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CD Projekt Group management affirms that The Witcher 3 is still planned for a holiday 2022 release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.

The Witcher 3's next-gen version is still coming in 2022--or at least that's the strategy that CD Projekt is sticking to. The game is expected to be a major driver for CD Projekt's Q4 period, which corresponds to the calendar holiday period, after the company's traditional Q3 sales lull (July-September).

"The main event for us in Q4 will be The Witcher 3 next-gen release, which Adam confirmed is going to happen by the end of the year in Q4," CD Projekt's Adam Kicinski said in a recent Q2 earnings call.

Call of Duty will eventually be removed and kept off of PlayStation systems, Sony gaming boss Jim Ryan has officially confirmed today.

Call of Duty will not remain on PlayStation after all. Following multiple nebulous statements with lots of PR speak from Microsoft and Xbox's Phil Spencer (and a non-answer to Bloomberg regarding the topic of exclusivity), Sony has officially responded and outlined the terms of the Microsoft's proposed non-exclusivity deal.

Sony's Jim Ryan confirms that Call of Duty would be removed from PlayStation hardware three years after Sony's deal with Activision ends. In a recent statement to The Verge, Phil Spencer said as much without actually explicitly saying that Call of Duty would be kept off of PlayStation after this time.

CD Projekt management has confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 is only getting a single expansion, and that it's being treated as a AAA game while in production.

Cyberpunk 2077's new Phantom Liberty expansion will be the only major post-launch story content the game receives. Instead of releasing two expansions like The Witcher 3, CD Projekt appears to be doubling down on Phantom Liberty and creating a kind of mega-expansion that might be just as big as The Witcher 3's Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions.

"We decided to develop one major expansion of Cyberpunk which is going to take advantage of all capabilities of new-gen consoles," said CD Projekt's SVP of business development Michael Nowakowski.

The new Witcher saga will include more than one game, but CD Projekt isn't yet sure if it'll be a trilogy of games like Geralt's adventures.

In a recent Q2 earnings call, CD Projekt Group management confirms that it has plans to release multiple new Witcher games. The newly announced Witcher saga is a multi-part series of titles, but the first game is still in very early pre-production phases.

"We said that this will be a new saga. We have in mind more than one game. The first saga was 3 games, now we are thinking about more than one game," CD Projekt president Adam Kicinski said in the Q&A session of the call.

Chinese company CanSino Biologics has produced an inhalable version of a COVID-19 vaccine, which has been approved for use this week as a booster dose in China.

Over a hundred oral or nasal vaccines are currently in development worldwide in hopes of creating alternative means of vaccination for people to avoid using injections with needles. An additional theorized benefit of nasal inhalation of a COVID-19 vaccine is the priming of immune cells found in the thin mucous membranes lining the nose and mouth, where SARS-CoV-2 particles first enter the body, allowing them to respond quickly to stop the virus from spreading.

So-called 'mucosal' vaccines have the potential to provide what's known as sterilizing immunity, preventing mild cases of illness and transmission to other people. Evidence in animals has shown that sterilizing immunity can be achieved against COVID-19, but there is little data regarding humans. Researchers believe that mucosal vaccines may provide better protection against mild illness and stop transmission, whereas traditional injected vaccines are better suited to reducing disease severity and preventing hospitalization.

A study on Thwaites Glacier titled "Rapid retreat of Thwaites Glacier in the pre-satellite era" has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Researchers led by the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science (USF CMS) have created the first-ever high-resolution map of the seafloor in front of the Thwaites Glacier of West Antarctica, also known as the Doomsday Glacier. The glacier is roughly the size of Florida and is quickly retreating as it loses ice to the ocean. It would bring an expected sea level rise of between three to ten feet (0.91 to 3.05 meters) if the glacier and surrounding icy basins were to melt into the ocean entirely.

When viewed on geological timescales, the rate the glacier is retreating shows it is effectively collapsing. Mapping the ocean floor revealed a collection of over 160 parallel ridges, created as the leading edge of the glacier retreated, shifting up and down slightly with the tide. The researchers found that the current rate of retreat is slower than previously unknown periods where the rate of the retreat was much faster.

The price of Bitcoin is in yet another steady downtrend as the world's most valuable cryptocurrency's value drops below the $19,000 mark.

Bitcoin reached its all-time high price of $69,000 in November 2021, and since then, the cryptocurrency has been in an overall downward trend, with only some small periods of a price increase. One of the small periods of price growth occurred halfway through July, when Bitcoin broke the $21,000 resistance ceiling and climbed to approximately $24,500 by August 12.

The following day Bitcoin began its now current downward trend in price, dropping from the achieved $24,500 mark down to $21,000 by August 19, and a further drop to $19,000 by August 31. Currently, Bitcoin has fallen through the $19,000 support range, dropping to $18,700 at the time of publication. Over the last seven days, Bitcoin has lost 7% of its value, and over the course of a month, its value has decreased by 6.6%.

A Michigan-based atmospheric photographer has captured an astonishing image of a strange phenomenon that occurs when charged particles from the Sun impact Earth's magnetic field.

The phenomenon captured by Isaac Diener is called STEVE, and it stands for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, which is an atmospheric optical phenomenon that produces purple or green light in a straight ribbon-like fashion in the sky. The phenomenon was first dubbed STEVE in 2016 by aurora watchers from Alberta, Canada, and according to reports, it can appear farther away from Earth's poles than an aurora and is much less frequent.

Diener, a photographer that has been observing auroras for seven years, said that STEVE appeared out of nowhere, and that it would be impossible to predict. Diener wasn't the only photographer to spot auroras, as SpaceWeather reports that several individuals witnessed auroras as a result of the recent ejection of charged particles from the Sun. Charged particles released from the Sun that impact Earth trigger geomagnetic storms in Earth's upper atmosphere. The interaction between the solar particles, Earth's upper atmosphere, and the magnetic field create the spectacles we call auroras.

NASA has demonstrated the difference between the famous Hubble Space Telescope and the impressive James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that recently became operational.

Astronomers have pointed Webb's advanced instruments at a stellar nursery called the Tarantula Nebula that's located only 161,000 light-years away from Earth within the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. NASA writes on its blog found on its website that the Tarantula Nebula is home to the brightest star-forming region in the Local Group, which is the group of galaxies that are closest to our Milky Way. Additionally, the Tarantula Nebula is home to the hottest and largest stars observed so far.

Researchers have pointed three of Webb's advanced instruments at the stellar nursery and with Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) produced the below image, which depicts a tarantula's spider burrow lined with silk. The NIRCam image showcases a gap in the center, or as NASA writes, a "cavity", which is caused by a cluster of massive young stars that are producing high amounts of stellar wind and radiation that erodes the nebula. The stars NASA references on its blog shine a pale light blue in the below image.

Mark Zuckerberg has shown off his in-development Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) skills in a video posted to his personal Instagram.

Meta's CEO and Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg posted the video to his Instagram over the weekend where he mentioned his training partner Khai "The Shadow" Wu and his debut into the UFC. Zuckerberg shows off his clean striking skills by throwing a combination of jabs, kicks, grapples, takedowns, and more.

The post got lots of support from prominent names in the fighting industry as UFC commentator and host of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan commented on Zuckerberg's video, writing, "This is great! I'm so happy to see this. Training looks solid too!".

Instagram has been hit with a record-setting fine from the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), a supervisory authority for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Meta's Instagram has been hit with a $405 million fine, marking one of the largest fines that the regulator has given. According to the decision, the fine was given after an investigation that began in 2020 concluded Instagram failed to protect the data of users aged between 13 and 17 years old, as an unknown number of users between the aforementioned age groups were able to use "business" or creator accounts on the platform, which enabled public access to underage users' private information such as email address, phone numbers, and engagement with adult-aged accounts.

It's unknown how many children were affected by this purported privacy breach, but according to a DPC spokesperson, more information will be released sometime next week. Meta fixed the issues that were brought up by the regulator a year ago, as explained by a Meta spokesperson who said that anyone who creates an account that's under the age of eighteen automatically has their Instagram account set to private, which means only people that individual knows can see their content. Furthermore, adults can't message teens who aren't following them.

National news TV has showcased an extremely detailed image of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) that appeared shortly before a storm.

Mexico's national news TV interviewed UFO witness Juan Manuel Sanchez who claims that he spouted the object while he was trying to take photos of an approaching storm that was rolling into his area. Sanchez says he noticed a black sauce-shaped object in the images that appeared in the foreground, which led to him taking zooming in on the object to snap more photographs. The sighting occurred outside of Sanchez's home in Valle Hermoso on August 17 and was reported on by Mexican television station RDTV.

Backing up Sanchez's story is his wife and his mechanic co-workers, that claim they also saw the object before it suddenly vanished toward space. Sanchez described the moment of realization by saying he was "in shock" and that it wasn't fear that overcame him but "something like astonishment". The car mechanic acknowledges that he should have taken a video of the object, but he said he quickly snapped the images before it disappeared.

Elon Musk's legal battle with Twitter over his backing out of the deal to purchase the world's second-largest social media platform just became harder.

Feathers were ruffled after a whistleblower complaint from Twitter's former head of security made headlines, as the complaint from the former Twitter official named Pieter "Mudge" Zatko may be added to the ongoing case. On Tuesday, a hearing was called where lawyers from both sides gave statements on if the complaint should be included, with Twitter's lawyers painting Zatko as a "disgruntled" employee that had a "huge ax to grind" with the company.

The social media platforms' lawyers denied that Zatko was in charge of spam at Twitter and even went as far as to accuse the former employee of structuring his complaint around Musk's legal case in order to "benefit" the SpaceX and Tesla CEO. On the other side of the fence, Musk's lawyers portrayed Zatko as put together employee that was "decorated" and was qualified for his position, even to the point of once being offered a position as a US government official.

China's in-development Tiangong space station has been the home of various experiments since its first module, Tianhe, launched on April 29th, 2021.

The space station's second module, Wentian, was launched to join the burgeoning station on July 24th, 2022, bringing eight new experiments to be conducted in the microgravity environment of space. One of the experiments included a rice experiment, which began on July 29th and sought to cultivate two varieties of rice; one tall shoot rice and one dwarf rice variety.

The former has grown to about 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) tall, and the latter has grown to about 5 centimeters (1.97 inches). Both are "growing very well," according to Zheng Huiqiong, a researcher at the Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Seedlings for Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant from the mustard family, were also included in the experiment and are often grown by scientists to study mutations.

A study on the remote-controlled cockroach titled "Integration of body-mounted ultrasoft organic solar cell on cyborg insects with intact mobility" has been published in the journal npj Flexible Electronics.

An international research team led by the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) in Japan has created a system that allows them to make 'remote-controlled cyborg cockroaches,' that comprises a small, wireless control module, a rechargeable battery, and a solar cell. The cockroach can still move unencumbered by the electronics, as they are relatively thin and flexible. The particular cockroaches used were Madagascar cockroaches, measuring approximately 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) long.

The team's device brings cyborg insects (part insect, part machine) closer to becoming a practical reality, which scientists have been trying to design for applications like inspecting hazardous areas and monitoring the environment. To make a cyborg insect viable, the insect must be remotely controllable for significant lengths of time, meaning its electronics must be able to remain charged for as long.

A study on the prototype device titled "Hydrogen production from the air" has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers from the University of Melbourne have created a new system that utilizes direct air electrolysis (DAE) to produce hydrogen fuel directly from the moisture in the air. The researchers believe that 'green hydrogen' created cleanly, such as by splitting water (H₂O) into hydrogen gas (H₂), "is the most promising energy carrier of the low-carbon economy."

One of the hurdles for producing green hydrogen is the crossover between areas with renewable energy sources and freshwater availability. The researchers sought to overcome this with their prototype DAE module, which had a stable performance with 95% efficiency as it operated for 12 consecutive days. Notably, another of their devices was left to run on its own for eight months.

Sony has lost a long-time employee in Masayasu Ito, who led the development team on both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles.

Masayasu Ito will be leaving Sony on October 1, after joining the company all the way back in 1986 meaning he's been with the company for 36 years now. When Ito first started at Sony, he was working on the development of in-car audio equipment, but later transferred to Sony's console division in 2000.

Ever since he joined the PlayStation team, Ito has had an influence on Sony's consoles since the early days -- including the PS Portable and the PlayStation 4 Pro. In the end, and the position he is retiring from, Ito was the Executive Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Operation and representative director of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Intel launched its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPU close to a year ago now, and just as we're weeks out from the launch of the 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs, the company is sending out Alder Lake swag boxes to infuencers and tech reviewers.

The new Intel 12th Gen Core Gift Box packs a few cool things for collectors and geeks alike, myself included, with an Intel Core i9 baseball cap, a hoodie, and even a full-body tracksuit are included in the box. Intel is also packing a cool little Alder Lake die shot, and an even cooler 3D-printed figure that is made specifically for each person it's sent to. Awww man, now I want one, Intel.

Winter is coming, and Intel has these people included with both a hoodie to keep its wearers' warm, as well as a full-body tracksuit. Now the reviewers can wear the Intel-themed full-body tracksuit while they're reviewing Intel's upcoming 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors.

Intel is giving away one of the biggest -- if not the very biggest -- games of 2022 with its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" desktop and laptops, and Arc GPUs in the form of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is valued at $70, and is just part of the $370 worth of applications and games that you could be applicable to get... if you have purchased the right components, desktop, or laptop from Intel. The brand new Intel Software Advantage program includes applications and games, but there are limitations.

But first, let's go over what Intel is putting on the table. On the games side of things, we have the biggest in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (valued at $70), but there's also Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed (valued at $40), Gotham Knights (valued at $60) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt (valued at $20).

Intel has confirmed that its Arc Alchemist GPUs will be launching "very soon" during a recent interview with PC Games Hardware and Digital Foundry.

During the interview, Intel GPU marketing duo Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson said that the desktop launch of Arc will include the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards. Intel will be launching the Arc A770 SKU with 8GB and 16GB configurations, but the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card will only be available in 16GB. AIB partners can choose to have an Arc A770 with either 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

We also got to know more about the performance side of Intel Arc A770 and A750, where the Arc A770 will find itself between NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards, but faster than AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT. Intel is promising ray tracing performance that will match the same graphics cards, but the team did make it clear that the Arc A770 graphics card won't be competing with the GeForce RTX 3070.