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Sony has revealed a much more expensive and powerful iteration of the PlayStation 5, the PS5 Pro.
The digital-only PS5 Pro is set to arrive on 7th November and it will cost £700 for the console - but there are a number of extra bits of kit that can increase the price further.
Gamers will need to buy the vertical stand separately for £25. The separate disc drive is also compatible but costs an additional £100.
Saqib Shah, tech & gaming reporter for the Evening Standard, explains what sets it apart from its predecessor ,and gives his verdict on whether it’s worth the hefty price tag.
A new wearable brain imaging device is helping shine a light on how babies respond in real-world situations.
Dr Liam Collins-Jones, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and first author of the study, tells Tech & Science Daily about the significance of the technology, and what it can tell us about babies’ development.
The wearable brain imaging headgear, which was developed in collaboration with UCL spin-out Gowerlabs, found unexpected activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that processes emotions, in response to social stimuli, appearing to confirm that babies start processing what is happening to them in social situations as early as five months old.
The researchers say this technology could help to map the connections between different brain regions and establish what distinguishes typical and atypical neurodevelopment in the crucial early stages of childhood.
And the rest
Andrew Laughlin, Which? principal researcher and writer, discusses their latest study which has found that most people have no plan for their ‘digital death’.
We find out about the tiny fish which ‘checks its body size in the mirror before getting into fights’.
You can listen to the episode in the player above, find us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here’s a fully automated transcript of this episode:
Hi, I'm Rochelle Travers, and this is The Standard's Tech and Science Daily podcast.
Coming up, do you have a plan in place for your ‘digital death’?
Now, let's get into it.
If you're new here, make sure to hit follow.
Sony has revealed a much more expensive and powerful iteration of the PlayStation 5, the PS5 Pro.
What you're getting is a new GPU, that's basically the graphics processing unit or the graphics card inside the PS5 Pro.
That's larger this time, two to three times more ray tracing, which is basically a fancy graphics technique that simulates light in gaming, makes it more realistic and something called AI assisted game upscaling for 4K, which basically boosts the resolution of games that weren't 4K up to 4K resolution.
That's Saqib Shah, Tech and Gaming reporter for The Evening Standard.
He's been explaining what sets this console apart from its predecessor.
And a new gaming mode that basically combines all of those things together for games that have already been released.
So about, I think there's about 50 games that will get this enhanced gaming mode that will make them look even better on a PS5 Pro than they do on a PS5.
The digital only PS5 Pro is set to arrive on the 7th of November and it will cost £700 for the console.
But there are a number of extra bits of kit that can increase the price further.
Gamers will need to buy the vertical stand separately for £25.
The separate disc drive is also compatible but costs an additional £100.
But is it worth the hefty price tag?
I think it's a luxury console.
I think that's a good way to describe it.
But I think there are gonna be people who buy it the same way there are people who buy designer fashion.
They're not, you know, they don't really mind forking out a thousand pounds on their jacket or the same way some people are quite content to spend, you know, upwards of 1,200 pounds on an iPhone Pro Max.
Back when the original PS5 came out in 2020, it was notoriously hard to get hold of, largely due to supply issues during COVID.
Saqib says this shouldn't be the case with the new version, although he wouldn't be surprised if it initially sells out.
However, he does question how long it will be until a PS6 is released.
Sony has said that the PS5 is kind of on the latter stages of its lifetime.
At the general console life cycles are about seven years, to put that into perspective.
So we might only be another few years out from a PS6, and the PS5 Pro certainly isn't a PS6.
It still uses some of the similar kind of graphics architecture as the PS5, only it's just got a lot more of that graphical heft inside of it.
Pre-orders for the PS5 Pro start from the 26th of September.
Now, a new wearable brain-imaging device is helping shine a light on how babies respond in real-world situations.
In this study, we invited babies with their parents to come into the lab.
What would happen is we'd put a cap on the baby's head, and this cap shines light into the head, so red light that can travel quite far through skin, through bone and into the brain.
Now what happens is when a part of the brain is activated, that part of the brain has more blood flowing to it, and blood is a stronger absorber of red light compared to the surrounding brain tissue.
So, by seeing the differences in levels of light that we detect coming back off the brain, we can see where there are changes in blood concentration in the brain, and changes in blood concentration is a marker of brain activity.
That's Dr Liam Collins-Jones, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and first author of the study, which was carried out in collaboration with University College London and Birkbeck.
What we did in the study is we put the cap on the baby's head.
We got them to watch different kinds of videos, so videos of actors singing nursery rhymes, but also videos of moving toys.
And what we looked at was the differences in activity in the baby brain while they were looking at these two kinds of videos.
The wearable brain imaging headgear, which was developed in collaboration with UCL spinout Goa Labs, found unexpected activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that processes emotions.
In response to social stimuli, appearing to confirm that babies start processing what is happening to them in social situations as early as five months old.
The real significance of this work is that we've demonstrated that we can see a really wide area of the brain surface in babies outside the typical conventional brain scanning environment.
And what this lets us do is see what the baby brain is doing as babies interact with their world.
The researchers say this technology could help to map the connections between different brain regions and establish what distinguishes typical and atypical neurodevelopment in the crucial early stages of childhood.
What I would like to see come next is this work replicated but with stimuli that are more representative of what babies come across in their everyday life.
For instance, seeing the response of the baby brain to a parent or a carer interacting with the baby.
Let's go to the ads.
Coming up, the tiny tropical fish that looks at themselves in the mirror before getting into fights.
Welcome back.
Now here's a slightly morbid question for you.
Do you have a plan in place for what happens to your digital accounts and online assets after you die?
Because apparently, most of us don't.
According to new research from Which?
We actually did a big survey to see how prepared people are to deal with their digital accounts after they pass away.
So, that's not things like a painting that you want to give to your son or daughter, or a financial bank account with money in it.
This is like the more nebulous things that we have in our data estate, photos, email, social media accounts, all sorts of things.
That's Andrew Loughlin, Which? principal researcher and writer.
We wanted to see how prepared people were for passing those things on when they unfortunately pass away.
We did a survey of just over 14,500 Which? members and found three quarters had no plan at all.
Their study also found that less than one in five planned to leave directions on how to access their online accounts, while only 3% have included digital provisions in their will.
Andrew has been explaining to Tech and Science Daily how to go about setting up a plan.
But you've got to think in every single one of those cases where you want someone else to access those accounts, you've got to put down a kind of an instruction to how to.
And you can do that securely by maybe a secure note in a cloud storage solution, maybe a password manager has these things.
A physical hard drive can be quite good, so you can actually record this information and then maybe password protect it.
And then the third thing you can also consider doing is, while digital assets can't really go in a will, what you can do is you can put in a letter of wishes.
Which? is also calling for the government and tech companies to make the process of handing over digital assets much easier, so that it's much clearer what people need to do and to help ease the pressure during some of the most stressful times of their lives.
Make a plan, but make sure it's updated.
If you change your password and the old one's in your plan, it's not going to help anybody.
So, make a plan, keep it updated.
And finally, scientists have found that a tiny fish appears to check its body size in the mirror before getting into fights.
Lab experiments led by a team at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan revealed that the blue streak cleaner wrasse, which is about the size of a human finger, can not only recognize its own reflection, but may also have an internal awareness of their own bodies.
Very few animals are known to recognize themselves in the mirror, but scientists believe that the small tropical fish may possess a more sophisticated type of self-awareness, only ever seen in humans.
Researchers said the findings published in the journal Scientific Reports provide important clues on how self-awareness evolved.
You're up to date.
Come back at 4pm for The Standard podcast for all the latest news and analysis.
Tech and Science Daily will be back tomorrow at 1pm.
See you then.
