Latest news with #Bethesda
Washington Post
a day ago
- Health
- Washington Post
‘I'm not a politician,' says NIH director. But it's not that simple.
'I'm not a politician,' the new director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya insists. 'I'm not going to get involved in the political fight over things.' Easier said than done. The great challenge facing the former Stanford University doctor and economist as he guides the world's largest public funder of biomedical research is that science and American politics have become intertwined as perhaps never before. There is little ideological distance between NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, and the White House in nearby D.C.
Digital Trends
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
Silksong will be playable next month, but only if you can get to Gamescom
Gamescom 2025 is shaping up to be a groundbreaking event with playable demos of many highly-anticipated games, including Hollow Knight: Silksong. Unfortunately, the demos will only be available to those who are present at the event, so anyone not making the trek to Germany is out of luck (for now.) Still, a playable demo is great news for fans who have waited years for Silksong to release. The news dropped today in an Xbox Wire post. Maxi Graeff, Xbox's gaming marketing lead for Germany, wrote that Gamescom will have more than 20 titles available to play, as well as hands-on experiences with both the ROG Xbox Ally and the ROG Xbox Ally X. In addition, Gamescom 2025 will also have a World of Warcraft celebration focused around the upcoming Midnight expansion and its anticipated housing feature. Playable demos will be available for the following games from third-party studios: Hollow Knight: Silksong Borderlands 4 Onimusha: Way of The Sword Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater EA Sports FC 26 Aniimo There Are No Ghosts at the Grand PowerWash Simulator 2 Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade Final Fantasy XVI Invincible VS Super Meat Boy 3D Cronos: The New Dawn Mistfall Hunter Recommended Videos In addition, Grounded 2, Ninja Gaiden 4, and several other titles will also be present with hands-on demos, while games like The Outer Worlds 2 will have a theatrical presentation that dives deeper into its late-stage capitalistic setting. Bethesda is hosting its own broadcast straight from the show floor starting on Friday, and Xbox FanFest is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Although the contest winners have already been chosen, Xbox invites more fans to sign up in the sweepstakes for next year. There will be a live broadcast covering many announcements starting at 9 AM ET on Wednesday, August 20 and Thursday, August 21. It might not be exactly the same as being there in-person, but the broadcast is a great way for fans to stay up to date on all of the latest announcements.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics Partners with Promega to Combine Complementary Offerings for Enhanced Sample Collection, Transport and Analysis
Longhorn's validated PrimeStore® MTM sample collection device and Promega Maxwell® instruments will be offered together to laboratories globally Longhorn and Promega to showcase combined offering at the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine conference, July 29-31, 2025 BETHESDA, Md. & GAITHERSBURG, Md., July 28, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics, a One Health company developing vaccines and diagnostic tools for global public health and zoonosis concerns, today announced a strategic co-marketing agreement with Promega Corporation to deliver integrated molecular testing solutions designed to enhance safety, efficiency and flexibility across a wide range of diagnostic settings. This collaboration brings together Longhorn's validated PrimeStore® Molecular Transport Medium (MTM) and Promega's Maxwell® automated nucleic acid extraction platform, delivering a powerful, end-to-end workflow to support an all-in-one solution for safer and enhanced virus sample collection, transportation and analysis. Longhorn's PrimeStore® MTM is an inactivating molecular transport medium for both RNA and DNA. The device delivers nucleic acid samples in a time-efficient manner with Promega's Maxwell® instruments and reagent kits, designed for the automated extraction of viral total nucleic acid from a range of sample types. "The accuracy of molecular diagnostics, PCR and sequencing, starts with high quality nucleic acid," said Longhorn Vaccine and Diagnostics President Jeff Fischer. "Promega has proven that PrimeStore® MTM does just that with validation testing on their Maxwell® platform. Samples are safe to handle outside of containment, speeding up the testing time and therefore speeding up the accurate treatment of patients. The Maxwell® platform and nucleic acid extraction kits are now being added to our Instructions for Use." "Together, these technologies streamline the workflow from sample collection to high-quality nucleic acid purification without compromising on safety or performance," said Promega Director of Applied Markets Julie Yang. Longhorn and Promega will showcase their combined technologies at the upcoming Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine conference (ADLM 2025) in Chicago from July 29-31, 2025. Visit booth #3757 to learn more about PrimeStore® MTM and booth #3655 to learn more about the Maxwell® instruments and nucleic acid purification kits. A joint poster showcasing how these technologies work together was presented at the May 2025 Association of Public Health Laboratories annual conference in Portland, Oregon, titled "Validation of a Novel Sample Collection-to-Detection Workflow Using PrimeStore® MTM, Pathogen Total Nucleic Acid Kit, and PrimeMix® MTB." A second joint poster was presented at the June 2025 International Symposium of the World Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians conference in Calgary, Alberta, titled "Novel Biosafe and Scalable Detection of Influenza A (H5N1, H3N2, H1N1) for Veterinary and One Health Applications." For more information about Longhorn, visit About Longhorn Vaccines and DiagnosticsLonghorn Vaccines and Diagnostics is a closely held One Health company based in Maryland that is developing broad coverage vaccines and diagnostic tools for worldwide public health concerns such as anti-microbial resistance, sepsis and to prevent future pandemics. Since its inception in 2006, Longhorn has focused on developing broad coverage vaccines and diagnostic tools that can impact a pandemic on a global scale and at all socio-economic levels. Since pandemics flow between humans and animals, Longhorn products play a significant role to surveil, diagnose, prevent and treat the next infectious disease. Longhorn's core diagnostic product, PrimeStore® Molecular Transport Medium (MTM), is a patented, FDA cleared, state-of-the-art ambient temperature molecular diagnostic collection and transport device that can help governments, global health organizations, and drug manufacturers improve the diagnosis and treatment of highly infectious diseases such as Influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB). Unlike standard devices for collecting and transporting virus samples, PrimeStore® MTM is the first molecular transport device that can safely deactivate pathogens and stabilize RNA and DNA, allowing enhanced point of care and ambient temperature transport for laboratory based molecular testing and characterization. About Promega CorporationPromega Corporation is a leader in providing innovative solutions and technical support to the life sciences industry. The company's portfolio of over 4,000 products supports a range of life science work across areas such as cell biology; DNA, RNA and protein analysis; drug development; human identification and molecular diagnostics. These tools and technologies have grown in their application over the last 45 years and are used today by scientists and technicians in labs for academic and government research, forensics, pharmaceuticals, clinical diagnostics and agricultural and environmental testing. Promega is headquartered in Madison, WI, USA with branches in 16 countries and over 50 global distributors. View source version on Contacts Longhorn Vaccines and DiagnosticsJeffrey FischerEmail: jeff@ MediaAlexis Feinberg – ICR HealthcareEmail: Promega CorporationPenny PattersonE-mail: Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
CD Projekt Red on 10 years of the Witcher 3 and how it will inform Ciri's upcoming sequel adventure
Following the most recent demonstration of The Witcher 4 at this year's State of Unreal presentation, we discuss the past, present, and future of the series with CD Projekt Red. We sit down with CD Projekt Red's Senior VP of Technology, Charles Tremblay, to talk about all things past, present, and future on The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary. For many players there exists two moments in history: a time before the release of The Witcher 3 and the time after. A lot may have changed in the industry since 2015, but something that's remained a constant is how revered CD Projekt Red 's open-world rendition of the celebrated Polish book series remains. 2025 marks a decade since its initial release on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and in that time it'd be fair to say that a lot of other open-world games have been playing catch up. Sure, we had The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim beforehand, but The Witcher 3 more than earns its place alongside Bethesda 's game as a true classic of the fantasy RPG genre. Knowing this makes it easy to understand why CD Projekt Red's next game, The Witcher 4, is so highly anticipated. The sequel is still without its release date, but we know that it will include a new region to explore – Kovir – alongside a totally new protagonist to do it with in Ciri. To find out more about how much CD Projekt Red as a studio has evolved since the Witcher 3's release, the switch to Unreal Engine 5, and how these changes may inform Ciri's adventure, we flew to the studio's HQ in Poland and spoke to Senior VP of Technology Charles Tremblay. How has CD Projekt Red's approach to making games changed since The Witcher 3 first released? I think The Witcher 3 was quite a sweet spot in terms of team size, mostly because we were quite a smaller team when I joined. We were 150-ish people, and we grew to 200 to 250 to make the whole [game]. The communication was fine. I could just walk to anyone at a walking distance. Right now, if I want to walk to the Witcher 4 team, I have to walk a few kilometres to the other building. The art team [and] the programming team were much more aligned also. We still had problems, but we were able to make the game as we used to do in the industry for decades. When we scaled up to Cyberpunk 2077, we almost doubled the team. Now it's getting a bit scarier because the more people you have, the more the communication problems start to arise where there's expectation on one side and reality on the other. Before we very quickly could align. Now, there's so many people in the loop. We tried to learn how to adapt, but it was extremely challenging and we did fail in quite a few ways. Some expectations from art were not aligned with engineering, especially [with] what we could do with the hardware we had at the time. But the ambition was there. If we had a small team, it would have probably been simpler and we didn't think too much about this problem until it was too late. Fast forward [to] where we are now. Especially after the launch of Cyberpunk, we had some self-introspection about, 'okay, we do not see a way we can scale down back to 150 people because of the reality of the ambition, plus what people expect from our product'. We needed to change the way we approach game development a little bit. We don't think it's sustainable to grow to thousands of people to make a game. We want to keep around the ballpark of Cyberpunk's scale, if not less. We try to now have a more multidisciplinary team working together. I cannot say too much about Witcher 4, but I think that we are getting to a point where we get some good results. But still, we are learning and evolving how to make the game better and faster, and better for the players. Is it hard to switch back to making and designing a fantasy world versus something more modern like Night City? Oh, on the technology side, it's completely different. One is a sprawling city with verticality. It was not a city like New York; it's much more organic. A very disgusting world [with] lots of trash and lots of details that needed to be handled. You have vehicles, which we don't necessarily have in The Witcher universe. Bigger crowd, different behaviours, encounters… graffiti everywhere. When we go back to The Witcher, though, it is a much more dynamic world, mostly because of the forest. The forest is a completely different challenge, technically, to make it as good as possible. You can imagine we will definitely have some city in some form going forward, like Novigrad that we had in The Witcher 3, so they're still there in some form. But I think one of the biggest issues we have right now is how to design forest and how to make everything move all the time. How to [give] it [a] feeling that it's alive. How do we improve from the Witcher 3 forest? How do make monsters, wildlife and everything so it fits into this universe's completely different design? Also, the agenda is quite different. The Witcher, of course, Ciri or Geralt, they are full-fledged characters. They have their own personality. There are things that they will not do. While when you go [back] to Cyberpunk, V is a more a mercenary. She has more freedom about how she wants to tackle the world, in an evil or good way. It's very difficult to see Geralt starting to go GTA style, so there's a different constraint. The most recent glimpse of Witcher 4 we saw from the State of Unreal presentation. Were you happy to people's reaction to that gameplay slice? Oh definitely, I think that even our friends from PR were not expecting that it would be as well received, because it's very difficult to explain a tech demo, right? How do we discuss this with you guys? I think it turned out very well. There was a lot of things that we needed to prove within [the] technology and we aligned into what we showcased. And with Epic, it was much easier to now have a result on the screen. We want to go at 60fps on PS5. Now the reception, when we were in Orlando and we were doing the rehearsal, I had shivers. I had complete shivers the first time I saw it from the beginning to end, and I was like, 'this is just fantastic'. Of course, we saw it on the little screen and were iterating on it, but when we saw on the big screen we were like, 'okay, this is going to be great'. And I think when we did the first official rehearsal everybody from Epic and our side were very impressed about the result. Speaking of Epic, how are you finding the process of developing Witcher 4 in Unreal Engine 5 as opposed to the Red Engine from before? We are a very ambitious company and now, since we work together [with Epic] on what it means to make the next generation of open-world, we need to align differently. That's why we did this. The two technologies are completely different, the way they handle a few things. Definitely some things would have been way easier on RED Engine and somethings are way easier on Unreal. Now we just try to take all the good things we have on Unreal and all the things we add with Unreal Engine, and try to now have some kind of a beautiful baby, just to be sure that we can scale up to the hardware. We don't want to go back and to have a less quality product. For us, it's not very acceptable to step back, right? The ambition is still there. We want to push forward always. This was very important for us, and I think this is why with Epic, we managed to have very good collaboration. I think the fact that they managed to work with us to make this open world and deliver the technology that is required to make it at performance [where] everybody will benefit, not just us. Finally, with it being The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, do you have a favourite quest? I think the most interesting one is probably when you reunite with the witchers in Kaer Morhen. All those characters have been following you around since starting your journey with Geralt. It was really great to continue building into those great characters. All the quests with those characters were great. I'm a sucker for a nostalgic moment, especially when you're an IP fan or a game fan and you have all those moments that you know those characters, you've been working with them, or having discussions with them in previous games. There is, of course, all the quests that go back to The Witcher 2, Letho, which if you didn't kill him, spoilers, I think it's great to have him back and having this character back, and the dialogue was just fantastic.
CNET
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNET
Wolfenstein TV Series in the Works at Amazon
After a successful first season of the Fallout series, Amazon MGM Studios will adapt another video game. Interestingly enough, this franchise has a story that's similar to the one in Amazon's first popular TV series, The Man in the High Castle. Amazon will begin work on adapting the video game Wolfenstein, according to a report from Variety on Friday. There are few details about the show's plot available other than the tagline "The story of killing Nazis is evergreen." The showrunner of the series will be Patrick Somerville, who created Maniac for Netflix and Station Eleven for HBO Max. Jerk Gustafsson -- an executive producer at MachineGames, which develops the Wolfenstein games -- will also be part of the production, as an executive producer. Wolfenstein is one of the oldest video game franchises. The series started back in 1981 with Castle Wolfenstein, a stealth game that was ahead of its time. Most people are familiar with the reboot of the series, Wolfenstein 3D, which was developed by id Software, the company that later acquired the rights to the franchise. In 2010, publisher Bethesda acquired id Software, and a new Wolfenstein game went into production with development handled by MachineGames. That game, Wolfenstein: The New Order, shifted the franchise's setting from World War II to an alternate timeline where the Nazis won the war. This reboot starred William "B.J." Blazkowicz, the same American soldier from the original Wolfenstein 3D, although this time, instead of killing Hitler, he ends up in a coma. Blazkowicz awakens in 1960 and begins fighting to defeat the Nazis once again. Multiple games were released in this new Wolfenstein timeline, including Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot. There are no details on when the new Wolfenstein series will premiere or who will star in it. Amazon MGM Studios didn't immediately respond to a request for additional info about the show.
