Nintendo is spending more than ever on research and development to help fund new next-gen hardware, games, experimental technologies, and innovative services.

In a recent Q&A session, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa discussed Nintendo's increased research and development expenses. The condensed version of Furukawa's response is that game development costs are rising, Nintendo is currently doing research and studies on beefing up its digital content and services business, and that early phases of next-gen hardware development is underway.

To give Furukawa's statements more context, I decided to put together a look at the company's historical R&D spend since 2002. The results are pretty illuminating. Nintendo has spent $793 million on R&D in FY2021, more than any other period, and rightly so given the higher costs of game dev during this period. The Switch is in the middle of its lifecycle, but Nintendo wants to keep the console's momentum going with a fusillade of games.

AMD will have another Navi GPU out this year with rumors swirling on the new Navi 24 being teased, codenamed "Beige Goby" and spotted in new Linux drivers.

For reference, Navi 21 was codenamed "Sienna Cichlid" while Navi 22 was codenamed "Navy Flounder" while Navi 23 is codenamed "Dimgrey Cavefish" because reasons. The new Navi 24 GPU should be powering the not-yet-announced Radeon RX 6500 or Radeon RX 6400 series graphics cards.

The new RDNA 2-powered Navi 24 GPU will reportedly have 1 SDMA engine (normally discrete GPUs have 2 SDMA engines), 16MB of Infinity Cache, and 16 Compute Units (1024 shader cores). But then our friend Tom @ Moore's Law is providing more details in that the single small 16 compute units + tiny IC + single GDDR6 chip = great low-power Radeon RX 560 replacement that should consume under 75W.

1980s action stars John McClane and John Rambo are coming to Activision's billion-dollar Call of Duty trifecta.

Activision already teased big crossovers from Die Hard and Rambo, but now they've confirmed the classic macho heroes are coming to more games other than Warzone. In a recent Tweet, the company announced guerrilla survivor John Rambo is coming to Warzone, Black Ops Cold War, and Warzone on May 20.

The crossover is complete with a new area set in Die Hard's Nakatomi Plaza. It's also likely that John McClane will show up too (Activision made a fictional website for Nakatomi Duct Cleaning and a fake email account for John M.).

Remedy wants to be in full control over publishing and financing of certain projects, but company CEO Tero Virtala is careful to say it'll still pursue third-party deals.

Like independent developers IO Interactive and Bungie, Remedy too has aspirations to self-publish its own games. In a recent earnings report, Remedy CEO Tero Virtala outlined a tentative plan for this endeavor.

Remedy plans to use portions of the 41.5 million Euros generated from its recent share offering to help fund new projects. Virtala was light on exact details and didn't say which of the companies new games would be self-published or self-financed, but he did say the company will carefully evaluate its options. Being in total control of financing, marketing, and publishing is very risky, and Remedy is intent on balancing these risks, therefore it's pursuing a varied business model.

NASA has dropped a very cool video on its Perseverance Mars Rover Twitter page that shows a close-up of the surface of Mars.

NASA has taken to the personal Twitter page for Perseverance, the most recent rover to land on Mars. The Twitter account for Perseverance tweets from the first-person perspective, which is a neat and kind of comical personification that I believe NASA does to also include children in space exploration - not just adults.

According to the tweet, Perseverance blasted the rock with its laser and then used its robotic arm to get a nice close-up of it. A Twitter user asked Perseverance 'what's the scale of images', Perseverance replied by saying, "The main rock in the wider shot is around 20 in / 50 cm wide; the darker section I focused in on is about the size of a thumbprint." If you were wondering if the laser makes a cool sound when it blasted the rock, you can actually listen to it on the NASA website, check out this link here.

Trading cards are leaving Target after a man pulled a gun out in a dispute over trading cards in a Target parking lot.

Target has announced that it will be removing all trading cards from store shelves from May 14 onward after a man on May 7 pulled a gun out during a fight over trading cards. Target states it is temporarily suspending the "sale of MLB, NFL, NBA and Pokemon trading cards within our stores, effective May 14." Target added that it decided to remove these trading cards "out of an abundance of caution", and that shoppers can still purchase them online "Guests can continue to shop these cards online at Target.com."

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the value of trading cards to increase drastically, with some Pokemon cards such as a mint condition Charizard sold for $300,000 in January - it was worth $16,000 in 2019. According to Joe Maddalena, executive vice-president at Texas-based Heritage Auctions said, "When Covid-19 hit, a lot of Gen X and Millennials were looking for things to do and we found a lot of these guys and girls started playing Pokemon again because they grew up with it."

The United States Customs and Border Protection agency made a very surprising announcement on Monday regarding cow poo and traveling.

According to the announcement Customs agents located cow dung in a travelers luggage, and now the agency is publicly telling all travelers to stop packing cow dung into luggage because of the health risks that come with it. Just last month Customs agents found two cow dung patties in a suitcase that was accidentally left behind by a Air India flight traveler. So, why cow dung?

There is a seemingly growing belief that cow dung offers some health benefits, and some of those beliefs stretch as far as cow dung offering protection against COVID-19, hence the the dung being placed in the travel luggage. It should be noted that Customs has prohibited cow dung transportation from India to the US because of the risk it poses to transmitting Foot and Mouth Disease to livestock. Foot and Mouth Disease has been wiped out of the US since 1929.

Elon Musk's tweet about Tesla now not taking any Bitcoin as payment for Tesla vehicles caused a significant dip in cryptocurrencies value.

It was only a few days ago that Musk announced that Tesla would not be taking any Bitcoin as payment for Tesla vehicles, citing the energy needed to mine Bitcoin. Musk said that Tesla still intends to use the currency for transactions "as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy". Since Musk has halted Bitcoin payments to Tesla due to environmental concerns, Tesla is now looking towards other cryptocurrencies that use much less energy.

According to attorney, John E Deaton, Musk has handed "the best ad campaign" to Ripple's (XRP) executives. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and other executives aren't strangers to promoting how energy-efficient Ripple is, with Garlinghouse recently stating that XRP is 10,000 times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin. XRP isn't the only energy-efficient cryptocurrency on the market. Other options include one of Musk's personal favorites - Dogecoin.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk announced that Tesla has suspended Bitcoin payments for Tesla vehicles, and now the billionaire is working with the developers behind Dogecoin.

A recent Tweet found on the official Elon Musk Twitter account reveals that Musk is currently working with the developers behind Dogecoin to "improve systems transaction efficiency". Musk goes on to say that the coin is "potentially promising", which may be a hint towards Tesla potentially accepting Dogecoin as a payment, which is something Musk has asked his audience before.

Almost every time Musk Tweets out about Dogecoin, the price of the coin is affected significantly. This time is no different, and since Musk's Tweet reveals he is working with Dogecoin developers, the impact of his news caused a spike in the coins price. At the time of writing this, the coin's price increased by 17.42%, bringing it to its current price of $0.51. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

It won't be long now until the famous Hubble Space Telescope is replaced with the long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched back in 1990, and the development for its replacement began in 1996. Since then, the JWST has gone through multiple delays caused by cost overruns and major redesigns, but now we are finally nearing the end of its development. The JWST opened its primary mirror for the last time on Earth before its launch scheduled for October 31, 2021.

So, how much better is the JWST going to be compared to Hubble? Well, the JWST has a far larger mirror than Hubble and also sports a sun shield the size of a tennis court that basically acts as a beach umbrella to keep it cool. Astrophysicist Blake Bullock, who is a director at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, the contractor on the project, said, "It is the biggest, most powerful telescope ever to be put in space. There are big telescopes on the ground but nothing of this nature and complexity in space. Hands down, it's the most powerful thing out there."