Remedy's Alan Wake 2 has now "recouped most of its development and marketing expenses", CEO Tero Virtala has announced in a business review for January-September 2024. Speaking as somebody who would quite like there to be more Alan Wake games - or at least, moderately weird and pretty decent blockbuster singleplayer horror games - I am both pleased by this news and a little troubled that Remedy's eldritch forest fable (which came out in October 2023) has yet to break even.

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Like a plague doctor delicately administering another handful of leeches, Ice Pick Lodge have shared a bit more about the recently announced Pathologic 3, explaining how their plans for the cult epidemic-battling series have progressed since the release of Pathologic 2.

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When nightmarish sci-fi extraction shooter The Forever Winter launched into early access in September it was somewhat messy. Bugs and maddening enemy spawns diminished the tension of being a fleshy human scavenger in a mech battlefield. But one feature annoyed some players much more - fresh water. See, you need to keep your headquarters stocked with water, as it gets steadily used by your settlement's inhabitants. The catch being that this water diminishes even while you're not playing the game. If it runs out completely, then everything you've collected gets wiped. The developers have listened to complaints about this most Farmville of mechanics, and they've answered in an interesting way. Water thieves! Now, on top of the usual downward trickle, burglars will come to steal your H2O as well.

It's not as bad as it sounds.

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Twitch have introduced a new "Politics and Sensitive Social Issues" label for streams that "focus" on topics like "elections, civic integrity, and war or military conflict". As with the streaming giant's existing labels for M-rated material, sexual themes or depictions of gambling, the idea is that viewers can filter out such streams in advance by altering their settings.

Advertisers, similarly, can "make better choices about the content they want to advertise next to" - in other words, pull their ads from a whole swathe of material if they don't want to be associated with anything controversial. Twitch's hope is that "the labels will allow advertisers to have more context to inform which types of streams they show their ads alongside, which we expect to increase brands’ confidence in running ads on Twitch, and could bring new advertisers to our service."

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Early reactions to Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer range from frothing dislike through omnimovement hype to our own Ed Thorn's dead-eyed appraisal that it's "a good one, I think. Not a bad one. If you like Call Of Duty, you will like this. If you don't like Call Of Duty, you will not like this." I feel like we need to emergency-deploy a supply crate of smelling salts, because the sheer OK-ness of Black Ops 6 appears to have tumbled Ed into a stupor.

Perhaps it would be a different story if he'd encountered some of the spawning issues and glitches people are talking about, with players joining games and materialising right into a hail of fire. The players in question include Black Ops 6's developers, who comically note in the latest Black Ops 6 patch notes that "Yes, we saw ourselves in a Killcam before selecting a Loadout too." The latest patch seeks to address this, naturally. As regards the campaign side of things, it also resets your safehouse currency to 5000, if you've had your single player funds stolen (or multiplied) by technical gremlins.

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Enshrouded has received what developers Keen Games are calling the survival game's "most sizable" update yet, sizable being an appropriate word for mountains. Expect a new playable area, the Alabaneve Summits, with its own enemies, resources, non-threatening wildlife and quests. The maximum character level has risen to 35! There are new townsfolk to find and place in your poorly built houses! You can tame animals, and make them live in poorly built houses too! You can get hypothermia!

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When I was a competitive long-distance runner at school, breath control was paramount. We were never really taught this, mind. It was an art you picked up through practice: how to breathe before the race, saturating your blood with O2 without dizzying yourself; when to permit the shorter, emergency breaths and when to apply restraint; when to deepen your inhales and charge yourself up for an attack on a hill.

And then, how to organise your body around your breath, straightening your posture to expand your lungs without tipping back too far and squandering muscle power; how to breath in time with your stride and the movement of your shoulders, so as to firm up your momentum and shave a miraculous-feeling minute off your finishing time. All this, plus various daft psychological war gambits of my own devising. When overtaking or being overtaken, I used to seal my lips shut on that side and breath through the other corner of my mouth, to make it look like I was hardly out of breath at all.

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The dominion of hated Super Earth threatens to expand afresh as Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt toys openly with the prospect of Helldivers 2 cross-over games, beginning with tabletop wargame Trench Crusade and extending to, well, take your pick. Arrowhead's appetite for other licenses appears insatiable. It's the kind of sheer expansionism you'd expect from Earth's loathsome regime, whose "managed democracy" propaganda continues to enthrall thousands of hapless disposable imperialists. Pilestedt even wants to make a Fifth Element game! Milla Jovovich is spinning in her grave. Milla Jovovich isn't dead, you say? Well, that's good news at least.

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Take-Two Interactive have sold their publishing label Private Division to an unnamed party, along with five of Private Division's "live and unreleased titles". The GTA 6 publisher have also finally confirmed that they have shut down OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome devs Roll7 together with Kerbal Space Program 2 creators Intercept Games, months after performing mass layoffs at both studios.

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A few months ago, the rumour took root that GTA 6's release date would slip back from 2025 to 2026. An anonymous insider averred that studio heads were "worried" about the new open world game's progress - hence, perhaps, Rockstar's decision to mandate a full return to in-office work. Pshaw, say publishers Take-Two CEO. They announced a fall 2025 launch in March and have just doubled down on it in their latest financial briefing, with CEO Strauss Zelnick subsequently going on the tellybox to say that Take-Two are "highly confident in the timing", though he still has nothing to share about GTA 6 on PC.

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When multiplayer fishing game Webfishing came out last month, it offered a relaxing hangout zone for cats and dogs. Everything revolves around catching, selling, and collecting the fish that gather in the rivers of a small island. It also lets you customise your character with clothing. Mostly simple hats and shorts, but some options let players celebrate their sexuality, such as a rainbow-adorned t-shirts, or titles that hang above your character which simply say "Trans" or "Bi". All this led one player to complain there was no "Straight" title. So, the developer added one. It costs 10 grand.

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Amplitude Studios, developers of many a game with "Endless" in the name, have split with publisher Sega to become independent again, with ownership of the studio reverting to its original founders and "other members of the team". The developers say everyone is parting "on good terms" and that the last eight years of getting published under Sega has been "amazing". But there are other businessy reasons, of course. Namely, Sega have been trying to trim down their European studios for the past year, and Amplitude is just the latest bunch of devs affected by that.

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The developers of hero shooter Overwatch 2 must have dropped a box full of old photographs while clearing the attic, spilling old snapshots of Route 66 onto the floor and getting snared in a nostalgic daze. The game is launching a "Classic" mode today that will let you play the first-person payload pusher as it (mostly) was back in 2016 when the first Overwatch launched. That means 6v6 fights, the original abilities of its heroes, and no limits to stop the entire team picking the same character.

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In America, there’s a significant kind of public insistence that one’s “freedom” is fundamentally tied to one’s wealth.

Much of the country views America through an aspirational and transformative lens, a colorblind and bias-free utopia, wherein wealth conveys equality and acts as a panacea for social and racial ills. Once an individual achieves massive financial success, or so the message goes, he or she will “transcend” the scourge of economic and racial inequality, truly becoming “free.”

Working in parallel with this reverence for this colorblind version of the “American Dream” is the belief that economic privilege mandates patriotic gratitude. Across industries and disciplines, Americans are told to love their nation uncritically, be thankful that they are exceptional enough to live in a country that allows citizens the opportunity to reach astronomical heights of economic prosperity.

For the nation’s black citizens, there’s often an additional racialized presumption lurking under the surface of these concepts: the notion that black success and wealth demands public silence on systemic issues of inequality and oppression.

These are durable and fragile ideologies that prop up the concept of the American Dream – durable because they are encoded in the very fabric of American culture (most Americans, including African Americans, have readily embraced these ideologies as assumed facts); yet fragile because it’s all too easy to see that one’s economic privilege is a lousy barrier against both individual and systemic discrimination and oppression.

Consequently, black people have also been among the most vocal challengers of these ideologies, as we’ve seen most recently with the Colin Kaepernick and the NFL #TakeAKnee demonstrations. In a show of solidary with the free agent quarterback, professional football players – the vast majority of whom are black – have been kneeling during the National Anthem as a means of protesting racial injustice and police brutality.

WATCH: NFL players team up in defiance and solidarity

Over the past few weeks, the president of the United States has brought renewed attention to the inherent tensions that define the ideologies of the “American Dream” through his repeated public criticisms of these kneeling NFL players.

“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues,” Trump recently tweeted, he or she should not be allowed to kneel. Labeling the protestors actions “disrespectful” to the country, flag and anthem, President Donald Trump has called for players to be fired, encouraged a boycott of the NFL, insisted that the league pass a rule mandating that players stand for the anthem and derided the protestors as “sons of bitches.”

In a dramatic ploy more befitting of a scripted reality television show, the president gloated that he had instructed Vice President Mike Pence to walk out of an Indianapolis Colts game the moment any player kneeled. This was an orchestrated show of power and outrage, designed to send a flamboyant political message given that Trump and Pence knew in advance that on that particular day, the Colts were playing the San Francisco 49ers – the team that currently has the most protestors. The NFL’s announcement this week that the league has no plans to penalize protesting players is the most recent event to provoke the president’s fury; taking to social media during the early morning, he once again equated kneeling with “total disrespect” for our country.

As many have pointed out, the president’s moralizing outrage toward the NFL players is selective and deeply flawed – his apparent patriotic loyalty hasn’t stopped the billionaire politician from criticizing the removal of Confederate statues, or attacking a Gold Star family, or mocking Sen. John McCain’s military service.

The NFL players and their defenders have repeatedly stated that the protests are intended to highlight racial inequality and oppression. They’ve also explained that their decision to kneel emerged from a desire to protest peacefully and respectfully after a sustained conversation with military veterans.

Trump has chosen to ignore these rationales and the structural issues of inequality that motivate the protests and instead, advance a narrative exclusively concerned with overt displays of American patriotism and the “privilege” of the NFL players. As one of president’s advisors explained, by aggressively targeting the NFL players, Trump believes that he is “winning the cultural war,” having made black “millionaire sport athletes his new [Hillary Clinton].”

READ MORE: As ‘America’s sport,’ the NFL cannot escape politics

It’s a cynical statement, revealing the president’s perception of the jingoism of his base of supporters who envision him as a crusader for American values and symbols.

In casting the black protestors as the antithesis of all of this, Trump has marked the players as unpatriotic elites and enemies of the nation. For a president who has consistently fumbled his way through domestic and foreign policy since he was elected, a culture war between “hard-working” and “virtuous” working-class and middle-class white Americans and rich, ungrateful black football players is a welcome public distraction.

Trump’s attacks on the NFL protestors are rooted in those competing tensions inherent to the American Dream: that wealth equals freedom; that economic privilege demands patriotic gratitude; and most importantly, that black people’s individual economic prosperity invalidates their concerns about systemic injustice and requires their silence on racial oppression.

Among the protestors’ detractors, this has become a common line of attack, a means of disparaging the black NFL players’ activism by pointing to their apparent wealth. The fact that systemic racism is demonstrably real and that individual prosperity does not make one immune to racial discrimination appears to be lost on the protestors’ critics.

Theirs is a grievance that suggests that black athletes should be grateful to live in this country; that racism can’t exist in America since black professional athletes are allowed to play and sign contracts for considerable sums of money; that black players owe the nation their silence since America “gave” them opportunity and access; that black athletes have no moral authority on issues of race and inequality because of their individual success; and that black athletes’ success was never theirs to earn, but instead, was given to them and can just as easily be taken away.

This culture war being waged over black athletes is not new. Black athletes – and entertainers – have long been hyper-aware of their peculiar place in American society as individuals beloved for their athletic and artistic talents, yet reviled the moment they use their public platform to protest systemic racial inequality. The parallels between the #TakeAKnee protests and the protests of Muhammad Ali or John Carlos and Tommie Smith are readily apparent; so too are there important similarities to the case of Paul Robeson.

An outspoken civil rights activist, collegiate and professional football player, lawyer, opera singer and actor, Robeson had his passport revoked in 1950 because of his political activism and speech – actions that all but destroyed his career. The star athlete and entertainer, “who had exemplified American upward mobility” quickly “became public enemy number one” as institutions cancelled his concerts, the public called for his death and anti-Robeson mobs burned effigies of him.

During a 1956 congressional hearing, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities beat a familiar refrain with Robeson, challenging the entertainer’s accusations of American racism and racial oppression. He saw no sign of prejudice, he argued, since Robeson was privileged, having gone to elite universities and playing collegiate and professional football.

READ MORE: Poll: Americans divided on NFL protests

Black athletes, even the silent ones, largely understand that their economic privilege doesn’t insulate them from the realities of racial discrimination. They also understand that their wealth and success is precarious and is often dependent not only upon their athletic performance, but also upon them remaining silent on issues of racial injustice, especially those that appear to question the “American Dream” or implicate the American public by association.

It should come as no surprise then that Colin Kaepernick, whose protests turned him into a national pariah despite his on-the-field talents, has filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing the league and its teams of blackballing him because of his political beliefs. “Principled and peaceful political protest,” Kaepernick’s lawyers argued in a statement, “should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government.” Whether the ostracized Kaepernick will win his grievance is unknown, but it is certainly telling that he and his lawyers have rooted their claims in contested definitions of freedom and the precarious economic privilege of outspoken NFL players.

For the loudest and most vocal critics of black protestors, in particular, outspokenness is tantamount to treason, grounds for the harshest of punishments. Perhaps they would benefit from a close reading of James Baldwin, who once argued: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

The post Column: For black athletes, wealth doesn’t equal freedom appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

The second-closest planet to the sun is more geologically active than we thought and could have more than 17,000 venusquakes a year

Samantha Harvey has won the UK's top fiction prize for a novel that takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station

A robot can hold a squash, pumpkin or melon in one hand, while it is peeled by the other

Google has built a quantum computer that makes fewer errors as it is scaled up, and this may pave the way for machines that could solve useful real-world problems for the first time

Archaeologists are using AI and US spy satellite imagery from the cold war to find ancient underground aqueducts that helped humans survive in the desert

A quantum computing protocol makes it possible to extract energy from seemingly empty space, teleport it to a new location, then store it for later use

Using more training data and computational power is meant to make AIs more reliable, but tests suggest large language models actually get less reliable as they grow

Google, Microsoft and others have taken big steps towards error-free devices, hinting that quantum computers that solve real problems aren’t far away

The 2024 Nobel prize in physics has gone to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries that enabled machine learning and are key to the development of artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, more and more people are training to become quantum software developers

Who built this ripped, anatomically graphic snowman? Is there a world of snowmen offscreen waiting to be turned into sex objects for widows?

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Enjoy today’s videos!

Not even ladders can keep you safe from quadruped robots anymore.

[ ETH Zürich Robot Systems Lab ]

Introducing Azi (right), the new desktop robot from Engineered Arts Ltd. Azi and Ameca are having a little chat, demonstrating their wide range of expressive capabilities. Engineered Arts desktop robots feature 32 actuators, 27 for facial control alone, and 5 for the neck. They include AI conversational ability including GPT-4o support which makes them great robotic companions.

[ Engineered Arts ]

Quadruped robots that individual researchers can build by themselves are crucial for expanding the scope of research due to their high scalability and customizability. In this study, we develop a metal quadruped robot MEVIUS, that can be constructed and assembled using only materials ordered through e-commerce. We have considered the minimum set of components required for a quadruped robot, employing metal machining, sheet metal welding, and off-the-shelf components only.

[ MEVIUS from JSK Robotics Laboratory ]

Thanks Kento!

Avian perching maneuvers are one of the most frequent and agile flight scenarios, where highly optimized flight trajectories, produced by rapid wing and tail morphing that generate high angular rates and accelerations, reduce kinetic energy at impact. Here, we use optimal control methods on an avian-inspired drone with morphing wing and tail to test a recent hypothesis derived from perching maneuver experiments of Harris’ hawks that birds minimize the distance flown at high angles of attack to dissipate kinetic energy before impact.

[ EPFL Laboratory of Intelligent Systems ]

The earliest signs of bearing failures are inaudible to you, but not to Spot . Introducing acoustic vibration sensing—Automate ultrasonic inspections of rotating equipment to keep your factory humming.

The only thing I want to know is whether Spot is programmed to actually do that cute little tilt when using its acoustic sensors.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Hear from Jonathan Hurst, our co-founder and Chief Robot Officer, why legs are ideally suited for Digit’s work.

[ Agility Robotics ]

I don’t think “IP67” really does this justice.

[ ANYbotics ]

This paper presents a teleportation system with floating robotic arms that traverse parallel cables to perform long-distance manipulation. The system benefits from the cable-based infrastructure, which is easy to set up and cost-effective with expandable workspace range.

[ EPFL ]

It seems to be just renderings for now, but here’s the next version of Fourier’s humanoid.

[ Fourier ]

Happy Oktoberfest from Dino Robotics!

[ Dino Robotics ]

This paper introduces a learning-based low-level controller for quadcopters, which adaptively controls quadcopters with significant variations in mass, size, and actuator capabilities. Our approach leverages a combination of imitation learning and reinforcement learning, creating a fast-adapting and general control framework for quadcopters that eliminates the need for precise model estimation or manual tuning.

[ HiPeR Lab ]

Parkour poses a significant challenge for legged robots, requiring navigation through complex environments with agility and precision based on limited sensory inputs. In this work, we introduce a novel method for training end-to-end visual policies, from depth pixels to robot control commands, to achieve agile and safe quadruped locomotion.

[ SoloParkour ]

Simone Giertz came to fame in the 2010s by becoming the self-proclaimed “queen of shitty robots.” On YouTube she demonstrated a hilarious series of self-built mechanized devices that worked perfectly for ridiculous applications, such as a headboard-mounted alarm clock with a rubber hand to slap the user awake.

But Giertz has parlayed her Internet renown into Yetch, a design company that makes commercial consumer products. (The company name comes from how Giertz’s Swedish name is properly pronounced.) Her first release, a daily habit-tracking calendar, was picked up by prestigious outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art design store in New York City. She has continued to make commercial products since, as well as one-off strange inventions for her online audience.

Where did the motivation for your useless robots come from?

Simone Giertz: I just thought that robots that failed were really funny. It was also a way for me to get out of creating from a place of performance anxiety and perfection. Because if you set out to do something that fails, that gives you a lot of creative freedom.

You built up a big online following. A lot of people would be happy with that level of success. But you moved into inventing commercial products. Why?

Giertz: I like torturing myself, I guess! I’d been creating things for YouTube and for social media for a long time. I wanted to try something new and also find longevity in my career. I’m not super motivated to constantly try to get people to give me attention. That doesn’t feel like a very good value to strive for. So I was like, “Okay, what do I want to do for the rest of my career?” And developing products is something that I’ve always been really, really interested in. And yeah, it is tough, but I’m so happy to be doing it. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, as much as there’s a lot of face-palm moments.

Giertz’s every day goal calendar was picked up by the Museum of Modern Art’s design store. Yetch

What role does failure play in your invention process?

Giertz: I think it’s inevitable. Before, obviously, I wanted something that failed in the most unexpected or fun way possible. And now when I’m developing products, it’s still a part of it. You make so many different versions of something and each one fails because of something. But then, hopefully, what happens is that you get smaller and smaller failures. Product development feels like you’re going in circles, but you’re actually going in a spiral because the circles are taking you somewhere.

What advice do you have for aspiring inventors?

Giertz: Make things that you want. A lot of people make things that they think that other people want, but the main target audience, at least for myself, is me. I trust that if I find something interesting, there are probably other people who do too. And then just find good people to work with and collaborate with. There is no such thing as the lonely genius, I think. I’ve worked with a lot of different people and some people made me really nervous and anxious. And some people, it just went easy and we had a great time. You’re just like, “Oh, what if we do this? What if we do this?” Find those people.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Queen of Useless Robots.”

Meta had huge success last year with its flagship Quest 3 VR headset and it is back with a significantly cheaper 3S device that compromises on visuals but still delivers a great experience

The Health and Human Services Department employs 294 people whose jobs focus on diversity, and the department maintains seven separate "minority health" offices spread across its various agencies, according to a new report that suggests it will be tough for the incoming Trump administration to unwind it all.

Local officials are beginning to certify the results of this year's presidential election in a process that, so far, has been playing out quietly, in stark contrast to the tumultuous certification period four years ago that followed then-President Donald Trump's loss.

A Swiss-engineered robot can climb ladders, showing why it's at the cutting edge of autonomous robotic solutions for harsh industrial settings.

Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson says there’s been a rise in cybercriminal services using hacked police and government emails to send subpoenas and data requests to U.S. companies.

… Junior Asia/ Oceania Davis Cup and Fed Cup final qualifying event. The … players selected for the Junior Davis Cup include Dev V. Javia, Sandeep … Gogoi (reserve). The Junior Fed Cup team includes Anisha Kashyap, Bhakti … Junior Asia/ Oceania Junior Davis Cup will begin in Kuching, Malaysia ….

… Trains for 1st Time inside Davis Cup Venue VALENCIA, Spain – World No … the Spanish national team’s Davis Cup quarterfinals against Germany. Nadal, who ….

… a big upset in his Davis Cup debut on Friday, defeating Spaniard ….

In a new report, KPMG has broken down the provincial adoption rate of generative AI across Canada, and found that Quebec led with 26 per cent, ahead of Alberta (23 per cent), British Columbia (22 per cent) and Ontario (20.5 per cent), which nearly tied with Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Atlantic Canada saw the lowest adoption […]

A coronal mass ejection could strike the Earth's magnetosphere this week and cause a geomagnetic storm due to conditions caused by the autumnal equinox.

A spike in earthquakes at Mount Adams, a volcano in Washington state, prompted scientists to install additional monitoring instruments to assess the seismic activity.

U.S.-based startup company Heliospect Genomics reportedly is offering wealthy couples embryo screening for IQ and other traits at $50,000 for 100 embryos.

However, the comparative Win 11 AMD tests were on an unpatched (L3 cache, CPPC2) PC.

Scientists from the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie and Durham University have examined a collection of 406 engraved schist plaquettes found at the Magdalenian site of Gönnersdorf in Germany.

The post 15,800-Year-Old Engraved Plaquettes Shed Light on Paleolithic Fishing Techniques appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

The standard model predicted that the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies.

The post New Research Questions Standard Theory of How Galaxies Formed in Early Universe appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.