Latest News - Page 1131

A study on the magnetic reversal titled "A radio, optical, UV and X-ray view of the enigmatic changing look Active Galactic Nucleus 1ES~1927+654 from its pre- to post-flare states" has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Researchers observed a rare, enigmatic outburst from the 1ES 1927+654 galaxy 236 million light-years away. The unusual characteristics of the eruption indicate that it may have been produced as a result of a magnetic reversal, where the magnetic field surrounding the central black hole of the galaxy spontaneously flips.

The eruption began near the end of 2017 and, by March 2018, had caused the galaxy's visible light to brighten by nearly 100 times. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory noticed UV emissions were 12 times higher than normal in May 2018 and declining, indicating an earlier, unobserved peak. In June 2018, higher-energy X-ray emissions disappeared from the galaxy.

Rangers from the National Parks Service (NPS) have received reports of human remains found in Nevada's Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

An ongoing drought has resulted in all-time low water levels, resulting in human remains turning up on two separate occasions in the last two weeks. On May 1st, a body was found inside a barrel that appeared as the lake dried up. On May 7th, around 2 p.m. EST, a second body was found, potentially the victim of a Las Vegas mob murder.

A study on the drone swarm titled "Swarm of micro flying robots in the wild" has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

Researchers from Zhejiang University have created a purpose-built swarm of ten palm-sized drones, each equipped with depth cameras, altitude sensors, and onboard computers, that can navigate through unstructured environments with obstacles such as a forest.

The drones don't rely on any external infrastructure like GPS and are instead powered by flight algorithms that incorporate collision avoidance and coordination throughout the swarm. Researchers tested the drones in multiple scenarios; a dense bamboo forest, a high-traffic experiment where they had to avoid other drones, and following a human target.

Intel has completely screwed the launch of its Arc GPU, with multiple delays, a whimpered appearance on select notebooks in Arc mobile GPU form, and now Intel has absolutely confirmed Arc desktop GPUs will be a China exclusive at launch. Okay.

It was only a few hours ago that I wrote a news article that talked about Intel delaying the launch of its desktop-focused Arc Alchemist GPU, which Igor from Igor's Lab reported from his sources. But now... now this is from the horse's mouth -- and that horse's mouth... is Intel -- delaying Arc Alchemist GPUs on desktop.

Not only that, but Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs on the desktop will be exclusive to China... yeah, exclusive to China at launch. This is a mess and should've been explained to the press in detail, months ago. Nope. Instead, it comes out in a tiny little story today, which I hope truly blows up. I do love that Intel uses a picture that says: "Intel Arc, a new player has entered the game"... except that player hasn't entered the game, and when it does it'll be exclusive to China for god knows how long.

The now 17-year-old Benjamin Choi began working on the project in 2020 as a tenth-grader at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With lots of free time owing to the pandemic and inspiration from a 60 Minutes documentary on mind-controlled prostheses he watched in third grade, Choi set to work on a less-invasive version of a prosthetic arm than he had originally seen.

SpinLaunch has completed another test on April 22nd, 2022, of its unconventional alternative to traditional rocket launches.

New footage from the company's eighth flight test shows an optical camera payload being launched from its Suborbital Accelerator Launch System at over 1,000 (1,609 kilometers) miles per hour. The payload is a 3-meter (9.8 feet) long flight test vehicle, equipped for the first time with an onboard camera to provide a unique perspective.

The Suborbital Accelerator Launch System contains a large, rotating carbon fiber arm within a steel vacuum chamber 300 feet (91.4 meters) in diameter. The arm is used to accelerate the payload-carrying launch vehicle to up to 5,000 miles (8046 kilometers) per hour, faster than six times the speed of sound (Mach 6).

A team of marine scientists have discovered fascinating geological formations while diving at Lili uokalani ridge in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) in the Pacific Ocean.

The team of researchers was studying seamounts, underwater mountains, or geologic landforms that were formed by extinct volcanoes rising abruptly. The team was inspecting the summit of Nootka Seamount with the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus and discovered a "dried lake bed" formation that featured hyaloclastite rock.

The geological formation was described as a "yellow brick road" that leads to the mythical city of Atlantis and is a prime example of ancient volcanic geology. The 90-degree brick-like fractures were likely caused by sharp heating and cooling stress from multiple eruptions. The PNMM is located north of the Hawaiian islands and spans a whopping 583,000 square miles of ocean, making it one of the largest marine conversation areas on Earth.

NASA's asteroid detection system recorded an asteroid making its closest approach to Earth on Monday, May 9.

Data from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory detailed the asteroid named 2006 JF42, which passed safely by Earth at a distance of 3.5 million miles, or about 14 times the distance between the Earth and the moon. The asteroid is estimated to have a diameter of 1,247 feet to 2,822 feet, and poses no future threat to Earth, according to current measurements of its orbit.

NASA has previously stated that while many asteroids are categorized as "potentially hazardous," it doesn't necessarily mean that Earth is in danger by them. Two factors determine an asteroid being categorized as potentially dangerous; its diameter and if its orbit comes within a certain distance of Earth. Previously NASA researchers have stated that the agency doesn't know of any asteroid 500+ feet in diameter that has a chance of impacting Earth within the next 100 years.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce that there was a communications dropout between its Ingenuity helicopter and the Perseverance Mars rover.

On NASA's website, the space agency states that the Mars helicopter named Ingenuity missed planned communications with the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity uses Perseverance as a base station to receive new commands from Earth. Alerted to the drop in communications, NASA began to perform tests to see what had gone wrong.

According to the space agency, Ingenuity failed to communicate with the rover on May 3, which was due to the helicopter entering a "low-power state" that NASA says may be due to the "seasonal increase in the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere and lower temperatures as winter approaches". Essentially, the increase in martian dust is reducing the amount of sunlight Ingenuity's solar array can acquire, limiting the total amount of charge the helicopter can contain.

A 25-year-old woman from Texas has claimed that a man she met on Tinder has scammed her out of the fortune left to her by her murdered father.

Divya Gadasalli has told Bloomberg that she received $8 million from her mother's estate following her father's murder in 2015. Gadasalli told the publication that she had fallen victim to a scam called "pig butchering", which involves a scammer emotionally manipulating victims into investing in cryptocurrency projects, the scammer showing the investment is gaining profits, then advises more money should be invested, then the project's account is locked away from the investor or drained entirely.

Gadasalli met Jerry Bulasa on Tinder, and began talking to him for several months. Throughout that time, Bulasa touted to Gadasalli that he was making lots of money through cryptocurrency investments, which Gadasalli said coincides with a time in her life when she was craving financial independence. Gadasalli said to Bloomberg that Bulasa told her she could become a financial hero to her family.

For the very first time in Louisville, Kentucky, a home has been purchased with Bitcoin, making local history in just eight seconds.

A report from The Courier reveals that up until February 2022, there was no record of Bitcoin being used to purchase real estate in the area and that the seller of the property was looking to liquidate several homes to invest in Bitcoin. The buyer contacted the seller and informed him that he was able to purchase the property in Bitcoin, which was later sold for $65,000, according to Ashley Brown, a real estate agent with Louisville-based Homepage Realty.

The buyer spoke to the publication and said, "I'm happy that I can help try and bring this technology to the future. There's so many uses for [Bitcoin], and I think we're at the very, very early stages of it. It'll be interesting to see where it goes." While commission fees, title fees, and recording fees were paid in US dollars, the actual purchase of the property was made through a direct transfer of Bitcoin from one wallet to another, taking about eight seconds to complete and a small fee of $0.70 cents versus a traditional fee of $25-$30.

A US college has announced its closure after experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic and a grim cyberattack, ending 157 years of education.

Lincoln College has issued a goodbye note on its website that states the college has contacted the Illinois Department of Higher Education and Higher Learning Commission to inform them of the college's "permanent closure" that will become effective on May 13, 2022. The announcement states that the Board of Trustees has voted to stop all academic programming at the end of the spring semester following financial difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and a cyberattack that happened in December 2021.

The college explains that the COVID-19 pandemic forced large investments into "technology and campus safety measures", which coincided with a drop in enrollment. The cyberattack in December of last year prevented administrators from accessing institutional data, which stopped the college from being able to create clear projections for Fall 2022.

Hackers have taken aim at Russia once again, but this time they have targeted many of the nation's online platforms with a clear message.

On Monday, May 9, hackers infiltrated many Russian smart TVs by changing the channel names and descriptions to show a stark message. Notably, smart TVs weren't the only online platforms that were targeted, as reports indicate that Russian platforms such as Rutube, Russia's clone of YouTube, and even large internet companies such as Yandex. Rutube described the hack in its Telegram channel as a "powerful cyberattack" that caused the platform to not be accessible.

The message that was displayed on Russian smart TVs was, "The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands." These cyber attacks are hardly surprising as Russia has undergone many hacking attacks since it began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Notably, the Anonymous hacking collective has already performed many successful cyber attacks against Russia, claiming it has previously infiltrated the Russian space agency, Russia's Central Bank, and more.

Intel has had a troubled time getting its Arc Alchemist GPU out the door, with delay after delay, and now yet another delay that is reportedly pushing out Arc Alchemist desktop GPUs into mid-summer.

In a new post, Igor from Igor's Lab explained: "various sources told me (some of them quite annoyed), the release of the already so often announced Alchemist desktop graphics cards could be postponed even further towards late summer. A somewhat vague period is mentioned here, which extends from July 1, 2022 to August 31, 2022. Why one is then already more than half a year behind schedule can of course also be speculated creatively".

The launch has been a mess so far, and doesn't give confidence whatsoever. But in Intel's defence: you can't just build, and easily launch an entire family of graphics cards and then keep up with the two very established GPU companies (NVIDIA and AMD) in a single year, or even a few.

Intel will be officially unveiling its new "Alder Lake-HX" mobile CPUs at its "At Vision" event on May 10, which should deliver up to 16 cores with overclocking, PCIe 5.0 support, and more for laptops of the future.

The new Intel Alder Lake-HX mobile CPU will see the company using the full desktop Alder Lake silicon on a BGA package, with the same BGA package size as the LGA desktop (45mm v 37.5mm). Intel has made some slight modifications on the height of the BGA package with Alder Lake-HX, down to 2.0mm from a thicker 4.4mm on the desktop.

Intel is also super-powering the new Alder Lake-HX mobile CPUs with a new class of 55W-powered "Enthusiast" CPUs for high-end gaming and workstation laptops. Intel will be boosting CPU core count, power, and more PCIe lanes. PCIe 5.0 is a big deal with Intel's new Alder Lake-HX laptops, the industry's first PCIe 5.0-enabled laptops.

AMD isn't too far away from the launch of its RDNA 2 refresh GPUs with the flagship Radeon RX 6950 XT, and the new Radeon RX 6750 XT and Radeon RX 6650 XT graphics cards... now it's time for some leaks on GIGABYTE's upcoming graphics cards.

But what you'll notice immediately is how damn big the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6950 XT GAMING OC graphics card is, with GIGABYTE adding some chunk to the card over its custom Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING OC. THe new GIGABYTE RX 6950 XT GAMING OC is a huge, thick card... with a thicker and larger cooling system.

It looks like GIGABYTE is using the same PCB design for its new Radeon RX 6950 XT GAMING OC as it did for the Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING OC -- where you'll still need 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors -- and then 2 x HDMI 2.1 and 2 x DisplayPort 1.4 connectors. That's non-standard display I/O, and welcomed -- the second HDMI 2.1 port that is.

The world of HDMI 2.1 has been here for a while but it's mostly used on higher-end TVs and only a few gaming monitors, but DisplayPort 2.0 will soon help out... ushering in next-gen displays.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) announced that the very first video source and display devices that support DisplayPort UHBR (Ultra-High Bit Rate) are supported by DisplayPort 2.0, and have passed certification through the DisplayPort UHBR Certification Program.

What does this mean? Well, it means that the higher bandwidths that are supported by UHBR offer uncompressed 8K 60Hz HDR, 4K 240Hz HDR, 2 x 4K 120Hz HDR, or a bonkers 4 x 4K 60Hz HDR... all over a single DisplayPort 2.0 UHBR cable.

Well, the LHR gimping has been cracked by the NBMiner (NebuMiner) and NiceHash teams, with NBMiner available right now with a 100% LHR unlock for NVIDIA's current-gen GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs.

The crypto teams seem to be running crypto tools that are unlocking NVIDIA LHR gimping, almost at the same time, which seems suspicious. How? Are they communicating with each other? Did NVIDIA help them out? Maybe. AMD is launching its RDNA 2 refresh -- the new Radeon RX 6950 XT, Radeon RX 6750 XT, and Radeon RX 6650 XT cards in the next 12 hours -- and then there's this news of the un-gimping of LHR-locked GPUs.

If you're sitting there with a GeForce RTX 30 series GPU that is LHR locked, and you're crypto mining, this will be music to your ears. If you're a crypto miner that has fleets of LHR-locked GPUs... then this is Christmas coming early in a huge way.

Artist Lorenzo Drago creates a new Unreal Engine 5 project that redefines the visual standard for UE5 footage.

A new Unreal Engine 5 clip shows the real power of Epic's next-gen engine. The footage is one of the best-looking rendered projects to date, creating ultra-realistic renditions of a train station in Japan. The incredible level of realism sets the bar for other immersive projects including the notorious found footage analog horror sensation The Backrooms.

According to Drago, the footage is based on the Etchu-Daimon Station in Toyama, complete with original work on textures, lighting, animation, and modeling; Drago says he didn't use Nanite and used real-time VR tracking to depict the head movements as accurately as possible.

Stardew Valley continues its long-running success streak with a massive 20 million copies sold to date.

After six years on the market, Stardew Valley is still incredibly popular. The indie farming sim has now broken 20 million copies sold worldwide on all platforms as of March 2022, which is up 5 million units from September 2021. Of course it helps the game was released on practically every gaming medium to date, including PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and of course the PS4 and Xbox One.

"As of March 2022, Stardew Valley has sold over 20 million copies across all platforms, with 13 million copies sold on PC alone," reads the official website.