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 S21With placenta-on-a-chip, researchers hope to gauge how drugs and toxins impact pregnancy  The placenta is a vital organ that plays an important role in the development of a growing fetus. Not only does it form a barrier protecting a fetus from maternal infections and diseases, it also delivers nutrients to and removes waste products from the fetus — even as it constantly changes throughout the duration of pregnancy. For both practical and ethical reasons, it is virtually impossible to study the function of a placenta during pregnancy.Pregnant people are often excluded from clinical trials to avoid putting the developing fetus at risk and exposing drug companies to legal liability, noted Eke. As a result, physicians rely on studies that don’t have a control group, like pregnancy registries or retrospective cohort studies, to get data. But such databases “are prone to confounding, to misclassifications and to bias,” Eke said. Researchers have also turned to animal testing, pharmacokinetic studies — which simulate the physiological effect of drugs in pregnancy using historical data and models — and sometimes even placental tissue that’s expelled after birth, to study the effects of drugs and other substances. But the results don’t always reliably mirror results from trials with pregnant people.
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S1Ukraine has a navy that needs no sailors WHEN RUSSIA invaded in February 2022 Ukraine barely had a navy. The defenders scuttled their one frigate to prevent Russia from seizing it. Two years later Ukraine is struggling to hold back a Russian offensive on land—but it is winning the war in the Black Sea and has broken the Russian blockade of its grain ships. Its victories have often depended on rapid technological innovation: every other navy relies on crewed ships to fight, but Ukraine has built a fleet of drone boats, or uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs). How are they shaping the war at sea?
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S2Supreme Court Ethics Bill Blocked In Senate Amid Samuel Alito Controversies The Senate failed to advance a bill Wednesday designed to introduce ethics reform for the Supreme Court, with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., shooting down the effort as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito faces ethics controversies and rejects calls to recuse himself from cases related to former President Donald Trump.It was a widely anticipated outcome following Republican pushback and votes against the bill when it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in an 11-10 vote last year, while Justice Clarence Thomas was embroiled in his own ethics controversies reportedly linked to accepting undisclosed financial favors.
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S3Philippine Billionaire Ang Taps Son To Help Run San Miguel's $20 Billion Infra Projects "I will continue to guide San Miguel but will let Paul start to help operate the company," the older Ang said via text message, without giving further details. The set up is similar to the training he underwent under his mentor, the late former San Miguel chairman and CEO Eduardo Cojuangco Jr, he added.Ang's 44-year old son, a director of San Miguel since 2021, has a long pipeline of projects ahead of him: building a new airport while upgrading the ageing main international gateway in the Philippine capital. He will also manage a joint venture with billionaire Sabin Aboitiz and tycoon Manuel Pangilinan to build a liquified natural gas facility in Batangas, south of Manila, while overseeing the ongoing construction of a 22-kilometer mass rail transit that will connect several Metro Manila muncipalities to the neighboring province of Bulacan where San Miguel is building a new airport.
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S4Once in the thick of a debt crisis, Greece is now repaying its multi-billion-dollar loans ahead of time The early repayment corresponds to three years of installments and represents the third time that Greece has moved to accelerate reimbursement of a loan package received in its first bailout program in 2010. The latest move will be the first time the country is making that much of a dent in the Greek Loan Facility. The move, which covers loan amortizations from 2026 to 2028, is a confident signal to financial markets about the country’s ongoing economic recovery. Even though the government lowered its growth target for 2024 to 2.5% from a previous estimate of 2.9%, the country is performing well above the average growth forecasts in the European Union.
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S5Here's how Meta's virtual-reality workout compares to real-life exercise I am standing on a grassy mountaintop, listening to birds chirping, getting lost in the stunning landscape. Suddenly, pop music swells and round black and white objects the size of soccer balls begin to fly toward me at an accelerated clip, exploding into confetti each time I punch one away. No, I’m not dreaming—just working out in my living room while wearing a VR headset, playing the Supernatural fitness game, immersed in a 360-degree wonderland. When it’s over, I’m panting, elated, and totally sweaty, just like when I finish taking a class at the gym—and the next day my lats are on fire.
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S6Illegal short selling trades in South Korea could now get you life in prison “If short selling is resumed without a monitoring system in place, there is the risk that massive illegal activities may be repeated,” said Kim Soyoung, vice chair at the Financial Services Commission. “It will be allowed from March 31 after the platform is ready,” he said, adding that it’s difficult to say whether the rule change will be applied to all stocks. In an earlier Thursday statement, the government said it will increase financial penalties and jail terms up to life imprisonment for illicit activities. Same terms on repayment and margin requirements will be applied for retail and institutional investors to create a level playing field, it said.
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S7S8S9Younger Workers Are Lonelier. Managers Can Help In the U.S. and Canada, nearly a quarter of workers younger than 35 years old say they experience loneliness "a lot of the day," according to Gallup's new State of the Global Workplace report, including responses from 128,278 workers across the globe in 2023. That's compared with 15 percent of workers 35 years old and older, and 20 percent of workers globally. To start, great managers can make the organization's mission and purpose clearer to team members, Harter says: "They're having a weekly conversation with each employee and doing a lot of listening in terms of what's working, what isn't. Are there any barriers that are getting in the way? And clarifying priorities and goals."
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S10My Employee Is Patronizing When I Correct His Work My employee, who is fresh out of college, is often not very thorough or good at his job. He'll submit work that clearly lacked any attention to detail. And 90% of the time, there are errors that I end up pointing out. I am fair, factual, and give context to why the error is important to avoid. I never reprimand, just state the facts and move on.He always responds with an excuse like "oh, I thought you said it was this" (even though I clearly wrote the answer out in the email to him) and then he follows up with a "good job" or "cool, great catch." It's always in a tone that feels condescending and patronizing. I've been in my industry for years. I don't really need to hear compliments on how great I was at catching that 1 + 1 isn't = 40. To me, it's 100% not the same as saying "oh, thanks for catching that!" It's like instead of appreciating that I was there to help him fix something, he pats me on the back for doing my job?
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S11Research: How Remote Work Impacts Women at Different Stages of Their Careers While much has been said about the potential benefits of remote work for women, recent research examines how working from home affects the professional development of female software engineers at a Fortune 500 company, revealing that its impact varies by career stage. Junior women engineers benefit significantly from in-person mentorship, receiving 40% more feedback when sitting near colleagues, while senior women face reduced productivity due to increased mentoring duties. Male engineers also benefit from proximity, but less so. The authors suggest that recognizing and rewarding mentorship efforts could mitigate these disparities, ensuring junior women receive adequate support remotely and senior women are properly compensated for their mentoring contributions.
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S12When Your Team Offloads Their Stress onto You Being a leader in today’s evolving workplace is more emotionally demanding than ever — and especially so if you’re quietly sustaining the emotional well-being of your team or others. In this article, the author outlines five strategies to help you perform this vital organizational role without burning yourself out: 1) Seek to understand — not to feel. 2) Install boundaries. 3) Savor your positive impact. 4) Show yourself equal care. 5) Tie your contributions to performance.
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S13The West Coast's Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico Bryan Hance was sitting in his basement one Sunday afternoon in June 2020 when he got an email about a secondhand bike for sale. A BMC Roadmachine 02 from a Swiss company, the bike was painted the color of a traffic cone, with goblin-green racing stripes. It was gorgeous. The bicycle boasted some of the fanciest components anyone could buy, like sleek Zipp wheels and electronic shifting. It was the kind of ride that made other cyclists envy it and its owner as they blew past on a straightaway. Hance guessed that a bike like that probably cost $8,000. Yet it was being offered for a fraction of that amount.Hance is the cofounder of Bike Index, a site where people can register their bicycles (for free) and record when one has been stolen. This allows cyclists, and law enforcement, to keep their eyes peeled for a swiped bike. Since it was started in 2013, Bike Index has helped recover more than 14,000 stolen bikes, from Sacramento to Saskatchewan and as far away as Australia. Hance's passion is bicycles, or to be more precise, the sense of community and general goodwill that a life in the saddle fosters. Every message that offers tips on a missing bike is cc'ed to him.
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S14Let's Talk About Trump's Gibberish For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.Yes, sharks. In Las Vegas on Sunday, Trump went off-script—I have to assume that no competent speechwriter would have drafted this—and riffed on the important question of how to electrocute a shark while one attacks. He had been talking, he claims, to someone about electric boats: “I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”
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S15A Wild Plan to Avert Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise The edge of Greenland’s ice sheet looked like a big lick of sludgy white frosting spilling over a rise of billion-year-old brown rock. Inside the Twin Otter’s cabin, there were five of us: two pilots, a scientist, an engineer, and me. Farther north, we would have needed another seat for a rifle-armed guard. Here, we were told to just look around for polar-bear tracks on our descent. We had taken off from Greenland’s west coast and soon passed over the ice sheet’s lip. Viewed from directly above, the first 10 miles of ice looked wrinkled, like elephant skin. Its folds and creases appeared to be lit blue from within.We landed 80 miles into the interior with a swervy skid. Our engineer, a burly Frenchman named Nicolas Bayou, jerked the door open, and an unearthly cold ripped through the cabin. The ice was smoother here. The May sunlight radiated off it like a pure-white aurora. We knew that there were no large crevasses near the landing site. This was a NASA mission. We had orbital reconnaissance. Still, our safety officer had warned us that we could “pop down” into a hidden crack in the ice if we ventured too far from the plane. Bayou appointed himself our Neil Armstrong. He unfolded the ladder, stepped gingerly down its rungs, and set foot on the surface.
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S16S17S18S19S20Biden and Trump are fighting to claim credit for $35 insulin. It was actually a pharma giant's idea Eli Lilly, an $800 billion pharma giant and one of three insulin manufacturers in the United States, first proposed an experiment allowing Medicare insurance plans to offer $35 monthly insulin in 2019, CEO David Ricks and former Medicare agency chief Seema Verma said in interviews with STAT.The $35 monthly cap has proliferated broadly to nearly every corner of the American health care system. The cap eventually became law in Medicare, as one of Biden’s signature legislative achievements, adding more protections for the more than three million seniors who use insulin. The $35 figure also has been reflected in multiple state laws, and is the basis for proposals in Congress to extend the cost protections to people with insurance through their jobs. Some pharmaceutical companies, including Lilly and Sanofi, have adopted similar limits in their copay assistance programs. The origin story of the amount patients are expected to pay for insulin has not been previously reported.
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S22Israel and Lebanon Won't End Up at War On the Lebanese side of the border with Israel, only a few villages remain intact, and vast neighborhoods in the towns that remain standing, like Marwaheen, are entirely destroyed. When night falls and darkness envelops the area, the only distant light visible is from nearly 30 kilometers away—the glowing Bahai Gardens in Haifa, Israel’s largest northern city, home to around 280,000 people.On the Lebanese side of the border with Israel, only a few villages remain intact, and vast neighborhoods in the towns that remain standing, like Marwaheen, are entirely destroyed. When night falls and darkness envelops the area, the only distant light visible is from nearly 30 kilometers away—the glowing Bahai Gardens in Haifa, Israel’s largest northern city, home to around 280,000 people.
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S23When did bioluminescence evolve? A new study offers a clue. From fireflies to glow worms, algae to squid, a dazzling array of organisms can perform an act of magic: they can generate their own light through a process known as bioluminescence. And it isn’t just an aesthetic wonder. It has evolved independently at least 100 times in nature and has dozens of diverse uses, from luring prey to freaking out predators to winking at a potential mate. But when did life first develop the ability to glow in the dark? For decades, scientists believed the oldest example of animal bioluminescence could be found in a diminutive marine crustacean known as an ostracod, one that lived 267 million years ago and could light itself up. But a new study, published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, winds the clock on bioluminescence way, way back.
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S24How the rainbow flag became a symbol of the LGBTQIA+ community In preparation for the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade on June 25, 1978, California’s first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk, commissioned Gilbert Baker—an openly gay veteran, drag queen, activist, and artist—to create a symbol representing the LGBTQIA+ community.The original configuration included pink to signify sex; red, life; orange, healing; yellow, sunlight; green, nature; turquoise, magic; blue, harmony; and purple, spirit. After the assassination of Harvey Milk in November 1978, demand for the flag increased, leading to the removal of the pink and turquoise stripes due to manufacturing constraints. The six remaining rainbow colors then became the enduring symbol of gay pride.
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S25Dolphins Who Practice Courtship When Young Reproduce More as Adults For young male bottlenose dolphins, play is often practice. When that play concerns courtship, practice makes perfect. Juvenile males who spend more time play-acting courtship rituals father more offspring years later as adults, according to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The new study is the culmination of 28 years of observation and 32 years of genetic and other data gathered by researchers from the University of Bristol and University of Western Australia. It underscores the benefits of long-term field studies such as the ones researchers conducted at Shark Bay Dolphin Research on the westernmost point of Australia’s coast.
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S26The Future of Organ-Chip Technology Is Bright Biologist and bioengineer Donald E. Ingber doesn’t have time to sleep. As the founding director of The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, finding time outside of work hasn’t gotten easier with age. At 67, his morning still starts at 5 a.m., running through a pile of emails that seems to grow larger by the day.By lunch, he’s already revised the budget for a crucial government grant and met with postdoctoral fellows regarding work on various research projects. Ingber also deals with unexpected issues, like immigration and political turbulence, that he never dreamed would fall under his purview. Recently, when a scientist he hired from Germany came with his wife and child and was turned away at Logan Airport for having an Iranian passport, Ingber spent the morning wrangling with the Harvard visa office, trying to get him back into the country.
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S27S28What is the Median Pay of Magnificent Seven Companies? In May alone, these tech giants added $1.4 trillion in market capitalization to the S&P 500—surpassing the combined gains of 296 other stocks during the same period. Notably, Nvidia contributed to more than half of this rise. As tech stocks boom, many are offering robust salaries with substantial stock option plans.At Nvidia, employees received a median pay of $266,939, fueled by its soaring share price. Last year, over $300 million in value was delivered to its staff under its employee stock purchase plan. Along with a competitive pay package, the company offers an unlimited vacation policy along with 22-weeks of paid parental leave.
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S29Ranked: Top 20 Countries by Plastic Waste per Capita It’s also interesting to note how most of the countries in this top 20 ranking are wealthier, more developed nations. These nations have higher levels of consumption, with greater access to packaged goods, take-out services, and disposable products, all of which rely on single-use plastics.Severe storms have been the most common, accounting for half of all billion-dollar disasters since 1980. In terms of costs, tropical cyclones have caused the lion’s share—more than 50% of the total. Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in 2005, remains the most expensive single event with $199 billion in inflation-adjusted costs.
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S30S31S32S33The centuries-old baba recipe made with 96 egg yolks The baba is often served at Easter in Poland, with the most extraordinary version – the muslin baba – made from a rich dough of flour, yeast, butter and quite a lot of egg yolks.Depending on where it's baked, the baba or babka takes on many different forms. In the US, it's a braided brioche-like bread that often has chocolate, nuts or other ingredients mixed in. Europeans might be more familiar with baba au rhum, a desert popular in France and Italy that is soaked in liqueur and served in individual portions.
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S34 Organizations Face Challenges in Timely Compliance With the EU AI Act For the third year in a row, MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group have assembled an international panel of AI experts that includes academics and practitioners to help us gain insights into how responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) is being implemented in organizations worldwide. Last year, we published a report titled “Building Robust RAI Programs as Third-Party AI Tools Proliferate.” This year, we continue to examine organizational capacity to address AI-related risks in a landscape that includes the first comprehensive AI law on the books — the European Union’s AI Act.In our previous post, we asked our experts about organizational risk management. This month, we asked them to react to the following provocation: Organizations will be ready to meet the requirements of the EU AI Act as they phase in over the next 12 months. Our experts are divided: While nearly half (47%) disagree or strongly disagree with the statement, a third (33%) neither agree nor disagree, and only a fifth (20%) agree or strongly agree. Below, we share insights from our panelists and draw on our own observations and experience working on RAI initiatives to offer recommendations on how organizations might approach compliance with the AI Act’s requirements as they’re phased in over the next year.
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S35S36Capcom's Sleeper Hit of 2024 Will Make You Feel Like a God Last year, Capcom released Exoprimal, a dinosaur-infested shooter that dug its hooks into me hard, and against all odds, ended up becoming my most-played game of the entire year. It was one of my biggest surprises of the year, but what’s even more shocking is it feels like Capcom might be poised to do it again. After playing Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, it’s suddenly become one of my most anticipated games of the year: a fascinating fusion of tower defense game with a twist — wholly unlike anything you’ve ever seen from Capcom. It’s a sleeper hit in the making. After playing Kunitsu-Gami for over an hour, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the next two days. It’s a bizarre, surreal, and engrossing experience, and I can’t overstate just how different it feels from anything else out there. The story doesn’t have any dialogue whatsoever, completely conveyed through context, body language, and animation. Its gameplay loop is a unique fusion of tower defense and hack-and-slash action, requiring both strategy and finesse. Then there’s its bold watercolor visual style, tying all of the game’s interface elements into its classical Japanese art. These elements all coalesce into a game that feels bold, ambitious, and unique in ways we seldom see from established studios.
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S37'Assassins' Creed Shadows' Finally Delivers the One Thing the Series Desperately Needs In 2017, Assassin’s Creed went through a radical shift with the release of Origins, transforming the tried-and-true formula into a new RPG-heavy approach. Since then, that formula has been rinsed and repeated with Odyssey and Valhalla, but it finally feels like the series is ready to break new ground again. Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes players to Feudal Japan, a setting fans have been desperate to visit for over a decade. But more than that, Shadows' dual-protagonist approach already looks like a brilliant change that can breathe new life into a series that desperately needs it.At Summer Game Fest, Inverse had the chance to see a guided demo of Shadows, with nearly an hour of gameplay highlighting the two protagonists: the towering samurai Yasuke and the lithe shinobi Naoe. The demo was just a small snippet of the game, but the incredible variety between these two characters, mixed with a gorgeous and fascinating setting, give me hope that Shadows is trying something different. Coming off Valhalla, I still have reservations about the series at large focusing too much on the open world and suffering from bloat because of it, but Shadows feels like a step in the right direction — a great idea that, hopefully, has the execution to back it up.
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S38'The Acolyte' Just Introduced a Shockingly Oppressive Star Wars Rule In the classic Star Wars trilogy, the Force was viewed as an “ancient religion” by Admiral Motti and as a “hokey religion” by Han Solo. Meaning that, after the fall of the Republic, everyone from fascist bureaucrats to good-hearted smugglers had less than serious opinions about the Force. But over a century before that, the Force functioned much differently in day-to-day life. Instead of existing as a “mystical energy field” that random farmboys had never even heard of, in the days of the High Republic, the Force was not only widely known and understood, it was also legislated. As Star Wars: The Acolyte continues to unspool new threads about the nature of the galaxy before The Phantom Menace, one very specific detail in Episode 3, “Destiny,” creates a new precedent that changes our view of the Jedi forever. Not only are Jedi figuring out who is and isn’t a known Force-user, like some kinds of space cops. They’re also empowered to separate kids from their families without any mind tricks, but simply, through the rule of law.
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S39The Most Affordable EV in the U.S. Got a New Model -- and It Has One Big Caveat Nissan revealed the 2025 model year of its all-electric Leaf, continuing the legacy of one of the first battery-powered EVs dating back to 2010. First, the good news is that Nissan is keeping the Leaf’s starting price at a reasonable $28,140. However, the bad news outweighs the good since the Leaf no longer qualifies for federal EV tax credits.This is a major setback for the aging Leaf, since even the 2024 model year qualified for up to $3,750 back thanks to tax credits. Now at its current sticker price, other automakers have a golden opportunity to unseat the Leaf as the most affordable EV in the U.S. We’re already seeing the first signs of this happening since GM is confident that the returning Chevrolet Bolt will be the “most affordable vehicle on the market by 2025” and Ford is working on several affordable models based on a new EV platform. On top of that, we wouldn’t be surprised if Ford and GM’s upcoming entry-level EVs qualify for the full $7,500 tax credit.
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S40Ultra-Processed Plant-Based Foods Might Increase the Risk For Many Diseases There’s no question that eating fruits and vegetables are good for our overall health. Study after study has shown that a plant-based diet can benefit every organ system in our bodies. However, a recent study found that not all plant-based diets are created equally, nor are they equally healthy. In fact, ultra-processed plant-sourced foods (think: french fries) can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.The study, which was published in The Lancet Regional Health-Europe, used a sample of about 118,000 UK adults between the ages of 40 and 69. The study was a collaboration between researchers in both the United Kingdom, France, and Brazil. The researchers classified food groups as either plant-sourced or animal-sourced, as well as ultra processed and non ultra processed. The data collection spanned more than a decade, with follow-up ending September 2021.
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S41The Wildest Sci-Fi Show of the Century Is Getting a Disappointing Reboot Fourteen years ago, the world first met Finn the human and Jake the magic, stretchy dog when Adventure Time debuted on Cartoon Network with a 10-minute story in which zombified candy creatures threaten to upend a royal slumber party. (This was the first of two episodes that premiered that day. The second is titled “Trouble in Lumpy Space,” firmly establishing both the show’s sci-fi leanings and its irreverent tone from day one.)While there was never any doubt that Adventure Time was a show for kids, there was an undercurrent of creativity and humor that made the show popular with adults — or at least stoned college students — from the very beginning. Over the years, the series evolved and expanded to tell complex and emotional stories, culminating in an epic finale that aired in 2018, only to be followed by two excellent spinoffs that pushed the show’s mature themes even further. In other words, Adventure Time grew up with its audience. It never pandered and it never pulled punches.
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S42The Bloodiest Superhero Show Is Just Getting Started The future of The Boys has been uncertain for years, but now we finally have some clarity. Showrunner Eric Kripke refused to speculate on how many seasons he expected the smash-hit Amazon series to run for, but after reviews for the upcoming Season 4 started rolling out, he revealed that the already-planned Season 5 will also be the final season. But while the main story of Hughie, Butcher, and Homelander will come to a close, the greater universe will continue. Kripke has also revealed that The Boys’ existing spinoff will keep trucking, and that we may see new spinoffs too.
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S43'Astro Bot' Is the Mario Competitor That PlayStation Desperately Needs Back in the days of the PS2, PlayStation had a slew of great platforming titles, from Ratchet & Clank to Sly Cooper. But those glory days have faded as the company shifted its focus to narrative adventures and multiplayer epics. Nintendo rushed to full that void, pretty much dominating the genre ever since. Enter: Astro Bot.Astro Bot feels like the game PlayStation needs right now. It’s an adorable and ambitious platformer that’s simply a delight to play in every regard and a reminder that PlayStation’s games can still be simple fun. More than that, after an hour hands-on I get the feeling that this might be the rare gem that can give even Mario a run for his money.
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S44'Assassin's Creed Shadows' Is Scaling Back Its Ambitions In One Genius Way All early signs point to Assassin’s Creed Shadows being an exceptional entry in the long-running series. It’s a back-to-basics approach to gameplay blending the social stealth elements of older games with the combat-forward encounters that defined more recent titles. It is set in feudal Japan, a setting players have been clamoring for since 2008. And its two protagonists offer a unique lens through which the player will experience the setting players have experienced in other recent games.This week, the game’s associate director revealed that Shadows is making another bold decision that should go over well with wayward fans: a smaller world map. Ubisoft Quebec developer Simon Lemay-Comtois told Video Games Chronicle that the upcoming game will scale back the sheer scope of the open world, at least compared to the last mainline entries in the series.
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S45The Sequel to 2022's Best Sci-Fi Game Is More Stressful In the Best Possible Way It’s been a great week for sci-fi fans with impeccable taste. First, we got our first look at Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s gameplay along with an early 2025 release window at the weekend’s PC Gaming Show. Now previews for the game have emerged, showing that the sequel to what I consider the best RPG of 2022 (sorry not sorry) could actually stand a chance at surpassing its predecessor. The only downside: that 2025 release date is looking a little too far away given how exciting Citizen Sleeper 2 is shaping up to be.If you were a fan of the original Citizen Sleeper, you probably noticed things look a bit different in its sequel’s new gameplay trailer. Not too different, but enough to make this second voyage clearly more than a rehash. The game’s main mechanic — rolling dice to determine your chance of succeeding at everything from hacking computers to making small talk — remains intact, but with lots of new additions. There’s a lot of talk of contracts, a screen for selecting crew members, and mysterious indicators on the UI marked “supplies,” “glitch,” and “push.”
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S465 AI Features in Google Maps That Will Blow Your Mind When it comes to Google and AI, Gemini has been in the spotlight all the time. But Google Maps has been the beneficiary of several new AI features for directions and discovery that could make your experience of navigating easier, smarter, and maybe even fun. Better yet, you don’t need to be a Google Maps power user to take advantage.Until now, Google had been rolling out the integration of these new AI features slowly and locally, but now there are a lot of AI features that are available for just about everyone to use. If you haven’t already, open up the app and see for yourself — it’s free.
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S47NASA's Curiosity Rover Captured The Eerie Aftermath of A Solar Eruption Blasting Mars The Sun soaked Mars with high radiation last month, which gave way to exciting camera footage. And, perhaps less thrillingly, it also spotlighted one major obstacle for astronauts.The imagery looks like snow fell on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the eerie scene. There were so many charged particles that reached the Martian barren, jagged surface that the sky view filled with streaks and specks, and the solar spray fell upon the cameras.
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S48New Research Reveals What Ancient Humans Ate During the Bronze and Iron Ages The Mediterranean diet might conjure images of whole grains, fish, a side of cucumber and tomato salad, and a glass of red wine. While the diet, known for its link to longevity and health, has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, this eating pattern is far from new. In fact, a recent study reveals that this way of eating has persisted for millennia. Published today in the journal PLoS ONE, a paper looked at the agricultural and diet patterns of people living in what’s now Syria during the Middle Bronze Age, which occurred from 2000 to 1600 BCE. It turns out humans have been eating a Mediterranean diet since at least the Bronze Age.The research looks at plant, animal, and human remains from an archaeological site in modern-day Syria known as Tell Tweini on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Tell Tweini is located near the modern town Jableh, and was once part of an ancient harbor city called Gibala, the southernmost town of the Ugarit Kingdom in the Levant.
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S4915 Years Later, One of the Most Overlooked RPG Series Returns This Summer With An Exciting New Posse At the beginning of this year, the 2024 release calendar was looking pretty thin, with almost no release dates announced past this spring. But after Summer Game Fest, the summer and fall slates are starting to fill out a bit more. The latest announcement comes from Square Enix, sharing the word that Visions of Mana will arrive in just a few months’ time.Square Enix shared its anticipated launch date trailer for Visions of Mana, showcasing nearly four minutes of gameplay and cutscenes along with the reveal of its August 29 release date. To coincide with the announcement, Square Enix also dropped a new blog post going into even more depth than the trailer on Visions of Mana’s story, characters, and combat.
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S50Monster Hunter Devs Say Not to Worry About Monster Designs, 'Plenty More' Are Coming Since the release of the smash hit Monster Hunter World, the franchise has become a phenomenon on the same level as Resident Evil. A niche series now turned mainstream, Monster Hunter Wilds is the next game after the massively ambitious World, and it’s already looking like it could be the crown jewel in Capcom’s incredible resurgence. Perhaps most impressively, however, the developers behind Wilds are keeping a level head, not intimidated by the extra pressure of following-up on Capcom’s best-selling game ever.“The main pressure we feel on this, or any Monster Hunter title, is more about can we achieve what it is we're setting out to do with the game design. It doesn't necessarily change because of the performance of a predecessor,” producer Ryozo Tsujimoto tells Inverse, “In my mind, we just have a bigger audience to give this game to because they all came on board with Monster Hunter World and they're waiting for the next game. I don’t necessarily think of it as pressure to perform, as much as it’s my job to bring those players the next game they’re anticipating.”
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