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HP's Mindframe headset is a rad concept : Use a thermoelectric device in each cup to keep your ears cool during heated gaming sessions. Ahead of this weekend's Gamescom conference, the company revealed that you'll be able to pick up a pair in October for a starting price of $200. The headphones have gotten a few extras since they were announced in May, including noise cancellation and more breathable fabric cups. HP also had more to mention about its upcoming Omen-line Obelisk desktop, which will be one of the first to support NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20 line of GPUs, including the just- announced RTX 2080 Ti. The PC will be available in September with a starting price of $880. If you're at Gamescom this week, however, you can get an early look at both before anyone else. via Engadget RSS Feed https://ift.tt/2Bwb83E ...

Asteroid Ryugu from Hayabusa2 This big space diamond has an estimated value of over 80 billion dollars. It's only diamond in shape, though -- asteroid 162173 Ryugu is thought to be composed of mostly nickel and iron . Asteroids like Ryugu are interesting for several reasons, perhaps foremost because they are near the Earth and might, one day in the far future, pose an impact threat . In the nearer term, Ryugu is interesting because it may be possible to send future spacecraft there to mine it , thus providing humanity with a new source of valuable metals. Scientifically, Ryugu is interesting because it carries information about how our Solar System formed billions of years ago, and why its orbit takes it so close to Earth. Japan 's robotic spacecraft Hayabusa2 just arrived at this one-kilometer wide asteroid in late June. The featured image shows surface structures unk...

So you want a curved Samsung gaming monitor, but you don't want to splash out for an over-the-top model like the HDR-ready CHG90 . Are you out of luck? Not for much longer -- Samsung has unveiled the CJG5 series, which delivers some of the core features you might crave without the nice-to-have extras. It still includes a curved panel (to provide a more natural focus for your eyes, Samsung claims) and a speedy 144Hz refresh rate, but in a standard 16:9 aspect ratio, 2,560 x 1,440 VA display (no quantum dots here) at 32- and 27-inch sizes. This frugality extends to the inputs, which include two HDMI connectors (one of which is HDMI 2.0), a DisplayPort 1.2 jack and a place for your headphones. The company hasn't outlined pricing or availability, but it describes the CJG5 line as "reasonable and affordable." This is what you might get if you'r...

Nintendo's first few Labo Toy-Con kits let us go fishing and pretend to be a giant robot. But aside from the motorcycle kit, they didn't really get you moving much. That's where the upcoming Toy-Con Vehicle Kit comes in: It has an actual steering wheel; a joystick for flying; and a unique dual-dial submarine controller. And, thanks to a wide variety of game modes, you'll actually want to use them for more than a weekend. As with all things Labo, the first thing I did during my short demo was fold some cardboard. I had ten minutes to build the Toy-Con key, a small box that houses the right Joy-Con and lets you "turn on" each vehicle by plugging it in. Building it felt like a more advanced version of the Labo holster from the Variety Kit, with plenty of intricate and small folds that have to slot in just so. Thankfully, Nintendo had each ...

Once again, Facebook is notifying the media that it has mass-removed accounts exhibiting "coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram." This time around, Mark Zuckerberg said the cull caught up 652 pages that it says were linked to a campaign originating in Iran, as well as an unspecified number of accounts linked to Russian military intelligence services. Like Microsoft's announcement last night and Facebook's last notice in July , these changes are part of a push for security around elections happening in 2018, including the just-concluded events in Mexico, and the US midterms in November. While Facebook attributed the moves announced today to four separate investigations, it acknowledged that security company FireEye tipped it off to a network of sites starting with "Liberty Front Press." Facebook connected the page's bac...

Submarines can't normally communicate directly with anything above the water due to the physical limits of their signal, but that might change in the near future. Researchers have developed a wireless system that can transmit data from an underwater source to the air. The approach, known as translational acoustic-RF communication (TARF), sends a sonar signal to the surface, where tiny vibrations at different frequencies correspond to the 0s and 1s of binary data. Above the water, an extremely high frequency radar (30GHz to 300GHz) can pick up on minuscule changes in signal angles that relate to the data bits. It's just a matter of processing the bits into meaningful data after that. TARF doesn't require a perfectly still sea, either. New signal processing algorithms use the frequency of waves to tell the difference between large waves and the tiny ...

Facebook removed more pages today as a result of four ongoing influence campaigns on the platform, taking down 652 fake accounts and pages that published political content. The campaigns, whose existence was first uncovered by the cybersecurity firm FireEye, have links to Russia and Iran, Facebook said in a blog post . The existence of the fake accounts was first reported by The New York Times . "These were networks of accounts that were misleading people about who they were and what they were doing," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters. "We ban this kind of behavior because authenticity matters. People need to be able to trust the connections they make on Facebook." In July, FireEye tipped Facebook off to the existence of a... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2MoMB5I ...

Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden has filed an addendum (PDF) as part of a lawsuit headed by 22 state attorneys general that's seeking to reinstate net neutrality regulations repealed by the FCC in December. In the addendum, Ars Technica reports, the fire chief claims that Verizon throttled an unlimited data plan to the extent that it made the service useless during efforts to fight wildfires. The move specifically affected a department vehicle used to "track, organize and prioritize routing of resources from around the state and country to sites where they are needed most." The fire department found that while the vehicle was deployed in response to the Mendocino Complex Fire, data rates provided by Verizon were being throttled to speeds that made the service largely unusable. Through a series of emails, the department requested that Verizo...

T-Mobile is asking smaller carriers that run services on its mobile network to publicly come out in favor of the company's proposed merger with Sprint, according to Reuters . T-Mobile has requested that these mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) take steps that range from filing FCC comments in favor of the deal to publishing editorials in news publications. The company is also providing MVNOs with a number of talking points that match its own reasoning for why a merger between the third- and fourth-largest US carriers would be positive for consumers and the mobile industry. Accelerating the buildout of 5G is at the top of that list . MVNOs that operate on T-Mobile's network include TracFone and subsidiary Straight Talk, Google's... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2PtiVCs ...