Latest News - Page 1183

The World Health Organization (WHO) report is the latest in its weekly installments regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

On March 1st, 2022, the WHO reported that the reported number of new COVID-19 cases globally dropped by 16 percent in the previous week, following a month-long decline in new infections. The number of deaths has also fallen by 10 percent, following a decrease seen in the week prior. There have been more than 10 million new cases and about 60,000 deaths worldwide in the last week.

According to the WHO, the omicron variant is the overwhelmingly dominant variant, accounting for 99.5% of the virus sequences in the world's largest publicly accessible database, with only 0.3% from the delta variant. Other variants such as beta, gamma, lambda, and mu have not been reported in the last month, although the WHO notes there are surveillance challenges in many countries.

Many publicly-available images of the Russian invasion into Ukraine are already live from various satellite operators.

Max Polyakov, the founder and CEO of Earth Observatory System Data Analytics (EOSDA), has recently appealed to satellite operators and space agencies worldwide to share their real-time satellite imagery with EOSDA to assist military and humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

The United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) has begun negotiating the historic treaty.

Almost 200 nations at the UNEA in Nairobi unanimously agreed to create an intergovernmental committee to negotiate and finalize a legally binding treaty regarding plastics by 2024. The treaty has been mandated to target plastic waste in all forms, including microplastics that insidiously work their way in the food chain and more.

A study on the association titled "Emotion-based Modeling of Mental Disorders on Social Media" has been submitted to arXiv.

Researchers from Dartmouth College have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that analyzes Reddit conversations to detect users' mental disorders. Their model focuses on emotions instead of the specific content of the text analyzed. The researchers say this is a more reliable approach to assessing mental disorders irrespective of the topics being discussed in the posts.

Their research focuses on emotional disorders such as major depressive, anxiety, and bipolar disorders, each characterized by distinct emotional patterns. Using publicly available data from Reddit, the researchers trained their AI model to map emotional transitions between different posts to create a map of how likely a user was to transition from a certain emotional state to another.

A crowd-funded project by Russian art collective Pussy Riot created the one-of-one non-fungible token (NFT) of the Ukrainian flag.

The auction for the unique NFT was organized and orchestrated by UkraineDAO, which is led by Pussy Riot and the NFT studio Trippy Labs. The idea behind the creation of the NFT was to raise funds for the struggling people in Ukraine that are currently fleeing in droves from invading Russian forces. The winning bid for the Ukraine flag NFT was a pool of 3,271 donors that placed the bid through a service called PartyBid.

Read more: Student who tracked Elon Musk's jet is now tracking Russian VIPs

The head of Russia's space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, gave stark warnings during a recent interview against hacking any Russian satellites.

Dmitry Rogozin has been very vocal since Russia began its invasion into Ukraine, and as Western sanctions tightened Russia, Rogozin threatened to have the ISS deorbited. Now, Rogozin, the head of the Russian Roscosmos State Space Corporation, is responding to claims that Roscosmos' control center was hacked by a group affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous. According to Rogozin, "The information of these scammers and petty swindlers is not true," adding, "All our space activity control centers are operating normally."

Read more: Russia threatens to crash the ISS into US, top NASA official answers

A group of hackers has announced via Twitter that they have infiltrated Russia's command center for its spy satellites.

The hacking group goes by the name "NB65", and is reportedly affiliated with the infamous hacking group Anonymous. According to reports, NB65 has successfully shut down the control center of the Russian Space Agency "Roscosmos", and as a result, Russia no longer has control of its own spy satellites. In response to these claims, Russian space agency head Dmitry Rogozin announced that Russia was still in control of its control center and that the claims were false.

Read more: Russia threatens to crash the ISS into US, top NASA official answers

The 19-year-old that was ushered into fame by creating a bot that tracks Elon Musk's jet has now created a bot that tracks Russian VIPs.

In early February, 19-year-old college student and aviation enthusiast Jack Sweeney landed himself in the limelight as Elon Musk offered to pay $5,000 to delete the Twitter account bot created by Sweeney. The Twitter account is ElonJet, and was created to track the take-off and landing locations of Elon Musk's private jet. The account is now nearing 400,000 followers, and now Sweeney has announced a new account called "PutinJet", which tracks the movements of Russian VIP jets and any Putin may use.

Read more: Elon Musk offers teen $5,000 to kill the Twitter bot tracking his jet

In 2020 a team of astronomers reported locating the closest black hole system at 1,000 light-years from Earth, but fellow researchers contested the results of the study and teamed up to produce a new study together.

The international team of astronomy researchers has published a new paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics that details the HR 6818 system with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. According to the paper, the HR 6818 system isn't a triple system that consists of one star orbiting a black hole every 40 days and a second star orbiting much wider as it was originally thought. It is actually a system that features two stars orbiting each other with no black hole.

The team used two of the VLT's instruments called GRAVITY and the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), and with the results, were able to conclude that HR 6819 is a binary system that features two stars and no black hole. The reasoning for the miscategorization is that astronomers originally observed the system when one of the stars was ripping the atmosphere off of its companion star, which is described as being much like a vampire drawing blood from its victim.

An employee that was working at a local electricity company has photographed a rare phenomenon described as "light pillars".

The photograph was taken by Mark Matwick, who is employed at the Keewatinohk Converter Station in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Matwick works at Manitoba Hydro, the operator of the electricity company, posted the photograph to its Linkedin account explaining the phenomenon. According to Manitoba Hydro, these mysterious beams of light are called "light pillars" and aren't "aliens descending", but occur "on a cold night without wind, the ice crystals that form in the atmosphere can act as a mirror and reflect the light source below."

In response to the photograph being posted on LinkedIn, Justin Anderson, an adept northern lights photographer and also one of the founders of the Manitoba Aurora and Astronomy Facebook page, spoke to CTV News Winnipeg and said that Matwick's image was "probably one of the best photos of light pillars I've ever seen." The full-time northern lights photographer backed up the explanation from Manitoba Hydro, saying, "It will reflect that light upwards into the atmosphere and it'll go hundreds of feet," he said. "It looks like hundreds of feet for us, but really it's going miles in the air and it looks incredible."

Ukraine has asked for global support to fend off the invasion from Russian military forces that began last week.

Ukraine has asked for funding from any that are willing to give, and those that are willing to donate are able to do so in a variety of ways. One of those ways is donating cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, and so far, Ukraine has received tens of millions of donations in various coins. Recently, the founder of Polkadot, Gavin Wood, announced that if Ukraine were to post a Polkadot address, he would donate $5 million.

The official Ukraine Twitter account followed up with a post of a Polkadot wallet address, which then later received 298,367 DOT, with each priced at $19.33 it makes Woods' donation $5.8 million. So far, the Polkadot address has received more than $6 million in DOT donations and is continuing to grow. Recently the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, donated $10 million to Ukraine while also opening up a donation pool.

Russia began its invasion into Ukraine on February 24, and since then, residents of both countries have been moving their wealth into cryptocurrency.

According to a new report released by Arcane Research, Ukrainians are purchasing Bitcoin and Tether like they never have before via the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. According to the report, Ukrainians are purchasing Bitcoin and Tether with the hryvnia, Ukraine's native currency, currently worth about $0.033 USD. Right before the Russian invasion on February 24 the trading pair Tether/Hryvnia saw its 24-hour trading volume increase from $6 million to $8.5 million, when usually it doesn't exceed $3 million.

Additionally, Ukrainians are purchasing swaths of Bitcoin as data from the report indicates that the Bitcoin/hryvnia 24-hour trading volume increased from $1 million to $3 million. Ukrainians are purchasing cryptocurrency out of fear the traditional banking system will collapse under the pressure of the Russian invasion. Likewise, Russians are purchasing large amounts of cryptocurrency as a way to store their wealth that is safe from government seizure and the collapsing value of the Russian ruble. Cryptocurrency is a haven for both sides.

AMD will have its exciting new Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor in the hands of enthusiasts, benchmarkers, and gamers by the end of the month as the first CPUs have rolled out of the factory.

In a new tweet, industry insider "Greymon55" tweeted that AMD's new Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor "has been shipped and will probably be on the market by the end of this month". As for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor and what makes it so exciting is its new 3D V-Cache technology.

3D V-Cache is a huge L3 cache that sits on top of the compute chiplet, where AMD is expecting around 15% more performance thanks to the stacked memory, which means the new Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor is actually faster than AMD's higher-end Ryzen 9 5900X in gaming. Not only that, but the new 5800X3D beats the Core i9-12900K in gaming which is what really matters.

The ongoing NVIDIA issues are surely causing massive meetings inside of Team Green, with the cyber attack now seeing the DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) source code being leaked... and that's not the worst of it.

NVIDIA has kept its magic DLSS technology close to its chest, and while this is good for the company, its competitors -- AMD and Intel -- have their similar upscaling tech being open source. NVIDIA hasn't pushed into the world of open-source with DLSS, but hackers might actually force their hands.

DLSS beats the pants off of FSR (AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution) and even more so with DLSS 2.2 and DLSS 2.3 if the games support it, because when they do... NVIDIA reigns supreme by a (very) long shot. But now that the DLSS source code is out in the wild, it could end in a ball of blames for NVIDIA as their secret sauce is out in the nude.

President Joe Biden had many things to say at his State of the Union speech today, but it also pissed off SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk.

It all started with Joe Biden, who tweeted out: "Ford is investing $11B to build electric vehicles-creating 11,000 jobs across the country. GM is making the largest investment in its history-$7B to build electric vehicles, creating 4,000 jobs in Michigan".

Musk replied, saying: "Tesla has created over 50,000 US jobs building electric vehicles & is investing more than double GM + Ford combined [fyi to person controlling this Twitter]". Someone then tweeted "just do everyone knows, you're the only one who controls your Twitter, right" -- to which Musk replied simply -- "Well, I do have multiple personality disorder, but they're all technically in the same head".

NVIDIA's next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU architecture could have a big surprise up its sleeve, with new information that continues to flow from the leaked cache of content that hackers gained access to when they cyberattacked NVIDIA.

Inside of some of that information are some files that refer to the "Ada" GPUs with 16MB of cache per 64-bit memory bus, up from the 512KB per 32-bit memory on Ampere GPUs. This is a huge change, so the fact that the flagship AD102 GPU has 96MB of cache means it'll have a whopping 90MB more L2 cache than the GA102 Ampere GPU.

AMD has up to 128MB of Infinity Cache on its RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, with the likes of the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT both rocking 128MB Infinity Cache. NVIDIA's next-gen AD102 GPU should power the GeForce RTX 4090, GeForce RTX 4080 Ti, and GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards if the company keeps its naming system the same.

NVIDIA's systems have reportedly been compromised, with hackers now threatening to leak out confidential NVIDIA data, information, and even crypto gimping unlocks.

Things continue to go from bad to worse, where now the hackers are threatening to leak out information -- and unlocks to the LHR-based GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs. The LHR V2 bypass for NVIDIA's gimped GA102 + GA104 GPU, and now those unlocks are being sold.

This means that the hacking collective has found a solution to the algorithm that gimps crypto mining on the RTX 30 series GPUs that are LHR-gimped, should be un-gimped soon enough. NVIDIA has admitted it has been attacked now, but I guess we'll see how much deeper this goes in the coming hours, days, and weeks.

A World of Tanks developer is fired for controversial support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A bit ago, World of Tanks creative director Sergey Burkatovskiy wrote on Facebook that he agrees with Russia's unprovoked strikes on Ukraine. Shortly afterwards WoT parent company Wargaming terminated Burkatovskiy and confirmed he is no longer working on the game.

The Belarusian developer, who operates multiple war games including World of Tanks, World of Warplanes, and World of Warships, says these aren't the views it has on the escalating conflict. "Sergey Burkatovskiy expressed his personal opinion on social media which categorically does not reflect the position of the company. He has been let go and is no longer at the company," the Wargaming tells PC Gamer.

Netflix has acquired Next Games, the developers behind Walking Dead and Stranger Things mobile games.

Netflix has announce an offer to buy outstanding shares of Finnish game developer Next Games. Under the deal Netflix will pay 65 million euros ($72 million) for Next Games in an effort to bolster its growing video games production arm. The streaming giant has added mobile games into existing Netflix subscriptions free of charge to help boost value and continued engagement.

Next Games is the mobile dev responsible for two Walking Dead games, including The Walking No Man's Land that has generated 131 million euros in revenue across 23 million downloads, as well as a Stranger Things puzzle game.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 developer has halted work on the game as it faces war against Russia.

Ukrainian game dev GSC Game World has paused development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 due to the Russian invasion. Russia is currently trying to capture the capital city of Kyiv, which is GSC's HQ. The game is set in irradiate Chernobyl, which was captured by the Russian military five days ago.

The developer says work on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will continue "after the victory."