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As posted by Taiyo Masuda to Instagram. The headline, being accurate and complete, requires no further elaboration. (via Nicole Cliffe)

On Monday Natsume Inc. broke the news that Harvest Moon: Light of Hope was releasing on mobile, but at the time it was only available for iOS, and the Android release was to come later in the week. Well, it's later in the week, and it looks like Natsume has kept its word. Harvest Moon: Light of Hope is now available on Android for $14.99.

This is the PC trailer, but it should give you an idea of what to expect.

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Harvest Moon: Light of Hope is out on Android was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Four years since the last edition, Merriam-Webster's Official Scrabble Players Dictionary is on now shelves. From The Guardian:

Included in the new edition are some long-awaited two letter words, notably OK and ew.

“OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time,” said lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster. “Basically two- and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game.”

There’s more good news for Scrabble players with the addition of qapik, a unit of currency in Azerbaijan, adding to an arsenal of 20 playable words beginning with q that don’t need a u.

The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, Sixth Edition (Amazon)

image: thebarrowboy CC BY 2.0

Being told that you've been injured in such a way that you'll never walk again must be absolutely horrific. Such a loss of mobility would mean not only a great loss of one's options in life, but also having to worry about the peripheral effects that the loss of mobility could have on your health, such as a loss of bone density or the weakening of your cardiovascular system. For those who have to pay for their own healthcare, it could mean bankruptcy. I wouldn't even want to consider the sort of stress it would place on an individual's psyche, not to mention the emotional toll it would have on their loved ones. However, a breakthrough in treating spinal cord injuries made by the University of Louisville could, one day, make paralysis a thing of the past.

From The Verge:

Thomas and Jeff Marquis, who was paralyzed after a mountain biking accident, can now independently walk again after participating in a study at the University of Louisville that was published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Thomas’ balance is still off and she needs a walker, but she can walk a hundred yards across grass. She also gained muscle and lost the nerve pain in her foot that has persisted since her accident. Another unnamed person with a spinal cord injury can now independently step across the ground with help from a trainer, according to a similar study at the Mayo Clinic that was also published today in the journal Nature Medicine.

Absolutely amazing.

Image by George Hodan/PublicDomainPictures.net

Ten years ago this week, the first Android phone was announced - the T-Mobile G1. No one could have predicted the massive success that Android would eventually become; the OS now has over two billion active users worldwide.

In honor of Android's 10th birthday, we're taking a look at the most important and influential Google-powered phones of the past decade. Every one of these devices redefined Android in some way, by pushing the OS further into the mainstream, introducing design trends, or signaling the start/end of an era.

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10 years of Android: Ten of the most important handsets from the last decade was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Talk about a stacked Tuesday. First, a full HD port of Monster Hunter World Stories releases on the Play Store, and then Level-5 announces that Professor Layton and the Curious Village has been ported to Android, complete with an HD makeover, and it's also available on the Play Store starting today. There's already a couple of Layton games on Android, though this is the first to actually star Professor Layton. It's also the first game in the main series, so if you'd like to see where it all began, this is the title for you.

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Professor Layton and the Curious Village brings its mind-bending puzzles to Android was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Adam Rutherford's amazing book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived is on shelves in the USA now; debunking the absurd claims made by genetics testing companies -- claims about your distant relationship to ancient kings or the percentage of your genes that came from Vikings.

Rutherford's quest to debunk the highly profitable "genetic astrology" industry has some staunch allies, including the wonderful Sense About Science people (previously), including Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at UCL and Prof Mark Thomas.

Rutherford's book is a really clear -- and often very funny! -- explanation of what genomics is useful for: analyzing whole populations and species and discovering what is and isn't a heritable trait, adding nuance to the stories of heredity and evolution, and debunking old eugenic idiocies like "noble blood" and the idea that human beings can be divided into "races."

If you want to get a sense of just how terrible these old ideas are, check out this week's podcast of Rob Newman's "Total Eclipse of Descartes," a standup routine in which Newman explains how junk eugenic science and old scientific frauds have been used to make education into a toxic mess.

A warning about the accuracy of the tests was made by the Sense About Science campaign group, which said "such histories are either so general as to be personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence."

The warning was backed by a number of leading genetics experts. Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at UCL said: “On a long trudge through history – two parents, four great-grandparents, and so on – very soon everyone runs out of ancestors and has to share them.

"As a result, almost every Briton is a descendant of Viking hordes, Roman legions, African migrants, Indian Brahmins, or anyone else they fancy.”

His colleague Prof Mark Thomas said: "These claims are usually planted by the companies that provide these so-called tests and are not backed up by published scientific research. This is business, and the business is genetic astrology.”

DNA ancestry tests branded 'meaningless' [Nick Collins/Telegraph]

Google is apparently holding several concurrent events around the world for its latest “Made by Google” hardware announcements, and the latest event is set for London, United Kingdom according to an email sent to UK press this morning.

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The post Google announces ‘I <3 LDN’ Made by Google event in London appeared first on 9to5Google.

Shazam pre-dates the smartphone as we know it today, but it didn't become popular until everyone was carrying internet-connected devices that could play music. Then, everyone wanted to know what song was playing in the background. Shazam is no longer the only way to ID songs, but it's the only one now wholly owned by Apple. Why does this matter to you, an Android user? Shazam is about to be free.

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Apple completes acquisition of Shazam, will remove ads from free version was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

For the past several months, Google has been experimenting with a redesign to the Google Feed. Following reports last week of a rebrand, Google today confirmed that it’s now called “Google Discover” and is coming to the mobile web, along with a slew of other new features.

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The post Google Feed rebranded to ‘Google Discover’ and coming to mobile web, Search appeared first on 9to5Google.

Adrien Manduit (previously) returns with a breathtaking timelapse of galaxies as viewed from Teneriffe.

There’s something fascinating in our own home galaxy. Even if we still cannot look at it from above and gaze at the full span of its arms, the sideway view offers a quite a showdown. To me the central part of the milky way is the most spectacular sight of the night sky. It’s something you can clearly see with the naked eye when you are away from city lights. It’s a sight that really brings your down to Earth and lets you wonder at how small we are, while comforting you in the thought that you are part of this Earth and the Universe. I could gaze for hours at the central bulge and just contemplate its compelling beauty from where it rises till where it sets.From a photographic and scientific point of view, this part of the milky way is so interesting to capture and study because if our solar system is located in its suburbs, the downtown district of our home galaxy harbors billions upon billions of stars. They are so concentrated that the total light coming from them can be seen millions of light years away and really creates this halo of light visible when you take a picture of it, much like a fire blazing. However a thick blanket of dark hydrogen clouds shroud and block the complete view. You can even see these fine dark lanes with the naked eye and they really participate in making the whole picture something from another world. Of all of them the Pipe and Dark Horse nebulae are descending down the core obscuring the upper part of the central bulge. In addition to this celestial show many emission nebulae- reliques of previously exploded stars, pepper the disc. Among them the bright and colorful Lagoon nebula, the pink and blue Trifid nebula, the red Cat Paw, War and Peace and Prawn nebulae around Scorpius. Moreover many star clouds (like the Sagittarius star cloud) and other remarquable star clusters also participate in strewing this already full frame. Finally the closest stars (like Antares) and near planets visible during the time of shoot (Mars, Saturn, Jupiter) also give a sense of just how ridiculously big the distance between Earth the the core is.

• GALAXIES VOL. III : Voyage to the core - 4K timelapse (YouTube / Adrien Mauduit)

The roster of people carrying student debt is really just "a list of people liable to additional taxation after graduation"; in 2007, GW Bush signed into law the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program that would allow debt-haunted grads to earn loan forgiveness by foregoing the private sector and working for lower wages in public service for a decade.

In theory, thousands of people should be having their debts wiped away this year. In reality, less than one percent of the people enrolled in the program will see that happen. The rest are screwed.

The PSLF program is a bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork mountains that must be perfectly ordered, at all times -- despite the administering agency routinely losing and messing up its own records.

In addition, the eligibility requirements are incredibly confusing, resulting in many of the enrollees being signed up, even though they shouldn't be -- a fact they don't discover until their decade of service is up.

All that adds up to the fact that in about a decade, millions of people are likely to find themselves in the same position as Debbie Baker. She's a teacher in Oklahoma who had always been under the impression she was going to have her debt erased, only to find out to her horror that she had the "wrong type" of loan when she went to apply.

"I almost threw up," she told CNBC. "I've been teaching 18 years and I still don't make $40,000— and now I have to start all over."

You're Probably Not Getting that Loan Forgiveness You're Counting On [Allie Conti/Vice]

(Image: Donkey Hotey, CC-BY)

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have the long-awaited sequel to Life is Strange, an awesome take on solitaire card games, and an enjoyable platforming RPG with plenty of turn-based battles. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released in the last week.

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30 best new Android games released this week including Life is Strange: Before the Storm, Flipflop Solitaire, and Phantomgate : The Last Valkyrie was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The Anatomy of Surf rides along with surfing legend Ian Walsh as he describes the sensations of surfing, set to footage of some beautiful waves.

"Time completely stops when you get into the barrel. Your feet dig into the wax, and your toes start to grip into the board. You're seeing the lip slowly cascading over. The feeling of that just leaves a mark with you and literally never gets old."

• SAMSUNG VR - The Anatomy of Surf w/ Ian Walsh (Vimeo / Hidden Content)

Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems, though more and more are human-caused. Wendover Productions takes a look at how firefighters work to minimize the spread of wildfires in grueling and dangerous conditions.

I hope you guys enjoy this video! It's obviously quite an enormous topic that people will spend years studying condensed down into a ten-minute video so this isn't the comprehensive guide to stopping wildfires but for those that know nothing about wildfire suppression techniques I hope this will be interesting and informative!

• How Fighting Wildfires Works (YouTube / Wendover Productions)

This afternoon, Amazon took the stage at its Seattle headquarters to unveil a host of new hardware. Amazon is utilizing its new Spheres location for the first time in this regard. Today’s event includes a refreshed lineup of Echo speakers along with new auto accessories and more. Head below for additional details.

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The post Amazon unveils revamped Echo lineup, multi-room audio, new Ring cam, much more appeared first on 9to5Google.

Today Amazon took the wraps off a tremendous pile of Echo and Alexa-related hardware. Chief among the standalone Echo devices are the redesigned Echo Dot, Plus, and Show, as well as a slightly mysterious invitation-based Echo Auto. As expected, they're mostly incremental improvements, with better and louder sound or added Zigbee hub functionality.

Amazon's Alexa is one of the most popular and widely used digital assistants out there, and now it has a whole new generation of hardware available for pre-order.

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Amazon introduces Echo Auto alongside refreshed Echo Dot, Plus, and Show was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

YouTuber Kaplamino makes ingenious chain reaction tricks with marbles and dominoes. His latest, Blue Marble 2, is loaded with delightful little mechanisms that release their stored energy when a marble comes into contact with them.

From Kaplamino's comments:

The air canon with the balloon was a big challenge to make. The rubber band squeezes the balloon around the straw to release the air in a specific direction. Then the hardest part was to find how to stop the air and deliver it when I want. It was too difficult to put something like tape at the end of the straw because it was either too clingy or not enough.

The solution was to twist the balloon around the straw and block it in this position with a rope. In this position the air stays in the balloon until it untwists. I explain it because I think what exactly happened it's not easy to get when you see the video.

We've got some breaking news for you: Google has renamed its Keep app to 'Keep Notes.' We know, it's mind-boggling stuff. Nothing in the app seems to have changed otherwise, though, so it looks like someone at Google just got bored and decided to add another word to this app name.

As for why exactly 'Notes' was added to the app name, we're not sure. It does better state the app's purpose, but it's also not as simplistic as the one-word 'Keep.' The web version still simply says 'Google Keep,' for what it's worth.

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Google is renaming Keep to 'Keep Notes' for some reason [APK Download] was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

When was the last time your eyeballs feasted on something that wasn't a part of the dumpster fire we call a news cycle? It's been a while for me and I'm betting the same can be said for you too. Here: get a load of this greater one-horned rhino calf pestering its mother to play with him. There is running. There are head butts. There is so much joy here that you won't know what to do with yourself.

Over the past several months, Google has been testing various tweaks to the Google Feed on Android. These design changes could now be accompanied by a complete rebrand of the feature to “Discover.”

more…

The post Google testing a rebrand of Google Feed with ‘Discover’ appeared first on 9to5Google.

(Funny, as soon as I started typing these words I got a phone call from a telemarketer.) According to a new study, half of the 50 billion mobile phone calls that will be made in 2019 will come from scammers. I wish only half the calls coming to my phone were from telemarketers trying to cheat me. I think about 90% of my calls are spam. I use Nomorobo and Jolly Roger to stem the flow, but plenty of the crooked calls still make their way past these filters.

From First Orion:

There are a number of techniques scammers use to get people to pick up the phone, but the most popular method is known as “Neighborhood Spoofing,” which happens when a scammer disguises their phone number and displays it as a local number on a user’s caller ID. For example, a scammer may spoof their phone number to match the area code and 3-digit prefix of the person they are targeting and ultimately increase the likelihood of someone answering.

Not only is this tactic harmful towards the person being called, the owner of the phone number used to make the call is often subjected to return calls from the recipient of the scam call. These return calls come as surprises since the owner of the number used to make the scam call is not aware a call was ever placed from their number, leading to frustration and confusion amongst all parties.

Third-party call blocking apps are largely ineffective when it comes to detecting spoof calls since they can only black-list against known scam numbers, not legitimate numbers that are momentarily hijacked by scammers.

Image: Shutterstock/tstock Productions

The fad for fire-and-forget retro consoles continues with Sony's PlayStation Classic. It's $100, has 20 games built-in, modern connectors, and the original 1995 design—albeit shrunk to the size of the original's controller. Five of the games were announced: Final Fantasy 7, Jumping Flash, R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, Tekken 3 and Wild Arms.

The mini console is approximately 45% smaller than the original PlayStation, and it emulates the original’s look and feel by featuring similar controllers and packaging. Long-time fans will appreciate the nostalgia that comes with rediscovering the games they know and love, while gamers who might be new to the platform can enjoy the groundbreaking PlayStation console experience that started it all. All of the pre-loaded games will be playable in their original format.

The NES Classic and SNES Classic are huge moneyspinners for Nintendo, so this was an inevitability. It'll be out on December 3. Sony's press release says you can pre-order it, but the only place I could find was this unnervingly empty database stub at Best Buy.

There are Rube Goldberg machines and then there's Sprice Machines' Lemonade Machine, an elaborate, nine-minute-long exercise in dispensing cold lemonade. It impressively winds through an entire house (even the toilet has a role) and out through the backyard before reaching its refreshing conclusion.

Our first ever house wide machine project - The Lemonade Machine. This complex chain reaction travels through the kitchen, kid's room, bathroom, office, parent's room, living room, patio & backyard using everyday objects to automatically pour lemonade for the entire team of builders.

(Likecool)

A unicorn of the sea somehow ended up separated from other narwhals. Luckily, the lost narwhal was welcomed into a pod of beluga whales, where they were spotted frolicking in the St. Lawrence River. (more…)

It's been 54 years since Mary Poppins hit the big screen, and now Walt Disney Studios is releasing its sequel, Mary Poppins Returns. Directed by Rob Marshall, Mary Poppins will be played by Emily Blunt, and although I can't imagine anyone but Julie Andrews playing the part, by the looks of the trailer Blunt looks like she does a practically perfect job. Other actors include Meryl Streep (Mary's eccentric cousin), Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury, and most exciting of all, Dick Van Dyke (Mr. Dawes' son).

The plot is nicely summarized by i09:

She’s [Mary] returned to Jane and Michael Banks, now played by Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw respectively, 25 years after the events of the first film. Jane is fighting for workers’ rights and Michael is a widow, raising his three children in the original house on Cherry Tree Lane, which they’re in danger of losing.

To help the family heal, Mary Poppins soars back into their lives, with the help of Bert’s former protégé Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda) and Topsy (Meryl Streep), Mary’s cousin who lives in a flip-flopped world of opposites. There’s a gorgeous animated sequence in the style of the original film, and what sounds like a delightfully questionable Cockney accent from Miranda. It wouldn’t be a Mary Poppins movie without one.

The movie comes out December 19.

Floating in on the wind, yet again, the sound of It's Raining, It's Pouring being sung by a child on the creepiest siren in Britain. The Ipswich Star reports on what one local described as "something from a horror movie." I've embedded a recording made by one alarmed local at the top of this post so you know what they were hearing.

A tormented mother living in Bramford Road with her two young children has been woken on an almost nightly basis by a tinny, distant rendition of ‘It’s Raining, It’s Pouring’. She said the threatening undertone of the song had left her frightened and questioning whether she was imagining things. After months of torment, she finally reported the unusual complaint to Ipswich Borough Council.

The next time it happened, they scrambled workers to her address and she helped them track down the unnerving music to a loudspeaker installed at "an industrial premises on the neighbouring Farthing Road estate [business park]." The council subsequently issued a press statement, which follows.

“This is unique in our experience – it was difficult to believe a nursery rhyme would be playing in the middle of the night. “But we do take all complaints extremely seriously and asked the residents who contacted us to let us know when it was actually playing so we could investigate properly. “We took a call around midnight and immediately went to the Bramford Road area to find out more - we did hear the nursery rhyme playing from an industrial premises and it sounded very eerie at that time of night. We appreciate that people living nearby would find it quite spooky.”

The premises' operators blamed spiders.

“The sound is only supposed to act as a deterrent for opportunistic thieves that come onto our property, and it’s designed only to be heard by people on our private land. We are now aware of the problem - the motion sensors were being triggered by spiders crawling across the lenses of our cameras and it looks like we’ve had it turned up too loudly. We’ve spoken to the resident who brought it to our attention and adjusted it so this shouldn’t happen again.”

The BBC adds that it had gone on for months.

For several months she would hear the rhyme, which would go away only to come again another day. The woman, who did not wish to be named, said: "The first time I heard it it was the most terrifying thing ever, I went cold and felt sick, and thought 'what on earth was that?'"

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live on the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have a fantastic port of a popular strategy RPG, a completely free CRPG with great art and classic turn-based gameplay, and a followup to VOODOO's Paper.io. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released in the last week.

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16 best new Android games released this week including Chaos Reborn: Adventures, Vampire's Fall: Origins, and Paper.io 2 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

In the 1950s, Soviet zoologist Dmitry Belyayev began selectively breeding wild foxes based on how friendly they were. The result is a semi-domesticated red fox, five of which now live in California. (more…)

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have quite a few interesting releases, including the alpha of the TOR Browser for mobile, a new sports and news app from Yahoo!, and Google's marketing ap FameBit. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last fortnight.

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22 new and notable (and 1 WTF) Android apps from the last two weeks including Tor Browser, Yahoo!, and FameBit (9/1/18 - 9/15/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.