Author: Sean Patterson

The people in charge of creating the current most successful franchise in modern gaming (the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series) founded Respawn Entertainment in 2010. Since that time, gamers have been waiting anxiously to see what Jason West and Vince Zampella, the creators of the Modern Warfare franchise, could create with their own independent studio.

The studio’s first game, codenamed Project Titan, has been kept tightly under wraps by both Respawn and the game’s publisher, EA. Now, Kotaku is reporting some new details on the project, with a mix of good and bad news.

The publication is citing two independent unnamed “sources familiar with the game” as saying the title will be an Xbox exclusive, appearing only on the Xbox 360 and next-generation Xbox console.

As for what the game is, Kotaku is reporting that it is a sci-fi shooter that has been designed around multiplayer combat. Soldiers called “Davids” can ride around in giant exoskeletons called “Goliaths.”

Kotaku’s sources are also reporting that the game will have an always-online DRM scheme in place. That doesn’t sound far-fetched, considering that EA is the game’s publisher. If the game truly is designed around the multiplayer aspect, EA might not run into too much trouble by requiring a constant internet connection. However, if Respawn has crafted an enjoyable single-player campaign, then the always-on requirement will once again cause trouble for players, just like it did with Sim City and Diablo III.

It’s a given that the seven-foot-tall stars in the NBA have Nike shoes that are huge. None of them, however, compare to the largest shoe that Nike ever made.

Early this month, Nike PR Director Heidi Burgett tweeted out a couple of pics of the shoe, which she stated belonged to an elephant. Nike made the shoe, which has both buckles and laces, as a corrective shoe for an elephant that had one short leg. There was a pink version of the iconic Nike ‘swoosh’ on the side of the shoe, but the elephant quite obviously wore the shoe out:

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Heidi Burgett
@heidiburgett

Biggest shoe Nike ever made was for an elephant that had 1 leg shorter than the others. Nike fitted him w/ lifts: http://t.co/b9hD2hEa7u

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NASA has revealed new pictures and of a massive hurricane on Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

The images depict a hurricane in Saturn’s north pole region. The eye of the storm is around 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) in diameter. The clouds on the hurricane’s outer edge are travelling at 150 meters per second (330 miles per hour).

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

NASA has stated that the storm on Saturn is “locked onto” the planet’s north pole. Cassini was unable to image Saturn’s northern hemisphere using visible light until 2009, when the planet’s equinox passed. Researchers hope that studying the hurricane on Saturn can provide data on how hurricanes on Earth develop and sustain themselves.

“Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You cannot see the polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the entirety of the planet.”

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)

With the wild success of the LEGO Batman and LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes video games, it was only a matter of time before Marvel weighed in with its own LEGO video game. Back in January Marvel announced its competing game, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, and provided a glimpse of what players can expect.

Today, Marvel and LEGO released the first teaser trailer for Marvel Super Heroes. It shows fan-favorite Marvel heroes such as Spider-Man, Thor, Wolverine, the Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, Deadpool and Iron Man. In addition to the Avengers lineup, the game’s creators have announced that the title will feature over 100 different playable characters from Marvel comics. The trailer also teases Galactus as the main villain of the title, meaning Marvel is placing the stakes pretty high for its LEGO-ized super heroes.

Suda51 is well-known by gamers for creating games featuring tons of gore and not-so-subtle sexual innuendo. Games such as Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw revel in this type of grindhouse-style excess.

Suda’s newest game, Killer is Dead, is due out this August and looks as if it might even top Lollipop Chainsaw‘s bawdy innuendo.

Deep Silver and Grasshopper Manufacture today released a new trailer for the game featuring the various women that players will encounter during the game, dubbed “Mondo Girls.” Players will take on the role of Mondo Zappa, a James Bond-type executioner that hunts down criminals in a noir-styled world. As such, there will be plenty of seduction and skin, or at least enough to let gamers know they are playing a Suda 51 game.

The rovers on Mars this month were under a command moratorium as Mars passed behind the sun, an event known as solar conjunction. Now that the solar conjunction has ended, researchers have found something amiss with Mars rover Opportunity.

Mission controllers this week found Opportunity in a standby mode. NASA has stated that it appears the rover “sensed something amiss” during a camera check on April 22 and entered standby. Team members have prepared commands for Opportunity to bring it back to full operative status.

“Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun,” said John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground. We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur.”

Opportunity was one of two rovers that landed on Mars in 2004 as part of the Mars Exploration Rover Project. The other rover, Spirit, became stuck in soft soil in 2009, and ceased communications in 2010.

The newest rover on Mars, Curiosity, is reported to be fully operational following the solar conjunction. Researchers are planning on sending it commands starting tomorrow.

(Image courtesy ASA/JPL-Caltech)

While Facebook has recently been losing members in the U.S. and U.K., it has seen growth in developing countries such as India. While its worldwide membership growth is currently offsetting its membership losses, the loss of 6 million U.S. members this month does point to increasing competition in the social media space.

One of Facebook’s largest competitors, LinkedIn, has been slowly building up its user base worldwide as well. The social network for professional networking celebrated 200 million members in January, and one year ago hit 15 million members in India.

This week, LinkedIn announced that it now has over one million members in Singapore. The country is home to the social network’s Asia Pacific headquarters, which opened in 2011. Hari Krishnan, Managing Director at the headquarters, announced the milestone in a post on the LinkedIn blog. From the post:

I’m especially excited about this milestone because I moved to Singapore earlier this year to take on the role of Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan, and it’s been a transformational experience so far. The energy and spirit among the professional community in Singapore is palpable. It’s been an honor to watch Singapore professionals turn to LinkedIn to build their professional identity, grow their networks and find the insights they need to be great at what they do.

To celebrate, LinkedIn handed out coffee and cupcakes to commuters in Raffles Place.

The U.S. launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4 is imminent and Android fans are clamoring to get their hands on the Korean manufacturer’s latest flagship Android device. Anyone hoping to use the phone to store pictures, audio, and video, however, had better have an SD card handy.

Geek.com got its hands on an S4 this week and are now reporting that the smartphone will come with over 7GB of Android and Samsung software pre-installed. For perspective, that’s nearly half of the storage found in the 16GB version of the S4.

It’s been clear for a while that Samsung has been focusing its development and advertising on software. The company is trying to differentiate itself from other smartphone manufacturers now that Android device hardware has caught up with, and in some cases exceeded, Apple’s iPhone. Eye-catching software is a way to do that, but with it comes software bloat and apps that seem nice but are rarely used in practice.

The good thing is, Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones are also popular among the Android modding community. Modders have already rooted some versions of the Galaxy S4 and are working to unlock the bootloader for versions of the phone that are locked by U.S. carriers (such as AT&T). Once rooted, Samsung’s Galaxy devices have access to a wide variety of roms to choose from that do not come pre-loaded with crapware.

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that the Herschel space observatory has run out of liquid helium coolant. The coolant is necessary to cool the telescope’s instruments to near absolute zero.

Herschel’s ground station in Western Australia this afternoon found that the temperature in all of the telescope’s instruments is rising, confirming that the helium has run out. The depletion of the coolant was expected, as the 2300 litres of liquid helium inside the observatory had been evaporating since Herschel’s launch in 2009.

“Herschel has offered us a new view of the hitherto hidden Universe, pointing us to a previously unseen process of star birth and galaxy formation, and allowing us to trace water through the Universe from molecular clouds to newborn stars and their planet-forming discs and belts of comets,” said Göran Pilbratt, a Herschel Project Scientist at the ESA.

The telescope has been gazing into space for over three years. In just the past few months data from Herschel has been used to find starburst galaxies, examine a near-earth asteroid, discover massive comet belts, and link the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact to water on Jupiter.

“Herschel has exceeded all expectations, providing us with an incredible treasure trove of data that that will keep astronomers busy for many years to come,” said Alvaro Giménez Cañete, Director of Science and Robotic Exploration at the ESA.

(Image courtesy ESA)

In early April, J.C. Penny CEO Ron Johnson stepped down following over one year of dismal financial results at the company. Johnson had attempted to turn the department store business on its head, eschewing sales and coupons in favor of consistently lower pricing, but the company’s board was forced to make changes due to a plummeting stock price and an estimated $3.5 billion debt.

It seems, however, that not everyone has written off J.C. Penney. Investment bank Goldman Sachs has issued a five-year $1.75 billion loan to the troubled department store. J.C. Penney stated that the funds will be used to fund “ongoing working capital requirements,” “general corproate purposes,” and part of its debt. The loan is secured by real estate and interest in J.C. Penney.

“This loan facility is an important component of our strategic plan to strengthen the Company’s financial position,” said Ken Hannah, CFO of J.C. Penney. “Together with our revolving credit facility, this will give us the financial strength we need to meet our current funding requirements and build toward a successful future.”

This loan is in addition to the $850 million that J.C. Penny borrowed from a revolving credit fund two weeks ago. The company stated that loan would go toward ensuring the company’s liquidity and to replenish inventory at its stores.

When Watch Dogs premiered at E3 last year, it quickly became one of the most talked-about new IPs at the conference. Its open-world Grand Theft Auto-style gameplay combined with the player ability to manipulate a city’s technological infrastructure and spy on passers-by excited everyone who is getting a bit tired of the Assassin’s Creed series.

Today, Ubisoft announced through a trailer that Watch Dogs will be released on November 19 (November 22 in Europe) for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Wii U. The trailer also teases a bit of the story behind the cool gameplay. Players will take on the role of Aiden Pearce, who has been wronged by the powers that be and vows to get revenge by using the city against them.

In addition to the trailer, Ubisoft also revealed several different special and collector’s edition versions of the game that will be available for pre-order in Europe.

The Dedsec Edition, seen below, comes with a figurine of Aiden, as well as an artbook, soundtrack, badges, AR cards, and a map. Dedsec also includes three downloadable single player missions, which Ubisoft claims will add an hour of game time. Other additions include the Vigilante Edition, the Uplay-exclusive Exclusive Edition, and the Game-exclusive Special Edition. The Vigilante Edition comes with a replica Aiden cap and mask, while the Exclusive and Special editions come with some of the digital content found in the Vigilante and Dedsec editions.

Last week, Capcom release a multiplayer trailer for the upcoming Lost Planet 3. Today, Capcom has released an even longer look at the multiplayer of Lost Planet 3. In the new video, Lost Planet 3 Producer Andrew Szymanski talks about what players can expect with each of the new multiplayer modes added to the game.

Both the trailer and this new video have revealed two new Lost Planet multiplayer modes – Scenario and Akrid Survival.

Scenario puts a team up against offensive or defensive challenges that they can face in either third-person or first-person modes. Akrid Survival puts two teams up against several waves of Akrid before pitting them against each other.

A new study by geologists at Cornell University has shown that earthquakes can leave the Earth deformed.

Cornell geologist Richard Allmendinger told LiveScience that strong earthquakes in Chile have left permanent cracks in the surface of the Earth. The findings “perplexed” Allmendinger and his colleagues, as the Earth is known to “rebound” after earthquakes – an effect that is chronicled using satellite technology. Deformation, such as cracks, in the Earth’s surface is generally thought to be temporary, with geological processes erasing them in “days or weeks.” From the LiveScience report:

“It is only in a place like the Atacama Desert that these cracks can be observed – in all other places, surface processes erase them within days or weeks of their formation, but in the Atacama, they are preserved for millions of years,” Allmendinger said.” We have every reason to believe that our results would be applicable to other areas, but is simply not preserved for study the way that it is in the Atacama Desert.”

The researchers were able to study thousands of years worth of earthquakes in the dry rock of the Atacama desert in Northern Chile. Allmendinger told LiveScience that this new research could change current models of the way upper-plate deformation due to earthquakes is recovered. He also stated that another large earthquake (over magnitude 7) could allow geologists to test these new hypotheses.

Sprint Nextel has been in negotiations with SoftBank for a $20 billion merger since last October. However, Dish Network swooped in earlier this month with a $25 billion offer for Sprint, making things much more complicated. Sprint is currently in the process of evaluating each offer, while Dish is adamant that its offer is superior to SoftBank’s.

Today, Sprint announced that SoftBank has given the carrier a waiver that allows Sprint to continue its discussions with Dish. The waiver does away with some provisions of the merger agreement between Sprint and SoftBank. It will allow Sprint to enter non-disclosure agreements with Dish for further discussion of its merger proposal. Sprint is still not allowed to disclose non-public information to Dish, and the two companies cannot enter formal negotiations.

Last week, Sprint released its first quarter 2013 financial results. While the carrier’s net losses dropped from the fourth quarter of 2012, the carrier’s subscriber numbers also dropped by over 500,000 postpaid subscribers. Sprint is currently in the process of shutting down its Nextel platform, which is where many of the subscriber losses originated.

Over the weekend, footage from Beyond: Two Souls was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. As promised, the a brand new trailer for the video game was debuted at the event, as well as over 30 minutes of gameplay footage.

The new trailer shows off the heavily cinematic feel of the game, which stars Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page. The game is being developed by Quantic Dream and director David Cage, who have tried for years to bring a cinematic experience to video games through games such as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain.

The extensive footage from the screening has also hit the web. It doesn’t seem to contain any major spoilers for the game’s story, though some of the game’s early events are depicted:

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin continued her bid for attention this week by attempting to insult the press via Twitter.

The former vice presidential candidate Tweeted that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was “pathetic” and stated that those attending are “assclowns.” She also referred to the event using the ‘nerd prom’ hashtag. She also expounded upon her tweet on Facebook, saying, “Yuk it up media and pols. While America is buried in taxes and a fight for our rights, the permanent political class in DC dresses up and has a prom to make fun of themselves. No need for that, we get the real joke.”

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Sarah Palin
@SarahPalinUSA

That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom

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Palin is currently “working hard” in the media herself after quitting her job as the governor of Alaska. She provides political commentary on cable TV news channel Fox News.

Presumably, Palin considers the word ‘nerd’ an insult. Though the White House Press Corps is unlikely to take Palin’s insult to heart, real nerds may take offense at having the word ‘nerd’ expanded to include White House journalists.

Earlier this month, Palin had taken a poorly-informed jab at car company Tesla, and got called on it by Tesla’s CEO.

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is now being held under tight security in a federal prison hospital.

According to a report from CBS, the surviving Tsarnaev brother is being held in a cell with a steel door at Federal Medical Center Devens. The facility is located just outside of Boston.

Tsarnaev’s room also reportedly has a viewing window and video surveillance. Medical personnel at the facility monitor inmates in shifts. A prison spokesperson told CBS that keeping the bombing suspect locked up was “business as usual” for the facility.

Tsarnaev was injured in the same firefight with police in which his brother, Tamerlan, was killed. Though Dzhokhar was able to escape on that occasion, a city-wide manhunt eventually located the 19-year-old in a boat parked in a Watertown, Massachusetts backyard.

Another detail about the Tsarnaev brothers also emerged this weekend. Russian police reportedly recorded a phone call in 2011 between Tamerlan and his mother, during which the suspected bomber talked of his radical religious views.

Google Glass may still be a year away from hitting store shelves, but developers who shelled out $1,500 at last year’s Google I/O to pre-order the device have begun to get their prototype models.

As industrious hackers begin getting units, every inch of the device will no doubt be cataloged soon enough. For now, consumers will have to settle for a few of the initial specs from the developer version of the gadget.

Jay Lee, a software developer for Google Apps reseller Dito, got his Glass unit this week and has been geeking-out over the device on Google+. He has begun toying around with the device’s debug mode and listed some key specs for the Glass, including the processor and memory included:

Jay Lee8 hours ago

I realize that with innovative products like Glass, the experience is more important than the hardware specs. And the experience is pretty incredible! Having said that, it's Friday, I'm a geek and it's still awesome to nerd out on the guts. +Liam McLoughlin (Hexxeh) also found the USB debugging setting and got ADB working (looks like it was broken on my primary machine). Once I got it working I pulled up some details about Glass. Key points are:

* It's running Android 4.0.4 – Ice Cream Sandwich – just as Larry Page said
* It's an OMAP 4430 CPU – Dual Core? – Having trouble finding exact mhz
* There's 682mb of RAM (678052kb reported in /proc/meminfo). Kernel messages lead me to believe it's actually 1gb but some is being used for other hardware purposes(?)

https://drive.google.com/#folders/0B0YvUuHHn3MnV0FacEJiMG1GNW8

If you know Android pretty well and have additional questions on the Hardware or Glass OS you'd like answered (and know the commands that will answer them), feel free to post in the comments and I'll see what I can do.

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To put some of the info in context, the OMAP 4430 CPU has been used in mobile devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy S II and the Kindle Fire. Previous reports have shown that Glass has a 640 x 360 display and a 5-megapixel camera. In other words, Glass won’t match up to this year’s (or last year’s) cutting-edge smartphones in terms of power, though it’s still plenty powerful for a wearable computer.

(via BGR)

New research from the Yale School of Medicine shows that autism could be predicted by abnormalities in birth placenta.

The study, published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry found that placental “folds” and trophoblast inclusions – abnormal cell growths – can be used to predict whether babies are at risk for autism.

Researchers looked at 117 placentas from infants who already had risk factors for autism, comparing them to 100 placentas from infants not known to be at risk for autism. The placentas from at-risk infants were found to have as many as 15 trophoblast inclusions. The most any placentas from non-at-risk infants had was two. The Yale researchers stated that placenta with four or more trophoblast inclusions “conservatively” predicts a 96.7% chance of the infant being at risk for autism.

The new findings are important, researchers say, because current diagnoses of autism typically happen at age 3 or older, while effective treatment for autism should start well before the child reaches that age.

“Regrettably couples without known genetic susceptibility must rely on identification of early signs or indicators that may not overtly manifest until the child’s second or third year of life,” said Dr. Harvey Kliman, senior author of the study and a research scientist in the OB/GYN department at Yale.

“I hope that diagnosing the risk of developing autism by examining the placenta at birth will become routine, and that the children who are shown to have increased numbers of trophoblast inclusions will have early interventions and an improved quality of life as a result of this test.”

(Image courtesy Patrick Lynch/Yale University)

Watching stellar impacts as they occur is a rare treat for astronomers. The famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter (which left water in the planet’s atmosphere), which happened only 20 years ago, was the first directly-seen extraterrestrial collision in the solar system.

This week, NASA revealed that Saturn has now been added to the short list of places in the Solar System where astronomers have been able to observe collisions occurring as they happen (Earth, the moon, and Jupiter are the others).

NASA’s Cassini probe has captured images of meteoroids hitting the debris that makes up Saturn’s rings. Researchers believe that studying the impact rate on Saturn can help them determine more precisely how the planets in the Solar System formed.

“These new results imply the current-day impact rates for small particles at Saturn are about the same as those at Earth – two very different neighborhoods in our solar system – and this is exciting to see,” said Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “It took Saturn’s rings acting like a giant meteoroid detector – 100 times the surface area of the Earth – and Cassini’s long-term tour of the Saturn system to address this question.”

Cassini scientists studied data for years to find evidence of the tracks the small meteorites left behind. The research has been published in the latest issue of the journal Science.

“We knew these little impacts were constantly occurring, but we didn’t know how big or how frequent they might be, and we didn’t necessarily expect them to take the form of spectacular shearing clouds,” said Matt Tiscareno, lead author of the paper and a Cassini participating scientist at Cornell University. “The sunlight shining edge-on to the rings at the Saturnian equinox acted like an anti-cloaking device, so these usually invisible features became plain to see.”

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell)