Latest News - Page 1133

The hypersonic missile prototype has been developed by Lockheed Martin for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The prototype is being developed as part of DARPA's Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) program. Lockheed Martin's prototype's recent free flight test is the second such test conducted for the program. The first test was conducted in September, 2021, by Raytheon Technologies, according to a DARPA press release.

According to DARPA's latest press release, "air-breathing vehicles utilize air captured from the atmosphere to achieve sustained propulsion." Lockheed Martin's test saw the missile prototype reach and maintain a cruising speed of greater than Mach 5, or over five times the speed of sound, "for an extended period of time." It reached altitudes of over 65,000 feet (12.3 miles, 19.8 kilometers) and flew for more than 300 nautical miles (345 miles, 555.6 kilometers).

A study on the reversal of aging hallmarks titled "Fecal microbiota transfer between young and aged mice reverses hallmarks of the aging gut, eye, and brain" has been published in the journal Microbiome.

Researchers transplanted fecal microbes from young mice into old mice and saw the reversal of key aging hallmarks in their guts, eyes, and brains. Conversely, transplanting fecal microbes from older mice into young mice accelerated these hallmarks, increasing inflammation in the brain and reducing the production of key proteins such as those required for vision.

Take-Two Interactive's definition of Recurrent Consumer Spending now includes NFTs, but it doesn't necessarily mean NFTs are coming to games like GTA Online and NBA 2K.

Take-Two recently posted a new 425 business combination disclosure SEC filing that updates shareholders and investors about the incoming merger with Zynga. The report contains vital information on shares, performance metrics, executive compensation, and an interesting new definition of Recurrent Consumer Spending, a blanket term that is used for microtransactions, subscriptions, virtual content, and DLC.

The new definition has been updated to include NFTs: "For the avoidance of doubt, Recurrent Consumer Spending may generally include, without limitation, the sale of virtual currency, add-on content, microtransactions, NFTs, game related subscriptions offered directly by the Company and/or its subsidiaries and similar items, but would not include full-game digital downloads."

Performance-based compensation is one part of how Take-Two rewards its executives, and most of those awards are based around stock prices, not microtransactions.

A bit ago Axios published a report outlining specific terms of Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's pay structure. One interesting tidbit was how Zelnick and other executives like president Karl Slatoff are rewarded specifically if Recurrent Consumer Spending (RCS) grows.

Here's the company's official definition of RCS: "Recurrent Consumer Spending may generally include, without limitation, the sale of virtual currency, add-on content, microtransactions, NFTs, game related subscriptions offered directly by the Company and/or its subsidiaries and similar items but would not include full-game digital downloads."

The new Halo TV show is hailed as a huge success that helped spark subscriber counts for Paramount+.

While the Halo TV show dropped in the tail-end of the quarter in late March, Paramount says the series has been a "global hit". Subscribers are up 6.8 million, breaking a pushing total subscribers to a new all-time high of 39.6 million.

According to Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish, the series has delivered great results for the company:

Based on Activision-Blizzard's recent financials, Microsoft may lose out on over $1 billion in sales revenue if it keeps Call of Duty off of PlayStation hardware.

Recent financials show that making Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox platforms will have a significant material impact on earnings and revenues generated by Activision. Microsoft could lose out on over $1 billion in revenues, and Sony in turn could lose out on some $500 million every year. That's not a whole lot of loss for Sony, who has made $10.2 billion in FY21 so far, but it's not nothing either.

This could lead to the FTC making a provision in the Activision-Blizzard buyout mandating Microsoft to keep Call of Duty cross-platform in perpetuity.

In a new report from the New York Times, a man who received a pig heart transplant has died with traces of an animal virus.

57-year-old David Bennett Sr lived for two months after receiving his genetically modified pig heart, and according to surgeons who performed the first-of-its-kind procedure, the man's body didn't reject the organ, nor was there any evidence to say that the Bennett developed an active infection with a virus following the completion of the transplant.

Bennett died on March 8, and according to Dr. Bartley Griffith of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, traces of a virus that is known to infect pigs was found in Bennett. Notably, Griffith says that the traces of animal virus may have impacted Bennett's condition, and contributed towards his sudden decline in health.

In a recent interview with David Mayman, the founder of the company behind the flying motorcycle, he explained why the new way of transportation has been created and the goal behind it.

Mayman sat down for an interview with Futurism, where he was asked several questions about the flying motorcycle named Speeder. Mayman explained that the Speeder isn't for the everyday driver, and isn't technically a flying motorcycle, as he believes the design has pivoted away from the traditional concept of a flying motorcycle. Notably, Mayman said that Speeder is primarily aimed at the emergency response and disaster relief, but that doesn't mean there won't be any recreational use.

The founder of JetPack Aviation explained that a Speeder could be used to provide emergency response relief to an area hit by a hurricane that has caused extreme damage to roads and trails. The Speeder would be able to fly over all of the damaged roads, even in 40-50 mph winds. Furthermore, the Speeder is capable of reaching 15,000 feet in altitude, but Mayman says that the only time that kind of altitude is reached is when the Speeder is already in a location with terrain that has a high altitude.

A new WWE-based RPG is currently in development and will be announced soon, the wrestling company has announced.

Hot on the heels of WWE 2K22's big success, World Wrestling Entertainment has greenlight a new role-playing game based on its brand. Details are slim but the WWE confirmed the RPG is in the works.

"We continue to see strength in the performance of our mobile games with 2K and Scopely, SuperCard and Champions. And recently signed a new deal in the role-playing game space that will be announced soon," WWE chief brand officer Stephanie McMahon said in a recent Q1 earnings call.

The bulk of Final Fantasy 16's development is finished, however the game's critical debugging, polish, and adjustment phases still are not finished.

FF16 game director Yoshi-P recently gave some quick updates on the states of the RPG. In a recent NeiR Re[in]carnation stream, as translated by Twitter's @aitaikimochi, Yoshi-P says a new trailer for Final Fantasy XVI is coming "soon," and that a substantial amount of progress has been made on the game.

Yoshi-P and his team is "working their hardest" on Final Fantasy 16, and has spent lots of time squashing bugs and issues with the game's code. The project isn't entirely finished just yet and the team wants to spend more time polishing the experience before it's ready to ship.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a Second Request into the Sony-Bungie deal.

The FTC is currently reviewing Sony's proposed $3.6 billion buyout of Bungie. Reports indicate that this review has advanced into the third phases of standard M&A procedures with the FTC issuing a Second Request.

This essentially means the FTC requires more information and data from both Sony and Bungie before it agrees not to oppose the deal.

Stratolaunch's Roc aircraft is currently the world's largest flying aircraft in terms of wingspan.

The Roc's wingspan measures 385 feet (117 meters), dwarfing that of the world's heaviest plane, the Antonov An-225 cargo plane, which had 290 feet (88 meters) of wingspan before it was sadly destroyed during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The Roc has six Boeing 747 engines, and the newly installed pylon on the center wing will be used to carry and launch Talon-A hypersonic test vehicles.

The Roc recently completed its fifth test flight in the Mojave Desert, debuting the pylon and flying for 4 hours and 58 minutes and reaching an altitude of 22,500 feet (6,858 meters). The Talon-A vehicles carried by the pylon are rocket-powered, autonomous, reusable testbeds that can carry customizable payloads at speeds greater than Mach 5. The Talon-A vehicles provide streamlined access to a hypersonic flight environment for scientific research and technological development.

The Humanity 2.0 Foundation has signed a strategic partnership with Sensorium, a metaverse developer.

The new public-private partnership aims to bring the Vatican's heritage into the digital world by creating a VR and NFT gallery for content from the Vatican. Humanity 2.0 is a non-profit "Vatican-affiliated organization." According to a Sensorium spokesperson corresponding with VICE's Motherboard, "it would be correct to say that the Vatican is entering the metaverse and the world of NFTs."

The National Solar Observatory (NSO) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have released telescope and satellite views of the latest solar eclipse.

The partial solar eclipse on April 30th was viewable only from the Southern Hemisphere, in parts of Antarctica, South America, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. However, NOAA satellites were also able to view the event from space. NOAA's GOES-16 satellite captured the moon passing in front of the sun, while its GOES-East satellite spotted the moon's shadow passing over Earth.

Some ground-based telescopes also caught the event, such as the National Science Foundation's Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) telescope at their NOIRLab Cerro Tololo site located in Chile. The next eclipse is due on May 15th, when May's full moon, known as the Flower Moon, will undergo a total lunar eclipse. After that, another solar eclipse is due on October 25th, 2022.

A new interview with Vladimir Putin and Russian state media shows Putin dismayed with Wikipedia.

Putin met with Maxim Dreval, the General Director of the Knowledge Society, to say that Wikipedia can't be used in isolation as an information source. The comments appear to continue Putin's longstanding vendetta with Wikipedia. Most recently, in March, Moscow's censorship office wrote to Wikipedia, threatening to block the site over information about Russian casualties in Ukraine.

The big tech companies are looking for a more secure means of accessing accounts to replace passwords.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft jointly announced on May 5th that they will be adopting a common standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium that will allow them to go passwordless. Passwords would be replaced with secure keys or biometric authentication with mobile devices.

To celebrate Black Hole Week, NASA has shared a fact about the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy and how it has a "leak".

NASA explains that at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4.1 million Suns called Sagittarius A. In the space agency's blog post, NASA writes that black holes draw in material into what is called an accretion disk. Sometimes when some of the material swirling around the black hole falls inside, it's "swept up into outflowing jets that are collimated by the black hole's powerful magnetic fields. The narrow "searchlight beams" are accompanied by a flood of deadly ionizing radiation."

Gerald Cecil of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill was able to prove through multiple wavelength observations that the central black hole is "currently powered down" but can sometimes burp or hiccup out mini-jets when it consumes something large such as a gas cloud or an entire star. NASA explains in the below video that observations from Hubble have revealed that the jet is still pushing feebly into a hydrogen cloud, which causes bubbles that can expand as far as 500 light-years.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has already raised $7.14 billion in funding for his $44 billion buyout of the world's second largest social media platform Twitter.

The billionaire entrepreneur has already entered into a year-long deal to purchase Twitter that will cost him $1 billion if he fails to fulfill the transaction. According to a report from the Financial Times, investors that have already handed the money over to Musk include Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and asset management groups such as Fidelity, Brookfield, and Sequoia Capital.

Notably, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao spoke to the Financial Times and said when he heard that Musk was looking for third-party investors in his purchase of Twitter, he was very interested. "It's more of a blank cheque," said Zhao, who ended up pushing for Binance to pledge $500 million towards Musk's deal.

A group of scientists believes that the compounds found in lunar soil may be able to provide astronauts exploring the surface with oxygen and potentially fuel.

In a new paper published in the journal Jule, a team of scientists analyzed lunar samples obtained by China's Chang'e 5 spacecraft and now plan to develop a system capable of extracting oxygen from the lunar soil. The process is called "extraterrestrial photosynthesis" and includes developing a system that uses solar radiation and lunar soil to electrolyze water from the moon, creating oxygen and hydrogen.

Notably, the scientists also propose that carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts could be combined with hydrogen from the water electrolysis to produce hydrocarbons such as methane. Methane could then be used as fuel, proposed the researchers.

A team of scientists has uncovered fossils of a 33 ft apex predator dinosaur, breaking records in its appropriate category.

A team of Argentinian paleontologists has announced the discovery of what is now considered the largest Megaraptor on Earth today. The newly discovered Apex Predator has been detailed in a new study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. The dinosaur's scientific name is "Maip macrothorax", and the dinosaur is described in the report as being the "shadow of the death" that "kills with cold wind" throughout the Andes mountains.

The now largest Megaraptor measured around 33 ft in length and featured two sharp curved claws per front paw, each of the talons extended 15.7 inches in length. The researchers write in the study that during its time, Maip's would have fed on smaller dinosaurs slashing at them with its long talons and digging into their torsos to withdraw intestines. Maip's are estimated to have lived about 70 million years ago, nearing the end of the Cretaceous period, and according to researchers, the species went extinct about 66 million years ago, making it one of the last megaraptors to roam Earth.