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First Person Shooters (Games)

Versus Mode Comes To Resident Evil 5 28

Posted by Soulskill from the i-always-thought-you-looked-a-little-pale dept.
Resident Evil 5 will be getting a new multiplayer mode later today that allows players to square off against each other. It will be available on the Playstation Network and Xbox Live for a fee of $5. Two different game types will be available, according to Capcom. In one, Slayer's Rule, you'll compete against other players to kill the most enemies. The other mode, Survivor's Rule, pits you directly against other players, either one-on-one or two-on-two.
Biotech

Virtual Fence Could Modernize the Old West 216

Posted by CmdrTaco from the too-strange-for-a-topic-icon dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, ranchers in the West have kept cattle in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, electrified wires. Now, animal science researchers with the Department of Agriculture are working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Dean Anderson, a researcher at the USDA's Jornada Experimental Range at Las Cruces, NM., shows how he has built radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands — gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake — to get the cattle to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one head of cattle, but he says costs will fall and the entire herd wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the 'leaders.' Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow."
Government

Submission + - British ' X-files' released to public 2

Submitted by
Smivs
Smivs writes: "Britains Ministry of Defence has just released files regarding invesstigations into UFO sightings between 1978 to 1987. Over the next three or four years, 160 files will be handed over to the National Archives. The first group of eight files, one of which is more than 450 pages long, is available via its website today.
This article from The Guardian newspaper details many of the events in question, some interesting and many just bizarre.
A similar release of UFO files by France's national space agency last year attracted more than 220,000 users on its first day, causing it to crash. To avoid such problems, the National Archives is using an external hosting company which can add extra capacity as needed to handle the web traffic."

Feed Engadget: Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Dashboard update hands-on (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Features, Gaming


What, you didn't wait up all night to play around with Microsoft's Xbox 360 Fall 2007 Dashboard update? Ok, fine, we're just that geeky, but we feel vindicated: this is hands down our favorite 360 update thus far. And not just because we can finally watch DivX and Xvid on our 360. The best new bits (and other notes):
  • Um, did we mention DivX / XviD support? For free? Oh, we did. Well, we're still reeling. (Yep, we successfully tested both codecs using .divx and .avi files.)
  • Enhanced profiles is really exciting; you have to opt out of everyone being able to view your friends list, but given the permissions system Live is based on, that's not such a big deal. Browsing friends' friends lists adds a whole new layer. Microsoft, care to bump us up past 100 Live friends now?
  • IPTV support is included! Unfortunately, you are still dependent on your service provider to flip the switch, so don't expect to be able to just start watching / recording shows to your 360. (Interface shots here, from way back when.)
  • Family timers lets you specify the number of playable hours daily and weekly. For instance, you can enable between 15 minutes and 24 hours of daily play time (in 15 minute increments). We're not sure how this works if you're watching IPTV, though, although we presume the system is smart enough to know the difference between gaming and playing back media.
  • Microsoft added its increasingly pervasive twist interface all over the place, including Xbox Live downloads, the media interface, etc. Browsing just about everything on the 360 just got way easier.
  • Inside Xbox newsletter / feed is now available from the home blade, helping highlight new content and features. We kind of wish this wasn't so front and center though -- really, how often are you going to use this?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Transportation

Stopping Cars With Microwave Radiation 522

Posted by samzenpus from the stops-in-under-a-minute dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Researchers have created an electromagnetic system that can quickly bring a vehicle to a stop by sending out pulses of microwave radiation to disable the microprocessors that control the central engine functions in a car. A 200-pound unit attached to the roof of a police car can be used to stop fleeing and noncooperative vehicles. The average power emitted in a single shot is about 10 kilowatts at 100 hertz and since each radiated pulse lasts about 50 nanoseconds, the total energy output is 100 joules at a distance of 15 meters. One concern with the device is that it could cause an accident if a car is disabled and a driver loses steering control. The device could also disable other vehicles in the area so the most practical application may be for perimeter protection at remote areas. Criminals have a work-around too. Since electronic control modules were not built into most cars until 1972, the system will not work on automobiles made before that year."
Science

The Rules of the Swarm 166

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-to-the-collective dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers are starting to discover the simple rules that allow swarms of thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism. To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist at the Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory at Princeton University, builds computer models of virtual swarms with thousands of individual agents that he can program to follow a few simple rules. Among the findings are that swarm behavior has patterns common to many different species, that just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, swarm behavior can also change abruptly in character, and that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively by creating a bias in the swarm's movement that steers it in a particular direction. The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies and researchers are working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish. "How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you're seeing?" Dr. Couzin says. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm."

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