Tencent wants to use its partnership with Nintendo to not only bring the Nintendo Switch to China but also learn how to make good games with Nintendo characters.

Well, at least that is what an undisclosed Tencent employee has told the Wall Street Journal. According to this unnamed employee, Tencent wants to "expand from China" by building console games for both the US and Europe. To do this the company wants to "create console games with Nintendo characters" while also "learn the essence of making console games from Nintendo engineers."

If you don't know Nintendo, the company is notorious for not letting any of their IP slip out from their control. Let alone let another company coming into their home, taking their characters to put in their own games while also learning what it takes to make great console games. Knowing that, you can see that it doesn't seem very likely that Nintendo will be working with Tencent as closely as the unnamed employee hopes they will be.

Researchers are currently designing an extremely unusual but still awesome spacecraft for NASA. The spacecraft resembles a stingray, but it's not all just for show.

Researchers out of the University of Buffalo are designing the Bio-inspired Ray for Extreme Environments and Zonal Explorations (BREEZE). This is a project that has been selected by NASA to receive funding as it has the potential of changing space exploration forever. The researchers designing the spacecraft are envisioning a morphing spacecraft that can flap its wings and make efficient use of the high winds that are in Venus' upper atmosphere.

Researchers are planning on having BREEZE circumnavigate Venus every four to six days, with solar panels also located on the hull it can charge over two to three days on the planets illuminated side. This solar energy would be stored and then power the other instruments that will take atmospheric samples, track weather patterns, monitor volcanic activity, and more.

Just this past Monday, astronomers viewed Mercury sliding past the face of our Sun in quite a rare celestial event.

Astronomers equipped themselves to see the most inner-planet in our solar system go in-between Earth and the Sun. From the above image, we can see a tiny black dot, that's Mercury in comparison to the size of the Sun. US, Canada, and Central and South America managed to get the transition for around 5.5 hours, while Asia and Australia only got a brief show.

Why is this a rare transition? Due to the orbit of Mercury, astronomers don't expect to this occur until 2032, and North America, in particular, won't be able to see it again until 2049. Unfortunately, there was some weather coverage in Maryland for NASA solar astrophysicist Alex Young, he said "It's a bummer, but the whole event was still great. Both getting to see it from space and sharing it with people all over the country and world." A set of images have been provided in the entirety of this article.

On Monday, SpaceX's Falcon rocket took off to the stars, and aboard the rocket was Starlink mini-satellites. 60 mini-satellites in total to be precise.

The satellites aboard the Falcon rocket are just 575 pounds each (260kg), and have joined the other 60, which were launched back in May. Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive eventually wants to have thousands of these Starlink satellites floating around in orbit, as the plan is to offer the world a global high-speed internet connection everywhere.

Not only are there 60 more Starlink satellites now in orbit, but SpaceX also achieved two new milestones with this launch. This launch was the first time SpaceX flew a rocket with a previously used nose cone and an orbital booster that has been used three times previously. According to Musk, "These boosters are designed to be used 10 times. Let's turn it around for a fifth, guys".

AMD recently announced and will soon launch its new third-gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, where we will eventually see up to 64C/128T on the desktop courtesy of the new sTRX4 socket -- a new socket from AMD that is actually worthy of being called "future-proof".

The reason we're able to call AMD's new sTRX4 socket 'future-proof' is that the company itself has confirmed on Reddit that sTRX has AMD's support in both "near- and long-term basis". AMD confirmed that while the new socket has the same 4094 pin count as the previous-gen Threadripper CPUs, it is the "mapping of those pins to voltage or data will be different" with sTRX4.

AMD confirmed you can't install a third-gen Ryzen Threadripper into an older motherboard, and you can't use an older Ryzen Threadripper CPU in a new sTRX4 motherboard. Now, before you get all mad and claim "this isn't how it should be done!" there are two reasons for this. AMD explains:

Qualcomm will unveil its next-gen Snapdragon 865 (and I'm sure much more) at its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit in Maui, Hawaii in just a few weeks -- but ahead of the event, we have some details of the new Snapdragon 865 to share.

New rumors suggest that Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865 will have quite a few upgrades, one of which will be the upgraded GPU in the new Adreno 650. Qualcomm's current, and already fast Snapdragon 855 and Snapdragon 855+ feature Adreno 640 GPUs, but the new Adreno 650 will have a GPU clock of 587MHz -- providing 17-20% more performance over the Snapdragon 855-powered Adreno 640.

Remember that's versus the Snapdragon 855 and not the tweaked Snapdragon 855+ that powers the ASUS ROG Phone II, so we should expect maybe 10-15% faster than the Snapdragon 855+ with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865.

Magic Leap is in the headlines in all the wrong ways right now, with the beyond secretive company signing over all of its patents 2 months ago now, to JPMorgan Chase as collateral.

Documents filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office on August 22 saw a huge 1903 patents from Magic Leap, and its various holdings companies including Mentor Acquisitions, LLC and Molecular Imprints Inc. were assigned to JPMorgan Chase. The patent security agreement was signed by Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz and JPMorgan Chase collateral agent Eleftherios Karsos.

The bigger issue here is that Magic Leap has burned through its gigantic $2.6 billion in funding so far, as well as its latest funding round of $280 million from Japan's NTT Docomo earlier this year.

Acer has just joined the Large Format Gaming Display (LFGD) game with its new Predator CG437K P available in the US for $1499.

The new Acer Predator CG437K P is a larger-than-life 43-inch monitor with a native 4K resolution, so we're looking at 3840 x 2160, with a super-fast 144Hz refresh rate. Acer is also providing DisplayHDR 1000 certification on its VA panel, with the native 120Hz refresh overclockable to 144Hz.

Acer supports both NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync/Adaptive Sync with the Predator CG437K P, with G-SYNC supported over the DisplayPort cable while Adaptive Sync/FreeSync is offered over the HDMI connection if you want to plug in an Xbox One console.

Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ earlier this year, following it up with the larger and feature-packed Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy Note 10+ but what about 2020 flagship phones?

Well, the new Galaxy S11 specs that are leaking out sound delicious -- with 5G connectivity, bigger batteries, a huge 108-megapixel camera, and more teased. Notorious leaker "evleaks" AKA Evan Blass has said that Samsung will launch 3 different Galaxy S11 smartphones in February 2020.

We should expect a 6.4-inch, 6.7-inch, and 6.9-inch Galaxy S11 spread of phones which are a decent bump over the 5.8-inch, 6.1-inch, and 6.4-inch offered by the Galaxy S10e, Galaxy S10, and Galaxy S10+ respectively. But what's inside, is what'll impress.

The hype train for NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere GPU is really starting to gain traction, with new rumors fueling the release window of Ampere in 2020.

We heard about the purported GeForce RTX 3000 series cards not too long ago now, with NVIDIA reportedly preparing the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, GeForce RTX 3080, and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards for 2020. But the big question is when exactly, in 2020?

Raymond James analyst Chris Caso has said that NVIDIA reportedly pushed Ampere back by a few months, with Team Green aiming for a GTC 2020 reveal and Computex 2020 release. Caso adds that Ampere will be introduced at GTC 2020 in a big way as an AI/datacenter/HPC product, and then an Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3000 series family of cards will launch in the months after.