Latest News - Page 1009

Nearly 500 pilot whales have been found stranded on two remote New Zealand beaches, and, unfortunately, none could be saved.

In what seems like a bizarre, naturally occurring event, reports indicate that 477 pilot whales became stranded on the Chatham Islands, which is located approximately 500 miles from New Zealand's main islands. The event has been described by Daren Grover, the general manager of Project Jonah, a non-profit group that focuses on saving whales, as a "heartbreaking" loss as none of the whales could be saved, and the ones that were found still alive on the beach had to be euthanized.

While you may think this event is extremely unusual, it comes only two weeks after 200 pilot whales beached themselves in Australia on a remote Tasmanian beach. According to Dave Lunquist, a technical marine advisor for the Department of Conservation, said that refloating pilot whales isn't conducted on Chatman Islands due to the risk of shark attacks on humans, leaving only euthanasia as the "kindest option".

Elon Musk has been caught in the geopolitical crossfire as claims have surfaced that he's spoken directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The claims come from Ian Bremmer, a long-standing political scientist, and author that focuses on global political risk. The news surfaced when Bremmer released his Eurasia Group newsletter to subscribers, where he claimed that Musk spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin prior to tweeting the infamous peace proposal between Ukraine and Russia, where Musk called for Ukraine to permanently give some land back to Russia so a peace deal could be struck.

Bremmer doubled down on his claims saying that he has been writing his geopolitical newsletter for 24 years and that the newsletter mentioning Musk and the apparent conversation between the Tesla CEO and Putin was written: "honestly without fear or favor, and this week's update was no different". Bremmer added that he has, "long admired Musk as a unique and world-changing entrepreneur, which I've said publicly. He's not a geopolitics expert."

A group of researchers has released a new map that brings science closer to an accurate estimation of the true size and age of the universe.

The new research was published in The Astrophysical Journal on October 23 and details a new map called Cosmicflows-4. The scientists behind the study explain the map was created with very little margin of error and that they took into account not only their own data they acquired but also data from various other studies that looked into acquiring an accurate age of the universe, its expansion rate, and the date of the Big Bang. To find out any of the aforementioned figures, researchers measured the distance between 56,000 galaxies, along with their velocities as they move farther away.

With this data, the researchers measured the distances between each of the galaxies and their velocities to construct the Cosmicflows-4 map, allowing for an unprecedented level of accuracy to be achieved on the expansion rate of the universe and its age. The team's study gives a value of H0=75 kilometers per second per megaparsec or Mpc (1 megaparsec = 3.26 million light years), with a very small statistical uncertainty of just 1.5%.

Elon Musk has jumped into the fragrance industry with a new product called "Burnt Hair," and it has already sold more than 10,000 units.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO took to his personal Twitter account to announce the availability of the new fragrance on The Boring Company website, where it's being sold for $100 US. Musk wrote on his Twitter account that buyers have the option of paying for the humorous fragrance with Dogecoin and that with a name like his (Musk), it was only a matter of time before he made the jump into the industry. Notably, Musk said the product is "omnigender" and that it "doesn't get more lit than this!".

Musk described the new product as the "finest fragrance on Earth", and provided updates on the sales as they were stacking up. Only four hours after posting that 5,000 bottles of Burnt Hair have already been sold, Musk announced 10,000 units had been sold, equating to $1 million of Burnt Hair being sold. It will be interesting to see how many of these Burnt Hair bottles are sold over the course of the next few weeks and how many Musk has decided to produce in total.

NASA has released the results from the world's first planetary defense mission - the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

The DART spacecraft was launched in November 2021, and since then, the vending machine-sized spacecraft has been traveling at high speeds to a binary asteroid system with one goal, colliding into an asteroid named Dimorphos.

The 525-foot-wide asteroid named Dimorphos orbits its larger companion asteroid Didymos, and NASA's goal was to demonstrate the very first planetary defense mission using a kinetic impactor, which essentially means testing out if colliding a high-speed spacecraft into Dimorphos will alter its orbit around Didymos.

Intel's new Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards have been reviewed by those who received their samples, with the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards releasing in the next few hours on October 12... but now, there's a new report suggesting Intel is about to slice and dice THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of jobs.

Intel has continuously struggled over the years, where for all their strength, might, and money... Big Blue is still suffering. CPUs have been met with much stronger (than ever before, really) competition from AMD, while their GPU side of things doesn't even count at this point but still billions and billions of dollars (and thousands and thousands of staff) have been thrown at it with no fruit from that labor at all. No market share in the GPU market, nothing.

Well, now Bloomberg is reporting that Intel is "planning a major reduction in headcount, likely numbering in the thousands, to cut costs and cope with a sputtering personal-computer market". Bloomberg reports that Intel's huge layoffs will be announced as early as this month, and with over 113,700+ employees, it's going to be a big shave from Big Blue's headcount.

Japanese automaker Honda and South Korean tech company LG announced $3.5 billion in joint funding for an electric vehicle battery plant in Ohio. The facility will create more than 2,200 jobs once both companies receive government approvals for the facility - and upwards of $4.4 billion in total investment from both companies.

If all goes according to plan, construction will begin sometime in early 2023, with the facility finished by the end of 2024. Earlier in the year, Honda said it was interested in creating a joint venture for battery production somewhere in North America, with Ohio - because of the company's resources already in place - seemed like a strong candidate, though partner companies remained unknown.

As said by Dong-Myung Kim, Executive Vice President of Advanced Automotive Battery Division at LG Energy Solution:

Blink Charging, a company known for its electric vehicle chargers and support equipment, has launched its revamped Blink Network of driver and host platforms. Site hosts are able to create a pricing protocol with optimized scheduling - and increased control and visibility across Blink's network.

Blink has around 30,000 charging stations spread across the world, and is a leader in EV charging solutions. The company continues its international expansion and hopes its latest offerings set it apart from rivals in an increasingly crowded and competitive market.

As said by Michael Farkas, chairman and CEO at Blink Charging, in a press statement:

Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick comments on the possibility of the Grand Theft Auto publisher being acquired by another company.

Consolidation is running rampant in the $198 billion gaming sector. Microsoft wants to buy out Activision-Blizzard shares for nearly $70 billion, and Take-Two themselves just acquired Zynga in a huge $12.7 billion deal. There's reports Tencent is on the hunt for majority stakes, too. High-stakes Western games publishers are in the potential crosshair, including EA and GTA giant Take-Two Interactive.

Interestingly enough, Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick gives a rather level-headed answer on a possible buyout. "Not really [I don't worry about being acquired.] We're a public company and all public companies are potentially available and if someone shows up with up with a meaningful cash offer at a meaningful premium, every public company has to engage," Zelnick said in a recent interview with TheWrap.

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of games titan Take-Two Interactive, supports the incoming merger of Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard.

Sony is firmly opposed to Microsoft's $68.7 billion merger with Activision-Blizzard, but other industry players aren't up in arms. Take-Two Interactive, one of the most powerful forces in the games industry, actually welcomes the merger and encourages the competition.

The reality is that Take-Two Interactive doesn't have a whole lot of reasons to oppose the merger. The publisher has made billions of dollars through the Xbox ecosystem, whether it be full game sales on the Xbox store, big-budget deals for providing its games on Game Pass, or in-game purchases through its microtransaction-driven live games. Heavy-hitters like Grand Theft Auto V, a bevy of annualized NBA 2K games, and titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 have all leveraged the reach and spending power of the Xbox platform.

German automaker BMW wants to bring casual gaming into its vehicles beginning next year, after announcing a partnership with AirConsole. The games are powered using the vehicle's entertainment system, with passengers able to use their smartphones as controls.

People excited will have to keep in mind that AirConsole specializes in casual games, so you're not going to be able to magically boot up Call of Duty while riding in the car. To connect a smartphone to the entertainment system, interested players will scan a QR code that pops up on the screen.

As said by Stephan Durach, SVP of the BMW Group Connected Company Development: "With AirConsole we will leverage innovative technologies combined with a broad variety of fun and multiplayer games. This will make every waiting situation inside the vehicle, such as charging, an enjoyable moment."

Google pulls a very Google move with its latest product announcement.

Today Google announced the "ultimate cloud gaming laptop," a quizzical claim for a nascent market. The new Google Chromebooks are optimized specifically for cloud gaming on every platform except, well, Google's own cloud gaming service.

These Chromebooks couldn't have come at a worse time. Google recently announced it would shut down Stadia, its game streaming service, in 2023. Google promptly closed all access to the Stadia storefront so no one can buy games. The new Chromebooks have no mention of Stadia whatsoever and instead advertise competing services like NVIDIA's GeForce Now, Microsoft's xCloud streaming, and even Amazon Luna.

Kanye West has had his Instagram and Twitter accounts locked following a post that has been deemed antisemitic.

The restrictions came after Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, posted an alleged screenshot of a text chain between him and Sean "Diddy" Combs with the caption "Jesus is Jew". The text chain claimed that Combs was being controlled by Jewish people, which is a reference to the conspiracy theory that Jewish people are controlling the world, along with celebrities and silicon valley companies, in particular, social media platforms.

A Meta spokesperson commented on Ye's account suspension, saying that the Instagram page was restricted for violating the platform's rules and guidelines. In a now-deleted tweet, Ye published a message that he would go "death 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE", while also, in the same message, defended himself against the antisemitic allegations saying that he can't be antisemitic because "black people are actually Jew". In response to the account locking, a Twitter spokesperson told Engadget, "The account in question has been locked due to a violation of Twitter's policies."

A group of hackers that are suspected of being Russian targeted more than a dozen US airport websites on Monday.

According to reports from ABC News and several other publications, a group of hackers believed to be located in Russia targeted fourteen US airport websites on Monday, with some of the websites being LaGuardia, O'Hare and LAX. The hack brought down the website for approximately fifteen minutes and sparked a response from a US government official that stated air traffic control, along with internal airport communications and other critical operations, weren't impacted by the hack.

However, travelers that were interested in wait times or any other information found on the website would have experienced an inconvenience. Furthermore, a spokesperson for LAX said that the attack didn't compromise internal airport systems and that there were no operational disruptions to report.

Google is working on artificial intelligence (AI) system that is designed to convert text into videos. The system is called Imagen Video.

We have previously seen that Google is working on various AI systems designed to produce images from text prompts, as previously reported on, Google's generative 3D AI system called Dream Fields, originally unveiled in 2021, is one of these systems. Now, we are beginning to hear about Imagen Video, and it may be for all the wrong reasons, as Google writes in a newly released research paper that Imagen Video won't be released until these issues are remedied.

In the "Limitations and Societal Impact" section of the paper, Google outlines that releasing AI models such as Imagen Video have societal impacts, both positive and negative, as the AI system is an amplifier for human creativity. However, Google explains that these generative AI models will be misused by individuals to generate fake, hateful, explicit, or harmful content.

Amazon plans to invest more than $970 million into its effort to add electric vans, cargo bikes, and long-haul trucks to its fleet across Europe. Finding solutions that are eco-friendly and cost-effective both remain ambitious goals for the major retailer - and plans to have more than 10,000 EV delivery vans, a drastic rise from the 3,000 in use in Europe.

Amazon wants its electric van fleet to increase from 3,000 to more than 10,000 by 2025. To keep up with the demand from this effort, the US company plans to install hundreds of fast chargers at its facilities, with each one able to charge an EV in two hours or less.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had this to say: "Our transportation network is one of the most challenging areas of our business to decarbonize. Deploying thousands of electric vans, long-haul trucks and bikes will help us shift further away from traditional fossil fuels."

It was only last month that Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the highly anticipated Tesla Cybertruck will double as a boat.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO took to his personal Twitter account last month to announce that the Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, enabling it to cross rivers, lakes, and seas that aren't too choppy. Musk didn't go into further detail during these September 30 tweets but did mention that the motivation behind making the Cybertruck waterproof enough to serve as a boat was the need to get from Starbase to South Padre Island, which requires crossing the ship channel.

Currently, to reach South Padre Island from Starbase, individuals need to drive approximately 49 minutes, but simply crossing the ship channel, which spans just 1,500 feet with a Cybertruck, would reduce that trip to an estimated 15-25 minute trip. It should be noted that the speed at which the Cybertruck can travel on water hasn't been disclosed, but Musk recently chimed in on that missing factor, posting on Twitter that Cybertruck would need an electric propeller mounted on the tow hitch to reach speeds of more than a few knots.

A group of researchers has determined through sample analysis that the oldest DNA has been discovered, dating back approximately one million years ago.

The new study published in the scientific journal Nature Communications details a specific type of DNA called sedaDNA, which is ancient sedimentary DNA that can be found in various environments such as terrestrial caves and subarctic permafrost. Researchers use this sedaDNA to derive what lived in the region hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago, and it is also useful for understanding how climate change has and will affect regions such as Antarctica.

sedaDNA is found in locations that have extremely cold temperatures, low oxygen levels, and little UV radiation exposure, which makes locations such as the Scotia Sea a fantastic location for prospecting. As for the oldest sedaDNA found to date, it was originally found in 2019 when it was excavated from the ocean floor in the Scotia Sea, north of Antarctica.

A team of archaeologists is making wild discoveries in a cave that was used to sacrifice more than one hundred people more than a thousand years ago.

A new study published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology on September 20 details the discovery of blue cotton fibers in the teeth of the humans that were sacrificed in the Midnight Terror Cave. The cave was initially discovered 15 years ago, and after a three-year excavation conducted by professors and students from California State University, it was determined that the Midnight Terror Cave harbored more than 10,000 bones from at least 118 people, with many of these individuals showing signs of inflicted trauma prior to their deaths.

The cave was found to be used as a burial/sacrificial site during the Maya Classic period that dates between 250 to 925 CE, with researchers believing the sacrifices were to the Maya rain god Chac. The recently published study delves into the dental health of the victims and focuses on the blue fibers that were found clinging to some of the victims' teeth.

The Department of Defense's Defense Innovation Unit has chosen General Motors to develop and test a battery pack prototype for future use.

The DoD doesn't want to miss out on the expansion of batteries and other forms of energy storage, especially as more EV technology hits the road. This project, however, is designed for the National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries 2021-2030 objective and requires GM Defense to develop a battery pack prototype.

GM expects its Ultium Platform - combined EV battery architecture and propulsion system - will be the best choice, as it is modular and extremely scalable. Ultium ranges from 50 to 200 kWh and Ultium-powered Evs have fast-charging capability with a range of up to 400 miles supported on a full charge.