Microsoft has inadvertently revealed Xbox One console sales while confirming a massive sales lead for Sony's PlayStation 4.

Microsoft legal representation has delivered figures that the company itself no longer divulges: Xbox One console sales. The info was spotted in Microsoft's latest filing in the ongoing regulatory discussions with Brazil's government. CADE, Brazil's own FTC-like watchdog agency, is probing the games industry for data and insights about Microsoft's $68.7 billion buyout of Activision-Blizzard for any instances of possible anti-competitive practices.

According to one particular passage, the PS4 has sold over twice as many Xbox One consoles. Since the PS4 has sold 117.2 million units, this means the Xbox One has sold less than 58.6 million units worldwide. Microsoft evangelists like Paul Thurrott put the number more in the 50-55 million range. "Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and installed base, having sold more than twice as many Xbox in the last generation," the document reads.

A paper on radiation and Mars titled "Crewed Missions to Mars: Modeling the Impact of Astrophysical Charged Particles on Astronauts and Assessing Health Effects" has been uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.

The new paper was authored by researchers from an assortment of international universities and institutes, though it has yet to be peer-reviewed. It considers the impact of ionizing radiation originating from the sun and from outside the solar system on the health of astronauts that intend to journey to Mars in the future. Ionizing radiation is one of the main impedances to astronaut health for such a trip, and a spaceship would provide little protection over the estimated 300 days one way.

Planned missions to Mars are expected to have astronauts undergo much longer missions than they currently do to the International Space Station (ISS) or the Moon, the former of which has its astronauts much more protected from radiation thanks to Earth's magnetosphere. Once on Mars, the significantly less substantial atmosphere compared to Earth would provide little protection to astronauts from continued radiation exposure. This risks exposing astronauts to "Acute Radiation Syndrome, damage to the nervous system, and increased cancer risk."

Three new studies have been published on the world record fusion energy achievement in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review E.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) yielded over 1.3 megajoules (MJ) of energy on August 8th, 2021, setting a new world record for energy yield for a nuclear fusion experiment. The experiment also marked the first time fusion ignition has been achieved, the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction can sustain itself, generating more heat than it loses.

"The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF. Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma," said Omar Hurricane, the chief scientist for LLNL's inertial confinement fusion program.

A new world record for the strongest steady magnetic field has been set at the Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF) in Hefei, China.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences set a new record on August 12, 2022, of 45.22 teslas (T, the standard unit of magnetic flux density) using a hybrid magnet. This achievement broke the previous 45 tesla T record set using a hybrid magnet at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory of the United States in 1999. The 45.22 T hybrid magnet comprises a resistive insert housed within a superconducting outer ring with a bore of 32 millimeters (1.3 inches).

The Hefei scientists first developed the hybrid magnet in 2016 and generated a central magnetic field of 40 T, making it the second magnet in the world to pass the 40 T threshold. The hybrid magnet is one of ten magnets operated by the High Magnetic Field Laboratory of Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CHMFL), where SHMFF is located.

Franky Zapata has created yet another airborne vehicle, this time known as the JetRacer.

The JetRacer is a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, resembling a racing seat with ten micro-turbojet engines surrounding it. Zapata's website claims it has high speed and maneuverability but sacrifices range to achieve these characteristics. It will reach an altitude of 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) and speeds of 250 kilometers (155.3 miles) per hour, though these numbers are asterisked with the footnote "performances envisaged."

The JetRacer uses the same jet engines as Zapata equipped a former invention of his with, the Flyboard Air, which he had an unfortunate accident with in May 2022 after crashing into the water with one from a reasonable height. The JetRacer builds in eight additional engines by comparison, and two of its ten total engines can stop functioning before the JetRacer's flight capabilities are impacted.

A study on a potential nuclear winter titled "Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection" has been published in the journal Nature Food.

Researchers from Rutgers University have estimated that following a full-scale nuclear war between various nations, over 5 billion people would die globally due to hunger. Their study examines the effects of matter that nuclear weapons being detonated would throw into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and affecting crop growth. They analyzed six scenarios, with the smallest-scale nuclear war involving Pakistan and India, scaling up to the largest involving the United States and Russia.

In the smallest nuclear scenario, the global average caloric production would decrease by 7% within five years of the conflict. This figure would increase to 90% within three to four years following the largest-scale nuclear war. Mid-high latitude nations would suffer from the most severe declines in crop generation, including nations like Russia and the U.S., which export large amounts. This would likely lead to export restrictions, severely impacting countries reliant on imports in Africa and the Middle East.

Space is the final frontier that humans are yet to explore, and with companies and government space agency's around the world working on getting humans out into space and on to other worlds, there are going to be many dangers they will have to be mindful of.

#1 - Comets.

Space is home to many dangers, but the most terrifying can simply be categorized by their potential to wipe out Earth. Luckily, there are only a few different ways Earth can be completely destroyed by a space event, and one of those is a very large comet's trajectory lining up with Earth's orbit and impacting the surface of our planet. More luckily, NASA confirms that it hasn't found an object of this caliber and that it won't happen for at least the next 100 years.

As for the greatest comet danger to Earth, introducing comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) that measures a whopping 85 miles across and has an icy nucleus that's 50 times larger than the previous record-holder comet C/2002 VQ94. Notably, when comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was discovered, it was originally believed to be a minor planet, but after careful estimation and many follow-up observations, the researchers discovered it was an extremely large comet. Bernardinelli-Bernstein isn't expected to collide with Earth anytime soon, with its closest approach to our blue planet being about one billion miles in 2031.

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has commented on his company's upcoming "Lord of the Rings" prequel series that will release on September 2, 2022.

Amazon has poured about $1 billion into creating a prequel TV show for the "Lord of the Rings", with the TV show being set some 3,000 years before the events that were seen in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

The upcoming show titled "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" is expected to detail the forging of all the Rings of Power, the three eleven rings worn by Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond in the Peter Jackson movies, the eleven rings forged for dwarf lords, and the nine, given to mortal men doomed to die (the black riders in the Peter Jackson movies). Based on the released trailers, we can assume that the story will follow a young Galadriel through of the Second Age of Tolkien's world.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is 30 years old, and while it's a relic compared to NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope, it can still produce some incredible photographs.

The European Space Agency (ESA) released the new image, which has focused on the Orion Nebula, a colorful nebula that residents within the constellation of Orion and only being about 25 light-years from Earth. The Orion Nebula is so close to Earth that it's visible to the naked eye in the night sky with an apparent magnitude 4.0.

As for the image, Hubble has honed in a colorful region of the Orion Nebula that is home to the Herbig-Haro object HH 505, which are luminous regions around newborn stars that form when stellar streams of the star's wind or jets collide with nearby gas and dust. The ESA states that this image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys by astronomers that were looking to study the properties of outflows and protoplanetary discs, which makes the Orion Nebula a worthy candidate as it has plenty of bright young stars.

A video of an alligator being eaten by seemingly giant "sea bugs" went viral back in 2019 and has now received a follow up study detailing the recently discovered species.

The creatures seen in the above video are called Bathynomus yucatanensis, and while they certainly resemble a type of bug, they aren't actually bugs at all - they are isopods. A new study published in the Journal of Natural History in August looked into the Bathynomus yucatanensis and detailed their behavior, with the researchers writing that these isopods don't appear to hunt their prey and behavior more like a scavenger of food.

The researchers write that these strange creatures search for leftover corpses of sea creatures or any other food they can safely get access to. Notably, these isopods are capable of consuming an entire alligator corpse in just 51 days. The study details the location of the Bathynomus yucatanensis, with the researchers writing that they are common in tropical temperature areas in the deep sea. When seen in the ocean, they appear as large floating white pieces as this species can grow up to 1.5 feet in length.