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Zynga has started incubating blockchain games, sources tell Axios.

With more than $23 billion NFT trades in 2021, mobile titan Zynga wants in on the craze. The game developer is currently ironing out early details of new blockchain-based games with play-to-earn features. Zynga hasn't outlined exact plans, but the general idea is that gamers will be able to play, earn, and own digital assets that can then be re-sold on a marketplace for cryptocurrency.

NFTs have proven to be a wildly speculative market for major game publishers. Square Enix and SEGA have expressed interest. Konami and Ubisoft have both launched their own NFT line but the assets made less than $200,000 overall, which is a drop in the bucket to both companies who make mega millions from microtransactions.

Call of Duty and other Activision franchises will not be Xbox exclusive, Microsoft today announced.

Microsoft just dropped a megaton bomb on exclusivity and re-affirmed our predictions: Call of Duty and other major Activision games will still release on PlayStation consoles after the Activision-Blizzard buyout closes.

"Microsoft will continue to make Call of Duty and other popular Activision Blizzard titles available on PlayStation through the term of any existing agreement with Activision. And we have committed to Sony that we will also make them available on PlayStation beyond the existing agreement and into the future so that Sony fans can continue to enjoy the games they love."

A new study published in the journal PLOS Medicine explores how diet impacts life expectancy.

The research uses findings from meta-analyses and data from the Global Burden of Disease study (2019) to model how life expectancy changes with sustained changes in dietary intake of various food sources. These food sources included fruits, vegetables, whole grains, refined grains, nuts, legumes, fish, eggs, milk/dairy, red meat, processed meat, and sugar-sweetened beverages.

The authors found that by shifting from a typical western diet to a more optimal diet, a 20-year old individual could increase their life expectancy by more than ten years. For a 60-year old individual, life expectancy could increase by eight years, and for an 80-year old, it could increase by about three and a half years. Their in-between diet model to accommodate those with difficulty making drastic diet alterations could still see a six to seven-year increase in life expectancy for a 20-year old.

A new study on Saturn's aurorae has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Aurorae on Earth and other planets are formed by powerful currents flowing into the atmosphere from the surrounding magnetosphere. Charged particles from the Sun drive this interaction on Earth, and volcanic material on orbiting moons enable them on Jupiter and Saturn. Uniquely, Saturn's winds within its atmosphere have now been directly contributing to aurorae formation.

The Curiosity rover has snapped some images showing the state of its wheels.

NASA's Curiosity rover has spanned 3381 Martian sols and counting, or nine and a half Earth years, and it hasn't all been smooth sailing. Large chunks have been taken out of the six aluminum wheels the rover is equipped with, but NASA is confident that Curiosity still has plenty of tread left on the tires, so to speak.

The Perseverance rover set a new record for the longest distance traveled on Mars by rovers in a day.

A day on Mars is longer than a day on Earth by about forty minutes and is called a "sol." On February 4th, 2022, the Perseverance rover traveled 245.76 meters (806.3 feet), a new record for the longest trek by a rover on Mars in one sol, after setting a new record in the preceding days with a 243.3-meter journey.

The previous record was held by NASA's Opportunity rover, which traveled 214 meters (702 feet) in one sol in 2015. The new records came after the rover recovered from a blockage caused by Martian rock samples it had collected. Now, it is undertaking a multi-kilometer drive to a nearby delta.

A new study exploring the impact of these masks has been published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

The improper disposal of surgical masks, which have seen a drastic increase in usage owing to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, is a source of serious microplastic pollution. Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) estimate they contribute to seriously polluting more than 54,800 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of seawater annually.

A blast from the Sun that caused a geomagnetic storm has killed numerous of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, according to an announcement from the company.

According to SpaceX, the batch of Starlink satellites that was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 3 have suffered from a geomagnetic storm in low-Earth orbit will result in 40 of the 49 satellites failing to make it to their intended destination. SpaceX writes that a geomagnetic storm occurring on the February 4 "significantly impacted" the satellites by causing "atmospheric drag".

The company writes that the Starlink satellites were commanded to dodge the geomagnetic storm by turning sideways, or "edge-on", but unfortunately, the maneuver never reached the satellites. SpaceX has designed the Starlink satellites to disintegrate upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, which will mean that none of the satellites will pose a risk to anyone on the Earth's surface.

AAA-game publishers and developers are looking towards the emerging NFT and cryptocurrency space as a place of expansion and it seems that Ubisoft has taken the big leap of faith.

Ubisoft has announced a new partnership with Ethereum-based metaverse game The Sandbox, and the partnership features Ubisoft having its own plot of virtual land within The Sandbox metaverse. The publisher is free to monetize its plot of land however it wants, and will be launching an interactive space for gamers to enjoy, while also allowing for users to play around with Rabbids in the VoxEdit and Game Maker tools.

Decrypt reports that Ubisoft isn't going to stop at Rabbids invading The Sandbox, as it plans on introducing many more characters from its numerous franchises into the up-and-coming metaverse. It's possible that gamers could see characters from the Assassin's Creed franchise, Far Cry, or Rainbox Six Siege, enter The Sandbox metaverse throughout 2022.

The great-grandson of the famous painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso has created a collection of NFTs inspired by his grandfather's work.

Florian Picasso, a DJ and music producer, and his mother Marina Picasso announced that they were producing an NFT collection that included 1,011 purchasable NFTs based on a never-before-seen ceramic bowl crafted by Picasso in 1958. This announcement from Florian and Marina sparked a family debate between Florian, Marina, and The Picasso Administration, which is in control of the branding of the Picasso name and its affiliations.

It was concluded that the NFTs wouldn't be deemed as official Pablo Picasso works and instead would be a created of Florian's, as they would be "his own creation, independent of any claim vis-a-vis Pablo Picasso and his works." The rebranding of the Picasso NFTs to Florian's didn't stop them from being sold as one NFT that included an original piece of Pablo Picasso's pottery sold for $41,500, with an additional 10 NFTs (that didn't include any pottery) sold for anywhere between $4,000 to $5,655.

Four years ago this week, SpaceX needed a test payload for its Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, and what better option than Elon Musk's own Tesla Roadster?

The red Tesla Roadster wasn't the only thing that was launched off the surface of Earth, as the SpaceX team placed a mannequin called "Starman" in the driver's seat where he still should be today. The Falcon Heavy took off from Florida, flying high into the Earth's atmosphere, where it released the payload.

According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who spoke to CNN, the Roadster is likely still in one piece but may have suffered some damage from small meteoroids that could have caused some dents in the cars shell. As of Wednesday, February 8, the Tesla Roadster is 234,000,000 from Earth and is moving away from the planet at a speed of 3,682 miles per hour.

NASA has taken to its Hubble Twitter account to share a classic image of a stunning spiral galaxy called M81.

NASA's famous Hubble Space Telescope, which has been operating for more than 30 years, now snapped the image of the large "grand design" spiral galaxy M81, and the space agency released the image on May 28, 2007. NASA describes the image as the "sharpest image ever taken" of M81 as it showcases the galaxy's oblique angle and gorgeous spiral structure that is similar to the Milky Way galaxy.

M81 is located approximately 11.6 million light-years away from Earth, and with Hubble's incredibly sharp image quality, researchers are able to locate independent stars within the "arms" of the spiral galaxy. NASA explains that the stars seen winding down the spiral arms are young and have a blueish hue, meaning they formed within the last few million years.

Previous reports indicate that an out-of-control decommissioned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will collide into the Moon in early March.

Bill Gray, known for the Project Pluto software, which is used to track near-Earth objects such as asteroids/comets, called upon fellow astronomers to acquire data on what is believed to be a spent upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Astronomers pieced together the obtained data and estimated that the spent rocket stage will collide with the far side of the Moon, close to the equator, on March 4.

Now, the founder of the Virtual Telescope project, Gianluca Masi, who is equipped with several high-powered telescopes, captured the Falcon 9 booster on video and posted the footage to the Virtual Telescope Twitter account. Masi also captured a still image of the spent rocket stage, and while the quality of the video/image is lackluster, it's still very impressive when considering an amateur astronomer captured it.

NASA's newest Mars rover named Perseverance is a very sophisticated piece of technology and is currently collecting rock samples for a long journey back to Earth.

Unfortunately, Perseverance isn't able to send back Mars samples, but NASA has a plan, and it involves a rocket being launched from the surface of Mars. NASA has dubbed the mission "Mars Sample Return Program," and according to the space agency's recent announcement, it has tapped Lockheed Martin to construct the first rocket to do a round-trip mission to Mars to pick up samples.

Lockheed Martin will construct the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), which is a small, lightweight rocket that will launch from the surface of Mars. NASA's plan is for the Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) to take the Mars Ascent Vehicle to the Red Planet's surface, where it will land relatively close to Perseverance. The SRL will act as a launch platform for the small MAV rocket, which will be shot up into orbit and the payload caught by the European Space Agency's Earth Return Orbiter.

Billions of dollars in stolen Bitcoin (BTC) have been seized by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), according to a recent statement issued on Tuesday.

In 2016 the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex announced that it was hacked, and $4.5 billion worth of Bitcoin had been stolen from its wallets. Now, authorities have announced that $3.6 billion has been seized by the DOJ, and a couple living in Manhattan has been arrested for an alleged conspiracy of laundering the stolen Bitcoin. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, "Today's arrests, and the department's largest financial seizure ever, show that cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals."

The DOJ states that it was able to seize the Bitcoin through court-approved searches into the individual's online accounts, which later revealed the couple's private keys to the wallets containing the stolen BTC. Law enforcement was able to claim 94,000 Bitcoin, worth about $60 million at the time of the hack and representing about one-sixth of the total trading volume in 2016.

A new update for Dying Light 2 has been released onto the PC version of the game, with patch 1.04 now live for PC gamers -- but Xbox Series X gamers are in for a treat when the new patch arrives on their consoles.

Dying Light 2 developer Techland has already pushed out multiple hotfixes for the game, but now there's a big patch on the way for all platforms. The PC version of the game gets multiple improvements, with "DLSS improvements" for GeForce gamers.

But the Xbox Series X version of Dying Light 2 will be getting some lovin' with a new 60+ FPS Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) mode, exclusive to XSX and not the Xbox Series S console. Not the PlayStation 5 at this point.

MSI is preparing its new Summit E16 Flip EVO laptop which will be a new 2-in-1 ultra-portable business laptop, that has been revealed on the PugetBench website.

Inside, the new MSI Summit E16 Flip EVO laptop can be configured with up to Intel's new Core i7-12700H processor (14 cores and 20 threads) with 45W TDP. The previous E16 Flip EVO laptop had LPDDR4X memory but the new version should be upgraded to LPDDR5-6400, which is a big deal for laptops.

But it gets even more interesting when it comes to the GPU department, where the MSI Summit E16 Flip EVO laptop has an Intel Arc Alchemist A370M mobile GPU, steering away from the previous E16 Flip EVO that used the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 family of GPUs.

AMD's new EPYC 7773X "Milan-X" processors with 3D V-Cache technology are now out on the market, with some "overclocking" performed on the dual-CPU powerhouse 128-core, 256-thread monster.

A dual-socket SuperMicro motherboard was used, with dual AMD EPYC 7773X "Milan-X" processors with 64 cores and 128 threads each, so with a dual-CPU configuration, we're looking at 128 cores and 256 threads -- as well as AMD's new 3D V-Cache technology -- and now some overclocking.

One of the AMD EPYC 7773X processors was detected as the "100-000000504-04 CPU" which is an OPN core for the AMD engineering sample. This processor in particular has a 2.2GHz base CPU clock and up to 3.5GHz boost CPU clock -- but this engineering sample had its CPU clocks at 100MHz lower -- 2.1GHz and 3.4GHz, respectively. But there's also the special 3D V-Cache technology that dollops a special layer of L3 cache right on top of the compute dies.

MSI has officially unleashed its new MEG Z690 GODLIKE motherboard, which will cost you a pretty penny coming in at $2099.

The new MSI MEG Z690 GODLIKE motherboard is one of, if not the most badass Z690 motherboard ever -- it offers record-breaking OC abilities, beautiful RGB lighting, an LCD dashboard with a panel larger than the original iPhone -- and oh-so-much more.

It is covered in dark, deep, and full aluminum heat sink fashioned with a triangular grid pattern. The illuminating dragon nebula with tempered glass reveals the power with a column of faith and meteor RGB effect. The MEG Z690 GODLIKE symbolizes the endless power of the one universe, ready for every challenge.

ASUS is working on its new flock of GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics cards, with the flagship ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Liquid Cooled Edition.

It looks like ASUS will have three different GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics cards, with the flagship ROG Strix LC RTX 3090 Ti, and then two variants of the TUF Gaming RTX 3090 Ti. ASUS will have the TUF Gaming RTX 3090 Ti OC which is factory overclocked, and the TUF Gaming RTX 3090 Ti.

We're looking at the following models, and also the following eye-watering prices for the ASUS GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics cards: