Posted by from MMO Champion
The War Within: Ghosts of K'aresh Goes Live August 5
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Prepare to dive deeper into The War Within campaign in the Ghosts of K’aresh content update. Explore a new zone, break ground in a new Delve, make an impact in Ecological Succession, and more.The War Within Season 3 also kicks off on August 12 with a new raid dungeon, new dungeon pool, and PvP updates.
At a Glance:
Continue The War Within Campaign
New Zone: K’aresh
New City Hub: Tazavesh, the Veiled Market
New Raid: Manaforge Omega
New Upgradeable Artifact: Reshii Wraps
New Feature: Phase Diving
New Delve: The Archival Assault
New System: Ecological Succession
New Dungeon: Eco-Dome Al’dani
Season 3 Updated Dungeon Pool
New Class Updates
New PvP Updates
Continue The War Within Campaign
In The Ghosts of K’aresh, the campaign continues as more pieces to a troubling puzzle fall into place. Players immerse themselves in The War Within story as it leads up to the next chapter of the Worldsoul Saga—Midnight.
There’s some unfinished business to be had on K’aresh and the specter of an old enemy looms large. Forces with ill-intent are determined to bring forth Dimensius, the All-Devouring once more to finish off the ethereals. Should he arise, Azeroth will also be in peril from this dangerous Void Lord.
New Zone: Explore the Shattered World of K’aresh
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Posted by from MMO Champion
Ghosts of K'aresh: Manaforge Omega Raid Goes Live August 12
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Gather your allies and enter Manaforge Omega, a massive cosmic facility where the Shadow Guard Ethereals seek to revive Dimensius, the All-Devouring. Brave the arcane dangers and engage in the epic battles that await, culminating in a showdown that could decide the fate of Azeroth.
To enter and effectively navigate through the halls within Manaforge Omega, players will need to claim and utilize the Reshii Wraps artifact which is available by playing through the Ghosts of K’aresh campaign.
Raid Details:
Where: K’aresh
Raid Bosses: 8
Level: 80
Difficulties: Raid Finder Wing 1, Normal, Heroic, Mythic
Raid Finder Minimum Item Level: 651
Raid Unlock Schedule:
Week of August 12: Normal, Heroic, Mythic, Raid Finder Wing 1- Might of the Shadowguard (Plexus Sentinel; Loomíthar; Soulbinder Naazindhri)
Week of August 19: Story Mode, Raid Finder Wing 2- Monsters of the Sands (Forgeweaver Araz, The Soul Hunters, Fractillus)
Week of August 26: Raid Finder Wing 3- Heart of Darkness (Nexus-King Salhadaar, Dimensius, the All Devouring)
Manaforge Omega
Manaforge Omega, built to harness arcane power from the wastes of K’aresh, now hums with a sinister radiance. Within it, Nexus0King Slahadaar attempts to reawaken Dimensius, the All-Devouring, in a bid for ultimate power. The champions of Azeroth must disrupt Manaforge Omega’s operations or else risk a reborn Dimensius feasting on reality itself.
Bosses
The Forge Core
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Posted by from MMO Champion
The Winds of Mysterious Fortune Return July 15
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Get satchels chock full of valuable and unique items with the return of the Winds of Mysterious Fortune event, and take advantage of the Winds of Mysterious Fortune 20% experience buff—catch up on your alts, finish missed content and unlocks, and dive into the latest content in The War Within.
When: July 15 – August 12
You Get a Satchel, and You Get a Satchel!
While questing and adventuring in certain Dragonflight and The War Within zones, players below level 80 can gain Mysterious Satchels bursting with goodies while looting creatures or as a bonus reward from completing quests.
Mysterious Satchels contain various unique and valuable items, including temporary stat boosts, visual alterations, a chance for bonus gear appropriate to your level and specialization, and 10% experience potions that stack with the 20% experience buff to a maximum of 30%. If you think Mysterious Satchels are amazing, then you’ll love Pristine Mysterious Satchels. The first Mysterious Satchel drop you earn daily will be Pristine quality, giving you a greater chance to earn even more valuable rewards.
Experience potions are a Warband-bound item that can be consumed during the event or saved until after the event is over for use on your other level 10–79 characters. However, any stat or elemental potion effects will not work in Mythic+ Raids or rated PvP content.
A Buff to Speed Things Along
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Posted by from MMO Champion
The War Within Season 3 Arrives on August 5
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Take charge of your destiny with all-new challenges in The War Within Season 3 with an all-new raid— Manaforge Omega, a fresh dungeon—Eco-Dome Al'dani, a new Delve—The Archival Assault, an updated rotation of challenging Mythic+ dungeons, a new PvP season, and more!
Schedule
Week of August 5
Campaign Chapters 1–3
Dungeons: Dungeons on Normal, Heroic, and Mythic 0 difficulties (excluding Tazavesh).
Delves (all tiers, no Bountiful Delves or Keys)
Great Vault credit begins
Week of August 12
Campaign Chapter 4 and The War Within Epilogue
Manaforge Omega Raid: Raid Finder Wing 1, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulties
New World Boss: Reshanor, The Unteathered
Dungeons: Mythic+ difficulty, Tazavesh: Street of Wonder and Soleah's Gambit (all difficulties), and Tazavesh, the Veiled City Har Mode difficulty.
Season 3 PvP
Delves: Bountiful Delves and Keys, Challenge Boss, New Levels and Curios for Brann
Great Vault rewards become available
Week of August 19
Manaforge Omega Raid: Raid Finder Wing 2 and Story Mode
Week of August 26
Manaforge Omega Raid: Raid Finder Wing 3
New Raid: Enter the Manforge Omega to Face New Foes
Week of August 12: Raid Finder Wing 1: Might of the Shadowguard (Plexus Sentinel | Loomithar | Soulbinder Naazindhri), Normal, Heroic, Mythic
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the growing-reliance department: An anonymous reader shares a report: India is set to begin mass-producing electric-vehicle batteries within 18 months, a step hailed as a leap towards industrial self-reliance. Yet the structure of this new industry looks troublingly familiar, echoing a pattern of dependence that has long marked India's economy.
Nowhere is this dependence clearer than in the heft of intellectual property. The portfolios of India's largest battery-makers, Amara Raja and Exide, contain just seven patents combined. This pales in comparison to the industry's giants: China's CATL sits on a hoard of over 43,000 patents, while South Korea's LG Energy Solution possesses some 70,000.
Having largely missed the global lithium-ion boom, India's established lead-acid manufacturers built a business model on licensing technology rather than inventing it. This long-standing habit is now reflected in deals that create deep technological dependency. A 2022 agreement between Exide and China's SVOLT, for example, calls for SVOLT to not only transfer intellectual property but also to oversee plant construction, supply the equipment and integrate the factory into its own Chinese supply chain. Amara Raja's deal with Gotion High-Tech in June 2024 follows a similar template.
Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the China-grove department: China "is pouring money into building an AI supply chain with as little reliance on the U.S. as possible," the Wall Street Journal noted this weekend.
But what does that look like? The New York Times visits Liangzhu, "the coder 'village' at the heart of China's AI frenzy... a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou... As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China's AI frenzy," with its proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek..."
In Liangzhu, many engineers said they were killing time until they could create their own startups, waiting out noncompete agreements they had signed at bigger companies like ByteDance...
But some said the government support for Hangzhou's tech scene had scared off some investors. Several company founders, who asked not to be named so they could discuss sensitive topics, said it was difficult for them to attract funds from foreign venture capital firms, frustrating their ambitions to grow outside China. The nightmare situation, they said, would be to end up like ByteDance, the Chinese parent of TikTok, whose executives have been questioned before Congress about the company's ties to the Chinese government. Founders described choosing between two paths for their companies' growth: Take government funding and tailor their product to the Chinese market, or raise enough money on their own to set up offices in a country like Singapore to pitch foreign investors. For most, the first was the only feasible option.
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the star-gazing department: "Citizen scientists have successfully located thousands of previously unknown pairs of 'eclipsing binary' stars," reports the Washington Post, citing a recent announcement from NASA.
The ongoing initiative helps space researchers hunt for "eclipsing binary" stars, a rare phenomenon in which two stars orbit one another, periodically blocking each other's light. These star pairs offer important data to astrophysicists, who consider the many measurable properties of eclipsing binaries — and the information they bear about the history of star formation and destruction — as a foundation of the field...
The citizen science project in question, the Eclipsing Binary Patrol, validates images from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. The satellite, launched in 2018, is "exceptionally capable at detecting varying stars," the researchers write in a preprint paper describing the initiative. The researchers used machine learning to identify about 1.2 million potential eclipsing star pairs. Citizen scientists then validated a subset of about 60,000... manually inspecting hundreds of thousands of images of eclipse-like events and weeding out actual binaries from images that tricked the algorithm. "Thankfully," the researchers write, "to the rescue come volunteers from all walks of life that boost the capacity of bandwidth-limited professional astronomers many-fold and help tackle the ever-increasing volume of publicly available astronomical data."
Universe Today describes how they limited the dataset to only stars with a magnitude brighter than 15, then used a Python tool to generate a massive dataset of millions of light curves...
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the AI-on-drugs department: Google DeepMind's chief business officer says Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs "is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs," according to a report in Fortune, "pairing cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately."
"There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer," said Colin Murdoch [DeepMind's chief business officer and president of Isomorphic Labs]. "That's happening right now."
After years in development, Murdoch says human clinical trials for Isomorphic's AI-assisted drugs are finally in sight. "The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings," he said. "We're staffing up now. We're getting very close."
The company, which was spun out of DeepMind in 2021, was born from one of DeepMind's most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures with a high level of accuracy. Interactions of AlphaFold progressed from being able to accurately predict individual protein structures to modeling how proteins interact with other molecules like DNA and drugs. These leaps made it far more useful for drug discovery, helping researchers design medicines faster and more precisely, turning the tool into a launchpad for a much larger ambition... In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic signed major research collaborations with pharma companies Novartis and Eli Lilly. A year later, in April 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in its first-ever external funding round, led by Thrive Capital. The deals are part of Isomorphic's plan to build a "world-class drug design engine..."
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Posted by EditorDavid from Slashdot
From the enter-the-dragon department: "The China Film Foundation, a nonprofit fund under the Chinese government, plans to use AI to revitalize 100 kung fu classics including Police Story, Once Upon a Time in China and Fist of Fury, featuring Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee, respectively," reports the Los Angeles Times.
"The foundation said it will partner with businesses including Shanghai Canxing Culture & Media Co., which will license 100 Hong Kong films to AI companies to reintroduce those movies to younger audiences globally."
The foundation said there are opportunities to use AI to tell those stories through animation, for example. There are plans to release an animated version of director John Woo's 1986 film A Better Tomorrow that uses AI to "reinterpret" Woo's "signature visual language," according to an English transcript of the announcement....
The project raised eyebrows among U.S. artists, many of whom are deeply wary of the use of AI in creative pursuits. The Directors Guild of America said AI is a creative tool that should only be used to enhance the creative storytelling process and "it should never be used retroactively to distort or destroy a filmmaker's artistic work... The DGA strongly opposes the use of AI or any other technology to mutilate a film or to alter a director's vision," the DGA said in a statement. "The Guild has a longstanding history of opposing such alterations on issues like colorization or sanitization of films to eliminate so-called 'objectionable content', or other changes that fundamentally alter a film's original style, meaning, and substance."
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After determining that his body was full of pipes carrying iron-rich fluid, our current theory is that the dagger-shaped object precipitated within the wound. 
