Latest News - Page 1145

Call of Duty players will soon face off against colossal movie monsters in a battle that could shape the future of Caldera.

If Activision can pull it off, Call of Duty's new Operation Monarch might be the most epic live event in the history of gaming. Starting on May 11, gamers will face off against King Kong and Godzilla as they rampage the Pacific island-map of Caldera.

Activision says players "will need all the power they can get their hands-on to combat Godzilla and Kong, laying siege to Caldera later in the season with the limited-time event, Operation Monarch."

Old-school lyrical assassins Wu-Tang Clan are bringing Shaolin style to Fortnite.

Fortnite's latest crossover is a pretty big surprise. The legendary Wu-Tang Clan is coming to Fortnite with new skins, emotes, weapons, sprays, banners--the works. The new Wu Wear collection drops April 23, 2022 at 8PM EST.

The Wu Wear Bundle (pricing not announced) includes the Throwback BG Outfit (+ WUWEAR Worldwide Back Bling) and B.R.I.T.E. Outfit (+ Wu-Tang Represent Back Bling) alongside the Wu--Tang Hands Emoticon and Wu-Tang Style Loading Screen, which looks absolutely epic.

NASA has built the new alloy to withstand extreme environments and temperatures.

NASA innovators have created the NASA Alloy GRX-810, a new metal alloy created using 3D printing. It is an oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) alloy and can endure temperatures exceeding 2000 degrees Fahrenheit (1093 degrees Celsius). Compared to current state-of-the-art alloys, GRX-810's advantages include "twice the strength to resist fracturing," "1,000 times the durability under stress at high temperatures," and is more malleable, with "three and a half times the flexibility to stretch/bend prior to fracturing."

3D printing allowed the NASA team to uniformly disperse nanoscale oxides throughout the alloy, improving durability and high-temperature properties while using a more efficient, cost-effective, and clean manufacturing process. The team also used thermodynamic modeling to determine the final composition of the alloy.

The missile test features the RS-28 Sarmat nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The missile is also known as Satan II and was tested for the first time at 15:12 Moscow time (12:12 UTC) on April 20th from a silo launcher. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the missile would make his country's enemies "stop and think." The missile was launched from Plesetsk in northwest Russia and hit its targets in the Kamchatka peninsula, approximately 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) away.

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are now expecting to undock the Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) crew from the International Space Station (ISS) on April 23rd.

The crew will undock at 8:35 p.m. EDT on April 23rd (00:35 UTC April 24th) and splash down around 1:46 p.m. Sunday, April 24th (17:46 UTC April 24th) off the coast of Florida. The crew originally left Earth bound for the ISS on April 8th, and were due to return on April 19th, but poor weather conditions on Earth have meant their return has been delayed.

The return was initially pushed back to April 20th, but with the latest update moving their return to the 24th, the crew will have spent another five days aboard the space station on top of their originally planned ten. NASA and Axiom prepared for the possibility that the private astronaut team would spend additional time on the ISS and ensured there were sufficient provisions for all crew members.

The planned journey will take a Tesla Model 3 over about 15,100 kilometers (~9400 miles) around Australia.

The journey is a part of the Charge Around Australia (CAA) project, which is set to begin in September as the University of Newcastle team behind the project continues testing their printed plastic solar panels in the meantime. The 18-meter (59 feet) long panels are rolled out beside the Model 3 to capture sunlight when it needs to charge.

A study on antidepressant effectiveness titled "Antidepressants and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) for patients with depression: Analysis of the medical expenditure panel survey from the United States" has been published in the journal PLOS One.

The study is a meta-analysis that examined data from the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS) spanning 2005 to 2016. MEPS is a longitudinal study that follows 17.47 million adults in the United States diagnosed with depression, of which 57.6% take antidepressants. Females made up 67.9% of the MEPS cohort, and 60.5% were on antidepressants compared to 51.5% of males.

Within the MEPS cohort, mental health saw a general improvement over time. However, there was no detectable difference between those taking antidepressants and those who didn't. The researchers concluded that antidepressants do not "continue to improve patients' HRQoL [health-related quality of life] over time" and that instead of focusing on the short-term effects of pharmacotherapy, future studies should consider longer-term impacts.

The U.S Department of Defense has given the go-ahead for a new prototype nuclear reactor in Idaho.

The department has signed off on the Project Pele plan, which includes plans to build a mobile nuclear microreactor prototype and reactor fuel outside of Idaho before assembling and operating the reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. Two designs are being considered, and officials have estimated that building and testing the microreactor would take about three years.

It's not the first mass grave that's been spotted in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began.

Photographed on April 3rd, 2022, by Maxar Technologies' GeoEye-1 is a recently excavated mass grave with rows visible just below the road in a field. The grave is located in the Ukrainian town of Manhush, approximately 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the war-torn port city of Mariupol.

Maxar Technologies' WorldView-3 satellite took a photo of the same area on March 19th, 2022, highlighting the recent grim addition. To the right of the graves in the image is a previously existing cemetery, which evidently was not sufficient to bury all of the victims of combat. The mayor of Mariupol has said that over 10,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion began on February 24th.

PNY has announced that its PNY XLR8 SSD Cover with Integrated Heatsink designed for Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 console will cost $19.99 and be available later this month.

The new PS5 SSD heat sink has been designed to replace the standard SSD cover, perfect for when you are upgrading the SSD inside of your PS5. PNY designed the XLR8 SSD cover to integrate the SSD cover with an extruded aluminum heat sink... ensuring the super-fast SSD inside of your PS5 stays nice and cool.

PNY engineered the heat sink with a negative pressure design, which the company says "delivers extreme cooling performance, cooling the SSD over 40% compared to no heat sink". Well, duh... no heat sink versus heat sink. Still, the new PNY XLR8 SSD Cover with Integrated Heatsink designed to fit PS5 hits the market this month on BestBuy and Amazon (as well as PNY's own website, and other retail partners) for $19.99.

ORIGIN PC has just unleashed its new flagship gaming laptops, with the introduction of the EON17-S and NT-17 laptops. Check it out:

The new ORIGIN PC EVO17-S gaming laptop packs an Intel Core i9-12900H processor (14 cores) with up to 64GB of DDR5-4800 RAM, an 8TB SSD, and NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. It all arrives with a 17.3-inch QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution screen with a super-smooth 240Hz refresh rate.

The inclusion of the 1440p 240Hz display is great to see, as it will really use that Core i9-12900H processor + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU to its fullest. Unlike new flagship competitors like the AORUS 17X which has a better (16-core) CPU and same GPU, yet a 1080p panel (albeit @ 360Hz).

The dark cloud hanging over Bobby Kotick has been getting thicker and thicker, starting at the end of 2019 before the pandemic kicked off -- in the middle of the Hong Kong protests and China covering it all up -- but I don't forget, and neither does the internet (or Jeffrey Epstein's little black book).

Kotick, who isn't just associated with mystery billionaire ultra-weirdo Jeffrey Epstein -- whose girlfriend and BFF Ghislaine Maxwell is in court right now -- but he used to date Facebook (and now Meta) executive Sheryl Sandberg.

Yeah, well Sheryl used her enormous power to pressure UK outlet the Daily Mail to NOT post stories about her "temporary restraining order" against Kotick in 2014. Kotick dated Sandberg for 3 years until 2019 -- the year when his life started to unravel. The Facebook COO contacted the Daily Mail in 2016 and 2019, putting a brick wall between their stories, and the real-world.

GIGABYTE is the first to announce a gaming laptop that's powered by Intel's new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-HX" processor, rocking 16 threads at up to 5GHz.

The new AORUS 17X enthusiast gaming laptop can be configured with the Intel Core i9-12900HK processor, up to 64GB of DDR5-4800 memory, and NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 and a TDP of 130W.

You've got a 17.3-inch 1080p panel at a huge 360Hz, which is probably simultaneously the shittest part of this laptop and also awesome: 360Hz, yay. But 1080p on an "enthusiast" laptop in 2022 with some of the very fastest mobile silicon ever made? Not so good. Inside, GIGABYTE is using an HM670 motherboard.

The Taliban is busy... well, ordering a ban on video-sharing giant TikTok and battle royale smash-hit PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG).

The reason? TikTok and PUBG have "made the young generation go astray". After securing Afghanistan last year, the Taliban have been making swift changes across the country. Deputy spokesman of Afghanistan Inamullah Samangani tweeted that both PUBG and TikTok had been blocked in Afghanistan as the apps "mislead the younger generation" and "publishes immortal material and programs".

US troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, which saw the Taliban seizing every major city across Afghanistan and renaming the country to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The next time you hear Jim Cramer scream "BUY" on some stock -- maybe don't -- as the host of "Mad Money on CNBC" told the world to buy Netflix stock on January 4... and it has absolutely tanked since.

Netflix stock is down 39% in the last 5 days, down from around $350 to just $214 at the time of writing. A disaster, as Netflix stock has a 52-week high of $700.99 and now we're scraping just over $200. SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk said the "woke mind virus" is killing Netflix... and with shows like "He's Expecting" (about a man who is "pregnant") it's no wonder.

Netflix has been getting worse and worse with its content over the years, where its woke-focused content isn't being consumed anywhere near as much. Not only that, but there are far more competitors in the streaming space now including Disney+, Apple TV, HBO Max, and more.

Elon Musk is out and hyping his latest product -- Optimus -- Tesla's upcoming robot that the SpaceX and Tesla boss says will be "worth more than the car business, worth more than FSD".

The news on Optimus came during Tesla's Q1 2022 earnings call, where Musk said: "I was surprised that people did not realize the magnitude of the Optimus robot program. The importance of Optimus will become apparent in the coming years. Those who are insightful or looking, listening carefully, will understand that Optimus will ultimately be worth more than the car business, worth more than FSD".

Until now, we've seen nothing but a hype trailer... a man dressed in all-white spandex, pretending to be a robot. It wasn't a robot... it was a human, but that's how Tesla is selling it. Like it's this whizz-bang next-gen robot that is beyond The Jetsons but we'll have to wait and see what Musk and his team have in store for us.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has shared more details on Tesla's upcoming dedicated robotaxi electric car, something the Twitter enthusiast announced earlier this month at Cyber Rodeo.

Tesla will be aiming at the cost per mile, with the electric car maker wanting to hit volume production of the robotaxi in 2024. Musk said that Tesla will be able to provide "by far the lowest cost per that customers have ever experienced".

During Tesla's recent Q1 2022 financial results conference call, Musk talked up Tesla's upcoming robotaxI: "We are also working on a new vehicle that I alluded to at the Giga Texas opening, which is a dedicated robotaxi. It is going to be highly optimized for autonomy - meaning it will not have steering wheel or pedals. There are a number of other innovations around it that I think are quite exciting, but it is fundamentally optimized to achieve the lowest fully considered cost per mile or km when counting everything".

LG Display has been working with Lucasfilm's visual effects division, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and used its leading-edge OLED display technology to market The Book of Boba Fett in the middle of Times Square, New York City. Check it out:

The two companies are already knee-deep into the world of OLED displays and TVs in their everyday creative process, but with multiple OLED displays... well, the team at ILM wanted to do something different. LG explains: "An anamorphic video creates a visual illusion of the content being projected forward from a certain vantage point".

"With this technique, one can simulate 3D content on a 2D screen to provide the most immersive viewing experience. The complexity of this technique requires the utmost attention to detail, and LG Display's OLED provided this very solution, enabling the cutting-edge technology to power the video's unique visual effects".

Baldur's Gate 3 is coming sometime in 2023, Larian Studios announced during a recent D&D Direct showcase.

Larian's massively anticipated cRPG won't launch in 2022 as planned, and has now been moved to an undetermined launch in 2023. The game will remain in early access until then, where the developers will make use of feedback from fans to shape the game.

"By the nine hells we've added a lot of great stuff already, and there's more where that came from. So join us in early access on our journey to Baldur's Gate 3, or come along in 2023 when the game releases," Larian said in the presentation.

Borderlands creator Gearbox Entertainment is so big now that it's acquiring game studios.

Gearbox Entertainment is a major part of Embracer Group's decentralized empire, and just made its first major acquisition. Gearbox has purchased indie studio Lost Boys Interactive to help work on Borderlands 4, a new IP, and other projects. Back in October 2021, Gearbox's Randy Pitchford saidcould make acquisitions in the future.

Lost Boys Interactive has 220 employees and the deal raises Gearbox Entertainment's total headcount to a staggering 1,300. Embracer acquired Perfect World Entertainment (Star Trek Online, Neverwinter Nights) in 2021 and made it a subsidiary of Gearbox.