Latest News - Page 1075

EA's new Skate game will be free-to-play with microtransactions, developer Full Circle has confirmed in a recent stream.

Skate 4 (which is actually named Skate) won't be a premium game like its predecessors. Instead, EA is chasing the free-to-play model that has generated billions of dollars in revenues for the company. Skate is the latest franchise to get adapted for the lucrative F2P market, complete with cross-play and a years-long content roadmap.

"Yes, there will be microtransactions in the game. We knew that to support a never-ending, ever-evolving, free-to-play world of Skate, we'd have to look into different models for the game itself,"Full Circle general manager Dan McCulloch said in the stream.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge has sold 1 million copies in a week, making it a big hit on the games market.

Tribute Games' and Dotemu's dedication has paid off big time: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge is an official platinum hit with over 1,000,000 games sold on all platforms. The game is being hailed as a triumphant return of beat-em-up action and is one of the purest love letters to the original 1980s TMNT show that I've ever seen, complete with an incredibly faithful rendition of Konami's immortalized Turtles in Time arcade game.

Shredder's Revenge also sports 6-player carnage and has full cross-play, making it an ideal choice for modern TMNT action. What's even more impressive is that the game sold so many copies despite being on Xbox Game Pass.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has decided to sever its cooperation with Russia for an upcoming Mars mission.

The ESA had suspended its work with Russia on the ExoMars mission following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. Now, it has officially terminated all cooperation on the mission with the nation, which was originally going to use its rockets to deliver Europe's Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars as part of the mission. The ESA is now looking to partner with NASA to get its rover to Mars.

This decision led to the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, responding to ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher's decision by posting on Telegram, saying, "has the head of the European Space Agency thought about the work of thousands of scientists and engineers in Europe and Russia which has been ended by this decision? Is he prepared to answer for sabotaging a joint Mars mission?"

A study on video games and the brain titled "Video game players have improved decision-making abilities and enhanced brain activities" has been published in the journal Neuroimage: Reports.

Researchers from Georgia State University have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of frequent video game players. Their study showed "superior sensorimotor decision-making skills" and enhanced brain activity in key brain regions compared to people who did not play video games. The study examined 47 young adult participants, with 28 deemed regular video game players and 19 deemed non-players.

Patients lying inside an fMRI machine were presented with a mirror to see a visual cue followed by moving dots on display. They were asked to press a button either in their left or right hand to indicate which direction they saw the dots move or not to press a button if there was no movement. Overall, the study found the video game players to have faster and more accurate responses correlated with enhanced activity in certain brain regions. Speed and accuracy were both noticeably better, with no trade-off between the two.

Twitter is experiencing some issues across the world right now, with users in multiple countries including the US, UK, Mexico, Brazil, and Italy experiencing issues accessing Twitter.

Down here in Australia, I've got no problems on both accessing Twitter.com on my desktop PC, or on my Android smartphone. But there are over 50,000+ people with issues in the US along according to DownDetector. The outage kicked off at around 8AM ET, where people were having issues logging into the site, or accessing it from their phone.

Some users are getting error messages like "Tweets aren't loading right now. Try again" while others have no issues at all. Twitter doesn't get outages often, so when they happen they are headlines across the world. I'm sure that once you even read this news, Twitter will be back and operational.

A study on the new vaccine microparticles titled "Experimental and computational understanding of pulsatile release mechanism from biodegradable core-shell microparticles" has been published in the journal Science Advances.

MIT researchers have created new microparticles that can be adjusted to deliver chemical payloads in delayed stages, in which could be used to create "self-boosting" vaccines. Typical vaccines require multiple shots over a somewhat lengthy period for a person to be considered fully vaccinated against what the vaccine is designed to protect against. However, these microparticles are designed to circumvent the need for additional shots.

Rocket Lab has launched a US spy satellite from its New Zealand site on July 13 at 2:30 AM Eastern, according to reports.

The recent launch featured a Rocket Lab Electron booster that had aboard the NROL-162 spy satellite for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), marking the first of two Electron mission for the NRO. The most recent mission is named "Wise One Looks Ahead" and is the sixth mission Rocket Lab has conducted in 2022, and the third mission under the NRO's Rapid Acquisition of Small Rocket (RASR) contracts.

The NRO controls the United States' various spy satellites, and with the recent launch by Rocket Lab and once the satellite is operational, the NRO will have upgraded its ability to receive/send timely intelligence information. Rocket Lab is planning the second NRO launch which will feature the NROL-199 spacecraft no earlier than July 23. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Four former executives from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) have been ordered by a Tokyo court to pay damages in a recent lawsuit.

A civil lawsuit was brought against the company by shareholders for failing to prevent the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, when the now-defunct nuclear power plant was struck by a massive tsunami. The executives have been ordered to pay a combined 13.32 trillion yen ($97 billion) in what is estimated to be the largest compensation payout for a civil lawsuit in Japanese history.

Reports indicate that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sent a text message to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal about Twitter's lawyers.

Elon Musk has decided to back of his deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, and now the world's second largest social media company is moving to initiate legal action against Musk in the Delaware court as of Tuesday. Following the pull back from Musk and the lawsuit from Twitter reports are surfacing about text messages between Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Musk regarding lawyers.

According to reports from BusinessInsider, Musk sent text messages to Agrawal and Twitter CFO Ned Segal on June 28 where he stated, "Your lawyers are using these conversations to cause trouble. That needs to stop." Notably, these text messages were in response to Twitter wanting to find out how Musk was planning on financing the $44 billion for the merger. If you are interested in reading more about the recent events between Twitter and Musk, check out the below links.

A study is already underway, under the title "Personalized Neo-Antigen Peptide Vaccine for the Treatment of Stage IIIC-IV Melanoma or Hormone Receptor Positive Her2 Negative Metastatic Refractory Breast Cancer" on the U.S National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Clinical Trials website.

The listed study lists Amazon.com Services LLC as a collaborator with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center for the trial. It is currently recruiting patients to participate in an FDA-approved clinical trial. The framework for the study was initially submitted in mid-October 2021, and the study officially began on June 9th, 2022. It is currently in Phase 1 and is expected to finish collecting data around November 1st, 2023.

Twenty-one varieties of cancer fall within the scope of the study, and three treatments are being considered:

China's Tianwen-1 satellite orbiting Mars has finished photographing the entire surface of the Red Planet.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) launched Tianwen-1, which translates to "quest for heavenly truth," on July 23rd, 2020, consisting of six separate spacecraft: an orbiting satellite, two deployable cameras, a lander, a remote camera, and the Zhurong rover. The orbiter circled Mars 1,344 times to complete its primary mission of imaging the planet, contributing to the 1,040 gigabytes of raw scientific data it has captured so far.

The data collected by the Tianwen-1 orbiter has been processed by scientists back on Earth and is now in the hands of researchers for further analysis. Tianwen-1 marks the third successful attempt in history to send an orbiter to Mars and to have a rover land on the planet in the same mission, the first two being NASA's Viking 1 and 2 missions in 1975. The Zhurong rover's successful operation on Mars also makes it the third nation to land working spacecraft on the planet.

Samsung has just announced the industry's first GDDR6 memory at 24Gbps, ushering in a new era of crazy high memory bandwidth but not the higher-end, and more power-hungry GDDR6X memory standard.

The new Samsung GDDR6 DRAM at 24Gbps is being built on Samsung's new 10nm EUV technology, with the company saying that the new memory is "designed to significantly advance the graphics performance for next-generation graphics cards (Video Graphics Arrays), laptops and game consoles, as well as artificial intelligence-based applications and high-performance computing (HPC) systems".

Samsung's new 24Gbps GDDR6 is 30% faster than the previous 18Gbps GDDR6 standard, where at full speed the new 24Gbps of GDDR6 will see memory bandwidth hitting 1.1TB/sec (1100GB/sec). At this speed, Samsung points out that it's fast enough to transfer around 275 x 1080p movies in a single second.

Bill Gates has announced in a Twitter thread that he will be giving away all of his wealth and that he will drop off the world's richest people list.

Gates explained in a long Twitter thread that he believes many are viewing the world as a place that is growing progressively worse, and to reduce the pace of the worsening/mitigate its impact, Gates will be increasing the spending for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Microsoft founder says that the foundation was created in 2000 with his now ex-wife Melinda Gates and that the board has agreed to increase the foundation spending from nearly $6 billion a year to $9 billion by 2026.

BMW owners have expressed extreme displeasure at the recently unveiled plans from BMW to charge monthly for features such as car seat warming and cruise control.

BMW have already rolled out its new subscription plan in several international markets, with the new service available in the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, and more. The BMW UK website states the following, "Front Seat heating gets things nice and cozy in no time. Activation after purchase is quick and easy." The front seat heating is priced at $18 a month, and that will be what BMW owners will need to pay to access this feature in their own vehicle.

Owners also have the option of paying $180 per year for the heated seats, or $300 a year for a three-year subscription, or $415 for "unlimited access". Heating isn't the only feature that BMW is slapping a monthly subscription on, as the car manufacturer in some markets is charging $42 a month for adaptive cruise control, and $12 a month for the feature that automatically switches off high beams. Furthermore, BMW will charge owners $265 to use Apple CarPlay.

Reports indicate that cryptocurrency investors that have felt the wrath of the market downturn are going to an online screaming therapy group.

The Guardian has reported that several thousand cryptocurrency investors are banding together in a group called the "Bear Market Screaming Therapy Group", run by the founder named Giulio, who refused to provide his last name. Giulio spoke to the publication and said that the Telegram group has many members who are simply crying, sobbing, expressing grief or howling at their investment loss. According to Giulio, he "decided not to ban them. I felt bad".

The group currently has 3,315 members and is an example of the extreme pain some cryptocurrency investors feel as the price of Bitcoin barely holds on to the $20,000 price point. The world's most valuable cryptocurrency collapsed in June by diving by 47% to the current average price point of approximately $20,000, which has led to groups such as the Bear Market Screaming Therapy Group forming as investors didn't withdraw before the downward began.

Astronomers are keeping an eye on an 11-mile-wide comet called Comet C/2017, or K2, as it makes its closest approach to Earth on July 14.

The comet was originally found back in 2017 when it was approximately 1.5 billion miles away from the Sun, between the planets Saturn and Uranus, and now the mysterious icy body is moving toward the inner solar system where it will make an approach to Earth. At first, researchers believed that K2 was 99 miles wide, but after follow-up observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, it was established that K2 is approximately 11 miles wide.

Notably, most comets are 0.62 - 1.86 miles in diameter, which means K2 is still an extremely large comet, approximately two Mount Everest's stacked on top of each other . As for the mystery behind K2, researchers are still perplexed at how the comet has remained "active" throughout its long journey through cold space. For those that don't know, when a comet is "active," it's producing a halo or coma, which is the iconic tail and glow. Comet's typically become more active as they approach the Sun as the heat from our local star heats up the frozen exterior producing a gas.

NASA recently released the first batch of colored images snapped by the highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Webb's extremely powerful instruments are already giving researchers more insight into star formation, galaxies, and more. NASA recently took to its blog to shine a spotlight on Webb's first scientific operation images, and the next-generation space telescope certainly didn't disappoint as NASA states Webb has already produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.

If you have been keeping up with the news surrounding Webb, it's likely you have already seen the first set of colored images. However, there is one more image you may not have seen as it was published inside the JWST commissioning report, a document detailing all of the tests carried out on Webb's scientific instruments. The image shows Jupiter, and according to New Scientist, our solar system's biggest planet was a target for Webb's calibration to make sure the observatory was capable of tracking fast-moving objects.

You may have heard about the Vault 7 leaks from WikiLeaks back in 2017, where I was reporting about it back then... a cache of tools and exploits that the US government-funded CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) use to hack into everyone's computers, iPhones and Android devices, Samsung smart TVs and more.

Well, a jury in New York convicted 33-year-old ex-CIA engineer Joshua Schulte on 9 charges, which has now become the single largest leak in CIA history. Schulte worked inside of the Operations Support Branch (OSB) of the CIA, where he reportedly built hacking tools, turning prototypes that he was working on into real exploits that were capable of monitoring, or stealing information from the device that it was on.

Investigators secured evidence against Schulte through his own holes in his personal security, where the ex-CIA engineer stored the passwords for his accounts on his phones, and then investigators used that to access his encrypted storage.

Intel's new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs seem to be out like candy in some parts of the world, although we're still many months away from their release... we have a full review on the Intel Core i9-13900K processor.

The new Intel Core i9-13900K processor is the new flagship Raptor Lake CPU from the company, a new 24-core, 32-thread that in its pre-production sample state, has 125W and 250W (MTB) power limits and is ready for the world of overclocking.

The review is coming from Chinese reviewer Extreme Player, with the new Intel Core i9-13900K "Raptor Lake" CPU installed into an ASUS ROG Z690 Extreme motherboard and DDR5 memory at DDR5-6400. The CPU was cooled by a Thermalright AIO Frozen Magic 360 cooler, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 1500W PSU.

Tesla just fired around 200 people from its Autopilot department, shutting an office down in San Mateo, California, and now Tesla's head of AI has left the company.

Andrej Karpathy, Tesla's head of AI, and one of the key people behind the development of Tesla's industry-leading Autopilot software, announced over Twitter that he is leaving Tesla. Karpathy tweeted: "It's been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways. In that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum".

He continued: "I have no concrete plans for what's next but look to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education".