PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) comes with new updates, making the game tougher for those who do not follow the rules. Players are required to stay in the play area and, whenever they pass this boundary and start wandering in the zone called the blue area, they start accumulating damage. Now, the creators of the game decided to make this damage a lot tougher.

The blue zone gets tougher than ever

PUBG developers want to keep players inside the play zone, so they needed to find a way to make them focus more on it. Those who wander away and enter the blue zone usually suffer some penalties over time, but the effective way to make them focus on it more was to make the outskirts more difficult to deal with.

Therefore, developers will start rolling out the feature some time during upcoming weeks. Bluehole revealed they did this for the players, as their gameplay can significantly improve if they have to deal with only one set of enemies, namely those inside this play zone. In fact, there’s nothing bad about it, as players are taught not to waste time by running away in a safe area when facing the harshness of the blue zone.

More updates are in the making for the PUBG 1.0 release

However, these are not the only changes promoted by PUBG developers. In November, the test servers will bring some more updates. Some brand new mechanics will be available in a beta version at the beginning of the month, and players are invited to take a look at them and offer their feedback.

However, Bluehole revealed they won’t be included in the full game before its release. Version 1.0 of PUBG should arrive sometime before the end of the year, so all these updates, together with whatever bug fixes they might need, are to be attached to the final game only before the release.
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For the second time in the history of Nintendo’s classic consoles, a modder managed to crack open one of the devices, discover its functioning system, and find out how to load and play other games, which are not included in its original distribution. Only a week after the release, a Russian hacker loaded dozens of additional games on the mini SNES.

As soon as the NES Classic Edition console was first released, Cluster, a Russian modder, took its time to find out how to make it possible for people to play some extra games on the console. Several months later, he managed to find out NES’ secret, and a ton of new games were now side-loaded on it.

However, it seems Nintendo didn’t have any problem with it. The release of the mini SNES Classic Edition came and, only a week after, Cluster had already found out how to add games on the console. This means Nintendo didn’t take significant efforts to change the software and the components of the mini SNES, leaving modders able to manipulate the device with ease.

You can add what games you want on the mini SNES console

Cluster has a special tool, called hakchi2, which lets you upload the game you want on the SNES. You don’t need too much technical knowledge to do that but, if you are more than an average PC user, you should be able to load mostly any game you want on the console. It will even allow older games, which were available only on the NES.

This exclusive option will be more than welcome by the SNES fans, since being able to play more games on the console is, indeed, a huge advantage. The NES console has been released with 30 official games, while the number decreased to 21 on the new SNES.

Everything will happen with Nintendo’s blessing, as the company has absolutely nothing bad to say about this. You are probably aware NES contained a secret message for modders. The same message is now hidden inside SNES as well, so the Nintendo is actually encouraging all these attempts.
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Sunday, September 17, will mark the final day of an eight months long experiment which had a team of six researchers backed by NASA live in isolation on a volcano in Hawaii.

The scientists will emerge from a specially created habitat that mimics the conditions which travelers to the outer space are likely to face. For example, the team had to work with a 20-minutes communication delay between its base and the mission center.

The team of six researchers has been living ever since January on a remote volcano in Hawaii. Their habitat was placed on a vast plain below the summit of one the largest active volcanoes in the world.

Composed of two women and four men, the crew is part of an isolation experiment whose target was to better understand the psychological impacts of living in confinement for an extended period of time. Reportedly, the results will be used by NASA to better select the crews of years long outer-space missions.

These could have certain traits, which would allegedly help them fare better during a two to three years long manned expedition towards Mars. NASA is working on deploying such a mission to the Red Planet by the 2030s.

The Fifth but Not Final Isolation Experiment?

The team of six people involved in this isolation experiment has been living in a 1,200-square foot dome, and its primary food source has been canned or freeze-dried goods. The researchers were also asked to wear sensors that were specially designed to gauge their proximity to the other members, as well as their moods.

Based on several factors, such as their voice levels, the sensors were capable of detecting if the crew members were avoiding one another or perhaps arguing. A series of specially assigned games also measured their stress levels and compatibility.

In case things got stressful, the team did nonetheless have an outlet. They could use virtual reality devices to ‘go’ anywhere they wanted. The crew also had to keep written logs in which they expressed how they felt.

“This is our fifth mission, […]. We’ve learned, for one thing, that conflict, even in the best of teams, is going to arise. So what’s really important is to have a crew that, both as individuals and a group, is really resilient, is able to look at that conflict and come back from it.”

This is according to Kim Binstead, the lead investigator of the project and part of the University of Hawaii. The current mission is the fifth in a series of six. According to reports, the university is already starting to plan Mission 6.

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