Ripple has announced a new president will take the helm at the company as the cryptocurrency coin reaches the end of its long lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The company took to its blog to announce that Monica Long, Ripple's senior vice president, and general manager, will be taking up the position of president of the company. Long started her career at Ripple when the firm was in its infancy, counting just ten employees back in 2013. Sticking with Ripple long made her way up the ranks to eventually be given the position of general manager in 2020.

According to Ripple CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, "Even in the current challenging crypto environment, Monica has helped guide Ripple to a very unique place of growth and financial strength. She's been an instrumental adviser to me over the years, and I'm grateful to have the opportunity to partner with her even more closely as she embarks on her role as president."

NASA has already begun to prepare for the arrival of the very first Mars samples acquired by the hard-at-work Perseverance rover.

Perseverance has been exploring the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet since it became active in February 2021, and throughout its exploration, the rover has acquired several samples that NASA plans on transporting back to Earth as researchers believe they could contain microbial traces of ancient life.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce it will be constructing a special facility to house these samples at Johnson Space Center in Houston and that this facility will be designed to keep the samples as safe as possible from any Earth-based contamination.

Artificial intelligence is slowly becoming a reality as more and more companies unveil their AI-based projects aimed at making human tasks automated.

The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, and the widespread response from the public has put a big spotlight on AI-based services and what they have in store for users in the future. ChatGPT is already capable of answering most questions users can throw at it while also being able to write basic programs in multiple different programming languages. Notably, ChatGPT is already being used by students as anyone with an internet connection can simply ask the AI to provide them with any form of essay on whatever question they are required to answer.

However, ChatGPT is limited to text and does have its limitations. This is where other AI systems come into play. Introducing Google's MusicLM, an AI that's designed to generate high-fidelity 24 kHz music from text descriptions. According to a newly published research paper, the AI is capable of generating songs from rich text descriptions as well as sound prompts. MusicLM is claimed to create "original" songs from its database of sounds.

A researcher manning the telescope located at the top of Hawaii's tallest mountain has photographed what looks like a portal to another world.

The photographs were captured on January 18 by a camera that is located at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii's tallest mountain that is home to Japan's Subaru Telescope. According to reports, the camera was placed at the top of the mountain to take time-lapse footage and images of the area surrounding the Subaru telescope that can then be shared with the residents of Hawaii and the rest of the world.

Ichi Tanaka, a researcher at the Subaru telescope, admitted that he wasn't the first person to spot the spiral randomly appearing in the camera's frame as he was doing other work at the time it emerged. A random stargazer that was watching the YouTube livestream of the camera's view sent him a screenshot of the spiral, which caused Tanaka to drop his jaw. "When I opened Slack, that is what I saw, and it was a jaw-dropping event for me," the researcher said.

The University of Arizona has shared an image snapped by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and it appears to show the face of a massive teddy bear.

The image was snapped on December 12, 2022, and posted to the University of Arizona's blog on January 25. The blog post explains that MRO was flying overhead at approximately 156 miles when it took the photograph, which shows various geological formations across the surface of the Red Planet. The University of Arizona explains that when all of the geological formations are viewed together, the viewer may see a bear's face. Is it really a giant Martian bear?

Most likely not. Viewers that see the face within the collection of Mars' geology can attribute the thought to the human phenomenon called pareidolia, which is the tendency to see faces or meaning within an image of an object/s that has none. Technically speaking, there is a V-shaped hill that makes up the bear's nose, two impact craters make up the eyes, and a circular fracture pattern creates the head. UA writes on its blog that "Maybe just grin and bear it".

A blockchain investigator has revealed the hackers behind the Harmony Bridge attack that occurred in June 2022 are trying to move millions in stolen funds.

Reports indicate that blockchain investigator ZachXBT found evidence that the group of hackers behind the Harmony Bridge exploitation that cost the startup $100 million are trying to move the stolen funds to a few different wallets on various cryptocurrency exchanges. For those that don't know, Harmony is a US cryptocurrency startup that discovered in June 2022 that its Horizon blockchain bridge, which allows users to send/receive assets from one blockchain to another, had been hacked.

ZachXBT took to Twitter with on-chain data that backed up his claims that the hackers behind the Harmony attack transferred stolen assets to six different cryptocurrency exchanges. Notably, ZachXBT states that the appropriate cryptocurrency exchanges were notified of the transfer and at least partly froze the assets. Additionally, the movement of the stolen funds to the new addresses comes only days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced the culprits behind the $100 million Harmony hack. The FBI named the Lazarus Group and APT38 as responsible criminals.

NVIDIA might be planning to release a GeForce RTX 4090 Ti with 24GB of GDDR6X and a 600W TGP in addition to a TITAN-class Aada Lovelace graphics card with a whopping 48GB of GDDR6X and a 800W TGP. This comes as NVIDIA leaker kopite7kimi releases specs for the currently planned GeForce RTX 4090 Ti.

He lists RTX 4090 Ti using PG136/139-SKU310 and featuring 18176 FP32 (CUDA Cores), 96M L2 Cache, 24G GDDR6X memory, and total power of 600W. The CUDA Core count here represents a 10.9% increase over the GeForce RTX 4090.

Intel Arc GPUs launched last year as a new player in the discrete GPU market, with products that would compete directly with offerings from NVIDIA and AMD. As with GPUs, drivers play an essential role in overall performance, stability, and compatibility. Ahead of Intel's Arc debut, the company made it clear that DX9 (DirectX9 API) performance had issues.

Intel Arc A770 Graphics Card

Last December, Intel released a driver update for Arc that presented a massive bump to DX9 performance. For example, popular online shooter CS:GO saw an 80% increase in 1080p performance on the Intel Arc 770.

GPU manufacturers use ECC (Eurasian Economic Commission) listings to register GPU model names for use at a later date, often indicating that a product launch is happening relatively soon. A new ECC filing by Chinese graphics card maker Shangke Group (MaxSun and Soyo) lists A GeForce RTX 4060 and GeForce RTX 4050 alongside the RTX 4070.

The list doesn't mention any upcoming "Ti" models but indicates the expected release cadence of the GeForce RTX 4060 to follow the launch of the RTX 4070. What's interesting is that both of these cards represent the mainstream offerings for the GeForce RTX 40 Series, so even with a price increase over the previous Ampere generation - we should expect them to launch with prices relatively close to the RTX 3050's USD 249 and the RTX 3060's USD 329.

Based on recent earnings, Intel experienced one of its worst quarters, closing out 2023 and predicting a surprise 40% decline in revenue for the first quarter of this year. This led to a staggering USD 8 billion loss in Intel Corp market value, leading to industry analysts like Rosenblatt Securities' Hans Mosesmann calling the outcome "the historic collapse of Intel."

Intel did remain profitable for 2022, with a net income of USD 8 billion, but that was a sizable drop compared to 2021'a USD 19.9 billion. Intel has massive billion-dollar cost reduction targets for 2023 to increase income, which will continue through 2025, where it plans to achieve somewhere between USD 8-10 billion in savings.