Latest News - Page 1128

Aaaaand the fun continues... SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk has said that the Twitter acquisition deal is on hold, as he calls BS over Twitter's number of spam/fake accounts.

In a new tweet, Musk said: "Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users". Acquiring a company for tens of billions of dollars requires extensive research, documentation, proof, and a million other things... to find out that 10-20-30% of accounts of the second-largest social network in the world are fake or bots? Oh boy.

Musk replied to himself, adding that he is "still committed to the acquisition", while Mega founder Kim Dotcom tweeted that "30% bots, fake and spam accounts. Minimum". 30% of them wouldn't surprise me, and I think that would be across ALL social networks, not just Twitter... something I think we're all going to see very soon.

NASA has created a new video showing 22 X-ray binary systems containing black holes.

An X-ray binary system hosts a normal star and a collapsed star, either a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. X-rays are produced from the system as the normal star has matter pulled off it by the gravity of the dense, collapsed star when they come close enough together.

NASA's new animation features 22 such systems throughout the Milky Way and its nearest neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Each contains a normal star and a confirmed black hole. However, the size of the black holes is illustrated according to their mass, and so they appear much larger than they would otherwise relative to their companion stars and the accretion disk made from matter pulled off them.

A study on logic gates titled "Light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have developed a new kind of logic gate, the fundamental building block from which computers are made. Depending on the kind of logic gate and its rules, two inputs of any combination of 0 and 1 result in an output of either a 1 or 0. A single chip used in creating electronic components like processors and memory modules can contain billions of logic gates.

The newly developed logic gate, which demonstrates the viability of "lightwave electronics," works orders of magnitudes faster than traditional logic gates. Ordinary logic gates have an input processing delay on the order of nanoseconds, but the new logic gates process inputs in only femtoseconds, a million times shorter than nanoseconds.

NASA's Curiosity rover took the new image at the Greenheugh Pediment on Mars.

Curiosity captured the image with its Mast Camera (Mastcam) on Sol 3466 of its mission at 07:58:16 UTC on May 7th, 2022. The photo appears to feature a perfectly excavated doorway in the side of the Martian landscape. The above panorama image is a composite made from individual shots taken by Curiosity in the same area on the 3466th Martian day of its mission.

Reddit users have been quick to point out the spectacle is more likely a shear fracture, resulting when a strain in the rocks causes part of it to break off. Such a fracture may be due to temblors, or Marsquakes. Only days before the image was taken, on May 4th, 2022, NASA's Insight Mars Lander recorded a magnitude 5 Marsquake, the largest ever detected on the planet.

A study on the plants growing in lunar soil titled "Plants grown in Apollo lunar regolith present stress-associated transcriptomes that inform prospects for lunar exploration" has been published in the journal Communications Biology.

NASA astronauts collected the lunar soil from the moon during the Apollo 11 and 12 missions in 1969 and Apollo 17 in 1972. Only twelve grams of the soil was loaned to researchers from the University of Florida (UF) by NASA to experiment with after they applied multiple times to receive some. With such little material, their small-scale experiment involved growing seeds from the Arabidopsis plant in the lunar soil and Earthen soil for a control group.

The price of GPUs have been dropping massively in the last few weeks, which has been an awesome thing for gamers (a much-needed relief in the Bizarro world of GPU pricing). But it's forced AMD to do something kinda foolish...

AMD has pre-announced its new "Raise the Game" bundle, which it even labels as "Upcoming Radeon Raise the Game Bundle" as it's not here yet. AMD wants you to "stay tuned" as the new Raise the Game Bundle activsion is "coming soon". Alrighty... so which free games do Radeon gamers get?

Well, we don't know yet... because AMD hasn't said so. The company has listed the eligible AMD products (which I've got a list of below). So why is the game bundle, rushed, now? GPU prices have been dropping for a while, forcing AMD's hand here: all Radeon purchases between May 10 and August 13 get the free games, but they don't know what games they'll get yet.

AMD's next-gen Zen 4 architecture is a "bigger deal than Zen 3 was" according to the latest leaks, and that's obvious by now... AMD is once again going to be delivering the goods with some CPU domination later this year.

In a new video, Tom @ Moore's Law is Dead says that Zen 4 is generally referenced as "a bigger deal than Zen 3 was" but also adds that "it's not expected to be quite as memorable as Zen 2". He has "very high confidence" in his sources saying Zen 4 will have double the L2 cache per CPU core than Zen 3 (1MB) and the same amount of L3 cache (4MB per core).

Zen 4 has a "massive upgrade" in I/O across the board: PCIe 5.0, DDR5 + LPDDR5, more PCIe lanes, and more over Zen 3. AVX-512 performance is being stated as "comparable to Ice Lake-X" with the same threat counts and CPU clocks, but a huge 50% faster than Zen 3 chips with the same CPU clocks.

NVIDIA has released its latest GeForce Game Ready 522.17 WHQL drivers, which offer the best day-one gaming experience for Evil Dead: The Game.

Evil Dead: The Game packs NVIDIA DLSS technology, so you'll definitely want to enable that (and grab these new drivers). NVIDIA also offers support for Dolmen and Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong. The new drivers also address an issue with Adobe Premiere Pro and the "intermittent DirectX related crashes". There's still some known issues:

You can download the NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 512.77 WHQL drivers right here (786MB download).

NVIDIA has announced its Computex 2022 keynote, penciled in for May 23 @ 8-9PM PDT with 6 speakers getting ready to talk your ear off.

We are to expect Ian Buck (Vice President of Accelerated Computing), Brian Kelleher (Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering), Ying Yin Shih (Director of Product Management, Accelerated Computing), Michael Kagan (Chief Technology Officer), Deepu Talla (Vice President of Embedded and Edge Computing) and Jeff Fisher (Senior Vice President of GeForce).

I wouldn't be expecting any new GPU announcements, but rather NVIDIA will most likely highlight everything the company has achieved in the last 6 months (new GPUs including the delayed GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, as well as their next-gen Hopper GPU architecture). The last time we saw Jeff was at CES 2022 earlier this year, when he announced the new GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card.

AMD's next-gen Zen 4-based "Raphael" CPU -- aka the Ryzen 7000 series that'll drop later this year -- has been spotted out in the wild and tested with benchmarking platform Phoronix Test Suite.

This test is an automated set of benchmarks that, once complete, can verify the product being tested and its stability, as well as its performance. Once the product has been finished its benchmarking run, the results can be uploaded to the OpenBenchmarking website -- which is where the Zen 4-based CPU was spotted.

AMD engineering sample "100-000000666" which was spotted back in January, it's a Zen 4-based 8-core, 16-thread CPU that boosts at up to 5.21GHz. The new Zen 4 processors will be making use of AMD's upcoming AM5 platform, delivering DDR5 + PCIe 5.0 support. Intel is smashing over 5GHz right now, but AMD has been keeping up at lower clock speeds for a while now (oh how the tables have turned) especially with technologies like AMD's kick ass 3D V-Cache helping Team Red out in a big way.

Remedy celebrates Alan Wake's 12th anniversary with some new teases on the upcoming sequel.

Thanks to Epic's financing and Remedy's know-how, Alan Wake 2 is currently in development. Details are light, but we do know Alan Wake 2 is a psychological horror game with a new emphasis on survival. Now Remedy has dropped a few more details about the sequel and confirmed the protagonist will be "put through the ringer."

"It feels very familiar but at the same time it feels very fresh. We are breaking new ground. It's a new genre and we are pushing further into the horror aspect, but also exploring the depth of the character," Sam Lake said in the recent anniversary video.

Remedy Entertainment's new Alan Wake TV show has found a home at AMC, the network behind shows like Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead.

The Alan Wake TV series is still happening and Remedy is currently working alongside AMC to develop the show. The project was originally announced in 2018 with game writer Sam Lake executive producing the project. Reports at the time said the show is being produced by Contradiction Films, the studio behind 2011's Mortal Kombat Legacy.

"Making video games takes a long while. Well it turns out making a TV show can take even longer. Some of you might remember that quite a while ago we were talking about an Alan Wake TV show. Well AMC, the wonderful home for absolutely brilliant TV shows, has bought the rights for Alan Wake," Remedy Entertainment's creative director Sam Lake said in a recent anniversary video.

Prey, one of the best video games to release in 2017, is now free on the Epic Games Store.

Bethesda's surreal, mind-bending masterpiece Prey is currently free on the Epic Store. If you haven't played it before, now is the perfect time to jump in especially with all the recent 2022 game delays.

Arkane's first-person shooter weaves an engaging and ultra-weird tale of supernatural sci-horror with impressive visuals, fun gunplay and abilities, and some of the best environmental storytelling in the entire games industry. You'll definitely see shades of Deathloop strewn around Talos-I, complete with that old-school 1970s retro space-age charm.

Today Electronic Arts confirmed the new Dead Space remake is coming January 27, 2023 exclusively on next-gen consoles.

EA's Motive studio is making significant headway with its new Dead Space remake, an ambitious project that completely revitalizes the original Xbox 360 horror experience for modern-day consoles. The game is being completely rebuilt with DICE's powerful Frostbite engine using the base game as a skeleton reference point.

The game is still in pre-alpha phases in development, but the team was recently able to do a full walkthrough of the game where "all content was present." Major effect breakthroughs include real-time global illumination and volumetric lighting thanks to the power upgrade from the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.

EA's Need for Speed franchise is coming back in a big way with two of gaming's best racing devs at the wheel.

Today EA's games division announced that Codemasters and Criterion Games are co-developing a new Need for Speed Game and are also laying the foundation for the franchise's future. EA has actually merged the Cheshire-based Codemasters team into Criterion for the ambitious plan. EA purchased F1 and Grid developer Codemasters in 2021 for $1.2 billion to help supercharge its racing games, and Criterion is known for its work on Need for Speed, Burnout, and vehicle production in Battlefront and Battlefield games.

Not much is known about the project(s), but they will be dedicated games that are separate from the mobile-based Need for Speed title from Tencent.

The takers of the first-ever black hole photo have delivered on their promise of a massive announcement with the second-ever photo of a black hole.

The new photo is of the supermassive black hole at the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The image "provides overwhelming evidence" that Sagittarius A*, the center of the Milky Way galaxy, is indeed a black hole. The image was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, who originally produced the first-ever photo of the M87* black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, taken in 2019.

Also known as Sgr A* for short, the center of the Milky Way was known to scientists as home to something very massive, compact, yet invisible. The black hole itself cannot be seen as it is completely dark. However, the glowing gas surrounding the dark shadow in the center of the image shows the bending of light by the strong gravitational forces of the black hole.

Today Bethesda delayed Starfield into the distant galaxy of 2023, and Xbox fans aren't happy.

Starfield went from a set release date of 11/11/22 to a very wide six-month release window in 2023. The delay has considerably affected the sentiment around Xbox hype (yes, the console wars are still alive, but now it's more about platform wars).

Starfield's big push back certainly didn't help dissuade the popular rhetoric that "Xbox has no games," and the delay has impacted the excitement behind Microsoft's E3-style upcoming games showcase scheduled for June 12.

A study on the explosion titled "X-ray detection of a nova in the fireball phase" has been published in the journal Nature.

German astronomers have observed a white dwarf star explode with X-ray radiation for the first time. White dwarf stars arise when stars earlier in their life cycle, like our sun, use up all of their stellar fuel and shrink, becoming a dead stars. Such dead stars occasionally flare with explosions of radiation, but observing the first X-ray explosion from a white dwarf was "to some extent a fortunate coincidence."

A study posing an answer titled "Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?" has been published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

Astrobiologists Michael Wong and Stuart Bartlett have proposed a new hypothesis to answer the Fermi Paradox, named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, who noted the apparent contradiction between the age and size of the universe, which would suggest that alien life should be readily visible, and the lack of any evidence for alien life.

The researchers hypothesize that any other-worldly civilizations would meet one of two fates, one being collapse as their energy demand outpaces their rate of technological innovation to harness more energy. The other scenario would allow them to stave off collapse by focusing on maintaining equilibrium at a certain point, sacrificing the ability to expand further throughout the universe. They based their conclusions on the typical growth seen in cities concerning population and energy consumption.

The Twitter user @StarshipGazer has snapped a photo of SpaceX's Starship with an odd-looking payload door.

The photo is of Ship 24, a prototype build of SpaceX's Starship rocket, which SpaceX hopes to send to Mars eventually. A hatch on the ship's side, possibly a payload door, potentially for deploying Starlink satellites, was spotted sitting ajar, perhaps simply in the process of opening or closing or potentially even broken.

Last month, a part of Booster 7 was shown to be damaged in a leaked photo, which was developed for use with Starship. If the hatch captured recently is also damaged, the timeline for Starship's upcoming orbital test flight may be delayed even further. The previous Starship prototype, Ship 23, has allegedly been scrapped, with parts going toward Ship 24's development, and Ship 25 and Ship 26 are also currently under construction.