Latest News - Page 1233

After 11 years of writing for TweakTown, it feels like there are waves of "WTF" news that fly across my screen... and today my friends, is another day of crazy news.

Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita has created a prototype lickable TV screen that can imitate food flavors, so that you could lick your TV and literally taste it -- which is why the device is called Taste the TV -- or TTTV. Taste the TV has a carousel of 10 flavor canisters that are sprayed in a specific combination to create the taste of particular food.

From there, the flavor is rolled on hygienic film over a flat TV screen for viewers to... well... lick. In the current world we live in through the pandemic, I don't see how licking your TV can be a good thing... but I guess the excuse of being able to taste food from the confines of your walls, and never venture out into the world again... is leading us into the world of licking our screens.

If your hands get sore from gaming too much, Japanese company Bauhutte has just unveiled its new hand massager specifically crafted for gamers.

The Bauhutte MSG-01H-BK hand massager works on both the left and right hand, with a 15-later airbag for each individual finger, and a shiatsu plate for your palm. The company has two main options with the hand massager: Shiatsu mode for your entire hand, or a mode that focuses on stretching your fingers.

You've got some tweaking ability with the Bauhutte MSG-01H-BK hand massager, where you can use it as an optional hand warmer for those cold nights, and it'll also improve your circulation, or at least they say. If you want to massage your thumb, you'll need to slide your hand in sideways to get your thumb massaged.

AMD is gearing up for a gigantic CES 2022 this week and ahead of the big show we have an "official" photo of their next-gen codename "Rembrandt" APU, freshly minted on TSMC's new 6nm process node.

The new AMD "Rembrandt" APU will become the heart of the new Ryzen 6000 series mobile CPUs, with the new flagship Ryzen 9 6980HX processor smiling for the camera. A couple of new photos of the motherboard from inside of an Alienware m17 R5 gaming laptop, that is powered by AMD's new flagship Ryzen 9 6980HX processor.

This new Alienware m17 R5 gaming laptop will be one of the fastest laptops that AMD has under its AMD Advantage program, and will offer 8 cores and 16 threads with support for both DDR5 RAM and PCIe 4.0 connectivity. There's a built-in GPU powered by the RDNA 2 architecture, with 6 Workgroup Processors inside of the APU.

In the hours leading up to CES 2022 we're getting more concrete details about AMD's next-gen Ryzen 9 6980HX processor -- codenamed "Rembrandt".

The chip in the above photo is of the AMD Rembrandt APU, inside of Alienware's upcoming m17 R5 gaming laptop. This is the Ryzen 9 6850HX processor, with an RDNA 2-based GPU next to it in the form of the Radeon RX 6700M which will have 10GB of GDDR6 memory. The m17 R5 gaming laptop will ship with the higher-end AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT graphics card with 12GB of GDDR6 memory.

The new Rembrandt APU arrives with a flagship Ryzen 9 6980X processor that has 8 cores and 16 threads on the refreshed Zen 3+ architecture, and for the first time on the Zen architecture: pushing 5.0GHz. AMD will most likely be pre-binning the chips, with the 45W power target most likely good for the most part -- but it will go over -- by how much, we'll find out soon.

Three of Germany's power plants are being turned off before the new year.

As part of the German government's plan to phase out nuclear energy production, nuclear power plants at Brokdorf, Grohnde, and Gundremmingen are being closed on December 31st, 2021. These plants make up half of those remaining in Germany. Their closure will reduce the energy coming from nuclear sources by roughly four gigawatts, equivalent to that produced by a thousand wind turbines.

Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel began phasing out nuclear power from the country entirely. With three power plants remaining, the process will be complete with the planned closing of those at Neckarwestheim, Essenbach, and Emsland.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is so close to completing the first stage of its deployment.

On 7 p.m. EST December 31st, 2021 (00:00 UTC January 1st, 2022), NASA confirmed the port side mid-boom was successfully extended, designated the +J2 side.The boom was extended with a motor, after the sunshield covers were rolled up in the previous preliminary step for eventually unfurling the sunshield.

Almost four hours later, NASA announced the second mid-boom on the starboard side (-J2 side) of the JWST was successfully extended. The mid-booms pull out the five sunshield membranes into a large diamond shape, which will next be tensioned to finalize their deployment.

The exoplanet, HAT-P-11b, was found using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data.

Astronomers have identified and confirmed 4,884 planets outside our solar system, with another 8,288 potential candidates. However, no magnetic fields around any of these exoplanets had been detected until now. A team of astronomers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC), and many other institutes and universities published their findings in a new paper in Nature Astronomy.

The team observed HAT-P-11b, an exoplanet roughly the size of Neptune that orbits a K-type (orange dwarf) star found 123 light-years away from Earth, designated HAT-P-11. They found it using a technique known as Transit Spectroscopy, or the Transit Method, where the decrease in the brightness of a star periodically indicates a planet passing in front of it. It is used to detect exoplanets and reveal details about their atmospheres.

The White House has extended the International Space Station's (ISS) operational lifespan.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced in a statement that the Biden-Harris administration has extended the operations of the ISS through 2030. NASA will continue to work with the international space agencies from Europe (European Space Agency, ESA), Japan (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA), Canada (Canadian Space Agency, CSA), and Russia (State Space Corporation Roscosmos) to upkeep the station and conduct research.

So far, the ISS has hosted over 3,000 research investigations involving over 4,200 researchers globally. Almost 110 countries and areas have been involved in activities aboard the ISS, including over one and a half million students involved with STEM.

The next-generation laser made by researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is almost complete.

The laser will be the world's bright x-ray laser, called the Linac Coherent Light Source II (LCLS-II). It will be approximately 10,000 times as bright as its predecessor, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The LCLS became operational in 2009 and can create a beam that pulses light 120 times per second.

In comparison, the LCLS-II will produce one million light pulses per second, a rate of one pulse every femtosecond. The beam will be shot into a series of alternating magnets (known as an undulator) to produce X-rays, which can then be used to take snapshots during experiments. The laser apparatus of the LCLS-II spans two miles (3.2 kilometers) of a long tunnel excavated near Stanford University.

Top gaming companies see a decline in overall share value as post-pandemic surges start to even out.

2020 was a big year for gaming, with the top games-makers earning record revenues. Xbox, Nintendo, and Sony's PlayStation division all reported new all-time highs. Non-platform holders also say highwater marks from their respective revenues, however 2021 is a different story. Revenues are starting to moderate across big companies like EA and Take-Two Interactive, while scandals and controversies bite into shares of Activision's billion-dollar empire.

According to data collected by video games analyst and consultant Dr. Serkan Toto, various companies have seen share price drops after 2020's stellar performance. NYSE-traded stocks like Take-Two, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and CD Projekt are all down, and Japanese companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange aren't faring much better: Nintendo is down 18%, Capcom is also down 18%, and Konami, Square Enix, and Koei Tecmo are down ~4%. Sony, on the other hand, is up 38% on the back of strong PlayStation game segment earnings and semiconductors (as well as other successful business areas).

Diablo is one of the best-known franchises on planet Earth, but it wasn't always that way. Back in the day, Blizzard North wasn't sure if the game would break even...let alone make a profit.

The original Diablo from 1996 was made on a shoestring budget that only required thousands of sales, not millions, in order to recoup its development costs. According to original Diablo developer David Brevik, the old-school action RPG only needed to sell 20,000 copies to break even.

"If we could just sell 20,000 copies of this game we may be able to make a sequel. That'd be really cool. It'd be a dream if we could make that happen. It went on and it sold really well and everything was great," Brevik reminisced in a stream from 2020.

Ex-Call of Duty community manager actively speaks out against Activision's billion-dollar content empire, says gamers need to be treated like community first and not just consumers.

Warzone is the most important evolution of Activision's digital-first business. The gametype is a free-to-play gateway that funnels players into the COD ecosystem while also connecting myriad premium pay-to-play games like Black Ops IIII, Modern Warfare 2019, Black Ops Cold War, and Vanguard. Warzone comes at a cost, though. The compounding load of content is heavy even for the mighty Atlas, and Activision is having trouble lifting the massive weight. As a result, all the games are suffering leading to mass criticism from fans.

Ex-Call of Duty community manager Robert Bowling has an idea how to set things right. It all starts with cessation of commoditizing players into a ring of never-ending monetization and live service hooks. In other words, players should be treated like a community first and consumers second.

Halo Infinite's Big Team Battle playlist is still having significant matchmaking issues that make it very difficult to play.

With 24-player carnage, Big Team Battle is one of the best modes in Halo Infinite--when you can actually play it, that is. The playlist has had lots of connectivity problems since launch and hasn't really improved over the last few weeks. While queuing up for a match I ran into frustrating disconnects, bugged loading screens, and ultimately ended up waiting in a lobby more than I actually played.

On a lark I decided to keep track of how many times the BTB matchmaking failed on Steam. Out of 20 attempts, I was only able to play four matches. The rest were error messages, connection lost pop-ups, and stuck transition screens that required a restart. Halo Infinite's BTB playlist had a 80% failure rate on the attempts we tested--16 failures to 4 matches--and 5 of those failures required a forcible Alt+F4 restart.

A newly published Starfield screenshot shows a golden dome straight out of a NASA space station concept.

New assets from the 2018 Starfield leak have started to trickle out, giving players an idea of the overall style, scope, and feel of the upcoming spacefaring RPG. Bethesda has been very open about Starfield's early golden age space race vibes, taking inspiration from the late 60s and 70s era when high-tech futurism and imaginative concepts merged with science. We've already seen how Starfield borrows from artists and visionaries like John Berkey, Syd Mead, and Ralph McQuarrie, who shaped the Star Wars universe, but it's also grounded in realism too.

The singular new-but-old Starfield asset screenshot shows a golden dome using the real-life multi-layer insulation (MLI) that's found in satellites, stations, and other space vessels. It's admittedly not a whole lot to go on but it does further exemplify the early asset planning visuals that Bethesda was laying out, and it's likely something we'll see gleaming in distant suns as we explore the far reaches of Starfield's universe.

Jack Tretton, who presided over two generations of PlayStation consoles, is heading a new special acquisitions group aimed at the video games industry.

Longtime ex-PlayStation president Jack Tretton is now serving as CEO of PowerUp Acquisitions, a new special purpose acquisitions company (SPAC). According to a new prospectus SEC filing, PowerUp intends to raise $225 million through an IPO with a $10 share price across 22.5 million shares.

PowerUp will use its capital to secure a company in the entertainment space with an emphasis on video games. Considering its management consists of not only Jack Tretton, but also Vivendi and Activision-Blizzard merger veteran Bruce Hack, PowerUp is in a unique position to manage its game-related acquisitions.

Cobra Kai season 4 premieres today, and you know what that means: Fortnite crossover.

Fortnite's latest cosmetic bundle sweeps the leg with a bunch of content inspired from the Karate Kid series. The set has variety of stances and outfits lifted straight from the karate riot universe, including gis from Cobra Kai, Miyagi-Do, and even Eagle Fang Karate (wait, eagles don't have fangs...). There's even a crane kick emote for 300 V-Bucks that would make Mr. Miyagi proud.

The packs cost 2,000 V-Bucks ($14.99) and each piece is also sold individually. Sadly there's no wax on, wax off emote...

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has completed another two preliminary step necessary to deploy its sunshield.

The previous step in ultimately deploying the JWST's sunshield was the extension of the Deployable Tower Assembly (DTA) on December 29th. On December 30th, the Aft Momentum Flap was deployed, followed by the sunshield covers being released.

The Aft Momentum Flap is used to offset some solar pressure impinging upon the large sunshield. It also helps to minimize fuel usage by the JWST. Just after 9 a.m. EST (14:00 UTC), the hold-down devices were released, and a spring drove the rotation of the aft flap into its final position. The process took about eight minutes. An animation of the deployment is viewable here.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a beautiful image of the open star cluster, designated NGC 1755.

NGC 1755 resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy neighboring Milky Way approximately 200,000 light-years from Earth. The collection of stars measures 120 light-years across but is still on the smaller side for a star cluster.

Two main varieties of star clusters exist, open clusters and globular clusters. NGC 1755 is an open star cluster, a variety of star cluster that houses up to a few thousand relatively young stars. The other main type is globular clusters, which are much larger, containing millions of older stars in a denser, more spherical arrangement.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have published a new study that explores why only comet heads appear green and not their tails.

Comets are frozen masses of gas, rock, and dust leftover from the formation of a solar system. When approaching the sun, their ice sublimates from solid form directly into a gas, contributing to a bright green glow in some comets, but not all.

The researchers used a vacuum chamber and lasers to recreate the chemical reaction between ultraviolet radiation from the sun and diatomic carbon (dicarbon). The process, known as photodissociation, breaks apart the two carbon atoms and gives the comets their green appearance.

A recent study published in Developmental Cell has shown how cell membranes curve to consume material in their environment.

Cells can use their membrane to envelope material in their extracellular environment, then bring it into the cell, in a process known as endocytosis. After encircling a given substance, the membrane buds off into a vesicle, a tiny sac that carries substances around and in and out of the cell.

The cell membrane first needs to form a highly curved basket-like structure before closing around its target. Scientists previously believed the structure began as a flat lattice, but the mechanics of the membrane forming a pocket to move the substances it encounters has eluded scientists for almost forty years.