We know the sun belches out solar winds, but the origin of these streams of charged particles remain a mystery and has been the subject of numerous studies over the past decades. The images captured last year by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument aboard ESA's and NASA's Solar Orbiter, however, may have finally given us the knowledge needed to explain what powers these winds. In a paper published in Science, a team of researchers described observing large numbers of jets coming out of a dark region of the sun called a "coronal hole" in the images taken by the spacecraft. 

The team called them "picoflare jets," because they contain around one-trillionth the energy of what the largest solar flares can generate. These picoflare jets measure a few hundred kilometers in length, reach speeds of around 100 kilometers per second and only last between 20 and 100 seconds. Still, the researchers believe they have the power to emit enough high-temperature plasma to be considered a substantial source of our system's solar winds. While Coronal holes have long been known as source regions for the phenomenon, scientists are still trying to figure out the mechanism of how plasma streams emerge from them exactly. This discovery could finally be the answer they'd been seeking for years. 

Lakshmi Pradeep Chitta, the study's primary author from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, told Space: "The picoflare jets that we observed are the smallest, and energetically the weakest, type of jets in the solar corona that were not observed before...Still, the energy content of a single picoflare jet that lives for about 1 minute is equal to the average power consumed by about 10,000 households in the UK over an entire year."

Chitta's team will continue monitoring coronal holes and other potential sources of solar winds using the Solar Orbiter going forward. In addition to gathering data that may finally give us answers about the plasma flows responsible for producing auroras here on our planet, their observations could also shed light on why the sun's corona or atmosphere is much, much hotter than its surface. 

During its I/O annual developer conference earlier this year, Google said it was giving users the ability to transition their first-generation Nest Cam Indoor and Nest Cam Outdoor devices from the old Nest app to its new Home application. Well, the time has come — for the indoor camera, at least. Google has just started rolling out the ability to manage the camera model through the public preview version of its Home app, and it will take a few weeks before it's done making its way to all users. 

Nest cameras used to have their own application before the company was acquired by Google. Over time, Google added support for all its smart home products to its Home app, but users of the the oldest Nest cameras had to stick to the original application to be able to manage their devices. With this update, and as long as the user is on public preview, people will be able to access their first-gen Nest Cam Indoor device through the Home app and enjoy its updated camera history experience. They'll also be able to add the camera to their Favorites tab, so that its feed shows up as soon as they open the app. 

When Google first announced the ability to add the old Nest cam models to the Home app, it said the transfer would take users around 10 minutes. After that, they'll no longer need the old application to see the camera's data and footage, enabling a single app experience for a lot of users. 

Former President Donald Trump is back on Twitter (now X) more than two years after he was banned from the platform in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot. On August 24th, 2023, Trump tweeted for the first time since the website reinstated his account on November 19th, 2022. His first post? An image with the mug shot taken when he was booked at the Fulton County jail in Georgia on charges that he conspired to overturn the results of 2020 Presidential elections. 

The image also says "Election Interference" and "Never Surrender!," along with a URL of his website. Trump linked to his website in the tweet, as well, where his mug shot is also prominently featured with a lengthy note that starts with: "Today, at the notoriously violent jail in Fulton County, Georgia, I was ARRESTED despite having committed NO CRIME."

In November last year, Musk appeared to make the decision to reinstate Trump’s account based on the results of a Twitter poll. He asked people to vote on whether Trump should have access to his account returned. At the end of 24 hours, the option to reinstate the former president won with 51.8 percent of a decision that saw more than 15 million votes. Musk admitted at the time that some of the action on the poll came from “bot and troll armies.” Prior to the poll, Musk also said the decision on whether to reinstate Trump would come from a newly formed moderation council, but he never followed through on that pledge.

The website then known as Twitter banned Trump in early 2021 after he broke the company’s rules against inciting violence. The initial suspension saw Trump lose access to his account for 12 hours, but days later, the company made the decision permanent. At first, Trump tried to skirt the ban, even going so far as to file a lawsuit against Twitter that ultimately failed. Following his de-platforming from Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites, Trump went on to create Truth Social. Following his reinstatement, Trump said he didn’t “see any reason” to return to the platform. That said, the promise of reaching a huge audience with something as dramatic as a mug shot was obviously too good for Trump to pass up, particularly with what is likely to be a messy Republican primary on the horizon.

In 2004, a young Hidetaka Miyazaki joined FromSoftware. Before becoming a household name in gaming circles, he cut his teeth working on the studio’s long-running Armored Core series, serving as a planner on 2005’s Armored Core: Last Raven and then as director on Armored Core IV and Armored Core:For Answer.

Following the success of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, FromSoftware went on to release two more Armored Core games, though Miyazaki wasn’t directly involved in those projects. Since then, the studio has been busy building on the Souls series, culminating with the runaway success of Elden Ring. Now, for the first time in nearly a decade, From is revisiting its mech franchise. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon also marks the directorial debut of one of the studio’s most promising up-and-coming talents — Masaru Yamamura the lead game designer on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and a designer on Bloodborne. Armored Core VI is not a Soulslike, but a lot of its best ideas feel informed by Sekiro and Bloodborne. And if it’s any indication of what’s to come, Yamamura has a long career ahead of him as one of the studio’s premier directors.

If you’re reading this review, there’s a good chance that, like me, you haven’t played an Armored Core game before. Even at its peak, the series never enjoyed the kind of global popularity Dark Souls achieved in the span of five years. But if you’re curious if there’s something here for you, the short answer is a resounding yes. However, as with almost all of From’s games, a little — okay, a lot — of patience goes a long way.

Here’s the thing you need to know about Armored Core VI: It is uncompromising. Like Sekiro before it, prepare to be frustrated until you wrap your head around how Yamamura wants you to approach combat. I’ll admit, I died about a dozen times to Armored Core VI’s first boss, which appears at the start of the game before I managed to eke out a victory. Even then, it took me several more hours before I felt like I had a narrow grasp of AC 6’s interlocking weapon, piloting and mech assembly systems.

Part of what makes From’s latest so intimidating is that there’s so much going on all at once. To give you a sense of the complexity involved, the game's mechs — called Armored Cores — can carry up to four weapons, and fire them independently of one another. Moreover, there are dozens of different weapons archetypes, each with its own set of tactical considerations. Missile pods, for instance, fire a salvo of rockets either at a single target or multiple enemies simultaneously. Since most feature a lengthy reload or cooldown animation, you can’t rely on any one weapon alone to win an encounter. Each requires thoughtful consideration and use, all while keeping a hulking robot skillfully evading fire.

Movement is everything in AC6. Armored Cores have three different boosts available: one to increase their regular traversal speed, one to dash away from attacks and one that allows them to catapult themselves at enemies and quickly cover a lot of ground. They can also jump, and ignite their boosters to fly.

All of an AC’s more advanced movement abilities consume energy, which is represented by a bar along the bottom of the interface. Landing on the ground will begin to quickly replenish that resource. Most enemies don’t have anywhere near the mobility of the player’s mech, but some can hit hard if they’re allowed to land a shot. There’s also a stagger mechanic within the game that applies to both the player and opponents. One difference between AC6 and From’s Soulsborne games is that dashing doesn’t give invincibility frames. As a newbie to the series, the need to consider spacing on top of reacting quickly added to the game’s learning curve.

Since you’re not tied to the ground like you would be in Dark Souls or Bloodborne, combat is far more vertical than in any of From’s other recent games. A lot of enemies have access to wide, horizontal sweeping attacks that you can’t avoid through lateral movement. Conversely, gaining the high ground on opponents is often the most effective way to dispatch them. Knowing when to take to the air is probably the most important skill to grasp in AC6, and, if you’re a Soulsborne veteran, likely the most difficult to learn as well.

How nimble an Armored Core is depends on the parts it’s built from, and with hundreds of options to choose from, there’s a lot of room for creativity. Some offer simple stat boosts while others change how a mech travels across the battlefield. For example, a set of quadruped legs allow an AC to hover in the air without consuming energy, a feature that’s useful for missions that require a lot of aerial combat. By contrast, a mech with tank treads isn’t great at getting off the ground, but it can drift after dashing and charge up a weapon without stopping.

Like I said, there’s a lot to learn and unpack. Thankfully, Armored Core VI is also one of FromSoftware’s more accessible games. After the initial hurdle of the first boss, the first few missions that follow are smaller in scale, and feature less formidable enemies. At the same time, the game offers training missions that are there to illuminate the finer points of Armored Core VI’s mechanics. At most, these take a few minutes to complete, and provide useful mech parts as rewards. It’s a structure I felt eased me into the game before throwing harder challenges my way.

Yamamura and company have also wisely done away with some of the series’ more hardcore elements. Past games featured a system that allowed the player to go into debt if they didn’t play well. That’s not something that’s present in AC6. I found I always had spare funds to modify my mech, thanks to the amount of credits the game doled out for completing missions and the ability to replay them for even more money. It also helps that every component available to purchase can be sold for the same price it costs to buy it. As a result, I found I was free to experiment with different loadouts to find the combination that suited my playstyle without having to consider a punishing in-game economy.

AC6’s mission structure also does a lot of heavy lifting to make the game more approachable. The inclusion of a checkpoint system meant I never lost much, if any, progress when I died (and I died a lot in my early hours). It’s also possible to modify a mech between deaths without restarting a mission. Unless I was chasing an ‘S’ ranking when replaying a mission, that meant I was free to use one mech to reach a boss and another to defeat it. In fact, the game encouraged me to do exactly that after dying multiple times in a row to one boss I encountered midway through chapter one.

Still, there were some frustrations. Boss battles felt overly difficult relative to every other enemy, perhaps to balance the game’s checkpoint system. Most opponents — including opposing Armored Cores — have a limited pool of attacks. Bosses throw out that script. To give you one example, Balteus, the final boss of the game’s first chapter, starts with a moveset that consists of about a dozen attacks, a few of which flood the arena with homing missiles. When the battle enters its second phase, Balteus’s moveset doubles and the boss becomes even more aggressive. It’s a punishing encounter and a brick wall of an early-game skill check.

Sometimes the controls also don’t feel up to the task of what AC6 is asking you to pull off. It’s especially noticeable if you go with what’s known in-game as a “double trigger” build, which involves equipping an Armored Core with a pair of weapons that ideally should be fired in unison.

By default, Armored Core VI maps all of a mech’s weapons to left and right triggers, alongside the bumper buttons. The right analog stick, meanwhile, controls the camera and the square or X button is for dashing. The game includes a target assist mode that locks the camera to a single target, but it’s not ideal to use when fighting more than one enemy. When I felt I struggled the most, it was because I had to give up control of the camera to boost away from an attack. It’s possible to remap the controls, but I didn’t find a configuration that worked as well as the default setup.

Those frustrations aside, I never felt like Armored Core VI was anything short of compelling. Even in its most challenging moments, the game gave me little victories to celebrate. It is an incredible achievement in game design and thematic cohesion, and, I think, a promise of what we can expect from FromSoftware’s next generation of talent.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon arrives on PlayStation, Xbox and PC on August 25th.

When Instagram launched Threads on July 5th, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Twitter for the first time in 11 years. The tweet, which did not include any text, saw Zuckerberg reference the Spider-Man pointing meme to take a jab at Elon Musk. It turns out the use of that meme was more apt than the Facebook founder could have imagined.

As highlighted by TechCrunch, the release of Instagram’s Threads translated into a boon for another app of the same name. Threads, a Slack alternative that has been around since 2019, saw more than 880,000 downloads on iOS between July 6th and July 12th, according to an estimate Data.ai shared with the outlet. Where previously it had “few downloads” before that period, Threads became the 52nd most downloaded App Store program globally. In a handful of European Union countries, including Germany, Spain and Italy, it even managed to crack the top 10. That might have something to do with the fact Instagram’s Threads isn’t available in the EU, and Meta has since started blocking people who try to access the service through a VPN.

In addition, owing to the fact it owns threads.com, Threads (the Slack alternative) has enjoyed a “significant” increase in traffic to its website. In fact, the company has since added a badge to its frontpage that declares it’s “not associated with Instagram.” Over on Twitter, you’ll find a similar disclaimer. “We have no affiliation with Meta. But you’re welcome to stick around!” the company’s profile states.

Of course, Meta and Threads aren’t the first companies to employ the same branding. As TechCrunch notes, there are more than a few companies called Lightyear, including a solar electric vehicle startup, an online course platform and two separate fintech firms. Still, it’s funny a coincidence when you consider Threads, the workplace chat app, was co-founded by Rousseau Kazi, a former Facebook product manager. Oh, and Meta used to operate an Instagram companion app also confusingly named Threads. I suppose there’s no originality left in Silicon Valley.

Russian authorities have begun to ban government employees from using Apple devices for official state use, according to the Financial Times. As of Monday, the country’s trade ministry will prohibit the use of iPhones for all “work purposes.” Other agencies, including Russia’s telecommunications and mass media ministry, either have similar mandates already in place or plan to begin enforcing ones soon. The Times reports the ban covers all Apple products. In some cases, however, officials can continue using those devices for personal use, provided they don’t open work correspondence on them.

Apple did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, the company cut off access to Apple Pay. It later halted all product sales in Russia. At the time, Apple made clear the decision was in response to the invasion, noting it stood “with all of the people” hurt by the incursion.

The ban comes after Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed at the start of June that it had uncovered a “spying operation by US intelligence agencies” involving Apple devices. The FSB said thousands of iPhones, including those in use by the country’s diplomatic missions in NATO countries, had been “infected” with monitoring software. The FSB went on to claim — without showing evidence — that Apple had worked closely with US signal intelligence to provide agents “with a wide range of control tools.” The tech giant denied those allegations, stating it had “never worked with any government to build a backdoor into any Apple product, and never will.”

More broadly, the move is reflective of a desire by Russia’s government to lessen its dependence on foreign-made technology. As The Times notes, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree last year ordering institutions involved in “critical information infrastructure” to migrate to domestically developed software by 2025. 

The first batch of Apple’s M3-equipped Macs could arrive as early October, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman reports there “should be another launch” after the company’s annual iPhone event in September, with a new slate of Macs likely the focus of whatever Apple has planned. “October is too early for new high-end MacBook Pros or desktops, so the first beneficiaries of the new chip should be the next iMac, 13-inch MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro,” he notes.

At the start of March, Gurman reported that Apple was at “a late stage” of development on two new iMac models that would feature its next-generation M3 silicon. The new chipset likely won’t feature many more CPU and GPU cores than Apple’s current M2 SoCs, but it is expected to offer significant performance and power efficiency gains thanks to TSMC’s 3nm process. At the time, Gurman predicted the new iMac could arrive as early as the second half of 2023, and that it would feature the same colorful design of the 2021 model. Last week, he wrote that Apple is also working on a new 32-inch iMac, but warned that model won’t arrive until late 2024 at the earliest.

In the past, Apple has typically announced new iPad models alongside its latest Macs, but it sounds like that won’t be the case this time around. “I wouldn’t expect any major upgrades until the M3 iPad Pros with OLED screens arrive next year,” Gurman writes. However, he notes Apple is working on a new iPad Air with refreshed internals. The current model features the company’s aging M1 chipset.

Following a bitter, months-long feud over the company's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft and Sony have signed a deal to keep the Call of Duty franchise on PlayStation consoles. "We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard," Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer tweeted Sunday morning. "We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard." 

The announcement comes after Microsoft on Friday defeated a last-ditch effort by the US Federal Trade Commission to scuttle the company's $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant the regulator an emergency stay of a ruling that allows the deal to proceed in the US. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Electric vehicle startup Canoo has delivered its first shipment to NASA. This week, a trio of the company’s Crew Transportation Vehicles (CTVs) arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Although they look like they’re made for exploring the surface of the Moon, the vans are designed to carry astronauts to the KSC’s launch pads, starting with NASA’s forthcoming Artemis 2 mission.

According to Canoo, the vans, based on the company’s existing lifestyle vehicle design, can carry fully-suited astronauts, as well as flight support crew and any equipment they may need. “The vehicles have an exclusive interior and exterior design that will provide astronaut and crew comfort and safety while on the nine-mile journey to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center,” the company said, adding it would share interior shots of the vehicles later this year.

Canoo

The Artemis 2 mission will see NASA launch its first crewed mission to the Moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Four astronauts will travel around the satellite during the 10-day flight. During Artemis 2, NASA plans to conduct additional tests of its Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) super heavy-lift rocket to ensure both spacecraft are safe for future crewed missions to the lunar surface.

As for Canoo, this is a chance for the automaker to drum up interest for its EVs. In May 2022, the company warned investors it was running low on cash. Since then, it announced an agreement with Walmart to provide the retailer with 4,500 EVs. The company also delivered a test vehicle to the US Army. Still, even with those deals in place, it has a long way to go before achieving financial sustainability.

Twitter is still spending more money than it’s making, according to Elon Musk. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the billionaire tweeted the company was suffering from an ongoing negative cash flow issue due to an approximately 50 percent drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt burden. “Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” Musk said.

The admission comes in the same week that Twitter’s ad-revenue sharing program began paying out some creators, including a handful of far-right influencers. On Friday, Musk also claimed the social network could see “all-time high device user seconds usage” sometime this week. He also previously said almost all the advertisers who had left the platform following his takeover in October had “either come back” or “said they will come back.”

According to an estimate research firm Sensor Tower shared with Bloomberg, advertising spending fell by 89 percent to $7.6 million during a two-month period earlier this year. Per Reuters, Twitter has annual interest payments of about $1.5 billion due to the debt the company took on when Musk took it private for $44 billion. This is the latest sign the aggressive cost-cutting measures Musk has undertaken in the last year have not been enough to put the company on solid financial footing. It also suggests the company’s newly appointed CEO, Linda Yaccarino, has her work cut out for her as she works to rebuild Twitter’s advertising base.