It’s a relief for the gamers as China has finally decided to scrap its 15-year ban on video game consoles and companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft will now be allowed to manufacture and sell consoles anywhere in the country.

It is being said that back in 2000, these Game consoles were first banned due to fear that the devices and the 3D worlds produced by them could impact children’s mental and physical development negatively.

Though in 2014, China eased those restrictions by letting game console-makers operate in an experimental 11-square-mile area in Shanghai, those relaxed restrictions proved to be a major hurdle to console-makers, which had to enter into contracts to build new manufacturing facilities in the area.

However, now these restrictions have now been tossed entirely, opening up a massive new market for game consoles.

In a breakthrough discovery, scientists have revealed a new method which could lead to cheap, efficient metal-based solar cells.

Scientists from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics described a new method that solar-panel designers could use to incorporate light-capturing nanomaterials into future designs.

Bob Zheng, a graduate student and postdoctoral research associate Alejandro Manjavacas created a methodology that solar engineers could use to determine the electricity-producing potential for any arrangement of metallic nanoparticles.

Zheng said that one of the interesting phenomena that occurred when someone shined light on a metallic nanoparticle was that you can excite some subset of electrons in the metal to a much higher energy level.

Today’s most efficient photovoltaic cells use a combination of semiconductors that are made from rare and expensive elements like gallium and indium.

Zheng said that Plasmonic-based photovoltaics had low efficiencies, adding that it has not been entirely clear whether those arose from fundamental physical limitations or from less-than-optimal designs.

He said a recent example of such work comes from a pioneering experiment by another Rice graduate student, Ali Sobhani, where the absorption was concentrated near a metal semiconductor interface.

The scientists have spent years developing techniques to bolster the field-intensity enhancement of photonic structures for single-molecule sensing and other applications.

NASA’s New Horizons mission has made surprising new discovery, and found haze and flowing ice on Pluto.

John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate said that with flowing ices, exotic surface chemistry, mountain ranges, and vast haze, Pluto was showing a diversity of planetary geology that was truly thrilling.

Just seven hours after closest approach, New Horizons aimed its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) back at Pluto, capturing sunlight streaming through the atmosphere and revealing hazes as high as 80 miles (130 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface. A preliminary analysis of the image shows two distinct layers of haze — one about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the surface and the other at an altitude of about 30 miles (50 kilometers).

The hazes detected are a key element in creating the complex hydrocarbon compounds that give Pluto’s surface its reddish hue, said Michael Summers, New Horizons co-investigator at George Mason University, Virginia.

Models suggest the hazes form when ultraviolet sunlight breaks up methane gas particles — a simple hydrocarbon in Pluto’s atmosphere. The breakdown of methane triggers the buildup of more complex hydrocarbon gases, such as ethylene and acetylene, which also were discovered in Pluto’s atmosphere by New Horizons. As these hydrocarbons fall to the lower, colder parts of the atmosphere, they condense into ice particles that create the hazes. Ultraviolent sunlight chemically converts hazes into tholins, the dark hydrocarbons that color Pluto’s surface.

The new images show fascinating details within the Texas-sized plain, informally named Sputnik Planum, which lies within the western half of Pluto’s heart-shaped feature, known as Tombaugh Regio. There, a sheet of ice clearly appears to have flowed, and may still be flowing, in a manner similar to glaciers on Earth.

Additionally, new compositional data from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument indicate the center of Sputnik Planum is rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices.

At Pluto’s temperatures of minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit, these ices can flow like a glacier, said Bill McKinnon, deputy leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team. In the southernmost region of the heart, adjacent to the dark equatorial region, it appeared that ancient, heavily-cratered terrain has been invaded by much newer icy deposits.

The New Horizons mission will continue to send data stored in its onboard recorders back to Earth through late 2016. The spacecraft currently is 12.2 million kilometers beyond Pluto, healthy and flying deeper into the Kuiper Belt.

Google Maps has come up with a clever response for nagging kids who just can’t stop asking “are we there yet?” during trips.

The San Francisco-based internet giant has many secrets embedded in its technology, and in the latest version of Google Maps, the robotic voice behind the app shows it can do more than give directions.

During navigation mode, if someone continuously asked Google Maps ” are we there yet,” the voice replies with an increasingly terse “no.”

On persisting, the robot threatens saying, “If you ask me again, we won’t stop for ice cream.”

The amusing surprise that Google has placed inside its technology is called ‘Easter Eggs’.

If you are one of those whose cell phone keeps distracting you due to notifications, then chances are your may have trouble concentrating on other tasks as well.

A new Florida State University study claims that whether you are alerted to an incoming phone call or text by a trendy ringtone, an alarm bell or a quiet vibration, just receiving a notification on your cell phone can cause enough of a distraction to impair your ability to focus on a given task.

The level of how much it affected the task at hand was really shocking, said Courtney Yehnert, who worked on the study as an undergraduate student before graduating in 2014.

Psychology doctoral student Cary Stothart is the lead author of the study, which is the first to examine the effect of cell phone notifications on performance, and his co-authors are former FSU postdoctoral researcher Ainsley Mitchum and Yehnert.

The researchers wrote that although these notifications were generally short in duration, they could prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind-wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance. Cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupt performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants do not directly interact with a mobile device during the task.

The findings are significant because many public information campaigns intended to deter problematic cell phone use — while driving, for example — often emphasise waiting to respond to messages and calls.

Stothart said even a slight distraction could have severe, potentially life-threatening effects if that distraction occurred at the wrong time. Their results suggested that it was safest for people to mute or turn off their phones and put them out of sight while driving.

In a breakthrough discovery, researchers have revealed how a damaged DNA is transported within a cell and repaired.

Karim Mekhail, a professor at the University of Toronto, discovered the DNA ambulance, which is a motor protein complex, by using yeast cells. His team also found that the DNA hospital, also known as the nuclear pore complex, repairs damaged DNA inaccurately.

Mekhail said that this process allowed the cells to survive an injury, adding that the cell has a compromised genome, but is stable and could be replicated, which was usually a recipe for disaster.

The implications of the research could extend to a large number of developmental and disease settings, including unraveling secrets of how cancer operates.

Being socially engaged in college can finally pay off as a new study has revealed that your social life in college could predict your well-being later in life.

Cheryl Carmichael, who conducted the research at the University of Rochester said that the quantity of social interactions a person has at the age of 20 and the quality of social relationships that person has at age 30 could benefit their well-being in life.

She stated that people with poor social connections have been shown to be at an increased risk for early mortality. In addition to that, having few social connections was equivalent to tobacco use, and it’s higher than for those who drink excessive amounts of alcohol, or who suffer from obesity.

The study shows that having a high number of social interactions at age 30 has no psychosocial benefits later on, said Carmichael.

Carmichael contacted individuals who, as 20-year old college students in the 1970s for the study, and again ten years later, participated in the Rochester-Interaction Record (RIR) study.

The RIR was the first so-called “diary” technique used to examine social activity as it occurs spontaneously in everyday life. Diary methods, developed at the University and elsewhere, are now used widely to study social behavior.

Slack has integrated with Google calendar allowing post reminders inside slack channels.

The users can set any calendar to post events to any channel at set times.

It is easy to reminders in this app as it would slot right into the timeline of messages.

The app can remind on both a group and personal level.

Also, the users can add their personal calendar and Slackbot will happily directly message the users reminders instead.

It is often said what you listen is what you think and now this has been proved in a new study that shows how your music taste can reflect what you think.

According to the study, researchers have shown that thinking patterns whether a person was an ’empathiser’ who liked to focus on and respond to the emotions of others, or a ‘systemiser’ who liked to analyse rules and patterns in the world-was a predictor of the type of music people like.

In the study, the researchers argued that musical preferences reflect explicit characteristics such as age and personality.

The team of scientists has looked at how our ‘cognitive style’ influences our musical choices. This is measured by looking at whether an individual scores highly on ’empathy’ or on ‘systemizing or whether we have a balance of both.

The results proved consistent even within specified genres: empathizers’ preferred mellow, unpretentious jazz, while systemisers preferred intense, sophisticated (complex and avant-garde) jazz.

Senior author Dr Jason Rentfrow said that this line of research highlights how music is a mirror of the self, adding music is an expression of who we are emotionally, socially, and cognitively.

Based on their findings, the researchers believe following songs are likely to fit particular styles: High on empathy-Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley, Come away with me – Norah Jones, All of me – Billie Holliday, Crazy little thing called love – Queen and High on systemizing, Concerto in C – Antonio Vivaldi, Etude Opus 65 No 3-Alexander Scriabin, God save the Queen – The Sex Pistols, Enter the Sandman – Metallica.

Scientists have come up with a new theory which claims that dark matter really acts like subatomic particles, which the has been known to science since the 1930s.

Dark matter is the thing keeping galaxies, stars, our solar system, and our bodies intact. Yet no one has been able to observe it, and it has often been regarded as a totally new exotic form of matter, such as a particle moving in extra dimensions of space or its quantum version, supersymmetry.

An international group of researchers has now proposed a theory that dark matter is very similar to pions, which are responsible for binding atomic nuclei together.

Hitoshi Murayama at the University of Tokyo said that they had seen this kind of particle before, and it had the same properties- same type of mass, the same type of interactions, in the same type of theory of strong interactions that gave forth the ordinary pions.

The new theory predicts dark matter was likely to interact with itself within galaxies or clusters of galaxies, possibly modifying the predicted mass distributions.

It could resolve outstanding discrepancies between data and computer simulations, said Eric Kuflik, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University.

University of California, Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Yonit Hochberg added that the key differences in these properties between this new class of dark matter theories and previous ideas have profound implications on how dark matter could be discovered in upcoming experimental searches.

The next step would be to put this theory to the test using experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider and the new SuperKEK-B, and a proposed experiment SHiP.