Sony confirms that it plans to support the metaverse in its own unique way.

The metaverse offers different opportunities for each companies. Some want to use it to peddle NFTs and play-to-earn blockchain games. Others see it as a great avenue for monetization. Sony plans to use the metaverse as a grand convergence of its multimedia businesses.

In a recent corporate strategy meeting, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida gave a brief but telling look at the company's metaverse ideals. Sony's metaverse ambitions are based around immersion through the use of its powerful and flexible technologies that span gaming, music, sports, and even film and TV shows.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is still roaming the frontier with strong sales, and it did so well that even Take-Two Interactive was surprised.

In its recent FY22 earnings call, Take-Two Interactive said that Red Dead Redemption 2 "exceeded our expectations" thanks to continued sales growth. The legendary outlaw tale has sold 44 million copies worldwide since its launch in 2018, with 2 million copies sold during Q4.

"Results for the series were notably above our expectations for the period, which is further proof of the ongoing popularity of Rockstar's blockbuster entertainment experiences," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said.

Techland announces that it is working on a new IP set in a fantasy world, but Dying Light 2 will continue being supported.

Dying Light developer Techland is burying its dead and venturing to a brave new world of sword and sorcery. The studio has revealed tentative plans for its next big fantasy-fueled game. Like Dying Light, the new fantasy IP is an action RPG set in a sprawling open world.

Techland's new IP is built from the ground up for next-gen hardware and is described as a fantasy epic, and the studio is ramping up its teams for the mysterious project.

AMD's next-gen RDNA 3 graphics architecture will be led by the new Navi 31 GPU, which has changed specifications according to the very, very latest leaks.

Navi 31 is now reportedly packing a wider 384-bit memory bus, up from the 256-bit memory bus from previous rumors... while also packing 24GB of GDDR6. Navi 31 has been mentioned with a 256-bit memory bus + 32GB GDDR6 before, so this new SKU is interesting.

The newer Navi 31 rumored GPU specs would see the 384-bit memory bus not just increasing overall memory bandwidth over a 256-bit memory bus, but AMD would require fewer memory modules at the same time. This means that AMD and its AIB partners can make their Navi 31-based offerings cheaper, and require less cooling (which also helps with costs).

Officials have shared images on Facebook of three women posing with the strangely shaped plants and have asked the public to refrain from picking them.

The Cambodian Ministry of Environment has asked the public to stop picking the rare plant species, writing in its Facebook post that what the three women in the included images are doing is "wrong", "and please don't do it again in the future!". LiveScience spoke to Jeremy Holden, a freelance wildlife photographer and the discoverer of the Nepenthes holdenii plant species, and Francois Mey, a botanical illustrator.

The two informed the publication that despite numerous reports of the plant in the photos being Nepenthes holdenii, it was more closely related to Nepenthes bokorensis, which is more widely found across southwest Cambodia. These Nepenthes plants survive by producing nectar that attracts insects that climb inside of the plant and become trapped in digestive fluids.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson spoke at a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing about space-related matters.

The hearing addressed the $26 billion budget request by U.S. President Biden to be allocated to NASA for the 2023 fiscal year, more than has ever been allocated to NASA. During the hearing, Nelson said he believes NASA is "in a space race with China" and that "they've done some impressive stuff," according to this series of tweets quoting Nelson.

However, he followed this up by saying, "yes, they are good at stealing," after citing their rover on Mars and their Tianhe space station. Nelson believes that cybersecurity needs to be taken more seriously in the government and private sector, likely to prevent their technologies from being used by others.

A study on the fusion fuel breakthrough titled "First-Principles Density Limit Scaling in Tokamaks Based on Edge Turbulent Transport and Implications for ITER" has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Physicists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, or EPFL) have updated one of the foundational laws governing nuclear fusion research since 1988, the Greenwald limit, named after Martin Greenwald. They have shown that much more hydrogen fuel can safely be used in fusion reactors.

Nuclear fusion (the process of fusing two atomic nuclei, typically of hydrogen, and releasing large amounts of energy) experiments are conducted within reactors called tokamaks. The tokamak is designed to contain the plasma created from the fusion fuel, in this case, hydrogen atoms, which is heated to about ten times the temperature of the sun's core.

New estimations show that the upcoming Jupiter-3 geostationary communications satellite will be the heaviest commercial geostationary satellite ever launched.

Jupiter-3, also known as Echostar 24, is being built by Maxar Technologies for Hughes Network Systems, a subsidiary of EchoStar. The satellite was scheduled to launch at the end of 2022, after initially being planned to launch mid-way through the year, but delays to several Maxar spacecraft, including Jupiter-3, mean that it is now likely to launch in early 2023.

"This delay is due in part to relocation of critical resources at Maxar to a higher priority government-related spacecraft project," said Pradman Kaul, president of Hughes Networks Systems.

A study on the night-time solar development titled "Thermoradiative Power Conversion from HgCdtTe Photodiodes and Their Current-Voltage Characteristics" has been published in the journal ACS Photonics.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) managed to generate electricity using the energy from heat radiated as infrared light. The device used to generate power is called a thermoradiative diode, a semiconductor device made from materials used in night-vision goggles. Stanford University researchers were able generate electricity with solar panels last month with similar methods.

"Using thermal imaging cameras you can see how much radiation there is at night, but just in the infrared rather than the visible wavelengths. What we have done is make a device that can generate electrical power from the emission of infrared thermal radiation," the researchers wrote.

The end of operations for NASA's InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) Mars lander is due at the end of this year as it continues to lose power.

InSight on April 24, 2022, the 1,211th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Since landing on Mars on November 26th, 2018, to measure seismic activity, InSight has remained powered by a pair of solar panels, each measuring about 7 feet (2.2 meters) wide. Its primary science mission was to be achieved within a year on Mars (almost two years on Earth) and having completed it, NASA has extended its mission.