GoKawiil
Tech News
Nintendo's newest Fire Emblem entry, Fortune's Weave, arrives this week as a Switch 2 exclusive, weaving four overlapping character storylines set in the region of Dagda and its capital, Dagsion. The game opens with a time-traveling ambassador before shifting into tales of four flawed protagonists whose ambitions and grudges drive gladiatorial battles and city-wide side quests.
According to a blogger tracking Chinese social media chatter, Samsung is moving up the release of its Galaxy Z Trifold 2, seemingly in reaction to Apple's incoming iPhone Duo. The move comes despite the original trifold device's lackluster commercial performance, and the new model is expected to carry a similar price tag.
Xreal's 1S augmented-reality glasses are on sale for $399 at both Amazon and Xreal's own store, a $50 discount that ties their all-time low price. That narrows the price gap with Xreal's cheaper $299 Air 2 Plus model, which omits several features found on the 1S.
Canadian retro hardware enthusiast DiscoStarslayer has successfully reverse-engineered and dumped the CXP102064 MechaCon chip found in the original 1999 PlayStation 2 console. The process involved chemically decapping the chip to expose its die, then using microscopes and optical dumping techniques before a software exploit finally allowed extraction of its data. The entire effort took four years to complete.
A community of Linux modders has been reworking the AMD BC-250, a cheap leftover mining GPU built from a cut-down PlayStation 5 chip, into a functional PC gaming card. The latest breakthrough unlocks all 40 of its RDNA 2 compute units and packages AMD's FSR 4 upscaling and frame generation as a Windows DLL that can be dropped into compatible games.
Nintendo has released Fortune's Weave, a new Fire Emblem title that adopts the open-ended structure recently seen in Zelda, Mario Kart World, and Donkey Kong Bananza. The game lets players choose between four hero routes before converging into a final act, allowing them to switch storylines freely and even combine character stats across playthroughs to build powerful hybrid units.
Researchers filtered the PostgreSQL version of the CHEMBL34 database to find pairs of compounds tested against the same protein target, assay, activity type and publication, where one molecule was a simple chemical modification of the other (such as swapping a hydrogen for fluorine or a carbon for nitrogen). This produced 191,732 parent-analogue pairs, which the team supplemented by synthesizing new analogues from 18 selected parent compounds using RDKit-driven enumeration of feasible single-atom substitutions, each capped at $400 per 10 mg.
Scientists studying Arabidopsis have uncovered how the plant hormone salicylic acid controls immune gene expression through two receptor systems, NPR1 and NPR3/NPR4. They found that salicylic acid prompts NPR1 to bind a protein called MED15A, linking it to the cell's transcription machinery to activate defense genes, while simultaneously blocking NPR3/NPR4 from partnering with NIMIN1 and repressive complexes that would otherwise silence those genes.
Electric vehicle owners can charge at home either through a standard household outlet or by installing a faster Level 2 charger. The choice depends on factors like battery size, the car's maximum AC charging speed, and daily driving distance, rather than a need to always charge to full like a phone. Home charging remains far cheaper than gasoline, roughly a third of the cost, even before factoring in a Level 2 upgrade.
USB-C offers better convenience thanks to its reversible design and widespread use across laptops, tablets and smartphones, making it ideal for transferring large files on mobile devices. However, the connector type alone does not determine speed—actual performance depends on the USB specification (like 2.0 or 3.2) built into the drive and the port it's plugged into.
The SHOKZ OpenFit 2 open-ear earbuds are currently discounted by $40, bringing the price down to $139.95. The earbuds are designed for workouts, offering strong battery life and an open-ear fit that lets users stay aware of their surroundings.
A storage guide outlines how heat, humidity, and magnetic fields can damage hard drives over time, and notes that even undisturbed drives can fail due to seized mechanical parts or degraded capacitors. It recommends backing up all important data before archiving a drive, verifying the transfer, and following the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of data on two different mediums with one stored offsite.