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We've got some mixed messages from Sony over the past year or so about its ambitions for bringing first-party games to PC. It's previously said that it wants to bring more of its games our way, and it's had very solid success with PC versions of Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone. More recently, though, Sony Studios boss Hermen Hulst threw cold water on hopes that we'd see same-day PC releases of hot new PlayStation 5 games. And in case there were any lingering doubts, he effectively wiped them off the table in a new interview with Game Informer in which he made it very clear that PlayStation consoles are still the priority. "Typically, there have been about two years between the release on our platform and the PC platform," Hulst said. "But you can rely on us to continue to create platform-defining exclusive content for PlayStation—that's part of the reason why we exist. "It’s really important for us to squeeze the maximum out of the platform, to build showcases for the platform, and really let the audience see what these great features are contributing to the overall experience." That doesn't mean Sony is having second thoughts about the PC market, just that same-day releases—something we've come to take for granted with game launches on Xbox consoles—aren't likely to happen anytime soon. Hulst said in June that "we do value PC gamers," but that the question was finding "the right times to launch each game," presumably in order to maintain the value of exclusivity for PlayStation owners. Based on what we've seen so far, Sony's optimal window right now seems to be measured in years: Horizon Zero Dawn launched on the PlayStation 4 in February 2017 and didn't come to PC until August 2020, while Days Gone took about a year less, arriving on PC in May 2021 after a PS4 launch in April 2019. The wait for Uncharted has been even longer: Uncharted 4, the most recent game in the series, came out on PS4 in May 2016, and while a PC release was leaked earlier this year in a Sony investor presentation, it still hasn't been officially announced.

A scuba diver off Australia noticed some odd behavior whenever he came into contact with male sea snakes: The venomous reptiles would coil around his fins, licking the water around him and even sometimes chasing him underwater. Now, he knows why: It was mating season, and the males thought he was a potential mate. In a new study, the diver and another researcher analyzed 158 of these interactions with olive sea snakes (Aipysurus laevis) over several years in the Great Barrier Reef and found that interactions were more common during the reptiles' mating season. The sexually frustrated snakes also displayed elaborate behaviors that are often used during courtship between the sea serpents. "Males are very aroused and active while looking for 'girlfriends,'" lead author Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist and reptile expert at Macquarie University in Australia, told Live Science. But because the males can't tell the difference between female snakes and scuba divers, it can lead to some comical interactions, he added. Although olive sea snakes are venomous, and potentially lethal, to humans, the researchers do not think believe that people are at an increased risk from swimming with the reptiles during their mating season. Close encounters Tim Lynch — now a senior research scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency — collected the data while working on his doctorate at James Cook University in Australia in the mid-1990s. He recorded the encounters around the Keppel Islands in the southern Great Barrier Reef and was the first to notice a link between their unusual behavior and mating. "It was exciting; they are the most graceful of animals and also have no evolutionary relationship with people," Lynch said. "They are not actually trying to attack you; they are just curious." The new study came about after Shine read Lynch's work while researching sea snakes. "I read his thesis, thought it was great and convinced him to collaborate with me to finally publish these exciting results," Shine said. Although the data were collected more than 25 years ago, the researchers still think the findings are relevant today. "I think the data is still sound, as the behaviors of the snakes, and probably people as well, will not have changed," Lynch said. Sexually motivated During 74 out of 158 encounters, Lynch was approached by a sea snake, and a majority of these overlapped with their mating season, between May and August. Males were also significantly more likely than females to approach, and display some mating behaviors toward, the diver, especially during the mating season. Lynch also described behaviors known to occur during the mating season, such as males coiling their bodies around his fins. "Males coil around females during courtship, probably to hang on effectively while they get into position to mate," Shine said. The males also tended to flick out their tongues at Lynch. However, the most striking behavior occurred in 13 incidents, when the males rapidly chased Lynch underwater when he swam away. "Females don't do any chasing; they do the fleeing [during mating]," Lynch said. "So swimming away from a male snake is mimicking courtship behavior," which encourages the male to follow. The researchers suspect that the snakes that chased Lynch were probably in the midst of a failed mating attempt. "It's clear that most approaches to divers were by males who had lost contact with the females they were pursuing," Shine said. "They frantically search for a female if they lose touch with her." Mistaken identity The researchers suspect that sea snakes cannot properly distinguish between shapes underwater. "It's a lot more difficult to see through water than through air, especially if the water is rough or dirty," Shine said. Sea snakes also evolved from land snakes fairly recently, so they don't have a visual system that works well underwater, he added. Instead, sea snakes rely more on scent and less on vision to experience their world. That is likely why tongue flicking was such a commonly observed behavior during interactions with divers, Lynch said. "They can only really confirm that you are not a female snake by licking you." Sea snake tongues pick up chemicals in the water that then get analyzed by a special gland in the roof of the mouth, Shine said. This means that a sea snake has to get very close to an object to identify it, he added. Misunderstood behavior Divers don't need to worry about being attacked while swimming with these sea snakes. "Very few recreational users of the ocean are bitten by sea snakes, so the danger is low," Shine said. "Most bites, including fatal ones, are to fishers who haul snakes out of the water." Advertisement For instance, in the most recently reported human death from a sea snake bite, a British man was killed when he was handling a black ringed sea krait (Laticauda semifasciata) that was caught in a net byf a fishing trawler off the north coast of Australia in 2018, according to the BBC. Lynch was bitten several times during his doctoral work. However, these instances involved him physically handling the snakes, and he was always wearing wet-suit gloves. "Olive sea snakes do not usually bite unless harassed underwater," Lynch said, "but they are enthusiastic biters when brought onto land." Although people should always remain cautious around venomous animals, the researchers see no reason people should avoid sea snakes completely. "If you know what is going on you can relax, settle onto the bottom and stay still and let the snakes investigate you," Lynch said. The study was published online Aug. 19 in the journal Scientific Reports.

https://www.bbc.com/news After scrambling for days to bring them to safety, nine members of an Afghan all-girls robotics team have arrived in Qatar, the team's parent organisation has confirmed.Their flight out of Afghanistan was organised by the Qatar government, which expedited visas and sent an aircraft.The team first made headlines in 2017 after winning a special award at an international robotics competition in the US. They have been widely praised as a shining example of the potential of women's education in Afghanistan. The departure of the team members, aged 15 to 19, as well as a 25-year-old teacher, comes amid a worsening security situation in Kabul, the Afghan capital. In a statement, the team's parent organisation, the US-based Digital Citizen Fund (DCF), said that they requested help from Qatar on August 12, just three days ahead of Kabul's capture by the Taliban. Afghan girls make ventilators out of car parts Afghan girls robotics team wins in Washington Members of the Qatar government had remained in contact with the team after hosting them in Doha, the capital, in 2019. The girls originally came from the city of Herat, in western Afghanistan. "When we heard that Kabul was going to fall, we were able to contact the [Qatari foreign] ministry and they immediately started expediting visas to get them out," DCF board member Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown told the BBC. "They are taking very good care of them." She stressed, however, that the girls were not "rescued"."The girls rescued themselves through all their hard work and bravery over the past several years," she added. "The flight out of Kabul was only the end of a journey in which safety was a concern." The girls now in Doha may remain in Qatar or move further afield to continue their studies. Although she declined to provide specifics, she added that several universities around the globe - including some in the US - have offered scholarships. "It will be important for them to continue their education," she said. Ms Schaeffer Brown said other current and former team members remain in Afghanistan, along with teachers, mentors and others who work for the organisation. The robotics team, which includes teenage members, was formed by Afghan tech entrepreneur and DCF founder Roya Mahboob in 2017. Last year, the team turned its focus on Covid-19 patients by making low-cost ventilators out of car parts.

Call of Duty is parachuting back into World War II. Call of Duty: Vanguard, the next entry in Activision's multibillion-selling video game franchise, inserts players into many pivotal battles including the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Midway, and Operation Tonga on the eve of the D-Day invasion. In the game (out Nov. 5 for Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 5 and PS4, and PCs on Battle.net), you get to know—and fight as—four different characters who eventually team up as the first special forces squad for a mission against the Nazis in Berlin. Special operations forces such as SEAL Team Six grew out of Allied experiments with small squads chosen for specialized missions in World War II. In developing the single-player story campaign, Sledgehammer's creative team worked with historians including Marty Morgan, author of "D-Day: A Photographic History of the Normandy Invasion" who served as technical director on the studio's 2017 game Call of Duty WWII. "We were really inspired by these first special forces operators and they seemed like such interesting characters that we wanted to explore," said David Swenson, creative director of the game's single-player story campaign for development studio Sledgehammer Games. Call of Duty: Vanguard's story is fiction, but "even though we are not beholden to history, we are rooted in history," Swenson said. "It feels realistic and authentic." After Sledgehammer finished Call of Duty WWII—the top-selling game of 2017, generating more than $1 billion in revenue by the year's end—the studio wanted to create another game set in that period. "We kind of came out of that just scratching the surface, where we felt there was all these new stories," said Vanguard director Josh Bridge. Call of Duty: Vanguard has a new story with no connection to the 2017 game and "feels like a different take on World War 2," Bridge said during a recent online presentation about the new game's development. Addressing harassment allegations The game's reveal comes amid internal conflict at parent company Activision Blizzard, which faces a lawsuit filed last month by the state of California over sexual harassment and equal pay violations. The suit alleges the video game publisher paid women less than men, and fired or forced women to quit at higher frequencies than men. Women of color were "particularly impacted," the suit charges, and women employees were subject to constant sexual harassment including groping, comments and advances. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick apologized after the company's initial response to the lawsuit led to an employee walkout. "It is imperative that we acknowledge all perspectives and experiences and respect the feelings of those who have been mistreated in any way," he said in a note to employees. "I am sorry that we did not provide the right empathy and understanding." J. Allen Brack, the head of Blizzard Entertainment, has also subsequently stepped down and was replaced by Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra as co-leaders of the studio. "The stories and the pain that have been shared are simply devastating," said Sledgehammer studio head Aaron Halon last week before previewing Call of Duty: Vanguard. " Harassment of any kind goes against everything we stand for as a studio. ... While we cannot comment on the lawsuit ... as a team we are committed to making sure all team members feel safe, welcome and respected." The cast of Call of Duty characters The Sledgehammer team showed part of a mission from the game involving one of the main characters, Sgt. Arthur Kingsley, a British paratrooper attempting to land behind enemy lines in German-occupied France on the night before D-Day. You get a cinematic first-person panorama as Kingsley parachutes out of a plane after it takes a hit and now has an engine afire. Explosions and smoke pepper the sky as bombers drop payloads and fighters try to shoot them down. Kingsley hits the ground landing in an eerie dramatically-lit battlefield scene with German troops aiming their flashlights as they search for downed paratroopers. Kingsley is based on a real-world paratrooper, Sgt. Sidney Cornell, known as the first Black paratrooper to land on D-Day. The other members of the squad are inspired by real-world soldiers, too. The character Lt. Polina Petrova, is a Russian sniper who defends the city during the Battle of Stalingrad. She is based on Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who earned the title "Lady Death" of the Red Army and is the most successful woman sniper in history, credited with 309 kills. Navy Capt. Vernon "Mike" Micheel, who damaged two Japanese carriers during the Battle of Midway, is the inspiration for fighter pilot Captain Wade Jackson. And Second Lieutenant Lucas Riggs, an infantryman in the North African theater of operations where the Allies faced off with Rommel, is inspired by Charles Upham, a New Zealander and Captain in the Commonwealth of Nation forces, a two-time awardee of the Victoria Cross. Eventually these four soldiers are brought together as a squad to thwart Project Phoenix, a Nazi initiative aimed at ensuring the Third Reich after the imminent fall of Hitler and Berlin. "There's lots of cool opportunities to play as these different characters in these different locations," Swenson said. "They are all brought together into Berlin at the end of the war on their first special forces mission."

The mod is fairly straightforward and requires little soldering to pull off. A USB 3.1 Type-C connector is soldered to a male micro JST connector. There are test pads on the backside of the Pi Zero that you can solder the female micro JST connector to, but you could also use pins to connect it. In this case, Mcllrn’s project uses a Pimoroni inky pHAT, which envelopes the GPIO, so an alternative solution was necessary. The Raspberry Pi Zero is a capable SBC that can run a full-blown OS just like the regular Raspberry Pi. Despite its notable po[CENSORED]rity, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a new iteration of the pocket-sized board, and makers are itching for new features. It’s hard to slow down a community as dedicated as the Pi community though, and today we’re sharing an awesome USB Type-C Pi Zero upgrade developed by a maker known as Mcllrn. This isn’t the first of Mcllrn’s projects we’ve featured. They recently turned the CPU into a button, (which isn’t very practical or something we’d recommend, but some of the best Raspberry Pi projects are ones you can do, not should do).

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The menacing rattle of a rattlesnake's tail is far more sophisticated than first thought, as the structure can create an auditory illusion that suggests the venomous snake is closer to a potential threat than it really is, according to a new study. Scientists think that rattlesnakes "rattle" the keratin structure on their tails to warn off predators, gradually increasing the frequency as a possible attacker gets closer. But now they've found the snake may have another trick in its arsenal — a sudden frequency jump in the rattling sound that it uses to fool its listener. "Our data show that the acoustic display of rattlesnakes, which has been interpreted for decades as a simple acoustic warning signal about the presence of the snake, is in fact a far more intricate interspecies communication signal," senior study author Boris Chagnaud, a professor of neurobiology at Karl-Franzens-University Graz in Austria, said in a statement. Chagnaud discovered the first clue to the mystery of rattlesnakes' "smart signal" high-frequency mode while approaching one of the snakes during a visit to a laboratory. He noticed that the frequency of the snake's iconic rattle increased before suddenly jumping as he approached, but decreased as he retreated. To figure out what was behind this phenomenon, he and his team recorded the frequency of the rattle as various objects — including a human-like torso and a black disk — were brought closer to the snake. As threats first approached, the rattling rose by a steady rate to a frequency of 40 Hz, but as the objects came closer, the frequency suddenly jumped to between 60 and 100 Hz. According to the researchers, the rattling rate increased more quickly the faster the object approached, but changing the size of the object didn't impact the frequency level. To figure out why the snake was changing its rattling rate, and why it was using a sudden jump in frequency, the researchers designed a virtual reality grassland with a virtual snake hiding inside of it. Sending 11 volunteers inside the simulation, the researchers asked the volunteers to approach the virtual snake and indicate when the creature was 3.3 feet (1 meter) away. The cyber snake increased its rattling rate as the humans approached, suddenly leaping to 70 Hz as the volunteers came within 13 feet (4 m), and was able to trick all of the human participants into underestimating their distance to it. Chagnaud thinks that rattlesnakes weave this weird auditory illusion in order to create a "distance safety margin" between them and a potential attacker. He hypothesizes that human hearing, alongside the other mammalian auditory systems that it is closely related to, picks up on the frequency of the rattle and the rule of how it increases with distance, only to be fooled when the snake changes this rule with an unexpected, and sudden, jump in the frequency. "Imagine you walk towards the snake, it starts to rattle slowly, increasing the rattle events incrementally. If at a distance of 2 meters [6.5 feet] from the snake, the snake suddenly changes this rule, and instead of making the 2 meter sound, it makes the sounds like it's only at 1 meter [3.3 feet], then it fooled you," Chagnaud told Live Science in an email. Sure enough, when Chagnaud tested this hypothesis by repeating his virtual reality experiment without the frequency jumps, his human participants were far better at guessing the distance to the virtual snake. "Snakes do not just rattle to advertise their presence, but they evolved an innovative solution: a sonic distance warning device similar to the one included in cars while driving backwards," he said in the statement. "Evolution is a random process, and what we might interpret from today's perspective as elegant design is in fact the outcome of thousands of trials of snakes encountering large mammals. The snake rattling coevolved with mammalian auditory perception by trial and error, leaving those snakes that were best able

https://www.bbc.com/news The Taliban recently "massacred" and brutally tortured several members of the Hazara minority in Afghanistan, says human rights group Amnesty International. Witnesses have given harrowing accounts of the killings, which took place in early July in Ghazni province. Since taking over the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, the Taliban have tried to portray a more restrained image. But Amnesty said the incident was a "horrifying indicator" of Taliban rule. The Hazara community is Afghanistan's third largest ethnic group. They mainly practise Shia Islam and have faced long-term discrimination and persecution in predominantly Sunni Afghanistan and Pakistan. 'Everything I ever thought I would have is gone' In the report published on Thursday, Amnesty said the nine Hazara men were killed between 4 and 6 July in Malistan district in the eastern Ghazni province. The rights group interviewed eyewitnesses and reviewed photographic evidence after the killings. Villagers said they had escaped to the mountains when fighting intensified between government forces and Taliban fighters. When some of them returned to the village of Mundarakht to collect food, they said the Taliban had looted their homes and were waiting for them. Separately, some men who passed through Mundarakht on their way home to their hamlet were also ambushed. In total six men were allegedly shot, some in the head, and three were tortured to death. According to witness accounts, one man was strangled with his own scarf and had his arm muscles sliced off. Another's body was shot to pieces. One eyewitness said they asked the fighters why they inflicted such brutality on their people. "When it is the time of conflict, everyone dies, it doesn't matter if you have guns or not. It is the time of war," a fighter allegedly said. Amnesty's Secretary-General Agnès Callamard said: "The cold-blooded brutality of these killings is a reminder of the Taliban's past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring." "These targeted killings are proof that ethnic and religious minorities remain at particular risk under Taliban rule in Afghanistan." It added that mobile phone services have been cut in many of the areas that have been captured by the Taliban, and so information about the killing had not leaked out until now. Amnesty called on the UN to investigate and protect those at risk. The Taliban were known for their brutal rule of Afghanistan which deprived women and ethnic minorities of their rights, before they were ousted by a US-led coalition in 2001. In a press conference following its takeover of Kabul, the militant group promised it would not launch revenge attacks on anyone who worked with US forces, and that it would also grant women rights under Islamic sharia law. But a UN document has warned that Taliban fighters have been going door-to-door to search for people who worked for Nato forces or the previous Afghan government.

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