For the first time, the UK's Royal Navy is using artificial intelligence in a test against live missiles at sea, providing a look at the future of autonomous systems in the military. The exercise will take place over three weeks and involve testing two systems: Sycoiea and Startle. The Royal Navy says this is the largest test of its kind conducted thus far.
Before he was Finn in the latest Star Wars trilogy, John Boyega hit the big screen as Moses in the British sci-fi comedy/horror movie Attack the Block. The movie premiered in 2011 and though it was never a box office hit, the movie did find a faithful fanbase, establishing it as a cult classic in the science fiction genre.
A town in England attempted to add some color to the streets with a set of oddly familiar planters for the public. Some are wide, some are tall, all seem to have the same distinctive thick top lip, all appear in downtown Warsall. They all also come in the color green - a very bright green that, along with the shape, might remind you of a certain sewer pipe the likes of which appear in every Super Mario Bros. game since inception.
The UK's Royal Marines recently demonstrated the use of a jet suit that enabled them to fly one-by-one from an inflatable boat over the ocean to a massive navy ship. The exercise was a demonstration of Gravity Industries' jet suit, which bestows the wearer with a flying ability remarkably similar to that of Iron Man.
The University of Oxford has announced plans to study a nasal version of the COVID-19 vaccine, one that may be more effective than the intramuscular version by delivering the vaccine directly to the nose, which is the source of infection. The university describes this as a phase one trial that will involve 30 healthy adults ages 18 to 40 with a follow-up period of four months.
Today we're taking a peek at the newest Nintendo Switch with Monster Hunter special edition fittings. This is not the first time this console was released as a special edition for the Monster Hunter game series. The first version was released with special decorations for the game Monster Hunter XX, the first Monster Hunter game on Nintendo Switch. This new version was made for Monster Hunter Rise!
Today the first Raspberry Pi microcontroller was released for approximately $4 USD. This device is the Raspberry Pi Pico, built on RP2040, a "brand-new chip" developed at Raspberry Pi. This device bridges the gap between the still relatively heavyweight computation handled by the Raspberry Pi proper, and the computing that should be handled by a much lower power microcontroller. Today Raspberry Pi began rolling forth into the microcontroller universe.
The calendar has switched to another year but some things have unsurprisingly remained the same. COVID-19 still threatens the world's population, Big Tech is still on trial for various things, and Fortnite remains absent on iPhones. Despite being one of last year's highest-profile dramas, the fight between Epic Games and Apple seems to still have no resolution in sight. As if to stir things up again, Epic Games has apparently filed an antitrust complaint against Apple and even Google, this time in the United Kingdom across the pond.
There was a time when it seemed that carrier-subsidized phones as going out of fashion. That hasn't changed at all in the US where carriers still hold sway over people's mobile purchases but the landscape has shifted slightly in Europe. People there still get their phones from their carrier of choice but regional regulations have taken steps against lock-ins that US consumers have pretty much accepted as a fact of life. The UK is following suit and will soon force its remaining carriers to sell only unlocked phones by December 2021.
Japanese conglomerate SoftBank has been looking for someone to acquire its semiconductor designer Arm and although it finally settled on NVIDIA, that deal may still fall through at least in one country. The UK government is reportedly preparing to intervene and block the acquisition if necessary on the grounds that NVIDIA buying up Arm could not only endanger its citizens' jobs but also threaten the country's sovereignty over one of its very few technology champions.
A video was leaked this week featuring BT and EE CEO Marc Allera and Apple's own Eddy Cue. Per the video, "we are just days away from Apple's next major launch, a 5G iPhone, which will be a huge boost for 5G." This is the sort of video that'd be shared among carrier officials and affiliates, not meant for public consumption. In other words, there's little reason to believe we're more than a month away from a "launch" of the first 5G iPhone.
![HTC Desire 20 Pro is too familiar, save the price [UPDATE]](https://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/desire20-1280x720.jpg)
The HTC Desire 20 Pro looks a whole lot like a couple of other devices we've discussed this week. One's the Samsung Galaxy A51, the other is an LG smartphone that's coming closer to the end of the month. The HTC Desire 20 Pro doesn't look particularly different in any major way from most other multi-camera, punch-hole display, back-facing fingerprint sensor-having smartphone on the market today. But the price... is surprising, to be sure.