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This year's Gamescom festival will be fully digital, streamed online at gamescom.global, and one of the games being showcased is Dying Light 2 Stay Human. Various details about Techland's next zombie-filled open world have previously been revealed by the video series Dying 2 Know, the third episode of which will debut on-stream at Gamescom. Lead game designer Tymon Smektała will host the episode, which will include a new gameplay trailer and tell us more about Dying Light 2's parkour, combat, and factions. Apparently "players will find out how powerful Aiden's hands and legs can be as weapons, but they will also discover an impressive arsenal of deadly tools". In the footage we've seen there's been a lot of improvised armaments like street signs and buckets, as well as modified ones like a tomahawk axe electrified by the addition of a power cord, so expect a homebrew aesthetic to the zombie-slaying tools on display. It won't all be about killing the dead, however. Techland is also using the Gamescom showcase to "bring you closer to the differences between combat versus infected and humans". We've previously seen that Dying Light 2 will feature factions called survivors, peacekeepers, and renegades, and we'll be forced to choose sides during the story, coming into conflict with other humans trying to rebuild society in different ways. Expect more info on the faction system behind that as well. Finally, the studio plans to detail what it calls "Techland GG", short for "Gamers and Goodies", a community hub that will connect players of all its games beginning with Dying Light and Dying Light 2, and also run competitions, with a cosplay contest coming up Dying Light 2's showcase will be streamed during Gamescom on August 26 at 11am PT / 8pm CEST (which is August 27 at 4am AEST). The game's expected to release on December 7. Here's everything we know about Dying Light 2.

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https://www.livescience.com/ Early on their quest to reach the Lonely Mountain in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" (1937), Bilbo Baggins and company cross paths with an enormous, shape-shifting warrior named Beorn. "Sometimes he is a huge black bear," the wizard Gandalf says of the man, "sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard." In either form, Beorn is a giant among his peers. And now, paleontologists have immortalized the shaggy, axe-wielding brute with the discovery of an extinct mammal that rose to prominence in the Paleocene epoch (65 million to 23 million years ago), shortly after the death of the dinosaurs. They call this furry, puffy-cheeked creature Beornus honeyi. "I have always been a huge Tolkien fan, and there is a long-standing tradition of naming early Paleocene mammals after Tolkien characters," Madelaine Atteberry, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of a new study on B. honeyi and its relatives, told Live Science in an email. "I chose Beornus honeyi because of the large size and 'inflated' appearance of its teeth compared to the other mammals from this time period." Related: The world's 6 smallest mammals You might expect the Beorn of ancient mammals to be a hulking, bear-like monster with axe-sharp teeth and claws — but the reality, much like Bilbo Baggins' party, is a little unexpected. B. honeyi is a condylarth — part of an order of prehistoric, four-legged mammals that looked a bit like dogs, but were actually the ancestors of hoofed mammals like horses and rhinos, according to the new study, published Aug. 17 in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. But Beornus was no rhino; fossils of the creature's lower jaw suggest it was no larger than a modern house cat. That's actually huge compared with the menagerie of rat-sized condylarths that roamed North America in the early Paleocene, according to the researchers. This relative largeness, plus B. honeyi's extra-large molars and puffed-out cheeks, made it worthy of its Tolkien-esque name, Atteberry said. Like other condylarths, Beornus likely used its big, flat teeth to grind up plants, but may have also dined on the occasional insect or other source of meat, the team wrote. But Beornus was just one of many small mammals that seems to have thrived after the fall of the dinosaurs. In the same study, which included a number of jaw fossils excavated from the Great Divide Basin in southern Wyoming, the researchers also identified two other species of condylarths previously unknown to science — Conacodon hettingeri and Miniconus jeanninae. All three of the newly described species were closely related, but showed distinct differences in the shapes and sizes of their teeth. These condylarths could help rewrite the story of the earliest mammals that po[CENSORED]ted North America after the dinosaur extinction, Atteberry said. Prior studies of fauna from the first 320,000 years after that mass extinction suggest that mammals were still recovering, and that individual families like condylarths were diversifying very slowly. "However, the earliest Paleocene fauna in the Great Divide Basin in Wyoming is a different story," Atteberry said. "It has more diversity than what we would predict for this time period, which suggests that we cannot really generalize mammalian recovery after the dinosaur extinction." In other words, Beorn and its buddies may have been part of a thriving small-mammal scene during the early Paleocene. These three species are part of a collection of some 420 mammalian fossils discovered at the Great Divide Basin alone, and more newfound species from the same era are likely to turn up there, the researchers said. Perhaps those future fossil discoveries will find a place in the Tolkien club, as well. More than two dozen extinct mammals have been named after Tolkien lore so far, including the weasel-like insectivore Bubogonia bombadili (named for the eccentric forest-dweller Tom Bombadil) and the canine ancestor Barophagus orc (named for the brutish humanoids that Tolkien's works po[CENSORED]rized).

https://www.bbc.com/news//world Astronomers have captured some of the most detailed images ever seen of galaxies in deep space. They are in much higher definition than normal and reveal the inner workings of galaxies in unprecedented detail. Many of the images could yield insights into the role of black holes in star and planet formation. The researchers say that the pictures will transform our understanding of how galaxies evolve. The images are of the radio waves emitted by the galaxies. Researchers often study the radio waves from astronomical objects rather than the visible light they give off because it enables them to see things that would otherwise be blocked by the Earth's atmosphere or dust and gas in faraway galaxies. Many regions of space that are dark to our eyes, actually burn brightly in the radio waves they give off. This allows astronomers to peer into star-forming regions or into the heart of galaxies. What is new is that the team has dramatically improved the resolution of radio images by linking together more than 70,000 small antennae spread across nine European counties. Combining radio signals from so many antennas is not a straight-forward process. The team has spent six years developing a completely new way of collecting the signal from each antenna, digitising it, transporting it to a to central processor, and then combining all the data into images that are not only of enormous scientific interest but also of great beauty. The accomplishment is a technical tour de force and was led by Dr Leah Morabito from Durham University, UK. "To work on the data for so long, and then to finally get such images and be able be the first person to see what it looks like is just incredible," she told BBC News. "I walked around with a huge smile on my face for the rest of the day, because I felt so proud that I was able to make these images and be able to see something nobody had ever seen before". The image at the top of the page was produced by a member of Dr Morabito's team. It shows a galaxy that is barely visible, sitting in the middle of jets of material in orange, shooting out from either side, each one much larger than the galaxy itself. The jets are caused by a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy- an object with such strong gravity not even light can escape. It normally sucks in material - but the inward pull also creates forces around the black hole that result in material being spat out, far into space. Such jets have been observed before - but astronomers have obtained new scientific information from the dark bands on the jet on the right, which have not been seen before. These, the astronomers believe, represent periods of relative inactivity by the black hole - when it spits out less material. The image therefore gives researchers an insight into the black hole's "sleep cycle". The picture above shows two galaxies colliding. the bright spot on the one on the left is caused by exploding stars - creating what is effectively a galactic wind - blowing dust and gas away from it. The light from the galaxy shown directly above originated when the Universe was only 2.6 billion years old. Above and below it are jets of material thrown out by the black hole within. Normally such early galaxies can't be studied in detail. But now, for the first time, the astronomers have seen the structure of one of them at radio frequencies - which provides critical scientific information about how the black hole is interacting with its surroundings. The images are revealing that galaxies are much more than a collection of stars. They are dynamic sun- and planet-making factories, powered by black holes, according to Dr Neal Jackson, from the University of Manchester. "Even seasoned astronomers go 'wow!' when they see these images," he told me. "It's become very clear that, in order to understand galaxy evolution, we need to understand the black hole right at the very centre, because it appears to have a fairly fundamental influence on how galaxies evolve and that is what these images allow us to do," says Dr Jackson. "These high-resolution images allow us to zoom in to see what's really going on when supermassive black holes launch these jets of material." Dr Morabito says that images like these are helping astronomers learn just how these processes, that created stars and planets - including our own Solar System - actually work. "We are really beginning to understand how galaxies have evolved. And the black holes are a massive part of that because their jets can take away fuel for star formation. And as they push outwards, they can disrupt the galaxies. They can even trigger star formation or quench it and make it happen less," she said. The first set of results have led to the publication of nine scientific papers on the dynamics of black holes in galaxies. But this is just the start for the team. They plan to scan millions of galaxies over the next few years. "And that's really what we need to be able to understand, the whole complete picture of how black holes impact galaxy evolution," says Dr Morabito, "I think we're definitely in for some surprises. Whenever you start doing something new in astronomy you always find out things that you never expected and that's what I really look forward to." The international network of telescopes is known as the Low Frequency Array known as Lofar for short. Most of the antennas are located in Exloo in the Netherlands.