Hasta La Gadget!

The first results to stem from President Barack Obama’s 2013 “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies” initiative are in, Reuters reports. As noted in the journal Neuron, scientists were able to manipulate the brain circuitry of…

Sony’s latest financial report has revealed that the company has sold 22.3 million units of the PlayStation 4 worldwide ever since the console was released back in 2013, this works out to more than 44,000 units sold per day or roughly one about every two seconds. Sony provides proper sales figures as opposed to numbers that just show how many units were shipped to retailers, so here 22.3 million means that this many units were actually sold to customers across the globe.

The financial report does go into specifics about PS4 sales, Sony sold 14.8 million units during the year ending March 31st, 2015. Sony now expects to sell an additional 16 million units of the PlayStation 4 before March 31st, 2016.

While this console continues to perform well the company’s handheld console sales are under pressure. Sony actually witnessed a drop in combined PSP and PS Vita sales for the year ending March 31st, 2015 from 4.1 million to 3.3 million units.

In terms of revenue the company’s gaming division is now its biggest earner, bringing in a total revenue of $11.5 billion during the fiscal year, the significant improvement primarily being attributed to the success of the PlayStation 4.

Ever since the PS4 was launched in November 2013 it has continued to outsell the Xbox One which arrived at the same time. Microsoft has even had to cut the price multiple times whereas Sony hasn’t felt the need to, the numbers show that at $399 customers are more than happy to purchase the PlayStation 4.

PlayStation 4 Sales Exceed 22.3 Million Units , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

A unique Aston Martin built to celebrate the British car maker’s 100th anniversary is expected to sell for more than $1.5 million at auction. It was built for Peter Read, a car collector from California.

The Aston Martin DB9 Centennial Spyder Concept is a one-off model capable of almost 200mph.

It started out life as a DB9 before being sent to iconic Italian coach builder Zagato, which fitted the sports car with a brand new body.

Zagato spent a year on the project as designers working on the styling tried to recall famous Aston Martins from the 1970s and 1980s, such as the DBS, V8 Vantage and V8 Virage.

The snub nose penned by Zagato’s designers gives it a character all its own and a more aggressive personality, while still retaining an heir of elegance, as any Aston Martin should.

Its front end design carries through to the rear, where Zagato fitted unique taillights that mimic the design of the headlights, as well as a similarly squared off tail.

The car was eventually unveiled in July 2013 in London as part of a celebration of Aston Martin’s centenary.

Read said it “merges Aston Martin and Zagato’s DNA by combining the elegance of design, typical of Zagato, with the soul, power and prestige of Aston Martin.”

Read has driven the car just 2,300 miles over the past two years and has now decided to sell it at RM Sotheby’s high profile auction held in Monterey, California, in August.

It could sell for in excess of $1.5 million – making it one of the most expensive modern British motors.

Under the bonnet of the Aston is a 5.9-litre V12 engine which develops 510bhp, with power sent to the rear wheels through a six-speed gearbox.

The Aston should be able to accelerate from 0 – 62mph in around four seconds and do more than 190mph.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who calls himself a socialist, is running for president.

Don’t be afraid.

Sanders announced his candidacy on Thursday, via email to his supporters. He will seek the Democratic nomination, even though he won his Senate seat as an independent. That means he will be challenging Hillary Clinton and that also means he is unlikely to win. She has more money and name recognition. She’s extremely popular with the party’s voters. She’s sufficiently liberal on enough issues to satisfy many of the activists who would seem to be Sanders’ natural base of support.

Anything can happen in politics. But the last time an obscure lefty from Vermont ran for president, he didn’t win a single primary or caucus. Sanders’ campaign is likely to produce the same result.

Like Howard Dean and some other upstarts from electoral history, however, Sanders could influence the race — by making arguments that Clinton will have to address and, in the process, pulling the debate and ultimately Clinton’s platform to the ideological left.

This is an outcome that many Republicans seem to relish, given Sanders’ unabashed embrace of the “s” word. “Bernard Sanders is avowed Socialist,” John Cornyn, the senior Republican senator from Texas, chortled on Twitter. “52 percent of Democrats are ok with that.”

The figure is a reference to a 2014 survey in which about half of the respondents identifying as Democrats said they approved of socialism as an economic system. (Roughly the same proportion of Democrats approved of capitalism.) You can understand why that result would make Republicans like Cornyn feel smug. The label socialist isn’t as toxic as it was a generation ago, but the concept remains decidedly less popular among the population as a whole. Socialism, as commonly understood by Americans, means widespread government ownership of business. A candidate or a party seemingly calling for that would alienate most of the public — even in a lefty, earthy-crunchy state like Vermont.

But that’s not the agenda Sanders has actually been promoting. Sanders doesn’t shrink from the label socialist, Andrew Prokop pointed out in a profile for Vox last year, but he generally identifies himself as a democratic socialist. The distinction matters.

Democratic socialism, as generally conceived in the U.S., is a milder, more aspirational form of the ideology. Democratic socialists might not recoil at the thought of government running large industries, but they don’t actively pursue that goal. Instead, they focus on decidedly less radical objectives — like making the welfare state more generous, giving workers more power, limiting the influence of money on politics and policing the practices of business more closely.

You can see that agenda in the initiatives Sanders has proposed and the causes he has championed. He’s a longtime supporter of universal health care in what some would say is its purest form: A single-payer system, in which the government provides insurance directly rather than subsidizing private insurers. He’s called for making taxpayer-funded child care available to all parents, right up through kindergarten. He supports breaking up the big banks and imposing a carbon tax to slow climate change. He opposes trade deals, including the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, that lack what he considers adequate protection for labor. And he supports the public financing of campaigns for federal office.

Some of these ideas are more popular than others. How you feel about them will depend, inevitably, on your own ideological predispositions and, to some extent, how you interpret available evidence on their effectiveness. But none of these ideas is loopy. Most Western democracies have some of these policies, while some Western democracies have all of them. A few have produced such strikingly positive results — variations on single-payer work very well in France and Taiwan, for example — that it’s hard to understand why they don’t get more serious hearings in the U.S.

(Actually, the U.S. does have a form of single-payer health insurance. It’s for the elderly, it’s called Medicare, and it’s incredibly popular — which is one more reason many people think it should be available to everybody.)

But Sanders understands the political constraints of American politics — the fractured constitutional structure, the influence of money, the disproportionate power of rural, more conservative states. Even as he has tried to tear down those obstacles, he’s also been willing to compromise. He voted for (and continues to defend) the Affordable Care Act, even though it’s a weak imitation of the single-payer system he’d prefer.

Sanders also has a bipartisan streak. It was only a few months ago that he was working closely with John McCain, the Arizona Republican senator and former GOP presidential nominee, on a bill to fix the Department of Veterans Affairs health system to allow veterans to receive care through private, rather than government-managed, providers.

One reason for Sanders’ outreach is ideological: Socialist label notwithstanding, he isn’t actually that far to the left. A study by VoteView, determined that Sanders is actually less liberal than many Republican senators are conservative.

Another reason is temperamental. He’s simply not the destructive type — and that’s likely to define his presidential campaign. He has said he likes and respects Clinton. He talks about creating a grassroots movement, but one suspects his endgame is to leverage whatever power he can muster into concessions on policy from a prospective Clinton presidency.

And that might not be so hard. Clinton is a mainstream liberal, and these days mainstream liberals tend to want the same things that Sanders does — a stronger welfare state, more regulation of business, higher wages for the lower and middle classes, action on climate change. The question is how aggressively and enthusiastically she promotes these causes, via rhetoric and actual policy proposals. Sanders could push her in ways that are unlikely to hurt and might very well help — by encouraging her to confront Wall Street more forcefully, for example, or getting her to endorse government negotiation of prices with drug companies.

You won’t hear Clinton calling herself a socialist, for sure. But as Sanders’ own career shows, the label doesn’t mean a whole lot anyway.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In America, there is a strongly held conviction that with hard work, anyone can make it into the middle class. Pew recently found that Americans are far more likely than people in other countries to believe that work determines success, as opposed to other factors beyond an individual’s control. But this positivity comes with a negative side — a tendency to pathologize those living in poverty. Indeed, 60 percent of Americans (compared with 26 percent of Europeans) say that the poor are lazy, and only 29 percent say those living in poverty are trapped in poverty by factors beyond their control (compared with 60 percent of Europeans).

Such beliefs are just that: beliefs. While a majority of Americans might think that hard work determines success and that it should be relatively simple business to climb and remain out of poverty, the reality is that the United States has a relatively entrenched upper class, but precarious, ever-shifting lower and middle classes. While many Americans might hate welfare, the data suggest they are fairly likely to fall into it at one point or another.

In their recent book, Chasing the American Dream, sociologists Mark Robert Rank, Thomas Hirschl and Kirk Foster argue that the American experience is more fluid than both liberals and conservatives believe. Using Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) data — which has tracked 5,000 households (18,000 individuals) from 1968 and 2010 — they show that many Americans have temporary bouts of affluence (defined as eight times the poverty line), but also temporary bouts of poverty, unemployment and welfare use. (The study includes food stamps, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families/Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Supplemental Security Income and any other cash/in-kind program that relies on income level to qualify.) The researchers conclude that a large number of Americans eventually fall into one of these categories, but that very few Americans stay for long. Instead, the social safety net catches them, and they get back on their feet.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.