Latest News - Page 1090

The new feature was unveiled during the Re:Mars conference held by Amazon in Las Vegas on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022.

Amazon is currently developing the ability of Alexa to emulate a person's voice while needing less than a minute of recorded audio to do so. This will supposedly imbue Alexa with more "human attributes of empathy and affect," improving interactions with the virtual assistant. The main hurdle to developing the feature arises from having to learn how to create a "high-quality voice" with only snippets of audio, presumably collected by Alexa itself, instead of hours of studio recordings.

The Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in the Rostov Oblast of Russia was struck by a drone, potentially of Ukrainian origin, on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022.

Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the supposed attack. However, it has been using drones throughout its ongoing conflict with Russia, notably, 'suicide' drone models like the Switchblade have been sent to the country by the United States. The governor of the Rostov region, Vasily Golubev, confirmed the incident and noted that the remains of two drones had been found in the territory of the Novoshakhtinsk refinery.

Oil refinery workers captured the drone's approach and impact on video, with one asking "do you think it's Ukrainian?" and another responding with "of course not." The Rostov Oblast borders with Ukraine, but Russia has not admitted to any incidents of conflict crossing into its territories. According to The Guardian, no one was injured in the explosion at the refinery.

Elon Musk sat down for a virtual interview at the Qatar Economic Forum on June 21, where he discussed the current state of the market and cryptocurrencies.

The cryptocurrency market has been bleeding since November 2021, when Bitcoin reached its all-time high of $69,000. Since then, the world's most valuable cryptocurrency has been slowly decreasing in price until early June, when massive sell-offs occurred, causing Bitcoin to dive to approximately $20,000. As with most downturns in the cryptocurrency market, the price of Bitcoin drags down the price of almost every other cryptocurrency coin - Dogecoin being one of these coins.

Last week reports surfaced over a lawsuit that was filed by Keith Johnson, who claims that Elon Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla were involved in a racketeering scheme that manipulated the price of Dogecoin. Johnson claims that the "Defendants falsely and deceptively claim that Dogecoin is a legitimate investment when it has no value at all," and seeks to prove that Dogecoin is a form of gambling and doesn't hold any use. Notably, Johnson is seeking damages that total $258 billion.

A former NASA administrator has said that Elon Musk was motivated to start SpaceX after a Russian engineer literally spat on him.

The former NASA administrator is Lori Garver, who wrote in her memoirs how Elon Musk drew his inspiration to create SpaceX, and that the now richest individual in the world decided to launch after he was disrespected by a Russian in 2001. Garver described the incident between Musk and the engineer in "Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age," which was recently published on June 21.

Garver wrote that the act of spitting on his shoes "completely offended" Musk, and that on his flight back home, he decided he was going to create his own rocket company that would eventually be their competition. Garver described the incident as "If Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships, this was the spit that launched a thousand spaceships."

Astronomers have sifted through data acquired by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and have honed in on one star called G238-44.

A team of astronomers looked through Hubble data, along with other observations from various NASA telescopes, and studied the white dwarf star G238-44. The analysis researchers found evidence of a water reservoir after they scanned the elemental properties of the white dwarf star. This led the team to believe that the star must be siphoning debris from nearby objects.

For those that don't know, a white dwarf star is a star that was once like our sun, but it has exhausted all of its nuclear energy. The closest white dwarf star to our sun is Sirius B, located approximately 8.6 light years away. As for G238-44, the astronomers believe that the corpse star is siphoning material from a nearby asteroid belt as well as icy celestial bodies, which leads the researchers to suggest that water may be more common in distant planetary systems than initially anticipated.

The company behind the adult website Pornhub is facing scrutiny after allegations surfaced regarding the number of staff the company has laid off.

Reports surfaced on Tuesday when Reuters wrote that MindGeek, the owner of Pornhub, said that two top executives who ran the adult for more than 10 years had resigned but will remain shareholders. In 2021 MindGeek was hit with a lawsuit that claimed the company had broken federal sex trafficking and child pornography laws, which resulted in several payment companies such as Mastercard and Visa temporarily halting payment methods.

The recent allegations of layoffs come from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a non-profit that focuses on exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation, who said that its "no surprise" that two top Pornhub executives have "fled" the company after it's facing several lawsuits filed on behalf of sex trafficking survivors "whose abuse has been shown on Pornhub."

Reports have surfaced regarding the Biden administration seeking advice from Elon Musk's Tesla on climate policies.

The reports indicate that President Joe Biden's administration has tried to get into contact with Elon Musk's Tesla to discuss new climate policies that will allow for electric vehicle manufacturers to receive some form of climate subsidy. White House officials, along with Tesla executives, have reportedly met on several occasions to discuss policy changes that were linked to the Renewable Fuel Standard - a federal policy that requires a certain percentage of fuel sold throughout the US to be renewable.

Reuters reports that Tesla and the White House are discussing a way to include electric vehicles in the Renewable Fuel Standard. These discussions between Tesla and the White House reportedly date back to Biden's first day of office, where he is said to have attempted communication with Musk/Tesla. As for Tesla itself, Musk described the hardships of running a car manufacturing company and said that the company is entirely focused on avoiding bankruptcy.

NASA has taken to its blog to give an update on the progress being made on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The next-generation space telescope was launched on December 25, 2021, and after arriving in its designated location, it has been performing calibrations to meet the required levels of performance needed to achieve its science goals.

NASA writes on its blog that the space telescope performed two additional mirror alignment steps in March 2022 and that the Webb team can now confirm that the telescope's optical performance has now reached, and in some instances surpassed, the levels required for coming science missions. NASA explains that the below image was taken using a special lens inside of Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument, which was specifically designed to snap images of the space telescopes' mirrors and not the stars.

ASUS is preparing its totally bonkers new gaming smartphone with the soon-to-be-announced ROG Phone 6 gaming smartphone. We've got some of the leaked specs, and man they're pretty crazy.

Inside, the new ASUS ROG Phone 6 gaming smartphone will reportedly rock Qualcomm's fastest Snapdragon 8+ Gen1 processor, a crazy 18GB of RAM, and an FHD+ display with a Samsung-made OLED panel, cranking at a gaming-smooth 165Hz.

In a new leak, Digital Chat Station said that the new ASUS ROG Phone 6 gaming smartphone would have a 6.78-inch FHD+ 165Hz OLED Samsung "direct screen", a Snapdragon 8 Gen1 processor, 18GB of RAM, a 6000mAh dual battery with 65W fast-charging support, a 64-megapixel "triple camera" system, under-screen fingerprint sensor, measure in at 10.39mm thick, and it'll weigh 229g. It's a big boi gaming smartphone, that's for sure.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 Ti and GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards -- in Founders Edition form -- have been teased in some new renders. Just remember, this could be completely fake, so I've got a link here to make sure this is safe.

The new renders are courtesy of Moore's Law is Dead, with the alleged NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Ti Founders Edition, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition both shown off in their BFGPU goodness. NVIDIA will reportedly using a 3-slot, or 3.5-slot cooling design with more fins and more heat sink surface area with its new Ada Lovelace GPUs in the high-end RTX 4090 Ti and RTX 4090 designs.

In a new tweet about his video, Tom @ Moore's Law is Dead explains: "Tonight I share renders of the leaked #NVIDIA RTX 4090 Ti cooler, and break down what there is to learn about AD102 from said leak! 💚🧵 I also provide information about when you can expect decent Lovelace Volume this fall".

KIOXIA will be showcasing its next-gen, flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) that are optimizing Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) solutions, and in the words of KIOXIA "paving the way for the next wave of digital transformation".

We'll see it all unveiled at HPE Discover 2022 between June 28-29, but before that we've got news that KIOXIA has been collaborating with HPE on best-in-class storage solutions over the last few years. This spans from mobile, through to data center, through to enterprise.

KIOXIA explains that these new class of SAS SSDs will be doubling the performance of PCIe 4.0-based SSDs, as well as new form factors that enable high performance and density. KIOXIA will have both live demos of its new HPE-beefed storage solutions, as well as two breakout sessions that will be focusing on its new products, and its longstanding collaboration with HPE that "showcases the companies' leadership in storage technology".

We all know Apple is working on a new AR/MR headset of some kind, but now Apple CEO Tim Cook has a little more to say about the fruity giant's first foray into a headset.

In a recent interview with China Daily, Apple CEO Tim Cook talked about the future of AR and that Apple is excited about augmented reality (AR), not only that but that the "critical thing" to any technology including AR, is "putting humanity at the center of it".

Tim Cook explained: "I am incredibly excited about AR as you might know, and the critical thing to any technology including AR is putting humanity at the center of it. And that is what we focus on every day. Right now, as an example, we have over 14,000 ARKit apps in the App Store, which provide AR experiences for millions of people around the world".

It was only days ago that we were reporting on the world's first PlayStation 5 slim -- at least kinda -- with a new custom water-cooled design that looks awesome. But now... we have the world's largest Xbox Series X console.

The world's largest Xbox Series X console was built by engineer Michael Pick, which is a massive behemoth: 600% bigger than the actual physical Xbox Series X console. Not only that, but it is over 6.5 feet tall (2m) and over 3 feet wide (1m) and weighs in at over 250 pounds (112kg).

It's not just some fancy huge Xbox Series X console, but it is actually fully functional as well -- inside, there is a real Xbox Series X console -- an Arduino unit that lets you use the gigantic buttons on the ridiculously large Xbox Series X console, which actually work -- very cool to see.

AMD is celebrating the first anniversary of the first-gen FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 (FSR 1.0) technology, by making its next-gen FSR 2.0 technology open source, and available to download right now.

AMD has now published the source code of FSR 2.0 on GitHub, which should see many more FSR 2.0-capable titles in the future. AMD explains that with the introduction of FSR 2 "our temporal upscaling solution earlier this year, there are now over 110 games that support FSR. The rate of uptake has been very impressive - FSR is AMD's fastest adopted software gaming technology to date".

With over 110 games supporting FSR 1.0, there is now a dedicated FSR 2.0 page that also includes the FSR 2.0 API, the full C++, and HLSL source code behind it, with AMD adding that you'll "also discover our Cauldron-based sample and comprehensive API documentation to help you with your integration".

Despite offering distinct pay-to-win advantages in games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Ubisoft says it follows an internal "Fair Monetization" policy for its games.

Starting in 2017, Ubisoft became a digital-first company that started baking in live services and microtransactions into all of its games. Starting with Origins, then with Odyssey and now Valhalla, singleplayer-only Assassin's Creed games have seen monetized gear and storefronts. While Ubisoft's microtransactions have typically been controversial, the publisher says it follows what it calls a "Fair Monetization" charter to help guide its mTX practices.

In its recent 2021 annual report, Ubisoft outlined its monetization policies for investors. The company acknowledges that monetization carries risks of potentially "distorting the gaming experience" and could actually harm reputation, but says it is committed to "adopting monetization and engagement policies that respect the player experience and are sustainable over the long term."

343 Industries announces new armor cosmetics that are coming to Halo Master Chief Collection, and they look very similar to id's demon-slaughtering shooter.

In what can be aptly described as an identity crises, Halo is getting more non-canon armor sets that seem to borrow from other Microsoft franchises. 343i today revealed a sneak peek at MCC armor skins that look like they're borrowed right from Doom.

Similar to the cool-but-extremely-unfitting Greek and Norse mythology armor sets, the new demon skins are quizzical additions to the Master Chief Collection. According to 343i, the new skins aren't demonic, but are called "bioroid" and more like Guyver than Doomslayer. The armors are usable in Halo 2 Anniversary and may roll out with the new Spartan Points microtransaction store coming to MCC (yes, 343i is adding microtransactions to the Master Chief Collection).

Halo The Master Chief Collection is getting microtransactions, 343 Industries today announced.

It's finally happening. After 8 years, microtransactions are coming to Halo MCC. 343 has confirmed that a new premium currency called Spartan Points is coming to the Master Chief Collection that will allow players to directly purchase cosmetics and skins throughout the six-game collection.

"For players who are new to the MCC, or who may not have dedicated much time specifically to unlocking items during the seasonal updates, or are simply completionists looking to catch the last outstanding items they need, we are internally exploring a potential new feature for the future in the form of purchasable Spartan Points," 343i's Alex Wakeford said in a recent post.

Blizzard continues its support for World of Warcraft Classic, this time with Wrath of the Lich King's expansion release from way back in 2008.

WoW Classic has helped revitalize the flagging MMORPG and provide a separate monetization platform for Blizzard. Right now Blizzard needs all the help it can get; the publisher's MAUs have dropped significantly to 22 million monthly active users in Q1'22, the lowest point in the last six years. New WoW Classic content like the Wrath of the Lich King should help boost these numbers.

To kick things off, Blizzard has opened up beta invites for the Wrath of the Lich King over Battle.net: "The Wrath of the Lich King Classic beta test has begun! Over the course of the test, we'll be inviting opt-in beta testers, community veterans, press, fansites, and friends and family to check out the upcoming classic expansion and give us feedback," Blizzard said on the announcement post.

Square Enix lays out peculiar-sounding NFT plans that include using non-fungible tokens to tell stories in its upcoming games.

In a recent shareholders meeting spotted by Suzuki Online and Siliconera, Square Enix talked about its new strategy with NFTs. The company is going ahead with its blockchain entertainment segment but plans are still early.

According to slides that we ran through an online PDF machine translator, Square Enix has ambitious to create NFTs that tell some sort of story. The company has plans on "launching a new brand/IP of creative NFT that emphasizes world view and story." There's no further details on exactly what this means.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) are collaborating to bring nuclear power generation to space, particularly the Moon.

The two agencies have awarded contracts to three companies, each valued at roughly five million dollars. The money is to be put toward design concepts for a "40-kilowatt class fission power system planned to last at least 10 years in the lunar environment." The selected companies are Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, and a joint venture between Intuitive Machines and X-Energy called IX, and their work will benefit NASA's future Artemis missions.

The nuclear fission systems could be ready to launch and land on the Moon by the decade's end to demonstrate their viability. A fission system would be smaller and more lightweight than other power systems and could provide power regardless of location, access to sunlight, or other environmental conditions. Developing technology for fission surface power systems will also help NASA facilitate development of nuclear propulsion systems for rockets.