The Morning After: A new battle system for ‘Pokémon’

After a bit of a break from the headlines, the Pokémon juggernaut is back. A Nintendo Direct event yesterday gave us a better look at Pokémon: Legends, a new kind spin-off title from the Pocket Monster universe. Combining the cute monsters with feudal Japan aesthetics is a fun twist, and it looks like Legends will offer a different kind of battle system. Battles are still turn-based, but rather than Pokémon each taking a turn and trading blows, their stats and equipped items dictate the order of actions.

Each Pokémon’s four moves has two styles: agile style and strong style. The former speeds up your action speed and might bump up your next turn in the queue, but the move will be weaker than unusual. It appears this action queue will be core to battles in Legends.

And if you’re just here for Pokémon silliness, you’ll be able to ride your Pocket Monsters around like steeds and, well, jet skis.

— Mat Smith

Cruising in San Francisco, shooting drones.

Holoride’s VR gaming system for passengers caught our attention a few years back at CES when we were given a track ride in an Audi and had the game react to the movement of the vehicle while we played. Well, the company is back, and this time it demoed two games and threw off the shackles of the track for the real world. Roberto Baldwin tackles a new kind of in-car entertainment.

The device lives in your abdomen.

Researchers from Italy have created a robot that deals with diabetes without needles. PILLSID involves two separate parts: an internal insulin dispenser that a doctor would surgically implant in your abdomen and a magnetic capsule loaded with the hormone. When you need to top-up, you swallow the capsule, which makes its way to the dispenser.

In a test involving three diabetic pigs, the research team found the system could successfully manage insulin levels for several hours. In some instances, they found bodily fluids from the pigs would leak into the robot. It’s early days for now.

Continue reading.

The obscure online resource saw a spike in activity.

The FBI received a tip-off about suspicious activity ahead of the Capitol Riot on January 6th from a surprising source: a recreational mapmaker. Elliot Carter contacted law enforcement after his site about Washington, DC’s underground infrastructure got a spike in activity from suspicious websites. His warning eventually made it to the highest ranks of the Capitol Police.

His “online tip” to the FBI was even mentioned in the US Senate Rules and Homeland Security committees’ June 2021 review of the US Capitol insurrection.

Continue reading.

It removed more than 20 million individual posts.

Since the start of the pandemic, Facebook has taken a much tougher stance on health misinformation than it had in the past, removing millions of posts for sharing misinformation. Now, we know how many accounts, groups and pages have been banned from the platform for repeatedly breaking those rules: just 3,000.

But the relatively low number of bans tracks with findings by researchers who say that only a few individuals are responsible for the vast majority of vaccine mistruths on social media. Facebook’s VP of Content Policy, Monika Bickert, told reporters that the company has had to continually evolve its policies, noting that some groups have used “coded language” to try to evade the company’s detection. 

Continue reading.

The big news you might have missed