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PlayStation division operating income has been nearly cut in half due to unfavorable market conditions and increased game development spending.

Sony's recent Fiscal Year Q1'22 results show sharp declines in its billion-dollar gaming segment and highlight the tumultuous market that could inhibit consistent growth. Games & Network Services, which includes the mighty PlayStation brand, saw substantial drops in both total sales revenues when converted from yen to USD based on foreign exchange market rates provided by the company.

According to the data, PlayStation net sales revenues dropped to $4.67 billion in Q1'22, a decline of $890 million or 17% year-over-year.

One of Sony's most important gaming metrics is down by 4 million users as overall sales earnings slip in Q1'22.

PlayStation Monthly Active Users (MAUs) are down to their lowest point in the last 11 quarters. Throughout Q1'22, PlayStation MAUs dropped to 102 million to reflect downward trends in subscriptions, game sales, and overall PlayStation segment earnings.

This drop in MAUs will be weighted more heavily as Sony pivots into live service games and free-to-play titles on the PlayStation Network, however the diversification across PC and mobile will cushion any kinds of drops--at least once PlayStation live games are established on these platforms.

A collection of over 180 fossils has been uncovered in a farmer's field in Gloucestershire, England.

The site contained roughly 183-million-year-old fossils, including fish, marine reptiles, squids, and insects. The part of the country where the fossils were found was deep underwater when these animals died, explaining how they were found inland. Among the fossils was an exquisite Pachycormus fish from the Jurassic period, which was digitally modeled in 3D by Steven Dey of ThinkSee3D.

The site was discovered at Court Farm, Kings Stanley, with the fossils being found in rock layers that haven't been exposed for over a century. Sally and Neville Hollingworth found the site and were also responsible for uncovering mammoth remains at a nearby location that were ultimately featured in the 2021 "Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard" BBC documentary. Most of the fossils found at the new site will be donated to the local Museum in the Park in Stroud, England.

The Mini Cheetah robot was made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has previously been seen backflipping.

The robot learned to run faster than ever before after the researchers from MIT's Improbable AI Lab replaced its running controller with a "learn-by-experience model." The previous running controller was "analytically designed" and was a system designed by human engineers to manage the robot's balance and general locomotion. However, this process is tedious and requires too much manual labor to account for every potential terrain or situation the robot can encounter.

Simulations allow the robot to "accumulate 100 days' worth of experience on diverse terrains" in only three hours, equipping it with skills to handle those situations that it can pull from when it encounters a similar scenario in real life. This approach allowed the Mini Cheetah to learn how it could run at record speeds without requiring a human to design the capability manually. The team at MIT is expanding this approach to other robotic systems, like hands that can pick up and handle various objects, to teach them diverse skills without as much manual work.

A study on the Sixth Mass Extinction titled "Relationship between extinction magnitude and climate change during major marine and terrestrial animal crises" has been published in the journal Biogeosciences.

Kunio Kaiho, a Japanese climate scientist from Tohoku University, has estimated when we might see the next mass extinction event on Earth. Five major extinction events have been identified in Earth's history and are usually associated with some form of extreme climate change, either due to heating or cooling, such as what followed from the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid that caused the last mass extinction event.

Kaiho found a roughly linear relationship between Earth's average surface temperature and Earth's biodiversity, with greater deviations from the norm associated with extinction events of a greater magnitude. Global cooling events resulted in the largest mass extinctions with cooling of about 7°C, while for global warming events, they occurred with about 9°C warming.

A study on the physics discovery titled "Automated discovery of fundamental variables hidden in experimental data" has been published in the journal Nature Computational Science.

Researchers from Columbia Engineering have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that could derive the fundamental variables of physics from video footage of physical phenomena. The program analyzed videos of systems like the swinging double pendulum, which researchers already know four "state variables" exist for; the angle and angular velocity of each arm. Within a few hours, the AI determined there were 4.7 variables at play.

The space junk crash-landed on a sheep paddock in outback New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

Mick Miners, who runs a sheep farm in Numbla Vale, NSW, found an almost three-meter-high (9.8 feet) object that had struck the ground on his property. Jock Wallace, the owner of a nearby farm, reported a similar foreign object that had appeared on his land. Many residents in NSW reported a loud bang on July 9th throughout the state that is believed to be associated with the re-entry of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft through Earth's atmosphere.

Sony's PlayStation hardware hits a new sales milestone as the PS5 continues its successful run.

Historical PlayStation handhelds and consoles have surpassed 576 million shipments worldwide, Sony's recent financials have confirmed. The data shows lifetime cumulative sales across all PlayStation platforms, including console generations and the PSP and PS Vita handhelds, that tally up to 581.5 million units sold-in to date.

Read Also: PS4 and PS5 game sales reach nearly 2 billion combined

Sony has sold nearly 2 billion video games on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles.

Read Also: PlayStation 5 sales hit 21.7 million, to break 37 million this year

Sony's latest Q1'22 earnings report reveals total cumulative game sales across the PS4 and PS5 generations. According to the data, both systems have sold a combined 1.912 billion game units across digital and physical channels since the PS4's launch in 2013 to present day.

PlayStation 5 worldwide shipments have reached nearly 22 million units, Sony has announced.

Sony's latest Q1'22 earnings report confirms the PlayStation 5 has shipped approximately 21.7 million systems across the globe.

The PS5 is nearly two years old and the figures, which reflect six quarters of shipments, still don't beat the PS4's sales during the comparative period.

The PlayStation 4's lifecycle is ending after 9 years of sales, Sony has indicated.

Sony's latest gaming earnings report revealed a lot of things, including significant drops in operating income and revenues. The corporate document was also the death certificate of the PS4 as Sony has officially stopped reporting sales figures for the console.

Every earnings report from Q3'14 to Q4'21 had a section devoted to PS4 console shipments. The most recent Q1'22 report removed this section and replaced it with PS5 sales, signalling an end to the PS4. The writing was on the wall, though; Sony had only shipped a paltry 1 million PS4s throughout all of last year. PS4 sales have officially topped out at 117.2 million units.

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg explains to investors why the company is sinking billions of dollars into the vague and nascent metaverse.

The metaverse is hard to define, but Meta is a big believer in the new platform--it's the entire reason it changed its name. Meta wants to help define the new web3 platform in an effort to control and pioneer a new interactive realm of ads, social media, games, and shopping.

This plan is very, very costly. Meta's Reality Labs division, which is gearing up tech and hardware to power the metaverse, has lost $18 billion since 2020. Meta says that this spending will increase. The rationale is that Meta is trying to build an entirely new cyberspace that melds digital money-making models together, all wrapped in an interactive social media platform. Zuckerberg believes the metaverse will be worth "hundreds of billions of dollars."

Intel recently posted its Q2 2022 results and in the words of MarketWatch "investors try to parse through the wreckage of its disastrous second quarter".

AMD has been doing some serious damage to Intel's data center market share, where Intel missed $1.6 billion in revenue from its very, very important data center business. The reason? Intel is blaming the "macroeconomic environment" and some "internal execution" issues... execution issues that we've been hearing a lot about lately.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the call: "We were well into the quarter and we saw the market characteristics change quite suddenly. We wanted to be in a position that we had a thoughtful view of what the market was for the future".

The two asteroids are due to make their close approaches past Earth on Friday, July 29th, and Saturday, July 30th, respectively.

The first of the two asteroids is named 2016 CZ31 and will make its close approach at 23:02 UTC on Friday, missing the planet by about 1,740,000 miles (2,800,000 kilometers). The asteroid orbits within the solar system and makes its closest pass by Earth every few years, with the next one due in January 2028. 2016 CZ31 measures roughly 400 feet (122 meters) across, with a width comparable to the height of a 40-story skyscraper.

The second asteroid, 2013 CU83, will make its close approach to Earth at 23:37 UTC. 2013 CU83 won't come as close to Earth, only coming as close as 4,320,000 miles (6,960,000 km) from Earth. This distance is 18 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, compared to 7 times that distance for 2016 CZ31's close approach. However, 2013 CU83 is much larger, measuring roughly 600 feet (183 meters) across at its widest point.

A study on the thinking experiment titled "Thinking About Thinking: People Underestimate How Enjoyable and Engaging Just Waiting Is." has been published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Researchers have conducted six experiments involving 259 participants, comparing how people expected to enjoy sitting around and thinking with how much they actually enjoyed the experience. Participants were made to sit alone for 20 minutes without any distractions such as smartphones, books, or being able to walk about, and to predict how much they would enjoy it beforehand. Multiple variations of the same experiment were performed, reducing the time to 3 minutes, removing visual stimulation by sitting participants in a dark, tented area or empty conference room, and more.

The researchers found that in every scenario, participants enjoyed the experience more than they initially predicted. One experiment saw a group of participants predict their enjoyment of a bout of thinking, and another predicted their enjoyment of checking the news online. The thinking group more greatly underestimated their actual enjoyment, and both groups reported similar enjoyment levels after their respective activities. Overall, thinking on its own was rated between 3 to 4 on a 7-point scale of enjoyment.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos announced on July 26th, 2022, that it would abandon its role in the International Space Station (ISS) after 2024.

The nation has since shared plans for its own space station called the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS), which it plans to begin assembling in space in 2028. It is unknown exactly when Russia will fully sever its ties with the ISS, but it will likely coincide with the ROSS approaching operational status. The first construction phase is due to begin in 2028, and a second phase will begin in 2030, expanding the station with additional modules.

The need for a new station is partly because the aged modules making up the ISS require evermore work to upkeep. The Russian modules are up to 25 years old, despite initially being designed for a 15-year lifespan. As such, Russian cosmonauts have been less able to focus on science experiments in space as they attend to maintenance and repairs.

A study on the origins of life titled "Prebiotic synthesis of α-amino acids and orotate from α-ketoacids potentiates transition to extant metabolic pathways" has been published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Researchers from The Scripps Research Institute have discovered a new group of chemical reactions that can produce amino acids and nucleic acids, foundational molecules for life used to build proteins and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The reactions involve cyanide, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, all molecules thought to have been present on Earth early in the planet's existence.

The planet has reached Earth Overshoot Day for this year on July 28th, 2022.

Earth Overshoot Day marks the date on which humanity has consumed the number of resources since the start of the calendar year that the Earth is capable of sustainably regenerating in an entire year. Passing this milestone about a month past the halfway mark of the year indicates that it would take 1.75 Earths to produce the resources required by the world's population sustainably.

I wouldn't want to be on the Intel GPU marketing team right now, or anywhere at Intel for that matter as it seems to be filled with issues... but the Intel Arc GPUs have been an utter disaster, and no matter how much sticky tape that Intel puts on it, it's not going to be good.

A new leaked internal roadmap from Intel sourced by Moore's Law is Dead shows that Intel had originally planned to have 4 different Arc graphics cards: Arc A770, Arc A750, Arc A580, Arc A380 to system integrators by... well... now, the end of July. But no OEMs that manufacture these graphics cards, or the system integrators that will have Arc GPUs inside, have announced custom Arc graphics cards or Arc GPU-powered PCs.

Intel could be saying one thing about Arc internally, and externally... we don't know, but it sounds like that is happening. Intel GPU marketing is a mess right now, with them out there being confident -- sending Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson out to YouTubers -- meanwhile, it's a dumpster fire around them.

NASA is planning to inspire the world with its plan to get Martian samples back on Earth's soil for analysis.

NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed in the Jezero Crater on February 18 2021, has been hard at work collecting Mars samples, and so far, it has collected 11 scientifically-compelling rock core samples along with one atmospheric sample. NASA is devising a plan to get those samples and more back on Earth. The space agency has taken to its blog to reveal its updated plan for retrieving the Mars samples, and according to NASA, it's coming to the end of its conceptual design phase.

NASA writes that the retrieval mission will include a craft called the Sample Retrieval Lander that will feature two sample recovery helicopters that will be designed off the helicopter currently sitting on the surface of Mars, Ingenuity. These two helicopters will provide a secondary capability to retrieve the Mars samples cached on the surface of Mars. Here's how it will work. NASA's Perseverance rover will take its samples to the Sample Retrieval Lander, where a robotic arm provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) will load them into an ascent vehicle.