Latest News - Page 1124

Sony should revive PlayStation Home to serve its new plans for the metaverse.

Sony has interesting ideas for the metaverse. The Japanese giant sees the metaverse as a big online network that could merge media, services, and social interactions. Sony is well-suited with this plan because it has a wealth of games IPs, music licenses, produced films and TV shows, and rights to anime under its Crunchyroll streamer.

"The Metaverse is at the same time a social space and a live network space where games, music, movies, and anime intersect and expand," Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida said in a recent corporate strategy meeting.

Sony confirms that it plans to support the metaverse in its own unique way.

The metaverse offers different opportunities for each companies. Some want to use it to peddle NFTs and play-to-earn blockchain games. Others see it as a great avenue for monetization. Sony plans to use the metaverse as a grand convergence of its multimedia businesses.

In a recent corporate strategy meeting, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida gave a brief but telling look at the company's metaverse ideals. Sony's metaverse ambitions are based around immersion through the use of its powerful and flexible technologies that span gaming, music, sports, and even film and TV shows.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is still roaming the frontier with strong sales, and it did so well that even Take-Two Interactive was surprised.

In its recent FY22 earnings call, Take-Two Interactive said that Red Dead Redemption 2 "exceeded our expectations" thanks to continued sales growth. The legendary outlaw tale has sold 44 million copies worldwide since its launch in 2018, with 2 million copies sold during Q4.

"Results for the series were notably above our expectations for the period, which is further proof of the ongoing popularity of Rockstar's blockbuster entertainment experiences," Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said.

Techland announces that it is working on a new IP set in a fantasy world, but Dying Light 2 will continue being supported.

Dying Light developer Techland is burying its dead and venturing to a brave new world of sword and sorcery. The studio has revealed tentative plans for its next big fantasy-fueled game. Like Dying Light, the new fantasy IP is an action RPG set in a sprawling open world.

Techland's new IP is built from the ground up for next-gen hardware and is described as a fantasy epic, and the studio is ramping up its teams for the mysterious project.

AMD's next-gen RDNA 3 graphics architecture will be led by the new Navi 31 GPU, which has changed specifications according to the very, very latest leaks.

Navi 31 is now reportedly packing a wider 384-bit memory bus, up from the 256-bit memory bus from previous rumors... while also packing 24GB of GDDR6. Navi 31 has been mentioned with a 256-bit memory bus + 32GB GDDR6 before, so this new SKU is interesting.

The newer Navi 31 rumored GPU specs would see the 384-bit memory bus not just increasing overall memory bandwidth over a 256-bit memory bus, but AMD would require fewer memory modules at the same time. This means that AMD and its AIB partners can make their Navi 31-based offerings cheaper, and require less cooling (which also helps with costs).

Officials have shared images on Facebook of three women posing with the strangely shaped plants and have asked the public to refrain from picking them.

The Cambodian Ministry of Environment has asked the public to stop picking the rare plant species, writing in its Facebook post that what the three women in the included images are doing is "wrong", "and please don't do it again in the future!". LiveScience spoke to Jeremy Holden, a freelance wildlife photographer and the discoverer of the Nepenthes holdenii plant species, and Francois Mey, a botanical illustrator.

The two informed the publication that despite numerous reports of the plant in the photos being Nepenthes holdenii, it was more closely related to Nepenthes bokorensis, which is more widely found across southwest Cambodia. These Nepenthes plants survive by producing nectar that attracts insects that climb inside of the plant and become trapped in digestive fluids.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson spoke at a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing about space-related matters.

The hearing addressed the $26 billion budget request by U.S. President Biden to be allocated to NASA for the 2023 fiscal year, more than has ever been allocated to NASA. During the hearing, Nelson said he believes NASA is "in a space race with China" and that "they've done some impressive stuff," according to this series of tweets quoting Nelson.

However, he followed this up by saying, "yes, they are good at stealing," after citing their rover on Mars and their Tianhe space station. Nelson believes that cybersecurity needs to be taken more seriously in the government and private sector, likely to prevent their technologies from being used by others.

A study on the fusion fuel breakthrough titled "First-Principles Density Limit Scaling in Tokamaks Based on Edge Turbulent Transport and Implications for ITER" has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Physicists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, or EPFL) have updated one of the foundational laws governing nuclear fusion research since 1988, the Greenwald limit, named after Martin Greenwald. They have shown that much more hydrogen fuel can safely be used in fusion reactors.

Nuclear fusion (the process of fusing two atomic nuclei, typically of hydrogen, and releasing large amounts of energy) experiments are conducted within reactors called tokamaks. The tokamak is designed to contain the plasma created from the fusion fuel, in this case, hydrogen atoms, which is heated to about ten times the temperature of the sun's core.

New estimations show that the upcoming Jupiter-3 geostationary communications satellite will be the heaviest commercial geostationary satellite ever launched.

Jupiter-3, also known as Echostar 24, is being built by Maxar Technologies for Hughes Network Systems, a subsidiary of EchoStar. The satellite was scheduled to launch at the end of 2022, after initially being planned to launch mid-way through the year, but delays to several Maxar spacecraft, including Jupiter-3, mean that it is now likely to launch in early 2023.

A study on the night-time solar development titled "Thermoradiative Power Conversion from HgCdtTe Photodiodes and Their Current-Voltage Characteristics" has been published in the journal ACS Photonics.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) managed to generate electricity using the energy from heat radiated as infrared light. The device used to generate power is called a thermoradiative diode, a semiconductor device made from materials used in night-vision goggles. Stanford University researchers were able generate electricity with solar panels last month with similar methods.

The end of operations for NASA's InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) Mars lander is due at the end of this year as it continues to lose power.

Since landing on Mars on November 26th, 2018, to measure seismic activity, InSight has remained powered by a pair of solar panels, each measuring about 7 feet (2.2 meters) wide. Its primary science mission was to be achieved within a year on Mars (almost two years on Earth) and having completed it, NASA has extended its mission.

However, InSight's solar panels are slowly accumulating Martian dust on their surfaces, reducing their power output from around 5,000 watt-hours each Martian day (sol) when InSight landed to roughly 500 watt-hours per sol. The InSight team now estimates that it will become inoperative by December 2022. The team will put the lander's robotic arm into its resting position, known as the retirement pose, for the last time later in May.

A new report from CNBC has revealed that Netflix plans to cut over a 100 employees from its company, with most of the staffers being located in the US.

According to a Netflix representative that spoke with CNBC, as a result of Netflix's slowing revenue growth, the company has been forced to reduce our cost growth, which has translated into 150 staffers being let go. Netflix's 150-employee cull represents just 2% of the company's 11,000 employees, with the majority of the cut staffers being US-based.

The representative explained that the decision to fire staff had been driven by "business needs rather than individual performance," and for that reason, it makes it especially difficult to "say goodbye to such great colleagues. We're working hard to support them through this very difficult transition". These staff reductions are hardly surprising considering the fall of Netflix's stock price following its forecast for future losses in the coming quarter.

In the wake of Elon Musk's announcement that he wants to find out how many fake accounts are on Twitter's platform, an audit has been done on a very influential Twitter account.

In a new report from Newsweek, an audit conducted by software company SparkToro found that nearly half of President Joe Biden's Twitter followers, which is currently at 22.2 million, are fake accounts. Notably, the software company found that 49.3% of accounts following Biden's "@POTUS" Twitter account were "fake followers". SparkToro defines a "fake follower" as "accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account's tweets (either because they're spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they're no longer active on Twitter)."

Twitter has estimated in its last 11 quarterly reports that approximately 5% of users are spam/fake accounts, which Musk has now thrown into question following several recent tweets where Musk has proposed new ways to estimate the number of bot accounts, and asked the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) to get involved. Furthermore, SparkToro found that 70.2% of Musk's 93.3 million Twitter followers are fake accounts.

Elon Musk is attempting to figure out how many Twitter users are bots and how many are authentic users.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO recently stated that the deal to purchase Twitter was temporarily put on hold while an investigation was conducted into how many fake, spam, illegal, or duplicate accounts are on Twitter. According to Twitter's latest numbers, the social media platform estimates that below 5% of Twitter's total accounts are bots, and if that number is found to be inaccurate, it may impact the $44 billion price tag in a way that Musk gets a discount.

Musk recently took to his Twitter account to publicly say that Twitter claims >95% of daily active users are real, unique humans. The Tesla CEO then asked his followers if anyone has that experience. Musk followed up by replying to a journalist that stated the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) should investigate Twitter's numbers to see if the company lied on its official filing with the regulatory body. Musk jokingly prodded the SEC by writing the below tweet.

Elon Musk has had bouts with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the past, and now he may be about to enter into the ring with them again following Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

In 2013 the SEC ruled that Twitter and other social media platforms are viable ways for publicly traded companies to disclose information that can affect share prices. In 2018, Elon Musk tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private, which caused Tesla's share price to skyrocket. The SEC went after Musk for his tweets which eventuated in Musk paying a $20 million fine, giving up his position as chairman of Tesla, and having information about Tesla pre-approved by colleagues at the company before publishing.

Now, an investor who has purchased more than 5% of a company's stock is forced to disclose their position within 10 days of the purchase. This SEC rule is put into place so other investors are aware that a potentially large investor has entered the scene and may be looking to gain a significant position or even take over. Musk waited 21 days to disclose his position of approximately 9.6%, which, when revealed, caused the price of Twitter's stock to skyrocket.

As reported yesterday, the US government conducted a public hearing with top military officials on UFOs, or as officials would prefer them to be called "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)".

During the hearing, which can be seen in full above, top Pentagon officials spoke to a House panel about UFO encounters and the risk they pose to national security. The hearing comes after a leaked military video of a UFO went viral, which eventuated into a large report on UFOs being released by the US military that stated the US had only tracked 144 encounters with UFOs.

However, there seem to be many more reports since then, as top Pentagon officials said during the hearing that the US military is "approximately 400" on record, a very sharp increase from the 144 recorded between 2004 and 2021. The spike in encounters can be attributed to the reduction in stigma attached to UFO sightings as a result of the 2021 report being released.

XMG has just announced their latest APEX 15 MAX desktop replacement laptop that is the world's first to pack AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs for the AM4 socket.

The new XMG APEX 15 MAX (E22) laptop supports AMD's flagship desktop CPUs in the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X, a B550-based chipset, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 graphics. XMG recommends the configuration using the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5700X, or Ryzen 5 5600X processors -- no matter the TDP of between 65W or 105W.

This is because the CPUs are operating within a PPT (Package Power Tracking) of up to 88W, so even the higher-end 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 5900X processor can run in the new XMG APEX 15 MAX (E22) laptop under AMD's ECO mode. XMG offers a 15.6-inch 1080p 240Hz IPS display, with the ability to hook up three external monitors.

ASUS has officially unveiled its new ROG Strix Scar 17 Special Edition gaming laptop, packing Intel's very latest Core i9-12950HX "Alder Lake-HX" processor with the CPU overclocked to a huge 5.2GHz when needed.

The Intel Core i9-12950HX processor has 8 Performance and 8 Efficiency cores, which boost up to 5.2GHz -- and an insane 175W of power, up from 65W -- when the GPU is disabled. This means for content creation it's perfect -- CPU cranking up to 5.2GHz -- while gaming-wise you've got the RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU.

NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU has a maximum TGP of 175W with Dynamic Boost, the highest wattage of any GPU used inside of a ROG laptop. There's a 17-inch display with the option of 1080p @ 360Hz or 1440p @ 240Hz, content creators and gamers shouldn't bother with the 1080p model, moving right into the 1440p panel (ASUS, it's disappointing to not see a 4K 120Hz option) on this high-end laptop.

ASUS has revealed some interesting information in their recent earnings report, with ASUS Co-CEO Sy Hsu explaining GPU demand for crypto miners is dying, while prices could stabilize soon, but maybe not.

ASUS's Co-CEO, Sy Hsu explained: "Because the demand for cryptocurrency mining on GPU shipments has been slowly coming down, the demand for graphics cards across the market is normalizing. Because the demand from cryptocurrency is disappearing, it's made us wonder if the pricing for GPUs will also normalize. In reality, the demand for gaming is still strong, so we still don't think we can necessarily meet all of the demand".

We've seen GPU prices skyrocketing over the last year or so, where prices were hitting 150-300% of their regular MSRP... but now, now they're floating back down to reality. This isn't just for one company, but rather both -- AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards are seeing most retailers and e-tailers pricing Radeon and GeForce GPUs at 5-10% above MSRP on average.

AMD's next-gen RDNA 3 architecture will debut later this year, with the introduction of the flagship Navi 31 GPU that we're now hearing is codenamed "Plum Bonito".

The new codename Plum Bonito GPU is the Navi 31 ASIC board according to leaker "Kepler", who recently said that the Navi 31-based purported Radeon RX 7950 XT graphics card will arrive on the next-gen PCIe 5.0 interface. We can also see that a Navi 31 board is reportedly called "Gemini" which could be a dual-GPU version of Navi 31 (workstation-class GPU possibly).

But if you look close, the next-next-gen Navi 41 GPU was teased in very early form as "gfx1200". AMD's current-gen Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards are based on the RDNA 2 GPU architecture, while next-gen Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards will be powered by the RDNA 3 GPU architecture. After that, we have the Radeon RX 8000 series powered by RDNA 4... of which we're now being teased.