Latest News - Page 1193

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has captured a beautiful shot of the galactic merger IC 2431.

IC 2431 is found 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer and appears to be a triple galaxy merger in progress, though a thick cloud of dust somewhat obstructs the view of the center. The image was taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and targeted the IC 2431 merger identified by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project.

The original Galaxy Zoo project consisted of more than 100,000 volunteers and classified 900,000 unexamined galaxies and was the largest galaxy census ever conducted. The project achieved a year's worth of work for a professional astronomer in 175 days and has since led to a consistent stream of similar astronomical citizen science projects.

A study on the newly discovered species has been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The new dinosaur species is called Guemesia ochoai and was discovered in the Los Blanquitos Formation near Amblayo, in the north of Argentina, through the finding of a partially complete skull. It is the first species to be identified for the Guemesia genus. The fossils were found in rocks between 65 and 75 million years old, meaning G. ochoai lived just before the mass extinction that marked the end of the Cretaceous period.

G. ochoai is an abelisaurid dinosaur belonging to the Abelisauridae family, a clade of carnivorous dinosaurs that lived in what is now Africa, South America, and India. These abelisaurids had front limbs even smaller than the Tyrannosaurus rex and were effectively useless.

Battlefield 2042 may need to go free-to-play to succeed on Steam, but only after the game is stable and fixed.

Battlefield 2042's player count has tanked on Steam. Significant controversy has dropped Battlefield 2042's player counts by 97% since launch to present day. There's one potential way EA can turn things around.

Data from Steam DB suggests that EA's best bet right now may be to release BF2042 as a free-to-play game. The shooter's concurrent players shot up from 18,907 to 47,883 during Battlefield 2042's free weekend on Steam, but dropped sharply to 19.516 after the freebie ended. This is the kind delivery mechanism that EA needs to leverage, possibly even breaking up Battlefield 2042 into segmented, separately-monetized pieces.

Dead Island 2 could release sometime in 2023...but our predictions have been here before.

Dead Island 2 is still alive although Embracer barely talks about the game. The project has been in development for nearly 10 years and has been handed off to multiple studios before finding a home at Dambuster Studios, the team behind Homefront: The Revolution.

So...when is it coming out? Neither Embracer Group nor publisher Deep Silver will say for sure, but CEO Lars Wingefors might've delivered a hint.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla has made over $1 billion in revenues in little over a year, breaking a new record for the franchise.

In less than a year, Assassin's Creed Valhalla became the second most-profitable game in Ubisoft history. Now Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirms the game has made over $1 billion in total consumer revenues, which includes sales and microtransactions.

"For the first time in the Assassin's Creed brand, the game passed $1 billion dollar consumer revenue and it did that during the December month. It's something new for a franchise like Assassin's [Creed] to reach that kind of revenue," Guillemot said in a recent Q3 2021 earnings call.

Nintendo isn't just shutting down the 3DS and Wii U storefronts, but it's also removing all forms of digital retro game purchases from the market.

Nintendo's unpopular business decisions are catching the ire of gamers and preservationists alike. The Video Game History Foundation, which wants to create the Library of Alexandria for video games, has gone so far to call Nintendo's current tactics "actively destructive" to the slowly-ebbing retro market.

Nintendo has made nearly $60 billion in dedicated video games revenues since the Switch's release, and a good portion of that is from hardware.

Nintendo's video games business has been rock solid since the Switch's arrival in early 2017. The Mario-maker has generated billions in revenue every year since it unionized handhelds and consoles into one cohesive multi-device ecosystem. Things have certainly turned around since the Wii U days.

According to data provided by Nintendo, the company has made roughly $59.8 billion in total cumulative sales revenues across its video games business unit since the Nintendo Switch released in Q4'17. What's interesting is Nintendo has made more from hardware than it has from software because every Switch is sold at a profit. Hardware made up $33.16 billion or 55% of total dedicated video games revenues, and software made $26.63 billion, or 45% of the total.

A new study published in the journal Nature models future outcomes for the Earth's climate.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) have created computer simulations of a hundred thousand different futures with various outcomes of climate change. The models incorporate social and political factors that help and hinder progress in combating climate change, not just technical, environmental, and economic factors.

A study on users' smartphone and app usage has been published in the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers from Lancaster University and the University of Bath in the United Kingdom analyzed 4,680 days worth of app usage data from 780 people's smartphones, creating models of their daily app usage patterns. They then tested whether the models could identify individuals based on only one day of anonymous smartphone usage activity.

A study on the deep learning approach has been published in the journal Nature.

DeepMind Technologies, based in Britain, is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., which also owns Google. It has recently used its DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) to control a tokamak, a magnetic confinement device used for nuclear fusion reactor experiments involving plasma. The plasmas in a tokamak are highly unstable, complicating their experiments and requiring careful control.

A tokamak control system has to coordinate all of its nineteen magnetic coils and adjust their voltage thousands of times per second to stop the plasma from touching the vessel's walls, which would result in heat loss and potential damage. DeepMind and the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL collaborated to create the first deep reinforcement learning (RL) system to control these processes for the Variable Configuration Tokamak (TCV) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

A paper describing the android child has been published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Researchers from Japan's RIKEN institute created the android child, named Nikola, as part of the Guardian Robot Project. The android could successfully replicate six emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The research team assessed the quality of facial expression by seeing how easily volunteers could determine the emotion the android was attempting to express.

The android's face contains 29 pneumatic actuators, used to drive the movement of its artificial muscles, with six more actuators that move its head and eyes. The actuators are air-powered to enable quieter and smoother operation for a more realistic experience. Using an existing system known as the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), the research team placed the actuators in the most appropriate places to recreate facial expressions.

Researchers from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) were responsible for the finding the specimen.

The NIWA researchers found the chimaera, known as "ghost sharks," near New Zealand's South Island. The chimaera is a neonate, meanly newly hatched, about 1200 meters (4,000 feet) deep on the Chatham Rise while surveying the area to estimate the local populations of Hoki, another fish. They are cartilaginous relatives of sharks and rays, meaning fish with skeletons made of cartilage and not bone.

Chimaeras lay their embryos on the seafloor, where they feed on the yolk within their egg capsule before hatching. The team will be conducting further tests and genetic analyses to determine which chimera species the catch belongs to, as there are currently fifty-two known species living in the deep ocean.

Ukraine has officially passed a piece of legislation that deems Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies legal in a move to usher in attractive, transparent investments.

The bill was originally passed by the government back in September 2021 but was sent back by parliament by Ukraine President Volodymyr, who requested that some changes be made. Four months later, the bill has been formally signed into law and now represents a massive step towards creating protection for digital asset owners, exchanges, and individuals through regulation.

The Ukrainian government now expects that nefarious acts that riddle the cryptocurrency industry, such as scam projects, money laundering, fraud, and other illegal acts, will reduce dramatically with the legalization of Bitcoin and other crypto coins. Additionally, it's expected that the legalization will usher in innovation throughout the space and instill confidence in those who are interested in exploring the emerging technologies. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

After being on a slow climb since its massive leg-up on February 4, Bitcoin has taken a hit when it comes to its price as prominent investors and other global factors cause fear, uncertainty, and doubt to flood the market.

Bitcoin broke its down-trend in late January and then experienced a massive increase in value on February 4, taking the digital asset from $37,000 to nearly $42,000 in a day, a jump by nearly 12%. The following days after the sharp increase in price, Bitcoin continued to rise, eventually failing to break the resistance at $45,000, which would have been a vital price point to re-take. From February 16-17, the price of BTC tumbled by nearly 10%, sending the price down from around $44,000 to where it is at the time of writing this article, $40,500.

So, why have we seen a sharp drop in the value of Bitcoin? There are several factors, and the first would be the stark words spoken by prominent legacy investor Charlie Munger, who said that he is proud of the fact that he hasn't invested in cryptocurrency and that it should have been banned immediately. Munger describes cryptocurrency as a "venereal disease". On top of comments from large investors spreading doubt throughout the cryptocurrency market, there are also the events between Russia and Ukraine that are injecting fear, uncertainty, and doubt into not only through the cryptocurrency markets but the stock markets as well.

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Below you can see a couple of screenshots of Windows 10 activated using one of the keys provided by CDKeysales.

There's a new crypto miner on the loose, with the introduction of the Jasminer X4 Etchash Brick crypto miner that's on Amazon for $2099.

The Jasminer X4 Etchash Brick crypto miner features a fanless design, so that it can sit in your living room, garage, or even your office and mine cryptocurrency without making much noise, if any at all. Sunlune Technology has made the Jasminer X4 chip inside, which uses 3D chip tracking technology with through-silicon vias (TSVs).

What this allowed Sunlune to do was put all of the computing and data storage units into a single chip, which reduces overall power consumption to 30W. You're going to mine around 65MH/s of Ethereum for that 30W, which isn't too bad at all... you'll be making around $2.85 per day at the price of Ethereum today.

Ubisoft plans to release at least 4 AAA games in the fiscal year ending March 2023, including the long-awaited Skull & Bones.

Ubisoft's next FY2023 period should deliver a handful of unique games across a wide spectrum of genres. The company wants to release four big titles from April 2022 - March 2023, including:

The slate is missing heavy-hitters like Assassin's Creed or a Tom Clancy title, however Ubisoft says this year will be the largest ever for Rainbow Six content and features. There's also more Assassin's Creed content planned throughout 2022, but the major new AC title won't launch in FY23.

Ubisoft's holiday 2021 earnings have dropped due to a smaller number of game releases.

Today Ubisoft announced its Q3'21 figures, and while respectable, the numbers are substantially lower than last year's period. This led to a 30% drop in sales and a 25% reduction in net bookings. Some vital context is needed.

The main reason for the slip is that Ubisoft released more games in 2020 than it did in 2021. Ubisoft had a stacked holiday 2020 period with multiple heavy-hitting games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs Legion launching with next-gen consoles. The Q3 2021 period only really had Far Cry 6 and Just Dance 2022 to prop up holiday sales.

Ubisoft shrugs off direct questions about being acquired by a larger company like Sony or Microsoft.

Having fought off one hostile takeover against Vivendi, Ubisoft wants to remain as free as it can for as long as possible. Billion-dollar giants like Microsoft and Sony are flashing pocketbooks to buy up content IP to power their ecosystems of services and hardware.

Ubisoft is one of the last major games companies that hasn't been purchased...and that's how company executives want it to stay. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says the publisher is stable and doesn't technically have a reason to sell.

Embracer Group has over 200 games in development, and most of them remain unannounced.

With its sheer volume of developers, labels, and owned IP, Embracer Group is one biggest games companies on the planet. In updated figures, the multimedia giant says it has an incredible 216 game projects that are currently in development. Most of these games are unannounced; there are 149 mystery titles in the pipeline across Embracer's massive array of developers.

The significant increase in game projects reflects some of Embracer's most recent major buyouts, which include Gearbox Entertainment, 3D Realms, Perfect World Entertainment (nestled under Gearbox), and Aspyr.