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'Goat Simulator' headbutting its way to PS4 and PS3 August 11th
Your wildest caprine fantasies are about to come true, PlayStation owners. How's that? On August 11th, Goat Simulator hits PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. From the sounds of it all the irreverence from the PC and Xbox One versions will be present (wild glitches, taking to the skies, head-butting all the things) as well as something developer Coffee Stain Studios calls GoatVR. It's dubbed "the most authentic simulated GoatVR experience" and it apparently doesn't require Project Morpheus. A post on the PlayStation Blog notes that the team "still needs to do that part where it connects to an actual headset" but it isn't actually required for the version present in the game. We've reached out to Coffee Stain for some clarification and to see if it's just another example of their absurdist humor; we'll update this post should we hear back.
'Goat Simulator' is getting a ridiculous zombie survival add-on
Goat Simulator's offbeat, endearingly glitchy gameplay is about to invade yet another genre: zombie survival. Meet GoatZ, a not-so-subtle jab at DayZ and other titles where you spend as much time scrounging for supplies as you do fighting off the undead. Coffee Stain Studios' add-on is just as nuts as you'd expect (pink crossbows, anyone?), and is almost too on-point with its send-ups. It has "as many bugs" as other survival titles, and there's a "completely realistic" mode where you eat every few minutes -- because that's what you do in these sorts of games, isn't it? If that sounds at once hilarious and all too familiar, you'll be glad to hear that GoatZ will be available for $5 on Steam as of May 7th, with mobile versions also on the way.
Coffee-like stains inspire new type of touchscreen
The magical properties of coffee stains have already spurred on some researchers to develop a better coating for TV screens, and it looks like they've now inspired a few folks to create a new type of touchscreen as well. This latest instance apparently began when Hebrew University professor Shlomo Magdassi was working to develop a touchscreen using silver nanoparticles but ran into trouble making the screen conductive while still remaining transparent. As it happens, the coffee-like stains that he and his colleagues had been trying to remove with fast-drying solvents was actually the solution to his problem, since they remained in contact with each other as they dried and preserved conductivity, but left about 95 percent of the light through the holes in the center, thereby making the screen itself almost fully transparent. Of course, there's still quite a bit more work to be done before the screens move beyond the lab, but Magdassi has apparently already found that copper nanorings can be used in similar manner, and says that the screens could even double as solar panels to give devices a bit of added juice.
Researchers look to coffee stains for improved TV screen coating
While there's plenty of discoveries that no doubt wouldn't have been possible without coffee, few have been as directly influenced as this latest fit of inspiration from Ivan Vakarelski of the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences in Singapore, who apparently saw the future of TV screens in a coffee stain. More specifically, he was intrigued by the way a coffee spill dried into a circular stain, which, as New Scientist notes, is effectively caused by coffee granules being "assembled" by the varying evaporation and convection rates in the fluid. That process, Vakarelski thought, could be replicated artificially to create a better coating for LCD and plasma screens, and he and his colleagues were ultimately able to do just that with a suspension of gold particles that were left to dry on a glass plate covered with closely packed latex microspheres. According to Vakarelski, the resulting network of gold nanoparticles is "finer than spider's silk," and potentially even more conductive than the ITO coatings commonly used today. Of course, it's still a long ways from actually be used on LCDs, although the researchers have already created coatings a few square centimeters in size, and say they plan to increase that "tenfold" as soon as possible.[Via New Scientist]
