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Tech News
Microsoft has filed a patent for a content management system that inserts ads into games during natural downtimes, such as after boss fights, during loading screens, or in menus. The game freezes while an ad plays, and watching it grants the player a fresh block of ad-free playtime before the cycle repeats.
Researchers at UC Davis had 61 teenagers either stroke or neck-scratch rescued donkeys and miniature horses for a few minutes and measured their mood before and after. Participants reported feeling less anxious, sad and lonely, and calmer, almost immediately, with neck-scratching prompting more visible signs of pleasure from the animals such as lip-wriggling.
Many Netflix viewers experience inconsistent audio quality, with dialogue sometimes sounding distant or garbled on certain shows while others play fine. The root cause isn't a weak internet connection or poor TV speakers, but a mismatch between the audio format Netflix streams and the playback device's capabilities. Netflix says the fix typically involves a quick settings adjustment rather than new equipment or a support call.
Culinary instructor Melanie Underwood explains that leftover frying oil doesn't need to be thrown out after a single use, as long as it wasn't overheated to the point of smoking or used to fry something with an overpowering flavor like seafood. She recommends neutral, high-smoke-point oils such as canola, peanut or sunflower oil, and maintaining a frying temperature between 350 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit to keep the oil viable for repeated use.
FunnyPlaying has released the FPGB Mini, a handheld barely bigger than a Game Boy cartridge that uses FPGA hardware to emulate Game Boy games with near-perfect accuracy. It supports both physical cartridges and ROMs via microSD, features a 2.98-inch 800x720 IPS screen, and runs on an 1800 mAh battery for four to six hours of play. The standard price is $89, though early units sold for $69.
A 192GB cache of internal Rockstar files, originally leaked in 2022, is now being combed through by fans who found a rough 2014-2015 build of a GTA VI map running inside GTA V, along with an outline for a scrapped Liberty City expansion and details on a canceled single-player DLC called Agent Trevor. The Liberty City map is only accessible through the CodeWalker editor and contains no additional content beyond its outline, while the GTA VI map fragment appears built from satellite and street-view imagery.
Aqara has released the Multi-Sensor FP400, its latest mmWave presence detector for smart-home setups. Despite being a newer model, reviewers found it fails to meaningfully advance on the capabilities already offered by Aqara's earlier presence sensors.
A new buying guide breaks down the essential hardware to check before purchasing an Android phone for gaming, starting with the chipset that houses the CPU and GPU. It also flags RAM capacity and thermal management systems like vapor chambers as critical factors that determine sustained performance during long gaming sessions.
Noctua has revealed that its NF-A4x10 5V PWM fan is being used inside the CAIM1, a compact 4K60 camera built to generate cryptographic proof that its footage is genuine and unaltered by AI. Because the device simultaneously handles high-bitrate video capture and cryptographic proof generation within a tightly enclosed shell, its processors run hot enough to need active cooling to avoid throttling.
An AI researcher argues that the perceived intelligence of chat-based language models isn't a property of the models themselves but an illusion created in users' minds, similar to how psychics use cold reading techniques. The author, who wrote a book called 'The Intelligence Illusion,' contends that LLMs are purely statistical text-prediction systems with no reasoning capability, and that user belief in their intelligence stems from the same psychological mechanisms exploited by cold readers.
A proposed grand challenge in biology asks researchers to engineer a protein catalyst capable of reading an unlabeled peptide chain and writing a corresponding nucleic acid strand without relying on a template, barcode, or lookup database. Success would require demonstrating the method on at least 100 preregistered random peptides of 50+ amino acids, achieving 90% sequence accuracy, average read lengths above 25 residues, and quality scores of at least Q10.
Cybersecurity agencies from Japan, the US, Australia and Germany issued a joint advisory identifying North Korea's WaterPlum group as the actor behind malware hidden in fake job application coding tests. The scheme has infected over 30,000 devices across 100 countries and compromised more than 7,000 crypto wallets, netting $10.71 million believed to fund the North Korean government.