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SEGA has announced plans to adapt two more iconic gaming franchises into feature-length films: Comix Zone and Space Channel 5.

The billion-dollar success of the Sonic The Hedgehog films has changed how games companies think about film adaptations. Sonic broke the decades-long curse that Nintendo originally started with the ill-fated Mario Bros. film with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. Now SEGA wants to expand its properties even more, and has announced plans to bring more of its games to the big screen.

Comix Zone and Space Channel 5 are the next round of games getting the silver screen treatment. Comix Zone, a stylish side-scrolling beat-em-up where a comic artist gets pulled into his comic book creation, was released in 1995 for the SEGA Genesis. Space Channel 5 is another cult hit released on the SEGA Dreamcast in 1999 as a dancing game with a distinct 1960s retro-futurism style.

Meta was roasted en masse for sharing a very graphically downgraded image of its Horizon Worlds metaverse. Now Mark Zuckerberg shows everyone how Horizon will really look.

A few days ago, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared an image of what its new metaverse would look like. The graphics were decidedly unimpressive, especially for a company that has spent $18 billion on its VR and metaverse plans since 2020. The image was memed mercilessly and the fledgling metaverse platform was turned into a laughing stock.

In a bid to get ahead of the negative PR (or at least as much as possible), Zuckerberg shared a new upgraded image of what Horizon Worlds will actually look like and assured consumers (and watching investors) that Horizon was rapidly iterating and accelerating. The differences between the images remind us of the leap from DS to the Nintendo Switch--there's a stark night-and-day contrast.

UPDATE: Ubisoft has squashed the rumors: "We're not making a Blade game," the publisher said.

Ubisoft could be developing a new AAA game based on Marvel's stylish katana-wielding vampire hunter.

New evidence suggests that Ubisoft could be working on a new Blade game for Marvel. The info was compiled by YouTuber JorRaptor and lays out a pretty convincing series of events pointing towards a potential Blade game of some sort. It's all speculation of course and nothing has been confirmed.

Samsung is officially teasing its next-gen PCIe 5.0 SSD, where on its official Samsung Semiconductor account it's tweeted about "The Champion Maker" is "coming soon".

The new Samsung 990 PRO will be a next-gen PCIe 5.0 SSD that will pump above 10GB/sec (10,000MB/sec) on Gen5-capable motherboards including AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors and upcoming X670E + X670 motherboards, as too with Intel's upcoming 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs and new Z790 motherboards.

Gen5 SSD speeds for all, and Samsung is preparing its champion in the new 990 PRO. It seems its PCIe 5.0 SSD season, given that we've just Corsair show off its new MP700 PCIe 5.0 SSD reaching 10GB/sec reads, and the new AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD up to the lofty heights of 12.4GB/sec (12,400MB/sec) reads.

Intel has just pushed out its new Arc graphics driver "30.0.101.3268" with some new titles getting Game-On support, a list of games that have been optimized, and a bunch of the usual bugs being squashed.

The new Intel Arc graphics driver "30.0.101.3268" has Game-On support for both Saints Row and Madden NFL 23, on the Intel Arc A-series graphics cards, while there are optimizations for the just-released Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered.

Along with the new Spider-Man Remastered optimizations, Intel's new Arc GPU drivers also fix Shadow of the Tomb Raider from crashing when setting the Ray Traced Shadow Quality to High. Intel notes that a workaround to this is changing it to "Medium" or "Off" instead.

NVIDIA will be detailing its next-gen Hopper GPU architecture at Hot Chips 2022, where NVIDIA engineers will be speaking during four talks across two days at the event.

NVIDIA will have a senior distinguished engineer who will lift a bit more of the veil behind the NVIDIA Hopper H100 GPU, with 14-year veteran Jack Choquette. NVIDIA's new Hopper H100 is the world's first to use the super-fast new HBM3 memory system, which pumps away at 3TB/sec (3000GB/sec).

The virtual Hot Chips event will see the annual gathering of process and system architects, where NVIDIA teases that they will disclose performance numbers and other technical details on another interesting NVIDIA product: their first server CPU, as well as the Hopper GPU, the latest version of the NVSwitch interconnect chip, as well as the NVIDIA Jetson Iron system on module (SoM).

Alphacool has confirmed that its family of CPU coolers and AIO cooling solutions are ready for AMD's upcoming AM5 socket.

AMD's upcoming AM5 socket will be the new home for their next-gen Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, with AM5-based motherboards rolling out with DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 technology for next-gen PCIe 5.0-capable SSDs and GPUs. Alphacool is ready for the new Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, with the company saying that their coolers are ready "just in time for the launch of the new AMD processors in September 2022".

We know that AMD's new AM5 socket will use the same socket size as AM4, so we should see virtually all AM4 coolers working with new AM5 motherboards, without many (if any) modifications at all. Most CPU cooling companies are confirming that their CPU coolers and AIO cooling solutions would work on the new AM5 socket, with Alphacool joining the AM5-ready ranks of GIGABYTE, Arctic Cooling, MSI, and Noctua.

GIGABYTE has just shown off its new AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD, with some blistering next-gen PCIe 5.0 SSD speeds of up to 12.5GB/sec reads and 10GB/sec writes.

The next-gen AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD has now been confirmed by GIGABYTE where we will see the company release next-gen AORUS Gen5 10000 SSDs in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities... but here's hoping to 8TB and beyond in Gen5 speeds. AORUS showed off a CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 benchmark with the new AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD pushing a huge 12.4GB/sec (12,400MB/sec) sequential reads, and up to 10GB/sec (10,000MB/sec) sequential writes.

GIGABYTE says that its new AORUS Gen5 10000 SSD is up to 55% faster than PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which were tapping out at around 7.5GB/sec. You won't be able to pull these huge 12GB/sec+ speeds without a PCIe 5.0-capable motherboard, which is perfect timing as Intel and AMD are both about to launch their respective next-gen CPU and motherboard platforms, which will both take these new PCIe 5.0 SSDs and let you drive up 12GB/sec+ reads on your next-gen SSD.

Blizzard reiterates something that most gamers already knew: Diablo IV is meant to be a never-ending live service game, and Blizzard is ready to serve up tons of content year-round.

Yesterday Blizzard confirmed that Diablo IV will two forms of monetization: an optional premium currency used to purchase cosmetic microtransactions, and paid season passes that will give cosmetic rewards. This will fund the most ambitious content expansion in Diablo history with tons of seasonal updates.

Blizzard recently said that it has an "army of developers" ready to bombard players with Diablo IV content. The game will expand with seasonal structure that sees 4 seasons a year. Every 3 months, gamers will get a bunch of new free content to consume and digest including new items, quality-of-life improvements, questlines and characters, and randomized events to make things interesting. Seasons are also like Ladders in Diablo II and require players to restart a brand new character for the 3-month term.

Datamined info suggests that Sony could be preparing its own PlayStation games launcher on PC. If true, Sony has a unique opportunity to unify PlayStation consoles with the PC platform...but it'll take a lot of planning to pull it off.

Sony has broken down its walled garden and is now sharing its precious, once-console exclusive games to PC. It's a good business plan; selling games on as many platforms as possible means more revenues. It's doing well so far, and Sony expects to make $300 million from PC this year.

There's just one thing missing: Console-to-PC integration. Right now gamers have to buy titles on Steam or the Epic Games Store, both of which are segregated from the PlayStation platform. Cross-platform integration is where the real money is. Sony could solve this issue with its own PlayStation PC launcher, which could unify consoles and services together in an ecosystem. It won't be easy...and it could be pretty costly. But if done right, Sony could make the most out of the PC platform.

The games industry is a wild place. Often developers, publishers, and platform-holders will make big-budget marketing and exclusivity deals that are typically hush-hush. Things get really interesting when two separate companies publish the same game on different platforms. Case in point: Death Stranding, which is coming to Xbox Game Pass in a few days.

The Xbox Game Pass Twitter made it obvious that Death Stranding was coming over, but it's still kind of surprising. Sony paid big bucks to fund and publish the game on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, keeping Kojima Productions' first game off of Xbox for an undetermined period of time. Then 505 Games got publishing rights for the game on PC, releasing the game on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Now 505 Games is releasing Death Stranding on Xbox Game Pass, which is a direct billion-dollar competitor to the PlayStation empire.

Death Stranding will be available on Xbox Game Pass for PC on August 23, 2022 at 12am UTC / 5pm PT / 1am BST / 9am JST.

An international team of researchers have published what is claimed to be the largest image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to date.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been making headlines since it began its scientific operations in July, with the space agency publishing the first batch of images snapped by the space telescope's next-generations instruments. Now, an international team of researchers that includes 105 scientists from 19 from 28 institutions around the world have used the telescopes instruments to gather an immense amount of data on the cosmos. The Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Study (CEERS) has now released the image.

Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), and its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) were all used to gather the data, which was then converted to imagery and then stitched together to form an incredible mosaic piece. Out of the myriad of galaxies captured in the images the researchers honed in on six specific galaxies. A blue spiral galaxy, some elliptical galaxies, a galaxy nicknamed Pac-Man for its resembling shape, and galaxies that are extremely old - dating around 9 billion years ago.

A new suite of tests by Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare has pitted an older car with physical controls across its dashboard with more modern cars that utilize touchscreens to assess safety and usability.

The Swedish magazine put the HMI (Human-Machine Interface) systems of twelve cars to the test, attempting to complete four simple tasks as quickly as possible. This included: turning on the driver's heated seat and increasing its temperature by two degrees and starting the defroster, turning on the radio and adjusting to a pre-determined station, resetting the trip computer, and lowering instrument lighting to its lowest level and turning off the center display.

The older car with solely buttons and switches for operating such features was a 2005 Volvo V70, while the remaining eleven cars were all modern, including the Tesla Model 3 and the Chinese electric vehicle, the MG Marvel R. In the Volvo V70, a driver was able to complete all tasks within 10 seconds flat, while at the other end of the scale, the same tasks took 44.9 seconds in the MG Marvel R.

NASA has released new footage of the spacecraft that will be sent to one of Jupiter's moons for an upcoming mission.

The timelapse video features NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft as it is being put together in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility. The main body of the Europa Clipper stands 10 feet (3 meters) high and 5 feet (1.5 meters) wide and will reside in High Bay 1, an ultra-clean room, over the next two years as engineers and technicians prepare it for its mission to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, in October 2024.

At Europa, the spacecraft will complete almost 50 flybys of the moon to gather data about its atmosphere, surface, and interior. It's believed that underneath the moon's icy crust, vast oceans may have suitable conditions to sustain life, so the spacecraft will also assess how the thickness of the surface ice, the salt content of the subsurface ocean, and any potential vents from the subsurface ocean that may leak water into space.

A study on the moisture-driven electricity generation (MEG) device titled "An Asymmetric Hygroscopic Structure for Moisture‐Driven Hygro‐Ionic Electricity Generation and Storage" has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore's (NUS) College of Design and Engineering (CDE) have created a new ultra-thin MEG device, consisting of only a thin layer of fabric, measuring only 0.3 millimeters (mm) thick, sea salt, carbon ink, and a water-absorbent hydrogel. The device generates electricity by utilizing the moisture in the air, and the concept of MEG devices shows promise for various applications such as wearable electronics.

Water saturation has been one of the challenges facing existing MEG devices, stopping them from being able to produce more electricity. The researchers overcame this by creating their new MEG device with two distinct regions, each with different properties that can indefinitely maintain a difference in water content between them. The fabric is made from wood pulp and polyester and coated with carbon nanoparticle ink.

A study on the newly discovered crater titled "The Nadir Crater offshore West Africa: A candidate Cretaceous-Paleogene impact structure" has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers from the University of Arizona have discovered an impact crater at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean, which indicates additional asteroids may have struck the Earth during the extinction event that marked the end of the dinosaurs. Named the Nadir Crater, it is thought to have been created by an asteroid striking Earth around the same time as when the Chicxulub asteroid impacted Earth off the coast of what is now Yucatan, Mexico, causing the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.

The Nadir Crater was found buried beneath up to 1,300 feet (396 meters) of seabed roughly 250 miles (402 kilometers) off the coast of Guinea, West Africa, and spans over 5 miles (8 kilometers) in diameter. The crater was found using scientific instruments that can see deep into Earth, and if confirmed, the crater will be added to the list of fewer than 20 confirmed impact craters in the ocean on Earth.

Dallas-based company Colossal Biosciences has set its sights on bringing the Tasmanian tiger, an Australian marsupial also known as the thylacine, back to life after it became extinct in 1936.

The Tasmanian tiger marks the second species in Colossal Biosciences' plans to bring extinct species back from the dead, as they are also working on reviving the wooly mammoth species. The Tasmanian tiger roamed the Earth for millions of years before it became extinct, living across mainland Australia and its island state, Tasmania. It became extinct two thousand years ago on the mainland, likely due to native dingos, but was only fully made extinct by hunters in Tasmania in 1936.

Apple is on the cusp of releasing its new iOS 16 iPhone software which is expected to bring new features to users.

Apple users will rejoice at the thought of being able to edit and unsend messages on iMessage, and that will soon become a reality with the coming iOS 15 iPhone software update. Reports indicate that users will be able to hold down sent messages to receive an options menu, and inside of this menu, there will be the "edit" option along with the "unsend" option.

The new feature has already been rolled out to the public beta, which is available to download right now if you choose to opt-in. If you don't opt-in to receive the beta, you will have to wait until sometime in September to receive the feature. Additionally, you will need an iPhone released in 2017 or later to use it. Once the update has been downloaded, whether you have opted into the beta or waited until the full release, here's what you'll need to know to use the new features.

NASA is scheduled to collide a high-speed spacecraft with an asteroid in an attempt to change its orbit using a technique called a "kinetic impactor".

The mission is called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and launched on Nov. 23, 2021, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft successfully exited Earth's atmosphere, and since then, it has been on a journey towards its target, a binary near-Earth asteroid system called Didymos and its smaller moonlet Dimorphos. The DART mission is the very first planetary defense mission that will attempt to deflect an asteroid, and the results from the mission, if the method is proven effective, will affect how Earth as a planet defends itself from asteroids entering our orbit.

The small spacecraft headed on a suicide mission with the Dimorphos will approach the space rock at extremely high speeds, with NASA officials estimating that the craft will be traveling 14,760 mph or 4.1 miles per second. The extreme speed of the aircraft and the kinetic power that will be generated by its impact should be enough to change the Dimorphos' orbit around the larger Didymos. To what degree the orbit changes will determine if the mission has been a success and if the results line up with NASA pre-launch estimations.

NASA is gearing up for the first mission of its Artemis program, which will be the first big step the agency takes to getting humans back on the Moon and eventually stepping up an off-world base.

Commander Moonikin Campos wearing the new Orion Crew Survival System spacesuit.

NASA is closing in on the launch date for its Artemis I mission which will include launching its new Space Launch System, which features the SLS mega-rocket along with the Orion capsule. The goal is to send the rocket around the Moon to record vital data that will be used to ensure the safety on efficiency of humans revisiting the lunar surface in Artemis III. The Artemis I mission will be uncrewed, which means no humans will be on board the Orion capsule, but that doesn't mean the capsule will be empty.