Technology

On Thursday, Sony announced that its Horizon Forbidden West game, sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, would be available for pre-order ahead of its February 2022 release date. But contrary to what Sony said last year (h/t Forbes), there’s no upgrade path for the game from PlayStation 4 to PlayStation 5. In a September 2020 blog post, Sony said Horizon Forbidden West would be among the games to have a free upgrade from PS4 versions to the PS5 version: “Additionally, we know that the PS4 community will transition to PS5 at different times, and we’re happy to announce PS4 versions of some of our exclusives. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Sackboy A Big Adventure, and Horizon Forbidden West will also launch on PS4. While these three games were designed to take advantage of PS5 and its unique next...

Facebook is apologizing for an incident where its AI mislabeled a video of Black men with a “primates” label, calling it an “unacceptable error” that it was examining to prevent it from happening again. As reported by the New York Times, users who watched a June 27th video posted by the UK tabloid Daily Mail received an auto-prompt asking whether they wanted to “keep seeing videos about Primates.” Facebook disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as it realized what was happening, a spokesperson said in an email to The Verge on Saturday. “This was clearly an unacceptable error,” the spokesperson said. The company is investigating the cause to prevent the behavior from happening again, the spokesperson added. “As we have said, while we have made improvements to our AI we kno...

It has long been common knowledge that there is water ice on the surface of the Moon due to the pioneering efforts of the many lunar expeditions in the past three decades. In order to truly explore and entertain the idea of humans taking up a potential permanent residence on the Moon, NASA scientists have devised a plant to land the world’s first autonomous lunar rover on the Moon to search for dihydrogen-monoxide deposits. The upcoming Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission will help scientists get a stronger understanding of how the frozen molecules are distributed and the best way for them to be extracted from the lunar soil. The machine itself is the size of a golf cart and is set to be land on the Moon’s South Pole in late 2023. The mission will be 100-days an...

BMW’s Motorrad division has been pumping out some wild concepts over the last few years as the larger company turns its attention towards electric vehicles. It’s latest is also the to date, but still looks extremely cool: the CE 02 mini-bike. Debuted this week ahead of the IAA Mobility conference in Germany, the CE 02 is a tiny two-wheeler that borrows some of the futuristic vibes BMW has been honing for its larger concept bikes — including the CE 04, which is actually going into production. Clad in silver and black and “technoid typography,” the minimalist design looks like it came right off the set of a sci-fi movie. The CE 02 has an 11kW belt-drive motor, which can help the bike reach a top speed of around 90 kilometers per hour (about 56 miles per hour). BMW isn’t sharing the battery c...

Lyft and Uber are committing to pay legal fees for any driver on their respective platforms who get sued under Texas’ controversial anti-abortion law. The new law, which was signed this week by Texas governor Greg Abbott, bans abortions of fetuses after six weeks (which is before many women even know they are pregnant) and offers no exceptions for rape or incest. The law also empowers private citizens across the country to sue anyone for “aiding and abetting” abortions past the six-week mark, including clinics, anyone who pays for the abortion, or even people who drive someone to the procedure. the law allows people to sue those “aiding and abetting” abortions past six weeks “This is an attack on women’s access to healthcare and on their right to choose,” Lyft co-founder and CEO Logan Gree...

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, more commonly known as PUBG (or Game for Peace in China) is already one of the most successful and influential games ever made just four years after release. Its director Brendan Greene, a former DJ and web designer from Ireland, is credited with launching the entire battle royale genre, directly inspiring what you now know as Fortnite, CoD: Warzone, Apex Legends and more. But this past week, he announced that he’d left the Korean company whose work on his battle royale vision propelled him to fame to build a studio all his own — and late Thursday, he revealed what to expect from his next project. It’s called Prologue, and it will be a pay-what-you-want tech demo designed to illustrate the kinds of games that Greene wants to build next: “We want to create rea...

A new peer-reviewed study from researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France will show that misinformation got six times as much engagement on Facebook as real news, The Washington Post reports. The study looked at posts from the Facebook pages of more than 2,500 news publishers between August 2020 and January 2021. Researchers found that the pages that post more misinformation regularly got more likes, shares, and comments. This increased engagement was seen across the political spectrum, but the study found that “publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories,” according to The Washington Post. The researchers will share the study as part of the 2021 Internet Measurement ...

Should an artificially intelligent machine be able to patent its own inventions? For a US federal judge, the larger implications of that question were irrelevant. In April 2020, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled that only “natural persons” could be credited as the inventor of a patent, and a US court decided Thursday that yes, that’s what the law technically says (via Bloomberg). Not every country agrees with that direction. South Africa and Australia decided to go the other direction, granting one patent and reinstating a second patent application filed by AI researcher Steven Thaler, whose AI system DABUS reportedly came up with a flashing light and a new type of food container. Thaler is the one who sued the US in this case as well — he’s part of a group called The Artifi...

In case you haven’t heard, Texas now has a law that makes it illegal for anyone to help women get an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — and to take advantage of that, the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life is encouraging citizens to report those people at a dedicated “whistleblower” website, promising to “ensure that these lawbreakers are held accountable for their actions.” However, it now looks like Texas Right to Life may have trouble keeping a home on the web, because hosting provider GoDaddy has given the group 24 hours to find a different place to park its website. “We have informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have 24 hours to move to another provider for violating our terms of service,” a spokesperson told The New York Times and The Verge. GoDaddy didn’t answer a questio...

Nintendo may be finally ready to bring its storied handheld gaming library to the Nintendo Switch — Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles will soon join the 100-plus NES and SNES games that it offers via its Switch Online subscription service, according to rumors from the “Nate the Hate” podcast, corroborated by Nintendo Life on Tuesday and now again on Friday by Eurogamer. It’s not every day we see a Nintendo rumor that strong. There’s no word on which titles might arrive, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect your favorites to be among them, particularly to start. Nintendo has curated its NES and SNES libraries for Switch very slowly, some of them are pretty deep cuts, and many titles like Earthbound, Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG are still MIA two years later. But it makes a lot of sense ...

A brief new promo for Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty features Christopher Lloyd playing the titular Rick Sanchez, scratching an itch that has persisted for many fans since the show’s genesis as a Back to the Future spoof. In the 14-second clip, we see Lloyd hop out of a portal and into his garage alongside Jaeden Martell (Knives Out, It), playing a pretty convincing Morty. Lloyd then does his best riff on Han Solo’s famous line from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with a signature Rick Sanchez belch added for good measure: “Morty, we’re home.” Aside from an “aw, jeez” from Martell, that’s it. There’s no explicit mention of whether this is an allusion to a potential Lloyd cameo in Sunday’s season five finale, or if it’s just another quick one-off clip — which the showrunners have made a number o...