Research News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Pokémon Go Sustainability Week is now well underway, with fans able to get their hands on some eco-friendly Pokémon. So expect plenty of grass types!

Pokémon Go: Rivals Week 2024 has been announced by the developers! There’s a lot to look forward to in this year’s event.

With all Dragonflight dungeons returning for Season 4 of Dragonflight, Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr is one of them! However, players are having a hard time getting to Badlands, as there are no portals by the usual Mythic+ place in Valdrakken. However, the portal in Valdrakken by the Titan Researcher area is still available, and can be used to get there quickly if you don't have access to Path of the Watcher's Legacy! /way #2112 25.3 39.4 Badlands Portal

The Entertainment Software Association, the big trade organization for the video game industry in the US, says it's fully opposed to a proposed copyright exemption that would allow gaming scholars to access online libraries of preserved games.

The United States' Federal Trade Commission is banning non-compete clauses.

In order to get your Spark of Awakening in Season 4, complete a weekly open world quest which rotates from week to week!

While knee-deep in a challenging Frostpunk 2 campaign, I found myself distracted by a pop-up notification.

There’s always something new going on in Pokémon Go, but this time it centres around something quite old — as the Rediscover Kanto Special Research quest harkens back to the original generation.

Last week, a government hearing took place between representatives of the Video Game History Foundation, the Rhizome project, and the Software Preservation Network among others, with legal representation for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the AACS among those in opposition. The hearing was a follow-up to the SPN petitioning the US copyright office, last year, for a DMCA exemption that would allow researchers to access games in libraries and archives. As reported by Game Developer, ESA legal representative Steve Englund said in the hearing that, currently, there’s “[no] combination of limitations [ESA members] would support to provide remote access."

You've two days to sign-up for our free webinar on the new transformative landscape of mobile games and how to succeed within it

A tipline set up 26 years ago to combat online child exploitation has not lived up to its potential and needs technological and other improvements to help law enforcement go after abusers and rescue victims, a new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory has found.

In a recent revelation at the Black Hat Asia conference, security researchers unveiled a cunning cybercrime scheme exploiting Apple Store Online's 'Someone else will pick it up' feature. This exploit has reportedly netted criminals over $400,000 in just two years.

Love crossword puzzles but don’t have all day to sit and solve a full-sized puzzle in your daily newspaper? That’s what The Mini is for!

In the quest to discover extraterrestrial life, scientists are broadening their horizons beyond the traditional green image of alien beings. A recent study suggests that alien life forms might actually be purple, specifically purple bacteria. Astronomers are focusing on these lavender-hued microbes due to their unique chemical makeup, which could make them well-suited to thrive on distant planets orbiting dim red stars.

In RimWorld, you play as crash-landed survivors who have to eke out a new existence on a hostile planet, surviving and perhaps thriving between raider attacks, AI uprisings, and swarms of hostile insects. The game has a handful of expansions with new events, and the latest, Anomaly, is the scariest one yet. If you only have the spare scratch to pick up one RimWorld expansion, Anomaly is by far your best choice.

Bosses worried about turnover or wondering how long a new hire will stick around can now turn to AI for a heads-up on who might be next out the door.

11 Bit Studios has become reliable since initially jumping onto the scene with Anomaly: Warzone Earth. The outstanding This War of Mine gave them that broader appeal, followed four years later by Frostpunk. The excellent reception of Frostpunk, critically and commercially, with over three million copies sold, meant a sequel was inevitable. This brings us to Frostpunk 2, which will be released later this year and is currently in an open beta.

Poipole landed in Pokémon Go at the beginning of March as part of the World of Wonders season, which includes a Special Research task.

If you’re playing Pokémon Go, then there’s a good chance you’re running around trying to catch as many Bug-type creatures as possible in conjunction with Bug Out 2024.

NVIDIA's former researcher has made interesting claims about the company's reign within the AI space, stating that its CUDA software ecosystem helped it a lot in securing dominance over the competition.

Typically, playing city-based or civilization-building games is a relaxing experience for me. There’s an inherent satisfaction in something I created in Cities: Skylines 2 or Mini Motorways running efficiently based on my actions. I’m content with spending dozens of hours crafting a functioning world, and only occasionally having my skills tested in a high-intensity situation. Frostpunk 2 from 11 bit Studios is a city-builder where those feelings are often reversed. Most of my time playing its beta was extremely stressful, as I constantly had to make difficult decisions in order to preserve a society that established itself in a frosty postapocalypse.

Of Fallout’s narrative high notes, the peak is arguably Fallout: New Vegas, the much-loved installment set in post-apocalyptic Vegas and crafted by Obsidian Entertainment, members of which have shepherded the Fallout aesthetic all the way from the Wasteland games to the Outer Worlds. And although Obsidian were fated never to helm another mainline Fallout game, they did get to revisit the universe four times before being ripped away by cruel reality. It’s those four twists on the formula, those four adventures into the unknown, that we’re here to celebrate today. At the height of their storytelling powers, Obsidian gave us some of the best sci-fi in games with the four Fallout: New Vegas add-ons: Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. Each veered sharply away from the standard Fallout formula in its own different direction, while simultaneously painting in the secret overstory of the New Vegas universe and the player character, the Courier.

A fifth season of True Detective is on the way from Night Country creator Issa López  – and the filmmaker is keeping it vague when it comes to prior season connections.

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

AI roundup:  London-based model Alexsandrah has a virtual twin which was created with the help of AI. This real-life virtual model is another big example of how AI transforms creative industries. In other news, new research on how AI will impact immersive media on 5G Networks will take place, addressing media packaging, ingesting, media delivery, and other concerns. 

Apple's iPhone has long been renowned for its sleek design and user-friendly interface, but the tech giant is now venturing into the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) to further elevate the user experience.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Fallout season 1, as well as information from the Fallout games.]

CJI Chandrachud advocates ethical AI in legal research; AI investment to boost productivity and worker pay: BlackRock CEO; Instagram enhances content discovery with generative AI integration; Surat municipal schools to offer AI and coding courses- this and more in our daily roundup. Let us take a look.

The highly anticipated game Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second installment in the ambitious Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, received widespread critical acclaim when it launched in late February.

Huawei has grand ambitions of completely ridding itself of foreign technology and relying on its resources to get the job done, but it will take a massive investment for the former Chinese giant’s goals to reach fruition. To accomplish this, the company is reportedly putting up $1.66 billion for its R&D chip plant and has employed talented personnel hailing from the likes of ASML to speed up the process.

John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing ends with its few remaining characters in a desperate spot. Faced with an alien creature that can infect, assimilate, and emulate human bodies, the survivors don’t know who among them might secretly be an alien, or whether their pyrrhic efforts have eliminated the infection. They’re stranded in the Antarctic with their research base destroyed. Their resources are gone, there’s no meaningful shelter left, they’re freezing to death, and they can’t even trust each other enough to work together.

Privacy concerns regarding Apple's iPhone have recently been highlighted by researchers from Finland's Aalto University. Despite Apple's reputation for prioritising privacy, the researchers found that keeping personal data hidden from Apple is challenging. The study focused on eight preloaded Apple apps, including Safari, Siri, and iMessage, which are integral to the Apple ecosystem and difficult to remove.

If you’re into factory simulation games, you’ve likely given Builderment a try at least once. Now, we have its kin dropping on Android, Builderment Idle. It’s free to play and is now up for grabs on the Play Store.

AI roundup: Microsoft is planning to make a huge investment in Japan to accelerate the country's AI development. Additionally, the investment will also aid Japan in building strong cybersecurity defence to combat enemy countries. In other news, President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida urged Amazon and Nvidia to fund an AI research program. Know more about such AI news of today. 

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and Belarus spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya, have safely returned to Earth following a productive six-month research stint aboard the International Space Station.

Actor Kyle MacLachlan compares the Fallout show to the work of David Lynch, praising its presentation and world-building.

Tired of running Domhainne Tunnels? Chances are good you’re not the only one. Thankfully, Raxxanterax has been hard at work testing an updated leveling strategy for Diablo 4 Season 4 that may surprise you — Helltides. According to Raxxanterax's research, leveling up in Helltides will be roughly 30% faster than sticking to the old “Dopamine Tunnels'' leveling strategy while being more fun, more social, and far more lucrative in terms of gold, gear, and crafting materials.

X-Silicon, a firm known for silicon IP solutions, has unveiled a new "C-GPU architecture," which combined with a RISC-V CPU focuses on low-power & efficient performance solutions.

The world of Numen is broken, shattered into nine floating planetoids by a calamitous event. Now, two major powers vie for control of what remains of Numen - the technological Syndicate, and the traditionalist Sovereign. Trapped between the two is you, Rin D'Lorah, daughter of a Syndicate researcher and the recent discoverer of a conspiracy that threatens what remains of this world.

NASA has been planning to develop a lunar terrain vehicle (LTV) which will allow Artemis astronauts to travel around the lunar south polar region. The US Space Agency has selected three agencies that will work on the development of a lunar vehicle. Among the three, NASA has also selected Intuitive Machines which recently participated in the landing of Odysseus spacecraft on the Moon. Now, the companies have again partnered to bring a high-tech vision to reality. Know more about the lunar terrain vehicle (LTV). 

GamesIndustry.biz, TikTok and the National Research Group will host a free webinar next month on the new transformative landscape of mobile games and how to succeed within it.

It appears that Gmail and Microsoft 365 accounts are in danger because of a newly discovered phishing kit that could put your accounts in a lot of danger. Now, most of our accounts are protected by two-factor authentication, and for the most part, it is one of the safest ways to prevent anything wrong from happening to your account. However, Tycoon 2FA, which is a new adversary in the middle, is now a threat to both of the aforementioned accounts.

Hello! Welcome to the 321st edition of the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up! This week we celebrate a player reaching 100 million gold and how they went about it. We also have a look at what's to come for gold making in Cataclysm Classic and some interesting changes to Speed Sets in 10.2.6. Finally, we have some discussions about making gold in retail without Dragonflight and some interesting quick farms that can be done on rotation. My name is Samadan and I'll be your guide through the World of Gold Making!

The latest season of Pokémon Go – known as World of Wonders – is bursting with new incentives to jump back into the worldwide catch 'em all.

Helldivers 2, Arrowhead Game Studio's highly successful sequel to 2015's Helldivers, was the highest-growing title on PC and PS5 in the US and UK in February 2024.

$400k worth of Playdate game consoles have disappeared in Las Vegas.

AMD's Zen platform is reportedly vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks, as revealed in new research by ETH Zurich, affecting the usability of DRAM.

In order to get your Sparks of Awakening in Season 4, players will need to complete a weekly open world quest which seems to rotate from week to week!

Millennia looks takes a different approach to the passage of time and the evolution of civilisations, nations and empires, building its retelling of history around the concept of Ages. That’s far from the only difference to its peers in the 4X strategy genre, but it’s certainly one of the most distinctive, as you explore ‘what if?’ scenarios across 10,000 years of history.

In a setback for the highly anticipated NISAR (NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission, the joint endeavour between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has hit a snag, pushing back its launch schedule with the target now shifted to late April.

It's impossible to overstate the devotion that Liverpool fans have to their soon-departing manager, Jurgen Klopp. Picking the team up from mid-table doldrums almost a decade ago, the charismatic German transformed it into champions of England and Europe once again.

Club Med embraces artificial intelligence for enhanced holiday experiences; IIT Kharagpur launches MTech in artificial intelligence; Pune Station's AI cameras identify blacklisted individuals; Academics sound alarm over AI generated content in research papers- this and more in our daily roundup. Let us take a look.

Scientists have recently uncovered two ancient streams of stars within the Milky Way Galaxy, dubbed Shakti and Shiva, shedding light on the galaxy's earliest formation stages. These star structures, identified using data from the Gaia space telescope, are believed to have merged with the Milky Way around 12 billion years ago, providing vital clues about its early evolution.

It's no secret that D&D is getting new core rulebooks this year, and new details have just been revealed about how its classes will work… but if one D&D designer had their way, some would be very different.

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, announced on Friday that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has honored renowned Indian astrophysicist Prof Jayant Murthy by naming an asteroid after him. The asteroid, previously designated as "2005 EX296," has now been officially named "(215884) Jayantmurthy" by the IAU's Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature. Positioned between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid completes one orbit around the Sun every 3.3 years.

Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile drops today (21st March 2024), which means the popular battle royale will be available on both Android and iOS.

BBC mulls in house AI model from text archives; MIT develops AI tool for 30x faster high quality image generation; AI could automate 84% of government jobs, says study; Yotta data services targets global AI market with cheapest compute rates- this and more in our daily roundup. Let us take a look.

The Pokémon Go Verdant Wonders event is live right now, and you have until 25th March 2024 at 8pm local time to make the most of it – it’s time to complete those Field Research tasks and unlock that Special Research Story to get hold of Zarude.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has debuted with the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score in franchise history – but that's not stopping fans (including myself) from keeping the faith.

Last year, Ubisoft announced that it had created an AI tool that could potentially generate NPC dialogue, much to the dismay of pretty much everyone. Ubisoft's games have never really had the most expressive or interesting NPCs, and many feared that giving them AI-generated dialogue would make them even blander than they already are.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission has delivered an extraordinary revelation with its sample collection from asteroid Bennu, unveiling a treasure trove of clues about the origins of life. Initial studies of the 4.5-billion-year-old sample have uncovered the presence of carbon and water, suggesting that the fundamental components for life on Earth may also exist within this extraterrestrial rock.

Apple established its business relationship with Chinese suppliers around 30 years ago, and while the company has formed alternatives in other regions, it will be a difficult task to sever ties with a region that has remained a reliable partner for all these years. In the latest interview with Tim Cook, the company’s Chief Executive highlighted how critical China’s supply chain is to Apple, likely hinting that both will be working with each other for the foreseeable future despite the U.S. government making trade relations difficult.

Much the same as last year, AI remains the talk of the town at GDC 2024. Roblox Studio has announced a new generative AI-based character creator. Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia unveiled a new AI-powered chip, sending its stock price skyrocketing. And behind closed doors, Ubisoft demonstrated something of its own to a small collection of the press: a partnership with Inworld AI to create a prototype for «Newly Evolving NPCs», or NEO NPCs as Ubisoft calls them.

Patch 10.2.6 adds new meta achievements for some of Dragonflight's main factions. These meta-achievements reward players for completing the activities from each faction, and each rewards a new mount.

AI roundup: In a big move, NVIDIA announces its new Project GR00T which is a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. These robots will be powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and the machine could copy human actions based on just observation. In other news, Samsung is stepping up its game in the semiconductor space by introducing a research lab for AI chip development. Know more about such AI-linked news today, March 19, 2024. 

A new Xbox devkit was rated in South Korea yesterday by the National Radio Research Agency. It's unclear what this console is, but there are a couple of possibilities, such as the leaked all-digital Xbox Series X and separate handheld.

A new Xbox development kit has reportedly been certified in South Korea.

A new Xbox dev kit console was certified today in South Korea, and the model number reveals it is not a development kit for a known console.

A new research paper has discovered the usefulness of DRAM cache for GPUs which can help enable higher performance at low power.

LinkedIn is planning to add a games section to its social media platform.

In the coming weeks or months, Meta Platforms could announce a new but more affordable version of its Quest 3 headset, and it is being dubbed the Meta Quest 3 Lite. While official details are scarce, rumours and leaks have given us a glimpse of what the Meta Quest 3 Lite could offer. In a new development, screenshots from a Meta User Research Zoom meeting have been leaked, providing details about the Meta's rumoured affordable VR headset including its name - the Meta Quest 3s. Know all about it.

LinkedIn may exist to help professionals look for new job opportunities and network with others in the same field, but it could soon become the place for a bit of down time, too.

In a bid to enhance user engagement and inject a dose of entertainment into its professional networking domain, LinkedIn, under the umbrella of Microsoft, is gearing up to introduce gaming features to its platform. Renowned primarily for its role in fostering professional connections, knowledge acquisition, and recruitment endeavours, LinkedIn boasts a staggering user base exceeding 1 billion. However, seeking to bolster the time users spend on the platform, LinkedIn is venturing into uncharted territory: gaming. What is LinkedIn gaming all about? It will be in very much in character with the platform's profile.

The Hubble Space Telescope has once again mesmerized astronomers and space enthusiasts alike with its recent images of Jupiter, showcasing the gas giant's dynamic atmosphere filled with swirling storms and the iconic Great Red Spot. Captured on January 5-6, 2024 and thereafter shared by NASA, these portraits offer a glimpse into the tumultuous weather patterns and atmospheric phenomena occurring on Jupiter's colossal scale. With its exceptional clarity and precision, Hubble Telescope has provided unparalleled views of the planet's opposing hemispheres, each revealing its own unique features and characteristics.

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform, has made a name for itself primarily as a platform for people looking to network and pick up knowledge for professional purposes, and for recruitment — a business that now has more 1 billion users. Now, to boost the time people are spending on the platform, the company is breaking into a totally new area: gaming.

In a stark warning, F.A.C.C.T., a leading Russian cybersecurity firm, has raised alarm about the sinister use of eSIM technology by criminals to pilfer phone numbers, enabling access to sensitive bank accounts. The revelation, reported by Bleeping Computers, sheds light on a disturbing trend where eSIM, initially designed for convenience, are now being exploited as tools for nefarious activities.

Ghost of Tsushima's success encouraged developers at Team Ninja to create the upcoming open-world game Rise of the Ronin.