It is only reasonable to think that past and present employees of Sony Interactive Entertainment could be prioritized when they order the video game consoles that they develop, but it seems that that isn’t the case. They are treated just the same as those who aren't part of the company.
Taking to Twitter to share his sadness was Adam Boyes, PlayStation’s former VP, who found himself unable to pre-order the console.
Former PlayStation head of global second-party games Gio Corsi replied to the tweet saying he hadn’t managed to get his hands on one either adding that the two could ‘sad together’.
Someone else responded to the tweet saying that they were ‘p*ssed off’ Boyes didn’t get a free console after all he did for Sony. Boyes replied to the guy, ‘They don’t owe me anything, my dude. I loved my time there, and my time there is over.’
Botswana — A few months ago, as they flew over the Okavango Panhandle, conservationists saw a horrifying sight. Around 356 elephants lay lifeless on the ground. Poachers were not to blame for this one, as the tusks of these elephants were still intact. So what caused their deaths?
As much as the government wanted to investigate the case, it could not because of the pandemic.
“Elephants began dying in huge numbers in early May and the government would normally respond within days to an event of this scale,” director of conservation group National Park Rescue, Mark Hiley, told the Associated Press in July. “Yet here we are, months later, with no testing completed and with no more information than we had at the start.”
Hiley also called it “one of the biggest disasters to impact elephants this century, and right in the middle of one of Africa’s top tourism destinations.”
More than two months later, investigations reveal that the mysterious deaths were caused by cyanobacteria, toxic microscopic algae found in larger bodies of blue-green water, the BBC reports.
But Hiley states that they are still investigating as to why the elephants were the only ones affected, and why it was in that area only.
When it comes to a buying laptop, the rule of thumb is don’t go cheap. This means that you really have to save money in order to buy a decent laptop, but it is guaranteed that it will be worth it in the long run.
But maybe this time it’s different. It seems that there are some laptops now that are pretty cheap but powerful enough. And when I say cheap, it’s not just under the $700-range, but also under the $400-range. Ars Technica compares two of Walmart’s finest laptops that are within this range — the $378 Acer Swift 1 and the $350 Gateway GWTN141-2.
Both of these are serviceable if cheap laptops, but the Gateway, despite being the less expensive model, will be the clear winner for most people. It's more powerful, more repairable, more upgrade-able, and in our testing, a bit more reliable as well.
Here’s a writing prompt for you: an alternate universe where we humans did everything in an aggressive manner, whether it’s opening a door, or putting the trash bag into the trash bin. But if you can’t imagine that type of universe, then Daniel LaBelle can show how that looks like through this short video.
“Why is she crying?” you might ask upon seeing the photo on the left. But when you see the photo on the right, you probably would go “Oh, I see” after realizing the reason why the girl was crying on the first photo.
Still can’t figure it out? Head over at Awkward Family Photos to find out why this girl cried.
The Astatotilapia burtoni. A species of cichlid fish. In this species, there are two types of males: the “leaders”, who are aggressive and territorial, and the “subordinates”, the weaker, non-territorial males. The former has the control on the group’s resources, territory, and space, and pushes everyone around. The latter, on the other hand… well, they just follow. Surprisingly, when it comes to complex tasks, it is not the “leaders” who wield much influence. Rather, it is the silent subordinate who has the greater influence. These were findings from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a few months ago.
"The same traits that make you powerful in one context can actively reduce your influence in others, especially contexts in which individuals are free to choose who to follow," writes Alex Jordan, the senior author of the study.
"More aggressive domineering personalities are most often in positions of power, but they may be least effective and have little influence when compared to their consensus-building coworkers."
When Polly found out about this study and its findings, she knew that she learned something very important.
… when it comes to staying focused and coming together to push through a challenge, to build the collaborative team needed to function well and improve despite adversity, those who adopt a less in-your-face approach might be the most effective.
As the assertive voice in her family, Polly is now trying her best to be the passive, yet powerful, voice, just like her husband.
I’m practicing this wait-and-see style more often now too. Learning to listen better. Pausing to think before I answer. Realizing, not everything requires my input or opinion. And that collaboration, particularly in family and friendships—really in any group where you need to come together to get through—makes things better for all.
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Like the fish, I imagine we all work better when we aren't pushed around, but when we are hungry for leadership, ready to be guided and led by people who respect others and leave room for others to collaborate and share. For other voices to be heard.
It has been a long-standing belief that birds are dumb animals due to their rather weird brain structure, which lacks the neocortex, the part of the mammalian brain responsible for working memory, planning, and problem solving. But in recent years, scientists found out that birds are, in fact, smart animals, who are capable of making tools, as well as understanding abstract concepts. They can also recognize paintings by Monet and Picasso. But what makes them capable of doing these things? They don’t have a neocortex, right?
Now, researchers have found a previously unknown arrangement of microcircuits in the avian brain that may be analogous to the mammalian neocortex. And in a separate study, other researchers have linked this same region to conscious thought.
The two papers are already being hailed as groundbreaking. “It’s often assumed that birds’ alien brain architecture limits thought, consciousness, and most advanced cognition,” says John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist and specialist on crows at the University of Washington, Seattle, who was not involved with either study. Researchers who have “demonstrated the cognitive abilities of birds won’t be surprised by these results,” he adds, “but they will be relieved.”
“This research confirms the old adage that looks can be deceiving,” Marzluff says. Although bird and mammalian brains “look very different, this study shows us they are actually wired in very complementary ways.”
So the next time someone calls you a “bird-brain”, thank that person for complimenting your intelligence.
With the many things that it can do, such as create poems, songs, and even articles that look like a human wrote it, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has certainly caught the eyes of the people. It could be considered as advanced AI already, but scientists are still looking towards making an AI more advanced than this one.
GPT-3 trained on an enormous amount of text data. What if the same methods were trained on both text and images?
Now new research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2, has taken this idea to the next level. The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption. The images look unsettling and freakish—nothing like the hyperrealistic deepfakes generated by GANs—but they might demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable intelligence, and perhaps smarter robots as well.
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The final images generated by the model aren’t exactly realistic. But that isn’t the point. They contain the right high-level visual concepts—the AI equivalent of a child drawing a stick figure to represent a human. (You can try out the model for yourself here.)
With the upcoming release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X for this year’s holiday season, video gamers will surely be breaking their piggy banks in order to buy one of the two consoles. The question is, is there enough space in their homes for the game consoles that they are buying? A Japanese illustrator helps us to put things into perspective.
Now that we have official dimensions for both consoles, Keisawada, an illustrator in Japan, decided to create computer-generated models to put their sizes in perspective. The image above shows the relative sizes of a PS5 in vertical mode, an Xbox Series X, and a Nintendo Switch for comparison. When placed alongside each other, you can see that the PS5 towers over the others, while the Xbox Series X takes the prize for girth.
Check out the comparisons that Keisawada illustrated over at Technabob.
Which console do you plan on buying this holiday season?
Georgia Langton attempted to recreate the chicken katsu curry served in Wagamama (a British restaurant chain) and it seemed like a success.The dish looked tasty when it was served at the dinner table, but when the family tucked in, they found out the secret of the chicken katsu curry that hides beneath the sauce and the chicken breading: it was undercooked. Severely undercooked that her brother, Aidan, called her out and jokingly accused her of “attempted murder.”
Posting side-by-side images of the dinner she had posted on Snapchat and what he found when he cut into the food, @Aidan_langton wrote on Twitter : "Nothing close to her story. This is actually attempted murder.
"I've decided to put my sister down so this doesn't happen again."
The tweet gained more than 45,000 likes as @georgialangton_ came forward to own up to the blunder, saying: "Safe to say I’m never deep fat frying again nearly killed my family", before insisting it was a rare blunder, stating: "Btw I'm actually a good cook just had a moment of weakness."
It has been assumed by scientists that the photosynthetic algae in the Arctic remain largely dormant during the winter season. That assumption is being challenged by this new study, which found out that phytoplanktons,under the thick sea ice and snow, already start growing and multiplying as early as February, a time where light is already barely detectable just about 1.5 meters underwater.
The study suggests that springtime blooms are the culmination of an extended period of growth that starts in winter, not a singular burst of activity as was thought.
“Arctic phytoplankton are superefficient at using every little photon they can find,” Randelhoff says, but he was surprised that they could grow with such little light. As the months progressed and the sun rose higher, the team found that algal growth accelerated, reaching its peak growth rate for the year in April and May, despite the microorganisms still being covered by ice.
Think about that for a second. Phytoplanktons grow and even multiply despite being covered by ice. If that isn’t impressive, then I don’t know what is.
It was previously believed that tarantulas are color-blind. However, scientists were still puzzled over the fact that these spiders come in vivid green and blue colors. What’s the reason for this? Researchers from Yale-NUS College and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have investigated, and they found out that the tarantulas might be using these colors to communicate with other tarantulas that could be potential mates. If this is the case, then it also suggests that these spiders are not color-blind.
The research was jointly led by Dr Saoirse Foley from CMU, and Dr Vinod Kumar Saranathan, in collaboration with Dr William Piel, both from the Division of Science at Yale-NUS College. To understand the evolutionary basis of tarantula colouration, they surveyed the bodily expression of various opsins (light-sensitive proteins usually found in animal eyes) in tarantulas. They found, contrary to current assumptions, that most tarantulas have nearly an entire complement of opsins that are normally expressed in day-active spiders with good colour vision, such as the Peacock Spider.
These findings suggest that tarantulas, long thought to be colour-blind, can perceive the bright blue colours of other tarantulas. Using comparative phylogenetic analyses, the team reconstructed the colours of 110 million-year-old tarantula ancestors and found that they were most likely blue. They further found that blue colouration does not correlate with the ability to urticate or stridulate - both common defence mechanisms -- suggesting that it did not evolve as a means of deterring predators, but might instead be a means of attracting potential mates.
The green coloration, on the other hand, could serve as camouflage in tree-dwelling spiders.
Head over to EurekAlert to know more about the study.
In the past 40 years, marine heat waves have become longer and more noticeable. According to scientists, the probability of these events has increased greatly due to global warming. And the one factor that contributes most to this is, unsurprisingly, human influence.
According to the findings of the attribution studies, major marine heatwaves have become more than 20 times more frequent due to human influence. While they occurred every hundred or thousand years in the pre-industrial age, depending on the progress of global warming, in the future they are set to become the norm. If we are able to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, heatwaves will occur once every decade or century. If temperatures rise by 3 degrees, however, extreme situations can be expected to occur in the world's oceans once per year or decade.
Davie504 shows us once again that the bass guitar is not just a musical instrument; it can also be a game controller. Thanks to a code that his friend made, Davie was able to control his in-game character as he plays notes on his bass. Surprisingly, he even wins a few games. While everyone struggles in playing the game using either a mobile phone or a mouse and keyboard, he owns the game by his bass.
Being around here on the planet millions of years even before the appearance of the first humans, it is not surprising that hippos know more about life than we do. Having been here on this planet longer than we have, these animals have realized many truths about life. Most of these truths, however, are hard-hitting truths, and we still might not be ready to hear them.
