raid Boss shows up, all of the Pokémon at that Gym will be sent back to Trainers. After the Raid Boss leaves, the fight to control that Gym restarts anew.
• You need a Raid Pass: If you want to participate in a Raid, you need a Raid Pass. The PokeStop at the Gym will give you one for free each day, but you can only hold one Raid Pass at a time. The Shop will have Premium Raid Passes, which will let you battle at any Raid.
• Raids support up to 20 trainers: It doesn’t matter what team you are on, you will all be able to work together to take down a Raid Boss.
• Victory means unique rewards: If you successfully take down a Raid Boss, unique rewards like exclusive candies and berries will be available to your whole Raid team.
• You can catch a Raid Boss: If your Raid Team successfully defeats the boss within the five minute limit, you’ll have a one-time chance to catch a less powerful variant of this unique Pokémon. This is undoubtedly how Niantic will introduce Legendary and Shiny Pokémon into the game.

Raid Rewards will be important

Catching a Legendary Pokémon will be pretty sweet, but the other rewards promised will make your day-to-day gameplay a lot more interesting. Niantic is promising Rare Candies and Golden Razz Berries to help lure and power up these Legendary Pokémon, but there will also be Technical Machines added to the game.

Technical Machines teach your Pokémon new attacks, which means you can improve your Pokémon by teaching them new Fast or Charged attacks with these machines. This takes the random element from evolving a Pokémon and gives you a little more control, which makes a big difference with the new Gym system.

Get ready for a whole new Pokémon Go

These changes radically change how the combat aspect of this game is handled right now, and sets the ground floor for a lot of important new features. Being able to change the attack capabilities with Technical Machines sets up ideal environments for the often-rumored breeding and trading systems, and being able to help your Pokémon stay motivated at a Gym means it will be more important than ever for teams to work together to take down hotly contested Gyms in most areas.

If you’ve stopped playing Pokémon Go, now is the time to get back into it. If you never stopped, now is the time to make sure all of your Pokémon are prepared for the new Raids system. Are you excited?

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OnePlus had a lot of interesting early OnePlus 5 designs

From OnePlus 3.5 to Huawei P10 to iPhone 7 Plus.

With the OnePlus 5 just a day away from being announced, the company is getting a bit looser with its trickle of details.

The company gave The Verge access to its Shenzhen facilities to talk about the new phone and its manufacturing process, and one of the interesting things to emerge from the interview was a glimpse at some of the early dual camera prototype designs before settling on the final form we’ve seen in recent renders.

Some early designs of the OnePlus 5. Image credit: The Verge

It’s interesting to see the progression of the dual camera design, which for a time was centered down the middle similar to last year’s OnePlus 3, or integrated into a piece of top glass aligning the top like the Huawei P10.

What the company (never) settled for is a design that pays homage to the iPhone 7 Plus without mirroring it exactly, since it has softer, more rounded corners and a narrower frame.

The whole piece is pretty interesting, so take a look over at The Verge.

Pokemon Go summer update: Raid Battles, Gym changes and more special items to collect

Pokemon Go is about to undergo a huge update that will make the game a lot more dynamic around Gyms and battles, as well as introducing proper collaborative play.

Gyms are going to be shaken to the ground and redesigned to really put the emphasis on collaborative team play, giving you rewards for visiting gyms controlled by your team. Like Poke Stops, you’ll be able to spin the photo disc to collect items from Gyms.

There will also be 6 permanent slots for gyms (although it’s not clear if this changes as the Gym levels up), and rather than battling the controlling Pokemon in order of CP, you’ll now battle them in the order that they joined the gym. That should, at least, stop the weakest always being knocked out straight away. 

There will also be a restriction on the type of Pokemon in the Gym, so you can’t have 6 Lapras sitting there. 

Rather than the Prestige system that’s been in place for the last year, Gyms will now use a motivation system. As Pokemon fight and lose, they will slowly lose motivation and their CP will dip along with it. For those who are visiting a friendly gym, you’ll have the opportunity to use berries to boost those defenders and help keep the Gym for your team. 

There’s also going to be Gym Badges that you can collect for getting involved the Gyms, suggesting that people are currently more interested in collecting Pokemon than battling. 

Looking to boost the social side of the game, there will be a new boss battle mode, called Raid Battles. This will place a powerful defender in a Gyms as an in-game event, giving people the chance to team up and take down the Raid Boss. This will let you win special items as well as give you the chance to catch those Pokemon. 

You’ll be able to see that a Raid Battle is about to take place, because an egg will appear at the top of a Gym, with a countdown timer. This is the countdown to the start of the battle. You’ll need a Raid Pass to be able to take part and you can collect one Raid Pass a day from Gyms. You’ll also be able to buy premium passes in the Shop. 

As well as these in-game events, you’ll also be able to create Private Raids, so that you can run these battles with your friends.

To enable this to happen Gyms will be closing, as we previously reported, while these changes take place. There’s no precise timeline, but Gyms will be closing from 19 June, with a phased roll-out of the new features in the coming weeks.

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Seaweed could be the key to long-lasting electric car batteries

Lithium-sulfur batteries are theoretically ideal for powering gadgets. They have more than twice the energy density of lithium-ion packs, but at a much lower cost thanks to sulfur’s dirt-cheap price. There’s just one problem: sulfur dissolves, giving the battery a short lifespan. That’s where Berkeley Lab might help. It recently discovered that a derivative of red seaweed, carrageenan, can stabilize a lithium-sulfur battery and make it practical for more devices. If you use the seaweed derivative as a binder (the “glue” that keeps a battery’s active materials together), it reacts with the sulfur and prevents it from dissolving. The ultimate goal is to produce cells that last for “thousands” of charging cycles, or better than many batteries you see today.

Some of the practical benefits are immediately evident. Your phone could last much longer on a charge even as the price went down. However, the researchers are eager to point out the potential uses in transportation. As lithium-sulfur is lighter than lithium-ion, it’s ideal for drones and other electric aircraft. The technology could also prove to be a minor miracle for electric cars. GM is one of Berkeley Lab’s partners, so it’s easy to imagine the Chevy Bolt maker using lithium-sulfur in future EVs that are both more affordable and drive much further on a charge.

The gotcha? It’s still quite early. The team needs to understand more about how the derivative interacts with sulfur, and whether or not it’s reversible if necessary. It may be a long while before you see a lithium-sulfur battery on the road or in your pocket. All the same, it’s notable that the technology is even on the roadmap. We’ve seen many promises of longer-lasting batteries, but the low-cost nature of this solution should give it a better shot at reaching real-world products.

Source: Berkeley Lab, ScienceDirect

Supermassive black hole dust is denser than we thought

The majority of galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their core. And, like our own Milky Way version, most of these black holes are relatively quiet. However, a minority of supermassive black holes are incredibly active, consuming dust, gas, and other matter at an extraordinary rate and emitting large amounts of energy. Scientists call these black holes active galactic nuclei.

Generally, these active galactic nuclei all look the same, with a donut-shaped ring of dust, or a torus, surrounding the black hole. Now, scientists have determined that the tori around active supermassive black holes are actually much smaller than originally theorized. The study will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The team used the SOFIA telescope (a Boeing 747SP modified to carry a 100-inch diameter telescope) to examine the infrared emissions of 11 different active galactic nuclei over 100 million miles away. They discovered that the peak infrared emissions are at even longer wavelengths and that the tori are more compact, to the tune of 30%, than scientists originally thought.

While this is certainly an interesting observation, it has larger implications for future detection and observation of black holes. By pinpointing these longer wavelengths that tori absorb and reemit energy at, scientists are able to determine the best way to observe them. Water vapor actually obscures these longer wavelengths within the Earth’s atmosphere, so future work on active galactic nuclei should be mostly conducted through SOFIA or other telescopes that operate above our planet’s water vapor. The team’s next step is to determine whether all of these emissions indeed originate from tori, or whether there’s something else within the structure of active galactic nuclei that is responsible for part of these signals.

Via: NASA

Source: arXiv.org

GOP-hired data company leaked information on 198 million citizens

Data from the largely conservative Deep Root Analytics, a company that strategizes how to target audiences for political advertisements, was exposed this month. Information on nearly 200 million US citizens, over 60 percent of the population, was contained in the leak.

Discovered by an analyst with the cybersecurity company UpGuard, the data was stored on a publicly accessible Amazon server. More than a terabyte of that data was not password protected. The data included citizens’ contact information, addresses, birthdays, and analyses used to predict how they felt about controversial political topics like gun control and abortion.

The Republican National Committee paid Deep Root nearly a million dollars last year for their work during the election. While some of the data came from Deep Root itself, a lot of it was aggregated from outside sources such as other data firms, Republican super PACs, and even Reddit. One subreddit the company compiled data from was the now banned r/fatpeoplehate, which according to FiveThirtyEight is where a lot of r/The_Donald subreddit members spent time when not discussing politics.

The exposure occurred when Deep Root updated its security settings at the beginning of the month and the company has hired a cybersecurity firm to investigate the issue. But the company doesn’t think any malicious parties accessed the data during the 12 days that it was exposed. In a statement, Deep Root said, “Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access.”

“While the scale and significance of this data exposure is nearly unprecedented, misconfigurations of the type that rendered the database public are not. With cyber risk increasingly endemic on all digital platforms, this exposure is a reminder that we must all begin fostering cyber resilience, or risk a future of these kinds of breaches,” said UpGuard in a statement.

Source: Gizmodo

Niantic Reveals Major Pokémon Go Update With Revamped Gyms, Co-op Raid Battles Coming Soon

Niantic and The Pokémon Company today revealed an all-new gym system heading to the popular mobile app Pokémon Go soon, as well as announcing a new cooperative “Raid Battle” update coming in the future. For gyms, the developer said that its goal was to encourage more players to head to friendly gyms because now they’ll be able to interact with them in new ways.

Notably, gyms will now act as PokéStops and include a spinnable disc that gives players unique items like Poké Balls. The basic structure of a gym is being altered as well, so now six Pokémon can occupy a gym and each one must be unique, preventing duplicates of the same Pokémon from appearing multiple times in one gym battle. Enemy teams will battle these Pokémon in the order they were added to the Gym, not in the order of their combat power as before.

Pokémon will also need to be motivated to stay inside a gym with the new “motivation system.” Over time, each Pokémon will lose motivation naturally and as they are defeated in battle, temporarily lowering its combat power so enemy teams will be able to more easily defeat the gym. To help keep up a Pokémon’s motivation, friendly team members can feed it berries.

Niantic said that all of these updates will feed into the new gym badges system as well, which will reward players for taking part in battles and feeding berries to Pokémon.

Now you’ll be able to earn Gym Badges when interacting with the many Gyms around the world. Gym Badges serve as mementos of your Pokémon GO adventures and reflect your contribution to a Gym’s success.

You’ll be able to level up your Badges by battling, giving Berries to the Pokémon in the Gym and spinning the Gym’s Photo Disc. You can earn the opportunity to receive bonus items and increased rewards from Gyms by raising the level of your Gym Badge.

In the coming weeks, players will be able to take on new “Raid Battles” at gyms, which Niantic described as a cooperative experience that forces trainers to work together to take down a Raid Boss. Before a Raid Battle begins, Pokémon at the gym in question will return to their trainers and a large egg will appear on top of the gym with a countdown clock.

When the countdown reaches zero the Raid Boss is revealed and players will be able to take on the challenge as long as they have a Raid Pass, which can be obtained each day by visiting a Gym, but only one can be held at a time. Up to twenty players can be in a Raid Battle at once, working together to take down the boss, similar to the original announcement trailer for the game back in 2015.

If the boss is defeated in under five minutes, each participant will have a chance to catch an “extra powerful Pokémon,” as well as a few new items.

After defeating a Raid Boss, you’ll receive a collection of rewards, including some new items obtained only by defeating a Raid Boss: Rare Candies, Golden Razz Berries, and two types of Technical Machines—Fast and Charged. A Rare Candy is a mysterious candy that, when used on a Pokémon, turns into that Pokémon’s Candy. Golden Razz Berries will greatly increase your chances of catching a Pokémon you encounter in the wild and can also be given to a Pokémon assigned to a Gym to fully recover its motivation meter. Technical Machines are items you can use to permanently teach a Pokémon a new Fast Attack or Charged Attack.

Niantic said that the gym update will begin rolling out to players around the world “very soon” (until then, gyms are disabled in the game), and Raid Battles will show up over the next few weeks, beginning in beta form. Recently, Niantic revealed some events occurring out in the real world to celebrate the one year anniversary of the app, which debuted in July of 2016, while Niantic CEO John Hanke commented on Apple’s upcoming ARKit developer platform and how it will change Pokémon Go and AR apps in general.

Tag: Pokémon GO
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Atari confirms it’s working on a new console, possibly called Ataribox

After releasing a teaser for a new product called the Ataribox, Atari CEO Fred Chesnais has confirmed to GamesBeat that the retro games company is working on a new console. Without giving away too many details about the console, Chesnais simply said: “We’re back in the hardware business”.

Atari posted a video of what appeared to be console-like device with a wood-grain surface and slatted black plastic top last week. The video is titled “First look: A brand new Atari product. Years in the making.”

A very simple website for the Ataribox is also now live, but it merely shows the short teaser video and absolutely nothing else. We hoped it would appear at E3, but unfortunately nothing was announced.

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Whilst Atari has mainly stuck to republishing classic titles, licensing out its name, and developing random, one-off, Atari-branded products, the confirmation that a new console is on the way has come as a bit of a surprise. 

However, with the announcement of the Xbox One X at E3, and 4K gaming in general becoming more popular, will a new Atari-branded console be able to tug the nostalgia strings enough for it to be a success?

Varjo promises a VR headset with ‘human eye-resolution’

A Finnish company called Varjo that has been working in secret until now has unveiled a new type of VR and AR headset code-named “20/20.” It supposedly has a display with “human eye-resolution” quality of over 70 megapixels versus around 1.2 megapixels per eye for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Varjo (which means “shadow” in Finnish), says it achieves that feat using “patented technology that replicates how the human eye naturally works, creating a super-high-resolution image to the users gaze direction.” It was supposedly developed by scientists that “formerly occupied top positions at Microsoft, Nokia, Intel, NVIDIA and Rovio.” While the resolution is much higher than current headsets, the 100-degree field of view is the same.

The headset also uses video see-through technology for “unparalleled AR and MR capabilities,” Varjo says. In an early beta video, they showed rendered objects like cars, planets and free-form artwork overlaid on top of a real room, much like Microsoft’s Hololens or the so-far-unreleased Magic Leap AR headset.

So how does it work? The information is pretty vague, but Varjo says it combined a context display, focus display, optical combiner and gaze tracker into a “bionic display” for human-eye resolution in VR, AR and XR. The company adds that the system has low computing requirements thanks to “foveated eye tracking.”

We take that to mean that the 70-megapixel resolution is limited to what you’re looking directly at, while anything in your peripheral vision renders at a lower resolution. That’s just a guess, however, as the company hasn’t even showed what the headset itself looks like. It did show off some images that come with it, though, and as you can see above, they’re of significantly higher resolution than the Oculus Rift or Vive, something that would no doubt make the VR and AR experience more immersive.

Varjo says its tech “pushes VR technology 10 years ahead of the current state-of-the-art,” but there are a lot of questions left unanswered, such as the latency, frame rate and how they plan to produce and display content at such a high resolution. As it stands now, it takes a reasonably high-end PC to view content on a Vive or Rift.

Hopefully we’ll know more soon and get a demo, as the company has promised to ship “Varjo-branded products specifically for professional users and applications starting in late Q4, 2017.”