With almost laughably low power, a monochrome screen, and unique controls, niche-micro console Playdate shouldn't make any sense in a world of modern gaming. Yet, it's near impossible not to love it. When video game developer and publisher Panic launched its own console, Playdate, back in 2022, it upended just about all conventional wisdom when it came to gaming hardware. Coming just two months after Valve's Steam Deck, the micro-handheld was comparably laughably low in power, brandished a tiny monochrome screen, and took a minimalist approach to physical controls, with only a D-pad, two buttons, and a bizarre crank on offer. Even stranger than the crank was that buyers didn't really know what they'd be playing on it--the earliest games were released in a season pass format, with mystery titles drip-fed to players weekly.

Stability AI just unveiled Stable Audio 2.0, an upgraded version of its music-generation platform. This system lets users create up to three minutes of audio via text prompt. Just imagine the fake birthday song you could make in the style of that one Rob Thomas/Santana track. The tool is free and publicly available through the company's website, so have at it. Introducing Stable Audio 2.0 – a new model capable of producing high-quality, full tracks with coherent musical structure up to three minutes long at 44.1 kHz stereo from a single prompt.

The little console that could, Playdate, is having its first sitewide games sale, just like its more-established rivals. Manufacturer Panic is holding the sale to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the online store, which is officially called the Playdate Catalog. If you happen to own a Playdate, you'll find plenty to like here. The cute little synthesizer app Playmaker is on sale for 8, instead of 15, and the action RPG Under the Castle is on sale for 7, which is a discount of 30 percent. Many titles go much lower than this.

INTRODUCTION Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a modern surgical approach that utilizes advanced techniques and specialized instruments to perform procedures with minimal damage to surrounding tissues. One commonly used tool in MIS is the laparoscopic instrument, which is inserted through small incisions in the body for tissue manipulation or dissection. Conventional laparoscopic forceps use the handle opening angle to control the jaw opening angle. A common limitation of laparoscopic instruments is the ambiguous haptic feedback, which prevents the user from feeling the actual texture or resistance of the tissue being grasped. Surgeons can only guess the amount of applied force through visual cues and proprioception.

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Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. These days, video games aren't often tied to a particular console or gadget – even if something like Halo or God of War originally appears on Xbox or PlayStation, it will often eventually make its way to PC, and the majority of games come out on everything at the same time. Unless you're playing a console-exclusive game like Returnal, specifically designed around the PlayStation 5 controller with its adaptive triggers and fancy haptic feedback, the experience of the game isn't shaped much by the hardware you play it on. You can play Minecraft with a controller or a mouse or on your phone, and it's still largely the same.

Playdate shouldn't be able to do the things it does. It's tiny enough to fit in the too-tight front pockets of my skinny jeans, it's lighter than a deck of cards and it has a 1-bit black-and-white screen. It feels like a relic of the '90s, at least until you power it on – Playdate supports smooth, densely pixelated animations, it connects to Wi-Fi and it has a library of exclusive games from top-tier indie developers, all available for free. The small crank attached to its side is the icing on the yellow cake, adding a layer of sweet innovation to every experience on the system. Playdate is my favorite handheld device since the Vita.

More than two years after it was first introduced, Panic's Playdate finally has a preorder date: Thursday, July 29. This charming and bright yellow handheld video game console has a unique crank on its side, and its $179 price includes 24 games developed exclusively for the device. You won't be able to play all 24 games right away, though. Panic will deliver two games every week to the device over Wi-Fi for three months until all 24 are in the system. This encapsulates Season 1's games, and unfortunately, Panic doesn't have much to share on Season 2. "We're waiting to see how many people are interested in the Playdate before determining how games are distributed in the future," a Panic spokesperson wrote in an email.

The current pandemic has highlighted the need for methodologies that can quickly and reliably prioritize clinically approved compounds for their potential effectiveness for SARS-CoV-2 infections. In the past decade, network medicine has developed and validated multiple predictive algorithms for drug repurposing, exploiting the sub-cellular network-based relationship between a drug's targets and disease genes. Here, we deployed algorithms relying on artificial intelligence, network diffusion, and network proximity, tasking each of them to rank 6,340 drugs for their expected efficacy against SARS-CoV-2. To test the predictions, we used as ground truth 918 drugs that had been experimentally screened in VeroE6 cells, and the list of drugs under clinical trial, that capture the medical community's assessment of drugs with potential COVID-19 efficacy. We find that while most algorithms offer predictive power for these ground truth data, no single method offers consistently reliable outcomes across all datasets and metrics. This prompted us to develop a multimodal approach that fuses the predictions of all algorithms, showing that a consensus among the different predictive methods consistently exceeds the performance of the best individual pipelines. We find that 76 of the 77 drugs that successfully reduced viral infection do not bind the proteins targeted by SARS-CoV-2, indicating that these drugs rely on network-based actions that cannot be identified using docking-based strategies. These advances offer a methodological pathway to identify repurposable drugs for future pathogens and neglected diseases underserved by the costs and extended timeline of de novo drug development.

This console generation is on its way out, but Andrew Tarantola believes one of the PS4's best games ever is about to appear. That game, of course, is Ghost of Tsushima, which takes place during the Mongol invasion of Tsushima Island in the 13th century. It's not breaking a lot of new ground gameplay-wise, though, with elements cribbed from other third-person Sony games you've played before, like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Uncharted, as well as third-party titles like Batman Arkham and Sekiro. Still, he said that "Sucker Punch has managed to seamlessly meld them together, hone and polish the overarching gameplay experience into something truly phenomenal," so I guess there's one good reason to give your PS4 another go before it's replaced this fall. Just as we were getting used to the Lego Super Mario kits, the company has officially unveiled a brick-based replica of an entire Nintendo Entertainment System (which just so happened to turn 37 today).