Get your first glimpse of ‘Spelunky 2’

Spelunky 2 exists! And, really that’s about all we know aside from the game potentially taking place in the sky, and you playing as the unnamed original protagonist’s daughter a la (spoiler warning) Uncharted 4. Check out the trailer below and see if you can unravel any other clues. The first game was available on practically every platform, and was a driving force behind taking the roguelike subgenre as close to mainstream as it’ll probably get.

Follow all the latest news from Sony’s PlayStation event here!

The ‘Infamous’ team is working on a Samurai game

Sucker Punch Productions, the studio behind the Infamous series, is building a new open-world game set in the mountains of ancient Japan: Ghost of Tsushima. So far, we’ve only seen a cinematic trailer for the new title, but it gives away a few clues: Ghost of Tsushima is set in 1247, and it focuses on Samurai life and swordplay, featuring a calculating and cruel villain intent on conquering the land.

Ghost of Tsushima is a departure for Sucker Punch. Infamous is a decidedly sci-fi kind of story, starring super-powered humans and lots of neon light. Ghost of Tsushima appears to be more serious in tone.

Sony revealed Ghost of Tsushima during its Paris Games Week event today. Sucker Punch is a subsidiary of Sony, so it’s safe to expect Ghost of Tsushima for PlayStation 4 some time in the future.

Play as Aloy from ‘Horizon: Zero Dawn’ in ‘Monster Hunter’ on PS4

Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of this year’s best games, hands down. But if you wanted to hunt flesh and blood monsters as Aloy it fell short. Not that taking down robo-dinosaurs wasn’t cool, it’s just that sometimes when you wanna fell a T rex-looking creature, you jut want to fell one that bleeds. Well, you’ll be able to do that in Monster Hunter: World. PlayStation 4 owners will be able to play through the game as the bad-ass ginger huntress as a bonus when the game releases worldwide January 26th.

Monster Hunter: World x Aloy?! One more reason to gear up January 26. #PlayStationPGW pic.twitter.com/4BR6Cp2t8t

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) October 30, 2017

Follow all the latest news from Sony’s PlayStation event here!

The first ‘Destiny 2’ expansion arrives December 5th

You won’t have to twiddle your thumbs too long before Destiny 2’s first expansion arrives. Bungie has announced that Curse of Osiris will be available on December 5th, and has unveiled a trailer to show what it’s all about. (Heads-up: the video includes a big spoiler for the game’s original campaign.) As hinted earlier, you’re traveling to Mercury to reunite with Osiris, a banished member of the Vanguard, to prevent the Vex from opening a time gate that will let them amass an army that could reshape the universe.

Not surprisingly, the DLC will give you much more to see of Mercury than you see in Destiny 2 right now, or even the first game. You’ll also learn more about Osiris than you ever did in the first title, where he was really just the pretext for the Trials of Osiris game mode. And yes, Bungie is determined to maintain the richer storytelling that Destiny 2 brought to the table.

There’s no mention of a price for the expansion, although those who bought an Expansion Pass (included in deluxe versions of Destiny 2) are already covered. As for the second, currently unnamed expansion? Bungie will only say that it’s coming in spring 2018. Either way, it’s clear that the studio is largely repeating the strategy it took during Destiny’s first year: offer a regular stream of fresh content to keep you engaged and whet your appetite for the larger releases in the pipeline.

Source: PlayStation (Twitter), (YouTube)

‘The Last of Us: Part II’ doesn’t shy away from violence and gore

The Last of Us: Part II is a violent game. At least, that’s the message Naughty Dog and Sony broadcast this morning when they debuted a new cinematic trailer at Paris Games Week. In the video, a woman is dragged to a campsite where corpses hang from trees, their stomachs cut open and intestines spilling out. By firelight, the captors place a noose around the woman’s neck and nearly slice open her own gut — until one of her allies is caught nearby.

The newcomer spits in the face of the camp’s leader, who smoothly responds, “Clip her wings.” Her henchmen grab a hammer and get to work on one of their captive’s arms. The “wings” are a reference to the Fireflies, the game’s revolutionary group.

Arrows fly, gunshots ring out and the revolutionaries prevail, though there’s no sign of Joel or Ellie, the main characters in the original game. Sony has yet to announce when The Last of Us: Part II will land, but when it does, don’t expect it to pull many punches.

Explore PlayStation 4’s ‘Detroit: Become Human’ next spring

At E3 this year we finally got to play the latest game from David Cage and Quantic Dream, Detroit: Become Human, but didn’t have an idea of when we’d get to do so at home. That’s changed a bit. Along with a powerful new trailer showing what happens when one of the game’s androids witnesses domestic violence, now we know that the game will come out sometime next spring. That’s soon!

For as complicated as the premise is (choose-your-own-adventure meets perma-death and a story about the decline of the human race), the trailer illustrates exactly what the game is capable of in under four minutes. If that isn’t impressive enough, maybe the game’s character models and potentially harrowing emotional moments will be more to your liking. Either way, we don’t have too much longer to wait.

Follow all the latest news from Sony’s PlayStation event here!

Heathrow Airport security documents found on random USB stick

At this point we’re all pretty numb to data breaches that expose the personal details of millions, but it’s been a while since we’ve heard about sensitive info being physically misplaced. Heathrow Airport said it’s begun an internal investigation after an errant USB stick was found on a street in west London that contained intimate details of security practices at the transport hub.

Finding the USB stick on a pavement in the Queen’s Park area, a curious man discovered 2.5GB of data, unencrypted and otherwise unprotected, concerning security at the airport. He gave the drive to the Sunday Mirror, which has since handed it over to the relevant authority. Among its 76 folders were details of the protocol used when the Queen passes through the airport, the different IDs needed to access restricted areas, a timetable of security patrols and maps showing the location of CCTV cameras.

Other documents included info on tunnels and shafts linking the airport to the Heathrow Express rail line, procedures for when Cabinet ministers, foreign officials and other VIPs travel, details on personnel “exempt from screening,” imagery and operating manuals pertaining to the airport’s radar system and various other words, pictures and videos that definitely shouldn’t have been found on a random USB drive on the street.

As The Register notes, however, some of the files were marked as “confidential” or “restricted,” which are classifications that fell out of common use years ago, so there’s no telling how old the data could be. Considering some of the stick’s contents mentioned recent terror attacks, though, it’s obviously within the airport’s interests to get to the bottom of the leak.

No word on potential culprits as yet, but Heathrow Airport told the Sunday Mirror it was “confident” in its security. “We have also launched an internal investigation to understand how this happened and are taking steps to prevent a similar occurrence in future.”

“The UK and Heathrow have some of the most robust aviation security measures in the world, and we remain vigilant to evolving threats by updating our procedures on a daily basis.”

Source: Sunday Mirror

GameStop offers used video game rentals with PowerPass program

If you’ve rented videos or games from the likes of Redbox or Blockbuster, GameStop’s new PowerPass will feel instantly familiar. According to a report at Mashable, the video game retailer is launching a rental service for used titles and sign ups will begin November 19th.

The program, says Mashable’s Adam Rosenberg, will run you $60 for six months. You can drop in to your local GameStop to get a different game at any time, but you can only have one title out at a time. At the end of the six months, you can choose one game to keep for no extra cost. You’ll need to be a free or paid member of GameStop’s Power-Up Rewards program to sign up for the rental program. Whether GameStop wants to monetize its huge stock of used games, as Rosenberg notes, or just wants to get more people into the store, PowerPass could likely be a hit among gamers looking to try their games out before buying them.

Source: Mashable

Stanford’s ‘accelerator on a chip’ could revolutionize medical care

When the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford first opened its doors in 1966, it had already earned the distinction of housing the world’s longest linear accelerator: A 3.2 kilometer monstrosity buried 25 feet under the gently rolling hills of Northern California. Today the lab, along with an international consortium of research organizations, is working to create a new kind of accelerator — one small enough to fit in a shoebox but offering huge scientific potential.

SLAC’s full-size accelerator, dubbed the LINAC, relies on klystrons — specialized vacuum tubes that act as radio frequency amplifiers — to generate high-energy electron beams used in the facility’s experiments. They also generate a whole bunch of radiation, which is why the beam is buried in a concrete bunker two stories underground.

Electrons are generated at one end of the line and then accelerated to 99.99999 percent of the speed of light, as they travel down the 2-mile long instrument. They are also infused with up to 50 GeV of additional energy. When these subatomic particles smack into their targets — in this case, either sample material or the electron’s bizarro twin, the positron — they really pack a wallop.

The problems with this setup is cost and availability; there are only a handful on the planet, because they’re so insanely expensive to build, maintain and operate. As such, the demand for the machines dramatically overshadows the amount of time that the facility can operate. Today, the linac operates on average 24 hours a day, five days a week, with the off days dedicated to maintenance. SLAC’s services are in such high demand that only one in six experiments are accepted and those that do get the nod are then expected to adhere to a brutally strict schedule.

What if, instead of relying on just a few mammoth linear accelerators around the planet, the scientific community could shrink these devices to the size of a football field? That would enable them to be installed in the basements of most universities and research hospitals, exponentially increasing their availability. Well, in 2015 — and thanks to a $13.5 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation — Stanford and SLAC began work on shrinking a particle accelerator from a scale of miles to meters. They call it the “accelerator on a chip” (AoaC) project.

“Can we do for particle accelerators what the microchip industry did for computers?” SLAC physicist Joel England, an investigator with the 5-year project, said in a 2013 statement when the program launched. “Making them much smaller and cheaper would democratize accelerators, potentially making them available to millions of people. We can’t even imagine the creative applications they would find for this technology.”

This device would work in the same manner as the linac but instead of shooting electrons down a copper vacuum tube and pushing them along with microwaves, the AoaC will shove electrons through a precisely-engineered silica chip, smaller than a grain of rice, and excite them with laser beams.

It’s a two step process. First, the electrons are boosted to nearly the speed of light using a conventional accelerator. They are then blasted through a half-micron tall channel etched into the half millimeter-long silica chip. This channel, as you can see in the video above, has a series of ridges and troughs carved into it.

By varying the width of these ridges with respect to the wavelength of the laser, researchers can generate a net energy gain as the electrons pass through. Without those ridges, as soon as the electrons hit the channel, they’d simply wiggle back and forth, riding the undulations of the laser like boats on a wave. The chip’s acceleration gradient, which measures the amount of energy added to the electron as it travels a specific distance, is a whopping 300 gigavolts per meter (GeV/m) — that’s ten times what the linac can generate.

So great, we can make electrons go super fast and pump more energy into them than a toddler hopped up on a 2-liter of Mountain Dew, big whoop? Well, outside of the fundamental physics research that can be accomplished (including their use as X-ray generators for the materials, biology, chemistry fields) the medical applications are numerous.

“One of the dreams is to make molecular movies, or something where you capture the state of a molecule at different times in its evolution and do that in a very short time scale,” Joel England, SLAC’s lead researcher for this program, told the IEEE. “So you can actually see how molecules change as they react or combine with other molecules.”

Or, take pediatric cancer for example. If an adult has cancer and is prescribed radiation therapy, they will have to spend up to 30 minutes a day, multiple days a week, for weeks on end lying on a table while industrial medical equipment blasts them with high energy particles. The process is even worse for kids, who must be anesthetized each session.

With a miniaturized particle accelerator on the other hand, we’d be able to replace that 10,000-pound, multimillion dollar radiotherapy machine with an inexpensive device (paired with a simple fiber laser power source) that can burn out tumors faster and without the need for anesthesia.

“Once you get into a million electron volts or more then you’re sort of in the regime of where you can have practical applications; where something like a medical accelerator is more viable,” England told IEEE earlier this year. “So typically for cancer treatment you’re using particles with between one and 20 million electron volts of energy.” And by making them portable, doctors can bring this life-saving technology to more people in even the most remote locations.

“We still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use, but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forces,” he explained in 2013.

And even when that does happen, there likely won’t be a day when you can just pop down to the local electronics store and pick up an accelerator of your own. The amount of radiation generated by a tabletop accelerator might not match that of the linac, but it is still enough to cause significant harm. “I don’t think it’s becoming a household appliance,” England quipped.

Sprint owner SoftBank may be calling off T-Mobile merger

One of the biggest on-again, off-again relationships in tech is reportedly off again. After the most recent rumors indicated a possible late October merger, Nikkei Asian Review is reporting that Sprint’s parent company, Japan’s SoftBank group, intends to call off the union. According to Nikkei, SoftBank and T-Mobile’s owner Deutsche Telekom had reached a broad agreement to integrate the two major US carriers, but couldn’t work out an ownership ratio that satisfied both companies.

Nikkei’s sources indicate that SoftBank board members decided to call the talks off on Monday, after a Friday meeting where executives determined “the company would not give up control.” SoftBank is reportedly expected to propose to Deutsche Telekom on Tuesday that they end negotiations.

Whether that would get Deutsche Telekom to change its mind about the ownership structure is not clear, and we’ve reached out to Sprint and T-Mobile for comment on this story. Meanwhile, it appears the merger of America’s third- and fourth-largest carriers remains in limbo.

Via: Reuters

Source: Nikkei Asian Review