Latest News - Page 1190

The digital world is slowly crossing over with real life, and while the process will take many years, it will be done in incremental steps.

Solana-based NFT marketplace Neon recently received a $3 million seed round last month to launch what could be considered as an "incremental step", the very first NFT vending machines. The marketplace rolled out the first NFT vending machine on 29 John St in Manhattan, New York, in December 2021, but now reports indicate that the vending machine is ready for purchases and is open 24 hours a day. The NFT vending machine will allow buyers to purchase Solana NFTs with US dollars.

Jordan Birnholtz, the co-founder and CMO of Neon, spoke to Decrypt and said that he came up with the idea of selling NFTs via a vending machine halfway through 2021 and thought "that there is literally no simpler way to buy something than a vending machine". Additionally, Birnholtz explains that the vending machines were created to showcase how simple it is to purchase an NFT and how powerful of a tool they can be to support digital artists.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed that Tesla charging stations will accept Musk's favorite cryptocurrency as payment.

Elon Musk responded to a tweet from the founder of Tesla Console, Ryan Zohoury, that featured an image of Tesla charging stations in Santa Monica, California, that showcased an almost full parking lot of Tesla vehicles. Musk said that a "futuristic diner / drive-in theater planned for Hollywood area!", and that it will be possible to pay in Dogecoin cryptocurrency.

This isn't the first time Musk has said that Dogecoin is a viable payment, as in December 2021, Tesla began trialing Dogecoin as a payment by allowing individuals to purchase some Tesla merchandise with the cryptocurrency. Reports also indicate that Musk has hinted or teased that in the future, people will be able to pay for SpaceX's Starlink internet with Dogecoin.

Activision looks to be delaying Call of Duty 2023 according to the latest rumors from industry insider Tom Henderson, who was pretty damn rock solid with his insider info on Battlefield 2042 and many other games in the last 18 months.

In a new tweet, Henderson tweeted: "Activision is set to delay next year's Call of Duty title. This will be the first title in nearly two decades where the franchise won't have a yearly CoD. It looks like a lot is riding on Modern Warfare II".

Now that Henderson opened up the "Call of Duty 2023 has been delayed" floodgates, everyone else is reporting in with their own industry sources saying they've heard similar reports. If the news is true, it will have been the first time there hasn't been a new Call of Duty "mainline game" in nearly 20 years -- 2004 was the last time.

I don't know why this is 'new' news but I'm still reporting on it anyway: Intel's new Arc Alchemist GPU family will have multiple performance tiers (that I reported on back in November 2021) in the form of the A300, A500, and A700 series GPUs.

The news is coming from SiSoftware which has a roundup of OpenCL benchmarks where we get a look at the higher-end A500 and A700 series Arc GPUs which should see the flagship Intel Arc A700 featuring the DG2-512 GPU with the full 512 Execution Units.

Intel Arc A500 should see the DG2-384 GPU, while the Arc A300 will find its way into our motherboards with the DG2-128 GPU. We should see 16GB of GDDR6 memory on the Arc A700, 12GB of GDDR6 memory on the Arc A500, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory on the Arc A300. Intel has already confirmed that its upcoming first-gen Arc Alchemist GPUs will be made on TSMC N6 process technology.

NVIDIA refreshed its Ampere cards last year with the LHR variant, otherwise known as Lite Hash Rate, gimped for crypto mining... but not anymore, well, it seems so at least.

Now we have Sergey releasing his new "NVIDIA RTX LHR v2 Unlocker" tool that will unlock the crypto mining performance on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series and Workstation RTX Ampere GPUs. There have been previous 'solutions' to un-gimping LHR cards, but this reportedly unlocks the "full mining performance" according to MyDrivers.

The way this new tool works is that the software implements a modification extracted from BIOSes that are detected by mining operating systems like HiveOS. The modification is then added into the BIOS of cards that have limited hash rate performance, while the new Unlocker software modifies, flashes, and gives you a backup of your BIOS. It's safe, and reversible, says Sergey.

Apple's upcoming AR headset has been in the headlines in a confusing way lately -- first, it was launching this year, then it wasn't -- and now it's completed important production tests, and could launch later this year.

The upcoming AR and VR headset from Apple has completed its second-phase engineering validation tests (EVT 2) which ensures that the prototype headsets meet Apple's strict design goals and specifications. The new report is coming from DigiTimes and its usual industry sources, who added that Apple's upcoming AR headset could launch by the end of 2022.

In the reports just weeks ago, the Apple AR headset was reportedly going through overheating problems and could be due to the two chipsets inside -- one of them being a 4nm chip, the other a 5nm chip -- both designed by Apple and made by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). We could see a very limited launch, with small numbers by the end of 2022, but I guess we'll have to wait and see how this plays out over the coming months.

With the help of LEGO, 2K Sports is about to get even bigger.

2K has signed a deal to license the LEGO brand for a new wave of casual, kid-friendly sports games. Sources tell Video Game Chronicle that Sumo Digital, the developers behind Crackdown 3, Team Sonic Racing, Little Big Planet 3, and Sackboy: A Big Adventure, are working on the first game in the series. It's believed to be a soccer game slated for 2023.

Another racing-based LEGO game is coming from Visual Concepts, who are responsible for the NBA 2K and WWE2K games.

Since the upgrade threshold for Windows 11 is relatively high, many users may download Windows 11 from other websites to try it, which puts your computer in danger. Because these download packages often contain malware, it will steal your personal information and your transaction password, and so on your data. So, to get a safe and genuine copy of Windows OS is your first choice.

Want to get a genuine and legitimate Windows OS or Microsoft Office for little money?

Don't worry, Keysfan has you covered. Keysfan sells mainly second-hand licenses, which it buys from companies that no longer have any use for them and passes them on to individuals. Keysfan knows the "history" of each license it sells, so the end-user can use them without any problems. According to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the system of buying and selling second-hand licenses is authorized in Europe, and you no longer have any doubt about the reliability of the legislation and services.

Sony is securing day one releases on PlayStation Now, which may signal big things to come.

Sony has taken a move out of the Xbox Game Pass playbook in a bid to boost PS Now. The games titan is now brokering deals to release third-party games day one on PlayStation Now. Sony could be trying to add more value to PS Now in preparation for PlayStation Spartacus, the new ambitious games subscription service that combines PS Now and PS Plus together.

The first game to release day one on PS Now is Shadow Warrior 3. This is an interesting choice because Flying Wild Hog is owned by The Embracer Group, one of the biggest companies on the market, and nestled under Koch Media. This deal may extend to other Embracer or Koch Media games including Saints Row V and maybe even Dead Island 2.

Bethesda is shutting down its proprietary PC launcher and will move all games and content over to Steam.

The Bethesda.net PC launcher is being retired in May 2022. Starting in April, gamers will migrate their games ownership over to Steam. Most modern games will have automatic save transfers but some, like Elden Scrolls III Morrowind, will require manual save transfers. Oddly enough, Wolfenstein Youngblood's progress is "currently unable to transfer." All Bethesda.net wallet currencies--Fallout 76 Atoms, ESO drakes, and any money associated with your account--will transfer over too.

Bethesda makes it clear only the launcher is shutting down in May, and gamers will still have ownership access to all of their full games after that period. They just won't be able to launch them from Bethesda.net software. The actual Bethesda.net account services aren't being closed, and you'll still need to make and sign into a Beth.net account to play specific games.

Sony has finally revealed the design of the PS VR2 headset. We've previously seen an early version of Sony's new 6-DoF Sense controllers, and now we have the final look of the headset to go with it. The Sense controllers have a distinctly round shape, and the new headset keeps the same aesthetic. Sony said the "orb" look of the hardware is meant to represent the 360-degree view that players experience inside the headset.

As you would expect, the PS VR2 headset shares the same styling as the PS5 console, with its white and black contrasting accents. Sony said that it put a significant amount of time and effort into refining the ergonomics of the headset. The weight of the PS VR2 is balanced between the headband and the visor to ensure it stays comfortable for long game sessions. The new headset will include a lens distance adjustment dial and a pupil distance adjustment to help you get the right fit for your eyes. Sony said the PS VR2 is a more compact device than the previous version despite the additional features like the IPD adjustment and the force feedback rumble motor. Sony also made a point to note that the new headset has improved ventilation.

"When I started to work on the design for the PlayStation VR2 headset, one of the areas I wanted to focus on first was the idea of creating a vent in the headset to let air out, similar to the vents on the PS5 console that allows airflow. Our engineers came up with this idea as a good way to allow ventilation and avoid having the lens fog up while players are immersed in their VR games. I worked on many design concepts to achieve this, and in the final design, you can see there is a little space in between the top and front surface of the scope that contains the integrated ventilation. I am really proud of how this turned out and the positive feedback I have gotten so far. I hope our PlayStation fans will also agree, and I can't wait for them to try it out."

A new study published in the journal Small describes the treatment.

Researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) have used high-frequency sound waves to turn stem cells into bone cells. Considerable bone cells are needed to help regrow bone, which typically requires complicated and expensive equipment to enable mass production.

The majority of clinical trials focusing on bone regrowth have extracted the stem cells for the treatment from a patient's bone marrow, a highly painful process. Now, the RMIT research team has demonstrated their stem cell conversion method to be effective for multiple types of stem cells, such as fat-derived stem cells, which are much less painful to source from a patient.

A study on the vulnerability has been published in the ACM MobiCom Conference and will be presented by the researchers at the upcoming International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in March.

Voice interactions are becoming more prevalent in VR and AR as they branch out into applications beyond gaming, compared to traditional handheld-controller interactions. Researchers from Rutgers University showed that hackers could access the built-in motion sensors on face-mounted virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets in an eavesdropping attack.

Their attack, Face-Mic, captures speech-associated subtle facial dynamics from these zero-permission motion sensors and infer sensitive information from live human speech, such as speaker gender, identity, and speech content. Using a deep-learning-based approach and four mainstream VR headsets, the team validated the generalizability, effectiveness, and high accuracy of Face-Mic in extracting speech information.

Moderna is expanding its mRNA pipeline with three new vaccine development programs.

The latest press release by Moderna includes announcements for three different vaccine candidates: mRNA-1608, a vaccine candidate against Herpes simplex virus (HSV), mRNA-1468, a vaccine candidate against varicella-zoster virus (VZV) to reduce the rate of herpes zoster (shingles), and mRNA-4359, a new checkpoint cancer vaccine.

A new study on the conversion process has been published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Researchers from Northwestern University and LanzaTech have engineered and optimized a strain of bacteria to convert carbon dioxide into the more valuable industrial chemicals acetone and isopropanol (IPA). The benefits of the new gas fermentation process are two-fold; removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere directly and bypassing the use of fossil fuels that would normally occur in generating acetone and IPA.

The combined global market for acetone and IPA is around $10 billion. IPA is the basis for one of the two World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended sanitizer formulas, while acetone is a widely used solvent. Starting with the anaerobic bacterium Clostridium autoethanogenum, researchers reprogrammed the bacteria at LanzaTech to ferment carbon dioxide to make acetone and IPA.

The exoplanet is named WASP-121b and is the focus of a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

WASP-121b is a type of gas giant exoplanet known as a "hot Jupiter" and is almost double the size of Jupiter. It was found in 2015, orbiting a star about 850 light-years from Earth. The planet is "tidally-locked" to its host star, resulting in a "day" side that permanently faces it and a "night" side that always faces away.

Astronomers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have observed the perpetually dark side of the exoplanet with the most clarity yet, which, combined with their observations of the permanent dayside, have allowed them to study the atmosphere as a whole.

The co-founder of one of the world's leading cryptocurrency exchanges has said that the next bull run for Bitcoin won't be for a few more years.

In a recent report from CNBC, who spoke to Du Jun, the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, Jun said that the Bitcoin bull run likely won't begin until late 2024 or around the beginning of 2025. In an interview with CNBC, the Huobi co-founder said that the bull market echos with a process called the "Great Halving," which happens every four years. This process relates to the Bitcoin mining network, which validates transactions on the network and gives miners, or validators, Bitcoin as a reward.

Every time the Great Halving happens, it halves the amount of Bitcoin that is rewarded to miners. In 2016 the halving happened, and the following year Bitcoin hit an all-time high. The last halving occurred in 2020, and throughout 2021 Bitcoin reached its current all-time high of $69,000. Du Jun believes if this cycle is still happening, we are currently at the early stages of a bear market and that we won't likely see a bull run until 2024.

Another NFT scam project can be added to the ever-growing list of projects that have turned out to be rug pulls.

YouTube investigator Coffeezilla has put together a short video that outlines the recent events surrounding the NFT project created by famous porn star turned influencer Lana Rhoades. The project is called "CryptoSis" and features collections of cartoon images of Rhoades, which the actress told her audience would be a valuable investment as she will be working hard to "increase the value of CryptoSis's, and make it a lucrative investment for holders that they can sell for more than they paid to mint".

It should be noted that if Rhoades said that the "CryptoSis" NFT project was purely artwork and not an investment, then it wouldn't have been a scam. Rhoades, on multiple occasions, said via social media that the value of the project would increase with every new collection drop, leading buyers to believe that they were making a long-term investment that would pay off when she would complete the outlined roadmap for the project.

A new study that has yet to be peer-reviewed has explored the capabilities of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and whether it's possible the world's most powerful space telescope will be an instrument that reveals alien life on other worlds.

The best way researchers can find alien life on other worlds is by collecting information about a planet and comparing that information to how humans evolved on Earth. Humans produce quite a lot of chemicals into the atmosphere, as well as large amounts of heat, and if researchers were hunting for intelligent alien life, they would observe the atmosphere of a planet look for evidence of chemicals that wouldn't be in the atmosphere without some kind of external intervention.

It's possible that since humans are using chemical detection in the atmosphere to search for life that aliens are doing so as well, which means that the chemicals humans produce into the biosphere that are, not only slowly killing the planet, may also be acting as a cosmic flare to anyone looking. Within the new pre-print study, researchers proposed how scientists would search for these chemical compounds that wouldn't usually be in the atmosphere of planets, and suggested specifically searching "potent greenhouse agents with long atmospheric residence times".

Did you know you can now run Android apps on Windows 11? Well, if you didn't know -- now you do -- and if you did, do you know what hardware you need to run Android apps on Windows 11? It's not much.

Microsoft recommends that you have an Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPU -- or if you're a laptop user, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8c or above. There's also a requirement for an SSD, and 8GB of RAM -- although 16GB of RAM is recommended -- and would make your system much smoother overall, let alone run Android apps in Windows 11 smoother.

You'll need to install the Amazon Appstore from the Microsoft Store, onto Windows 11 before you can run Google's mobile operating system -- Android -- and its apps. What a mess... using Amazon through Microsoft to access a Google product, to run on a Microsoft operating system. Okie dokie.