Latest News - Page 1085

Halo Infinite's forge mode will let players scale the size of in-game objects...which should lead to absolutely hilarious custom games.

New leaked footage of Halo Infinite's forge mode has me incredibly excited for the future of the game. Forge looks like it could save the live shooter and pretty much create a stream of never-ending player-made content (kind of like Halo MCC with its customs browser, which is absolutely epic).

We already know that Halo Infinite's forge mode is basically a games engine that lets you customize a million different parameters of individual maps. One new feature shows that Infinite's forge will let players scale the size and scope of in-game objects, meaning you can create massive master chiefs and set them on the map. This is reminiscent of one of Fallout 4's coolest console commands that lets players (or any other NPC or object) become gigantic or tiny.

Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of holding a sword while speaking to employees about their duties and completion timelines.

The news comes from former Facebook coder Noah Kagan, who was the 30th employee to be hired at Facebook and is currently the CEO of AppSumo. Kagan has taken to TikTok to reveal some interesting pieces of information about the early days of Facebook, and the activities of some of the company's most prominent members.

In the above video, Kagan states that he played poker with now-billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Facebook's first outside investor. Kagan says that Thiel requested his money back after losing the poker game. Additionally, Kagan says that Zuckerberg paid for all of the employees' parking tickets, which was at the time a very appreciated perk at the company. Notably, Kagan says that Zuckerberg was "bringing around a katana sword because he didn't like the code" - referring to Facebook's current code.

OpenSea has warned its users that they may be at risk to a scammer that has hacked the company from the inside.

The world's largest NFT marketplace has taken to its blog to announce that an employee at Customer.io, which is the company's email vendor, used their employee access to download and share email addresses from OpenSea users, along with any subscribers to the OpenSea newsletter. OpenSea has stated that an investigation has been launched into the matter and that law enforcement has already been contacted regarding the hack.

Since the hack was predominately email address-targeted, users should be very careful about being contacted via email by anyone who is stating they are an OpenSea employee. The NFT platform explains that the email address malicious actors will use will look very similar to the official email domain - 'official email address domain = "opensea.io". The platform stresses in its safety and recommendations that it will only ever contact users from the domain "opensea.io" and that any other variation of the email is illegitimate.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO took a several-day hiatus from Twitter but how now returned in a series of tweets following his birthday celebrations.

Musk recently celebrated his 51st birthday on June 28, and coincidently the world's richest individual managed to pass a milestone number of Twitter followers on the same day - a nice little birthday present. Musk's official Twitter account reached 100 million followers on June 28, and has since climbed to 100.2 million followers, a gain of approximately 200,000 new followers in just four days.

Musk stopped posting on Twitter on June 22 and seemingly took several days to himself to enjoy his birthday and work on his myriad of other projects. He has now returned on June 2 by firstly posting a meme followed by a simple, "Feeling... perhaps... a little bored?"

Skyrim Together Reborn, an updated version of the popular Skyrim co-op mod, will be released next week.

What if you could play Skyrim with friends? Modders have found a solution and created Skyrim Together, a co-op mod that allows multiple people to team up online and dungeon delve, battle dragons, and explore the Nordic continent. The mod's developers have now announced that the upgraded version will soon be available for Skyrim Special Edition owners.

"After a long development process, we are excited to announce that Skyrim Together Reborn is almost ready for release. It will release next Friday, July 8th, at 16:00 GMT. The mod will be published on Nexus," the devs announced on Reddit.

Sony's first-party developer Sucker Punch confirms that it is not working on any new games in key legacy franchises.

Contrary to countless reports, Sucker Punch today confirmed it is not developing new Sly Cooper or InFAMOUS games. Various rumors suggested that Sucker Punch could revive these landmark franchises to celebrate their 25th anniversary, but that's not happening.

"As our games continue to grow in scale and complexity, they require the full attention of our studio. With our focus on our current project, we have no plans to revisit inFAMOUS or Sly Cooper right now, and no other studio is currently working on projects related to those franchises either," the studio said in an announcement post.

A study on astronaut bone loss titled "Incomplete recovery of bone strength and trabecular microarchitecture at the distal tibia 1 year after return from long duration spaceflight" has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers studied seventeen international astronauts, comprising fourteen males and three females, before they went to space, upon returning to Earth, and at six and twelve-month intervals following their return. They scanned the astronauts' tibia (shinbone) and radius (forearm) to determine their resistance to fracturing, known as the failure load, bone mineral content, and thickness.

Overall, the average result for 16 of the astronauts was the incomplete recovery of their shinbones from bone loss sustained in space after one year back on Earth. However, the forearm did recover completely. The average pre-flight shinbone failure load was 10,579 newtons of force, which dropped by 152 newtons to 10,427 newtons, while bone mineral density reduced by 4.5 milligrams per cubic centimeter from 326.8 mg/cm³ pre-flight.

TSMC is having trouble getting engineers and keeping them on, with the company recently admitting it is struggling to retain new hires and that Taiwan's issues with power and water supplies add to the issues.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) released its sustainability report on Thursday, underlining that the global chip shortages have hurt customer satisfaction and that TSMC has been struggling to fill customer orders. TSMC has also had issues retaining new staffers, with a "fierce talent war that is gripping the chip industry".

TSMC said that its fresher employees that have been with the company for under 12 months had a turnover rate of 17.6%, missing the internal goal that TSMC had of 15% and is far, far worse than the average turnover rate of 6.8% within TSMC. The Taiwanese semiconductor giant wants to bring those numbers down, with the new hire turnover rate of around 10% by 2030.

A study on the bacteria titled "Biosynthesis of polycyclopropanated high energy biofuels" has been published in the journal Joule.

Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have found a way to produce jet fuel by harvesting a specific molecule created by streptomyces, a common bacteria found in soil. Streptomyces synthesize an energy-rich carbon molecule called Jawsamycin, named after the movie 'Jaws,' that is created by the bacteria as it metabolizes glucose.

Any molecule which requires a large amount of energy to produce can subsequently be broken up to release that energy. Jawsamycin is a large molecule containing multiple triangular cyclopropane groups, which require much more energy to hold together than open carbon chains. The researchers hope to scale up their process for producing Jawsamycin to avoid waiting millions of years for more fossil fuels to launch rockets with, opting for a more sustainable alternative.

Mark Zuckerberg has informed Meta employees that company performance goals will be increasing in order to discover underperforming staff.

Reuters has learned that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken to Meta staff during a recent Q&A meeting where he said that Meta will be focusing on plugging any financial holes following slower than anticipated revenue growth. Zuckerberg explained that he will be introducing new performance targets for employees that will be harsh as the company will axe employees that cannot meet them. The Meta CEO said that, realistically speaking, "there are probably a bunch of people at the company that shouldn't be here".

Audio from the Q&A was heard by Reuters, and Zuckerberg described the increasing performance goals will be "turning up the heat a little bit" where employees may realize that Meta isn't the right place for them, "and that self-selection is OK with me," said Zuckerberg. To illustrate how Zuckerberg is reeling back Meta's aggressive growth amid unexpectedly reduced revenue, the company brought its hiring target of 10,000 workers all the way down to 6,000/7,000.

Mojo Vision has developed and recently tested its prototype smart contact lens called the Mojo Lens.

Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins completed the company's smart contact lens's first ever on-eye demonstration on June 23rd, 2022, which provided a fully featured augmented reality (AR) experience. The lens creates an AR user interface (UI) that can provide information throughout the day and utilizes eye-tracking. Perkins used the lens' compass feature, viewed images, and read the text provided by an on-screen teleprompter.

NASA is gearing up for science operations to begin on the almost-ready James Webb Space Telescope that launched from Earth on Christmas day, 2021.

The $10 billion observatory has been in development since 2004 has been plagued with numerous issues, but the task was finally completed and Webb launched from Earth and sent a million miles away into a specific orbit around the Sun. The observatory is outfitted with next-generation instruments that officials says will "unfold the universe" by allowing researchers to see far further back in time than what was previously possible.

Not only will Webb be able to see further than any space telescope before it, NASA has also equipped it with planet-examining instruments that are primarily designed to observe exoplanets and identify their atmosphere's.

The paper titled "Can GPT-3 write an academic paper on itself, with minimal human input?" has been uploaded to the French HAL preprint server.

Swedish scientist Almira Osmanovic Thunstrom working for OpenAI, has written an article describing an instruction that she provided to the company's artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, GPT-3. The instruction was simple: "Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text." GPT-3 proceeded to generate text in the appropriate academic language with relevant citations.

GPT-3 is relatively new but has already generated its own news articles and books. Its recency also means there are few academic works published about it to reference, prompting Thunstrom's suggestion to have it write its paper on itself. Other topics would allow it to refine its work to avoid inaccuracies due to the wealth of data available. However, any mistakes it might make in a paper on itself would be of less consequence and serve as more of an interesting experimental result.

TSMC is seeing its 3 biggest customers revising their orders all at the same time: AMD, Apple, and NVIDIA for their next-gen RDNA 3, iPhone 14, and Ada Lovelace products, respectively.

NVIDIA is the big one that we'll tackle in this article because they're in a real precarious spot: NVIDIA has been bedding Samsung for a while now, leaving the South Korean arms for the arms of Taiwan and back to its old faithful: TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) for its next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU architecture and upcoming GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards... well, they've hit a snag.

According to the latest report out of DigiTimes and translated by @RetiredEngineer on Twitter: "Faced with abrupt drop-off in PC demand and customers' inventory adjustment, AMD and NVIDIA has no choice by to reduce orders".

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has delivered its verdict on the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.

The decision restricts the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to curb climate change and help the nation reach climate targets. The final ruling was 6-3, determining that the EPA does not have the authority to push broad limits across the country without receiving approval directly from the U.S. Congress.

West Virginia led nineteen states and various power companies against the EPA to prevent it from capping carbon dioxide emissions and fining those out of line. The EPA originally issued its Clean Power Plan in 2015, setting emissions targets for states that included limiting carbon emissions in 2022 while targeting a 32 percent reduction by 2030.

The Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) market has taken a dive following the massive cryptocurrency market crash that is currently being experienced.

Bitcoin's price reached an all-time high of $69,000 back in November 2021, and since then, the world's most popular cryptocurrency has been slowly decreasing in price until it fell off a cliff in early June, causing a bloodbath of red candles to sweep the charts. The crash of Bitcoin has dragged down the entire market as a whole, with many individuals seeing dwindling prices across the majority of coins and deciding to pull their money out of the market until it's a "safer" time to reinvest it.

The NFT market is no different, with now even large projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club experiencing a 30% reduction in floor prices in just 30 days. According to Pedro Herrera, head of research at blockchain data-tracker DappRadar, who spoke to Bloomberg, the "NFT market has fallen off the cliff this June", and its become apparent that traders are looking for "safer" places to invest their money. However, some investors in the space believe that this overall downturn in the cryptocurrency and NFT market, in particular, are a natural result of any new market that has caused waves.

On January 15, 2022, an underwater volcano erupted, that caused a violent explosion that shook the island of Tonga.

The underwater volcano named the Hunga Tonga is a submarine volcano that is located approximately 40 miles north of Tonga's capital, Nuku'alofa. Upon eruption, the massive underwater volcano immediately created a four-foot-tall tsunami that devastated the Tongan islands, wiping out most houses and structures. The Tongan government declared the event an "unprecedented disaster".

The explosion from the volcano was so large that it was detected in space by a NASA satellite. The above video was captured by the GOES West Earth-observing satellite that is operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and it showcases a large cloud of smoke suddenly erupting. The large plume of smoke reached 36 miles in altitude, and the power of the explosion was estimated to be ten megatons of TNT exploding, or more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

Arm has just announced its next-gen flagship GPU with a really interesting name that I like the sound of more and more as I see it: Immortalis.

The new Arm Immortalis-G715 GPU is the successor to Arm's super-successful Mali GPU -- which has shipped 8 billion GPUs to be precise -- packing hardware-based ray tracing (RT), variable rate shading (VRS), and more. Arm says that its new Immortalis-G715 GPU will support ray tracing and variable rate shading across all of its Immortalis GPUs.

Arm's new Immortalis-G715 GPU is the first Arm GPU to feature hardware-based ray tracing support, designed specifically for mobile. We have ray tracing on the PC and consoles and have had it for a while now, but Arm is wanting to get ray tracing support into smartphones and now it's on its way.

Samsung has announced that it has kicked off the initial production of its next-gen 3nm process node, using Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture.

This is the first time Samsung's new Multi-Bridge-Channel FET (MBCFET), their new GAA technology, "defies the performance limitations of FinFET". It defies those performance limitations of FinFET by improving power efficiency by reducing the supply voltage level, while boosting performance through increasing drive current capability.

Dr. Siyoung Choi, President and Head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics explains: "Samsung has grown rapidly as we continue to demonstrate leadership in applying next-generation technologies to manufacturing, such as foundry industry's first High-K Metal Gate, FinFET, as well as EUV. We seek to continue this leadership with the world's first 3nm process with the MBCFET™. We will continue active innovation in competitive technology development and build processes that help expedite achieving maturity of technology".

AYANEO has just teased its next-gen gaming handheld, which is also the world's first gaming handheld system that will include either Intel or AMD discrete graphics cards.

The new AYANEO NEXT 2 will include an Intel CPU and Intel GPU, or an AMD CPU and AMD GPU together, for the first time in history. AYANEO CEO Arther Zhang confirmed the news himself, with the AYANEO NEXT 2 being the first to use a non-integrated GPU -- a discrete GPU -- inside of one of its designs, giving gamers the choice between Intel and AMD.

AYANEO will be using an Intel Alder Lake CPU with an Intel DG2 Mobile GPU for its Intel-powered AYANEO NEXT 2 handheld gaming system, while the AMD-powered version will include an AMD "6000 series" CPU and an AMD 6000 series mobile GPU.