• Google TV will need 2GB of RAM in new TVs and related hardware
• Android TV is unchanged with a 1GB minimum spec
• It won’t affect your current streamer in the short term

One of the most common criticisms of Google TV is that it isn’t always very smooth on more modestly priced televisions. That’s largely because Google’s system requirements aren’t very demanding, so a TV can meet the minimum spec with some pretty unimpressive components. That’s about to change, though, which is good news for new buyers but a possible worry for existing owners.

As Android Authority reports, Google has submitted a change to the Android open-source project regarding Google TV minimum requirements. The change says that the minimum RAM must be 2GB, which is more than the RAM in the Chromecast with Google TV.

What does this change mean for your TV or streaming device?

When pushed into the smallest of cracks, water can be used in unexpected ways. A new battery-like device that relies on tiny amounts of water confined within layers of clay could eventually offer sustainable power in places as extreme as Mars.

Vasily Artemov at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and his colleagues built the supercapacitor, a type of battery-like energy storage device, with components similar to those of conventional batteries, including two electrodes, one with a negative and one with a positive charge. But instead of making these electrodes out of…

Throughout your long journey in Bioware’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, your Rook will have to make a myriad of difficult decisions that can alter the narrative or change how your companions feel about you. You may not know in the moment how trivial or significant the choices you make are, especially when it comes to the life of a small-town mayor.

You’ll eventually discover during the Shadows Crossing main quest that the mayor of D’Meta’s Crossing just so happened to be the reason behind his villagers perishing from the blight. Although he claims the gods made him do it and he would never typically do something so horrid, Rook is left with a decision to either save or leave Mayor Julius to die by the blight in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Let’s discuss how this decision affects your game.

Freeing the mayor

If you decide to save the mayor of D’Meta’s Crossing from the blight, the only consequences of this decision are in your approval ratings. While Neve will approve of you freeing Mayor Julius, Harding and Bellara won’t be happy with your choice.

By making this decision, you also lock yourself out of the sidequest called A Growing Corruption, but freeing the mayor who doomed his village won’t leave you with any negative consequences later on.

Leaving the mayor

Choosing to leave the mayor of D’Meta’s Crossing to his fate gains you Bellara and Harding’s approval. On the other hand, your approval rating with Neve will decrease. Explaining your reasoning to Neve after your decision won’t improve your relationship with her, unfortunately.

Due to this choice you’ve made, you will get the A Growing Corruption sidequest further in the game which has Rook and friends trying to take down the blighted version of the mayor in a boss fight.

Advertisement

What is the best choice?

Overall, the better choice is to leave the mayor, but this also depends on whether you care about getting all sidequests and losing out on Neve’s approval. If you care more about getting on Neve’s good side over Bellara or Harding, or if you’re role-playing as a lawful good Rook, saving the mayor isn’t the worst choice.

Leaving the mayor, on the other hand, gets you the approval of two party members instead of just one. Not only that, but you get a whole new sidequest to tackle that can earn you some XP. So to get the most out of your Dragon Age: The Veilguard experience, especially if you’re an Achievement hunter, you should leave Mayor Julius.

A big TV can be a wonderful thing to jazz up your entertainment and right now Best Buy has a pretty awesome deal on the B4 Series TV from LG. This is a 77-inch smart TV that would normally cost you $2,499.99 if you were to pay full price. However, right now Best Buy has the price knocked down to just $1,699.99 which is $800 off. This is also the lowest price we’ve seen this model and it’s an all-time low price for Best Buy. It’s also pretty close to being the all-time low anywhere, with only LG directly offering a lower price by $0.99.

LG is well-known for having some of the best TVs on the market and this one definitely comes with some enticing features. As a smart TV it comes with LG’s WebOS software. This gives you access to plenty of apps right on the TV so you can launch into things like Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney Plus, and more. There’s also an app for GeForce NOW if you like playing video games, which you can stream right in the cloud using nothing but a wireless controller and an internet connection.

Whatever entertainment you enjoy, this TV will amplify it with features like Dolby Atmos support and Dolby Vision support. So you get richer, more vibrant colors and a totally immersive sound experience. This TV also has support for NVIDIA G-Sync, and it comes with 4 HDMI 2.1 ports, which are going to be extremely beneficial if you play games on consoles like the Xbox Series X and PS5.

There are also ports for optical audio, USB, ethernet, and a few others. Plus, you can’t go wrong with a big TV most of the time regardless of the features.

Buy at Best Buy

BioWare had told Mass Effect fans to expect a quiet N7 day without any updates on the in the works, but there is still some exciting news for the franchise today. reports that Amazon MGM Studios is developing a TV series based on the sci-fi universe. Rumors first emerged about the tech company’s interest in a Mass Effect show , but now it’s official.

Daniel Casey will be the series’ writer and executive producer. He has action credits on the screenplay for F9: The Fast Saga and made contributions to sci-fi films Kin and 10 Cloverfield Lane. Variety noted some of the other executive producers, but there have been no details shared yet about the cast or plot of the project. Since a large part of the original Mass Effect games’ appeal was players making their own choices about Commander Shepard’s moral compass and love life, it seems likely that a show would want to tell an original story within that universe rather than retreading the same path as the trilogy.

Amazon had a huge win with its earlier this year, and it seems the company is going to continue mining video games for source material. After some stumbles, Amazon is also reviving its plans for a live-action .

When a volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of Pompeii, the last desperate moments of its citizens were preserved in stone for centuries.

Observers see stories in the plaster casts later made of their bodies, like a mother holding a child and two women embracing as they die.

But new DNA evidence suggests things were not as they seem — and these prevailing interpretations come from looking at the ancient world through modern eyes.

“We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built upon how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “It opens up different interpretations for who these people might have been.”

Mittnik and her colleagues discovered that the person thought to be a mother was actually a man unrelated to the child. And at least one of the two people locked in an embrace — long assumed to be sisters or a mother and daughter – was a man. Their research was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The team, which also includes scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material preserved for nearly two millennia. After Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed the Roman city in 79 A.D., bodies buried in mud and ash eventually decomposed, leaving spaces where they used to be. Casts were created from the voids in the late 1800s.

Researchers focused on 14 casts undergoing restoration, extracting DNA from the fragmented skeletal remains that mixed with them. They hoped to determine the sex, ancestry and genetic relationships between the victims.

There were several surprises in “the house of the golden bracelet,” the dwelling where the assumed mother and child were found. The adult wore an intricate piece of jewelry, for which the house was named, reinforcing the impression that the victim was a woman. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and child thought to be the rest of their nuclear family.

DNA evidence showed the four were male and not related to one another, clearly showing “the story that was long spun around these individuals” was wrong, Mittnik said.

Researchers also confirmed Pompeii citizens came from diverse backgrounds but mainly descended from eastern Mediterranean immigrants – underscoring a broad pattern of movement and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire. Pompeii is located about 150 miles (241 kilometers) from Rome.

The study builds upon research from 2022 when scientists sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim for the first time and confirmed the possibility of retrieving ancient DNA from the human remains that still exist.

“They have a better overview of what’s happening in Pompeii because they analyzed different samples,” said Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a co-author of that research who was not involved in the current study. “We actually had one genome, one sample, one shot.”

Though much remains to be learned, Scorrano said, such genetic brushstrokes are slowly painting a truer picture of how people lived in the distant past.

In August, archaeologists at Pompeii announced they had unearthed the remains of two more victims — a man and a woman discovered inside what was likely the bedroom of their home, where they’d become trapped as the rest of the structure filled with debris. The woman was found on the bed with a collection of gold, silver and bronze coins, as well as a pair of gold earrings, a pair of pearl earrings and other jewelry. 

Earlier this year, three researchers won a $700,000 prize for using artificial intelligence to read a 2,000-year-old scroll that was scorched in the Vesuvius eruption.

The Herculaneum papyri consist of about 800 rolled-up Greek scrolls that were carbonized during the 79 CE volcanic eruption that buried the ancient Roman town, according to the organizers of the “Vesuvius Challenge.”

The scroll’s author was “probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus,” writing “about music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures,” wrote contest organizer Nat Friedman on social media.

The scrolls were found in a villa thought to be previously owned by Julius Caesar’s patrician father-in-law, whose mostly unexcavated property held a library that could contain thousands more manuscripts.