Geek News

German new-space firm PTScientists has been planning a mission to the Moon for many years now. It has partnered with Audi to produce and deliver two XPrize-winning quattro rovers to the Moon that will explore both the lunar surface and carefully return to the Apollo 17 landing site in 2019. Now the team has partnered with Vodafone and Nokia to create a Moon-based communications network using 4G LTE to bring high-def video of the moon to those of us here on Earth. Vodafone's base station will communicate with the rovers as they gather images and video of the various lunar sights. The 4G network will use the 1800 MHz frequency band to send HD video to the Autonomous Landing and Navigation Module (ALINA), which will then connect to PTScientists in Berlin. Nokia is making space-grade networking gear that will weigh less than one kilogram in total. 4G is more energy efficient than analog radio, and will allow a larger amount of data to be transferred between the rovers and the ...

We've been massive fans of Teenage Engineering's affordable pocket-sized synthesizers since their debut . The company has added new, more capable models over the last couple of years, too, adding more sounds to individual units and import/export capabilities. They've always come in at an impulse-friendly $60, though, until now. The new additions to the metal series — the PO-33 K.O! sampler and the PO-35 vocal sampler — not only comes in silver and copper, but they now cost a less-budget conscious $90. The two new metal synths complement the existing gold-colored PO-32 drum machine for a trio of synthy goodness. The PO-35 speak voice synth and sequencer has a microphone for sampling anything you like, 120 seconds of memory for those samples, eight voice characters and the same number of effects, will let you transpose and change the scale of your sequences and includes replaceable drum sounds that you can buy separately. The PO-33 K.O! micro sampler has 40 seconds of m...

This past December, Facebook investigated whether Russia had used the social network to influence the EU Referendum vote, or Brexit. At the time, the team found little evidence of UK-related activity from the "Internet Research Agency" in Russia. Now, in a letter from Facebook's UK policy director Simon Milner, the company promises to continue the investigation at the request of Damian Collins, the chair of the Digital Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the House of Commons. Milner asserts that the work will need a "number of weeks" to complete, due to the detailed analysis of historic data required to be completed by the current security team, which is concurrently working on live security threats. The team will try and identify other clusters of coordinated activity around the Brexit referendum, similar to the one it investigated before. Milner also requests any information the UK government has that could help Facebook narrow its search. Via: The V...

If you get excited by cool vinyl video game soundtracks like we do, you're in luck. Mondo, the company behind the amazing Contra vinyl and that fantastic The Last of Us box set, has just partnered with Ubisoft on Far Cry 5 . Starting today, January 16th, you can pre-order the " Far Cry 5 x Mondo Edition" of the game for $100. The special edition is set to release alongside the title itself on March 27th of this year for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. There are only 4,000 of these units available worldwide, so if you're interested, you'll probably want to jump on it. You'll get the title itself in an attractive, durable SteelBook case designed by the creative director of Mondo, Jay Shaw, a vinyl record with the original Far Cry 5 soundtrack, a code for the digital version and a nice little box to hold it all in with an illustration of the game's main villain Joseph Seed. You'll also receive special in-game cosmetic and consumable items in the Doomsday Pr...