The New Batman Game is "Batman: Arkham Knight"

Warner has released the trailer already; although it still doesn’t reveal much more than the original GAME leak. The footage appears to be pre-rendered, but with it being a next gen-only game you can’t really tell nowadays.

‘We’re excited to be developing the game for next gen platforms, which has allowed us to bring to life the design elements that we envisioned from the beginning such as the Batmobile and how it augments Batman’s abilities, to the fully detailed and realised Gotham City,’ says director Sefton Hill in the accompanying blurb.

As expected Game Informer has the official announcement, confirming the earlier details – including the fact that the game is next gen only and out this year.

There are few other specific details though, beyond that the game is set one year after the events of Arkham City and that Batman is at ‘the peak of his powers’.

A proper gameplay video is promised tomorrow afternoon, but in the teaser on Game Informer’s website game director Sefton Hill says, ‘This is the natural end for the story. We really want to go out in style’.

The next Batman game is by the original series creators and features an open world Gotham City with a driveable Batmobile.

GAME have accidentally revealed this year’s new Batman game, with an Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC title named Batman: Arkham Knight.

It’s widely believed that the game will be officially unveiled later today by American mag Game Informer (we’ll update this story if and when that happens). But most of the information already seems to have leaked via GAME’s now withdrawn listing.

The game is billed as the final entry in the Arkham series, which Rocksteady began with Arkham Asluym and Arkham City, and which understudies WB Games Monteral produced an unnecessary prequel to last year – in the form of the okay-ish Arkham Origins.

As the final part of the tetralogy Arkham Knight doesn’t seem to be a massive departure from the previous games, with no signs of the rumoured other DC Comics characters.

GAME’s blurb implies that the Scarecrow is the major villain this time, with Penguin, Two-Face and Harley Quinn also confirmed. Harley Quinn is also pictured as a playable character in what look like pre-order exclusive challenged maps.

It now seems more obvious than ever that Warner Bros. is trying to turn this into a yearly franchise, likely with Rocksteady making one year’s game and Montreal the other.

But if that is the case it makes it harder to guess what next year’s game will be, if it’s not part of the Arkham series. You’d hope they’d finally try to broaden things out to encompass more of the DC universe, but then that was the assumption for this game as well…

Google to show restaurant menu, prices in search results

Google says it is working to show menu of a restaurant, complete with the prices, on the first page of the Google search when a web user looks for information on a restaurant. The company believes it will help web users make a more informed decision before they reserve a table for dinner or lunch.

"Next time you're planning a brunch or a date night, check to make sure the menu has something to satisfy everyone in your group, without having to browse through several restaurants' websites. Just search Google to show you the menu for the eatery you're considering and you can see it right on the top of your search page — complete with tabs for different parts of the menu (like appetizers, brunch or dinner) and, often, prices — before you make your reservation," the company noted in a post made on Google+.

It added that currently the feature was only available in the US.

In the last few years, Google has significantly tweaked its search page to show more and more information to web users. Earlier, Google had rolled out a feature called information graph. This feature uses snippets of information from websites like Wikipedia and IMDB to give users a concise summary on the topic, person, film and place etc they are searching for.

"When Google started, the idea was to index information and find keywords. Now it is about knowledge. But knowledge is a big fuzzy word. Computers find it difficult to understand context. In 2010, we acquired Metaweb, which worked on building large collaborative knowledge base. Internally, we have a number of solutions to improve search results. One of them is Knowledge Graph, comprising information about millions of interconnected entities and their characteristics. With Knowledge Graph we are moving to away from (search) strings to things," he said.

Currently, it is not clear how Google is acquiring the data that powers its menu feature. Also, the data is not always correct.

Search Engine Land, a website that extensively tracks Google, found that menu showed for Jones, a restaurant in Philadelphia in the US, was not entirely right. "For the record, Google actually seems to be getting the details wrong. In looking at the Jones website, this (the menu showed at Google page) looks like their 'all day' menu, (and) not the brunch menu (the web user) searched for," noted the website.

NASA discovers 715 new planets

LONDON: Nasa's Kepler mission has found 715 new planets in what is the largest number of planets discovered in a single go. 

Nearly 95% of them are smaller than Neptune which is almost four times the size of Earth. 

These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system. 

This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets which are planets outside our solar system. It also brings the confirmed count of planets outside our solar system to nearly 1,700. 

Four of these new planets are nearly 2.5 times the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone defined as the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of a planet may be suitable for life. 

Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. Discoveries include more than 3,600 planet candidates of which 961 have been verified as bona-fide worlds. 

"The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results," said John Grunsfeld from Nasa's Science Mission Directorate. 

"That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds," he added. 

To verify this bounty of planets a research team co-led by Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at Nasa analyzed stars with more than one potential planet all of which were detected in the first two years of Kepler's observations - May 2009 to March 2011. 

The research team used a technique called verification by multiplicity which relies in part on the logic of probability.

Samsung to unveil bendable tablet

South Korean media is abuzz that Samsung, the biggest maker of smartphones in the world, is set to unveil the first-ever bendable tablet. The device will be showcased behind closed doors to a select group at a private exhibition, according to a report by ET News. 

The report says that the tablet, to be showcased at Mobile World Congress  next week, will bend at 90-degree angle in the middle. The lower half of the bendable Samsung tablet will feature as a keyboard, while the upper half will be used as the screen and show the apps, quite similar to the setup in a laptop. 

While the technology will be demonstrated at the MWC, it is not to hit the mainstream market until next year at least. At the Samsung Analyst Day conference last year, the company revealed its roadmap, showing that it plans to bring bendable displays to the market in 2015. It also said that foldable smartphone displays will be launched in 2016-17. 

Samsung unveiled its first set of professional-grade tablets at Consumer Electronics Show last month. These tablets have bigger screens than other similar products in the market and can run four apps simultaneously, making operating them similar to multitasking on laptops. 

The highlight of Samsung's MWC event will be the unveiling of the Galaxy S5 smartphone. The device is said to have a 5.25-inch screen with 2K resolution, 16MP rear camera, eight-core processor option, 3GB RAM and Android 4.4 (operating system). It is widely expected that Samsung will debut the next version of its TouchWiz user interface with this smartphone. 

The company is also expected to launch the Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch at the same event.