Google said today that it's on track to bring more than 120 games to its cloud gaming service Stadia in 2020 and is planning to offer more than 10 Stadia-exclusive games for the first half of the year. From a report: That would be a pretty massive jump from the 26 games and one exclusive that are currently available, and all in a little more than a year after the service's launch, if those projections hold true. Previously, Google had only explicitly confirmed four games for 2020, so this news was much needed to let early adopters know there are a lot more games on the way. Google also announced other updates rolling out to Stadia over the next three months, including 4K gaming on the web, support for more Android phones (it's currently only available on Google's Pixels), wireless gameplay on the web through the Stadia controller (you currently have to plug in a cable), and "further [Google] Assistant functionality" when playing Stadia through a browser. We're asking Google for more details -- and we're particularly curious whether any of the new exclusive games are the kind that are only possible with the power of the cloud. The company said in October that it's building out a few first-party studios to eventually make that a reality.

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Pine64 will finally start shipping the pre-order units of PinePhone Braveheart Edition on January 17, 2020. Fossbytes reports: A year ago, PinePhone was made available only to developers and hackers. After getting better responses and suggestions, the Pine64 developers planned to bring Pinephone for everyone. In November last year, pre-orders for PinePhone Braveheart Edition commenced for everyone. But due to manufacturing issues coming in the way, the shipment date slipped for weeks, which was scheduled in December last year. PinePhone Braveheart Edition is an affordable, open source Linux-based operating system smartphone preloaded with factory test image running on Linux OS (postmarketOS) on inbuilt storage. You can check on PinePhone Wiki to find the PinePhone compatible operating system such as Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, or Sailfish OS, which you can boot either from internal storage or an SD card.

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Christopher Tolkien, the son of Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien who was responsible for editing and publishing much of his father's work, has died aged 95. The Tolkien Society released a short statement on Twitter to confirm the news. The Guardian reports: Tolkien, who was born in Leeds in 1924, was the third and youngest son of the revered fantasy author and his wife Edith. He grew up listening to his fathers tales of Bilbo Baggins, which later became the children's fantasy novel, The Hobbit. He drew many of the original maps detailing the world of Middle Earth for his father's The Lord of the Rings when the series was first published between 1954 and 55. He also edited much of his father's posthumously published work following his death in 1973. Since 1975 he had lived in France with Baillie. In an interview with the Guardian in 2012, Christopher's son Simon described the enormity of the task after his grandfather died with so much material still unpublished. Simon said: "He had produced this huge output that covered everything from the history of the gods to the history of the people he called the Silmarils -- that was his great work but it had never seen the light of day despite his best efforts to get it published." His son was left to sift through the files and notebooks and over the two decades after his father's death, he published The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Beren And Luthien and The History of Middle-earth, which fleshed out the complex world of elves and dwarves created by his father.

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In December, scientists sent 40 very muscular mice to live temporarily at the International Space Station. The resulting research, they hope, could lead to new treatments for kids with muscular dystrophy, or cancer patients with muscle wasting. From a report: In early December at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, two anxious scientists were about to send 20 years of research into orbit. "I feel like our heart and soul is going up in that thing," Dr. Emily Germain-Lee told her husband, Dr. Se-Jin Lee, as they waited arm-in-arm for a SpaceX rocket to launch. A few seconds later the spacecraft took off, transporting some very unusual mice to the International Space Station, where they would spend more than a month in near zero gravity. Ordinarily, that would cause the animals' bones to weaken and their muscles to atrophy. But Lee and Germain-Lee, a power couple in the research world, were hoping that wouldn't happen with these mice. "It was worth waiting 20 years for," Lee said as the Falcon 9 rocket headed toward space. "And someday it may really help people," Germain-Lee added. The couple hope that what they learn from these mice will lead to new treatments for millions of people with conditions that weaken muscles and bones. Among those who might eventually benefit: children with muscular dystrophy or brittle bone disease, cancer patients with muscle wasting, bedridden patients recovering from hip fractures, older people whose bones and muscles have become dangerously weak, and astronauts on long space voyages.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation will notify state officials when local election systems are believed to have been breached by hackers [the link may be paywalled], a pivot in policy that comes after criticism that the FBI wasn't doing enough to inform states of election threats, WSJ reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The FBI's previous policy stated that it notified the direct victims of cyberattacks, such as the counties that own and operate election equipment, but wouldn't necessarily share that information with states. Several states and members of Congress in both parties had criticized that policy as inadequate and one that stifled state-local partnerships on improving election security. Further reading: Despite Election Security Fears, Iowa Caucuses Will Use New Smartphone App.

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Microsoft has announced an aggressive plan to rectify its role in the climate crisis. From a report: In a blog post published on Thursday, the company pledged to "reduce and ultimately remove" its carbon footprint. To do that, Microsoft says its operations will be carbon negative by 2030 -- and, it will spend the subsequent two decades sequestering the equivalent of its entire history of carbon dioxide emissions, going back to 1975. Microsoft has already been carbon neutral for several years now, largely by investing in efficient energy practices. It isn't the only company to take these steps; Apple has boasted for some time now about being run on 100 percent renewable energy across the globe and Google says it's been carbon neutral for over a decade. But Microsoft's latest initiative takes all that a leap further. Moving forward, the company says it will be carbon negative, meaning that in addition to prioritizing energy efficiency in its own operations, it will actively work to reduce more atmospheric carbon than it emits. Microsoft is hoping to hit this mark by 2030.

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Google said this week that it will begin to phase out traditional Chrome apps starting in June, and winding down slowly over two years' time. Chrome extensions, though, will live on. From a report: Google said Tuesday in a blog post that it would stop accepting new Chrome apps in March. Existing apps could continue to be developed through June, 2022. The important dates start in June of this year, when Google will end support for Chrome Apps on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Education and Enterprise customers on these platforms will get a little more time to get their affairs in order, until December, 2020. Google had actually said four years ago that it would phase out Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux in 2018. The company appears to have waited longer than announced before beginning this process. The other platform that's affected by this, of course, is Google's own Chrome OS and Chromebooks, for which the apps were originally developed.

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Now is the time for me to respond via podcast to Doc. 28 minutes which seems to be the default length of one of these voicemailcasts. I don't mind vacuous platitudes. Wilt Chamberlain. My first winter in the country. There was no 3-point play when WC was playing. Here's the epic James Harden 3-pointer. If you shove the microphone into someone's face they don't have time to get nervous. Maps. I loved maps when I was a kid, and miss them terribly because of iPhones. Hillary's Emails and how the know-how of literally millions of people didn't influence journalism. Any one of these people could have helped, but journalism somehow didn't figure it out. Why can't universities do things? University is a 7-by-24 conference center. Fargo. Alex Jones and Shorenstein. The speaker whose name I couldn't remember was Bruce Sterling. Sorry man. More about creating a groove. First you become a habit, then you become an example, and that's a groove.

A new living substance can transform from a wet sand mixture into a solid brick, and even help to reproduce copies of itself. From a report: Researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, used a type of photosynthetic bacteria that absorbs carbon dioxide, sunlight, and nutrients and produces calcium carbonate -- a rigid compound found in rocks, pearls, and seashells. They grew the bacteria in a warm mixture of salt water and other nutrients and combined it with sand and gelatin. The mixture was poured into a mold, and as it cooled the gelatin set, forming a "scaffold" able to support further bacterial growth. The bacteria deposited calcium carbonate throughout the scaffold, turning the soft sludge into a harder substance after about a day. The mixture looks green initially, but the color fades as it dries. The research was published in the journal Matter and was funded by DARPA, the US military's research arm.

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BTW no one or anything is going to "awaken" the Trump base. That's not how it works. When friends are in a bad marriage, one day you hear they're breaking up, you saw it coming but if you had tried to "awaken" them, they would have kicked your ass for butting in.

An anonymous reader writes: It's been some 18 months since VentureBeat's last browser benchmark battle. What better time to get the latest results than the start of a new year? Over the past year and a half, Google Chrome has continued to dominate market share, Mozilla Firefox has doubled down on privacy, Microsoft Edge has embraced Chromium, and Brave launched out of beta. You can click on the individual test to see the results: SunSpider: Edge wins! Octane: Chrome wins! Kraken: Firefox wins! JetStream: Edge wins! MotionMark: Edge wins! Speedometer: Edge wins! Basemark: Brave wins! WebXPRT: Firefox wins! The Chromium version of Edge did a lot better given that the stable release only arrived this week. We were expecting improvements, but not so many outright wins. That said, browser performance was solid across all four contestants -- each browser won at least one test. Performance of course shouldn't be your only consideration when picking your preferred app for consuming internet content. As long as you're using a browser that receives regular updates (and all four of these meet that criteria), you can expect performance to be solid. There is certainly room for improvement, but Chrome, Firefox, and now Edge, as well as Brave, are all quite capable.

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There ought to be a TV show entitled What's The Scam!? Contestants compete to design a scam that explains mysterious Trump behavior. For example, Mnuchin gets to loot the Secret Service in return for not disclosing Trump's travel expenses.

India's trade minister isn't impressed with Amazon's new $1 billion investment in the country. From a report: A day after Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos announced that his company is pumping in an additional $1 billion into its India operations, making the total local investment to date $6.5 billion, the nation's trade minister Piyush Goyal said Amazon's investment was not a big favor to the country. "They may have put in a billion dollars, but then, if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year then they jolly well have to finance that billion dollars," Goyal said in a conference on Thursday organized by think tank Observer Research Foundation. "So it's not as if they are doing a great favor to India when they invest a billion dollars." The remark from the Indian minister comes days after the nation's antitrust watchdog announced a probe into Amazon India and Walmart-owned Flipkart's alleged predatory practices. Goyal reiterated that foreign e-commerce players would have to abide by the local law if they want to continue to operate in the nation. He said the watchdog's allegations were "an area of concern for every Indian."

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I finished watching all three seasons of the Fargo TV series. I can't recommend it highly enough. I started to talk about it in the podcast coming out later today, but didn't finish the analogy. The hottest place in the US is always Death Valley. Every day. So when they report the highest temperature on weather reports, they're telling you the place with the second highest temperature because it would just get boring to always say Death Valley. I think that may be how it works for TV series. Fargo is the best, hands down, nothing compares. It's incredibly funny the way Quentin Taratino movies are, or Itchy and Scratchy, it's filled with Easter eggs, and until you watch it twice (at least) you won't see the connections between the characters. For example, in Season 1, two of the main characters were also in Season 2, but it took place 25 years earlier. And there are echoes of the Fargo movie. So I often say The Wire is the best. What I really mean is it's second best. Fargo is, until further notice, the best thing on TV.