Latest News - Page 1264

Meta today announced that the Mercenaries DLC package for Resident Evil 4 is officially in development for the Meta Quest. Along with that announcement, the company revealed that RE4 is the fastest-selling game on the platform. It's almost as if people really want AAA games in VR.

Capcom and Oculus (now Meta) released the Quest version of Resident Evil 4 on October 21st, and in just over a month, the game has become the fastest-selling title in the Quest platform's history. Meta has never released sales numbers for any of its headsets or games, but we know several titles have made millions of dollars in profits. Resident Evil isn't likely in the top-selling ranks yet, but it will be if the high sales volume continues. Beat Saber and Population: One have big head starts, though.

To keep the excitement about RE4 VR going, Capcom is working on a DLC expansion for the Quest title. The Mercenaries expansion will launch next year and let you experience more of Resident Evil in terrifying first-person VR. The Mercenaries expansion adds a hoard-mode experience to the game, where you need to fight off a never-ending hoard of Ganados until your rescue helicopter arrives.

Star Citizen is one of the most expensive video games of all time and has an astronomically high budget.

According to a new financing update, Roberts Space Industries has raised an mind-boggling $400 million to fund Star Citizen's development. The infamous space sim has been in development for nearly 10 years and first entered Kickstarter in 2012; nearly a decade later and a budget that's roughly 4x today's biggest heavy-hitting franchises, Star Citizen still isn't finished or officially released.

Most of these revenues are direct deposits right into Cloud Imperium Games' coffers: "As a crowd funded project, Star Citizen's scope is based directly on the support provided by our backers. Money pledged goes directly to the game's development."

Black Friday is once again on the horizon, and as expected, great deals are popping up across the Internet.

Both Bose's QuietComfort Noise Cancelling line of earbuds and Sport earbuds have gone on sale, with up to 29% off. The QuietComfort line comes with active noise cancellation and transparency modes built in to scale how much of the world you want to block out.

Both come with IPX4 ratings to help withstand sweat and inclement weather. The QuietComforts claim up to 6 hours of battery life, and the Sport follows with up to 5 hours, though both are extended considerably with the included charging case.

For the past two years, a small CubeSat has been orbiting Earth, occasionally using its ion thrusters to prove that iodine can be used successfully for fuel in space.

Working with members of Sorbonne Universite, researchers from ThrustMe have published a paper in the journal Nature, detailing their work on the satellite and with iodine.

The accelerants used to launch a rocket into orbit are not ideal for actual space travel, where little power is needed to course-correct and propel a spacecraft. Typical rocket fuel is powerful but wildly inefficient. Space travel is where ion thrusters come in, moving spacecraft forward by expelling ions. Solar panels aboard the spacecraft generate the electricity needed to strip a neutral atom of its electrons, creating ions. Xenon gas is currently the default neutral atom source, though the authors of this paper have been trialing iodine as an alternative.

These new images from Hubble are part of the yearly maps of the planets in their entirety taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which provides annual global views of the outer planets to observe changes in their storms, winds, and clouds.

While planets closer to the Sun are more rocky and solid, reaching out into the solar system thirty times further than the distance between the Earth and the Sun are the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The composition of these planets is predominantly a cold mix of hydrogen, helium, ammonia, methane, and other trace gases formed around a dense, hot core.

Over the past fifty years, robotic spacecraft have captured snapshots of these planets. However, part of the Hubble Space Telescope's role in surveying our universe is to revisit these planets each year, imaging their surfaces to note the changes year to year.

Rocket Lab and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have entered into an exclusive license agreement to manufacture commercialized near and deep-space capable small spacecraft telemetry and control radio technology.

Developed by Rocket Lab, the Frontier-S is based on the APL Frontier Radio that flew aboard the Van Allen Probes, Parker Solar Probe, and the Emirates Mars Mission. Today, the APL-designed and Rocket Lab-manufactured Frontier-S SDRs (Software-Defined Radio) fly aboard Rocket Lab's Pathstone mission. They will also be aboard its upcoming CAPSTONE mission to the moon for NASA and to Venus for a Rocket Lab mission.

Extended functionality atypical of other low-cost radios includes a coherent transponder enabling radiometric navigation, timekeeping functions, and a hardware-based critical command decoder. The radio is low-cost and compatible with spacecraft as small as 6U CubeSats, creating a lightweight, power-efficient, and highly radiation-tolerant telemetry and command solution suitable for deep space and low Earth orbit applications.

Four thousand five hundred sixty-nine exoplanets are orbiting distant stars elsewhere in the observable universe, and recently a massive batch of 301 exoplanets has been added to that total.

ExoMiner is a deep learning neural network, which has been running on the Pleiades, NASA's supercomputer. Using datasets fed to it, ExoMiner has developed the capacity to distinguish between genuine exoplanets and false positives without the need for human scientists to sift through the datasets themselves.

As scientists determine the criteria for and properties of exoplanets, they can train the neural network to identify these characteristics and decide what data fits them. The network learns from previously analyzed data where scientists have validated exoplanets and false positives.

After recent technical issues that have plagued the Hubble Space Telescope, it nears full operational status following the recovery of its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

In late October 2021, NASA placed Hubble into safe mode, and its main scientific instruments ceased operation while NASA investigated synchronization errors related to internal system messages. There are five main scientific instruments aboard Hubble: the Advanced Camera System (ACS), the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer.

On November 7th, NASA brought the ACS back online and has confirmed in an update on November 22nd that the WFC3 was restored to working condition the day prior. It is scheduled to continue scientific operations on November 23rd. Both instruments were recovered without significant alteration to their parameters.

If you were looking to get a new monitor for your gaming setup or are just in need of a cheap, but decent second monitor now might be the time to pick one up.

Amazon is no stranger to ridiculous Black Friday sales, and 2021 is no different as the e-commerce giant has already dropped some discounts on a large selection of Samsung monitors. Most of the monitors are aimed towards gamers, but there are a few that are designed for professional use, such as graphics design, video/photo editing and more.

If you are a gamer, and are looking to pick up a new monitor, there are dozens to choose from, and the price range is extremely flexible, with monitor prices ranging from $139.99 to $1,999.99. Below are some of the hottest deals you will be able to find on the early Black Friday sales listing, but the monitors listed below are not all of the monitors discounted. To see the full list check out this link here.

NASA has announced that it has delayed the launch of its next-generation space telescope by a few days as something unexpected happened.

According to NASA's blog post update, the space agency will be delaying the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope to December 22. The next-gen space telescope was originally scheduled to launch on December 18, but due to a "A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band - which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter - caused a vibration throughout the observatory".

NASA goes on to state that engineers are currently testing whether the telescope was damaged during the incident and that an update will be provided once new information is gathered. James Webb is pegged to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that has been in service for more than 30 years now. If you are interested in reading more about James Webb and would like to learn what the new space telescope is capable of, check out the below links.

What if the little green men that are commonly perceived as a typical "alien" are really just humans, but from a different period in the evolutionary timeline?

During a recent interview with BBC's Science Focus magazine, Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the institution's Department of Earth Sciences, said that researchers can say with "reasonable confidence" that human-like evolution has occurred in other parts of the universe and isn't just locked to Earth. Science Focus explains that this thought is derived from the theory of convergent evolution, which is "random effects eventually average out so that evolution converges, tending to produce similar organisms in any given environment."

An example of this would be flight, which "has evolved independently on Earth at least four times - in birds, bats, insects and pterosaurs." Essentially, the theory points towards evolution itself being a law of nature, which would mean that it happens on other planets in the universe, and thus, human-like evolution may be happening on distant planets around the universe right now. Morris goes on to say that if there is alien life out there, it would have evolved in ways "analogous to a human."

NASA is currently preparing to launch its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that will send a spacecraft directly into an asteroid in an attempt to change the asteroid's orbit.

NASA is planning on launching its DART spacecraft from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1:20 a.m. EST (0620 GMT) on Wednesday, Nov. 24. The idea behind the mission is to test planetary defense technologies in case they need to be used when a real threat reveals itself. The DART spacecraft will travel for ten months towards the asteroid named Dimorphos, where it will then collide with it at 15,000 mph.

Betsy Congdon, DART mechanical systems engineer, said during a news conference on Sunday that the last hour of the spacecraft's trip towards the asteroid will be the most vital part of the mission as the navigation instrument that DART is carrying, called DRACO that will need to begin angling the spacecraft towards Dimorphos when the asteroid will only be 1.4 pixels wide in the field of view. As the spacecraft continues to approach Dimorphos, it will have a better idea of the shape of the asteroid, and thus an easier time to navigate.

A NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) space telescope has captured a new image of a star-forming hundreds of light-years away from Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope has zoomed in on a star being born in the reflection nebula IC 2631, which is a part of the Chamaeleon star-forming region in the southern constellation Chamaeleon. A new NASA blog post details the protostar and explains that stars are born from an accumulation of gas and dust. Clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravitation attraction, creating a dense, hot core that then gathers more dust and gas.

The gas and dust that is left over after the core of the star is formed can eventually become planets, asteroids, comets, or just remain as dust. As with most protostars, they are best observed in infrared light as they are known to emit a lot of heat energy. Additionally, observers using the visible light wavelength will have trouble locating a protostar as the star is obscured by large amounts of dust. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

On November 19, the longest partial lunar eclipse in the last 580 years happened, and if you missed it, mark your calendars for the next astronomical event.

Last Friday, the Moon entered Earth's shadow for nearly three and a half hours, and while the timeframe for viewing was small, many people managed to snap some awesome images of the event. If you were unlucky and didn't get to see the partial lunar eclipse in person, you will be pleased to know that another one is coming up, and this time it's a total lunar eclipse not a partial. For those that don't know, a lunar eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon. The Moon then enters Earth's shadow for a period of time.

So, why does the Moon appear red during a lunar eclipse? The Earth is blocking the majority of the Sun rays as it's in between the Moon and the Sun. However, some of the rays from the Sun go around the Earth and pass through Earth's atmosphere, which only lets long wavelengths of light such as red pass through. According to TimeandDate.com, the next lunar eclipse will happen between May 15 and 16, 2022. TimeandDate state that the total lunar eclipse will be visible for people in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia.

On November 19 an astronomical event that hasn't happened in 580 years took place and skywatchers around the world stopped to bare-witness the Beaver Moon.

On Friday morning the Moon passed into Earth's shadow for about three and a half hours and during that time 95% of it was covered in shadow, resulting in an eerie red to emerge. This event was the longest partial lunar eclipse to occur in 580 years, and was seen from all around the world as images of the spectacle were shared online.

So, why did the Moon turn red? Simple answer is Earth's atmosphere. Since the Earth is positioned in between the Sun and the Moon, the mass of Earth blocks out majority of the Sun rays, but some of these rays went around Earth, passing through our planet's atmosphere and letting only longer wavelengths of light, such as red, through to hit the Moon. This process is why we see a reddish hue on the surface of the Moon. Below are some images of the partial lunar eclipse from different parts of the world.

A man that was armed with a metal detector discovered a heavy rock that he believed was gold, but after further analysis, it was found to be much more valuable.

David Hole discovered the large rock back in 2015 when he was prospecting with a metal detector in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. After finding the rock, he took it home and attempted to open it, thinking that there would be a gold nugget inside. Hole tried opening the rock with a rock saw, angle grinder, drill, and even acid. All of which didn't work. Years later, Hole took the rock to the Melbourne Museum for identification, and that's when he discovered what he found wasn't a heavy rock with gold potentially in the middle, but a large meteorite.

The meteorite weighed in at 37.5 pounds and after using a diamond saw to dissect a small portion of it, researchers discovered that its composition is a high percentage of iron, meaning that the meteorite is classified as a chondrite. Melbourne museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald, "Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation, and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth)."

Activision-Blizzard has finally unleashed Call of Duty: Vanguard which is taking the huge battle against EA DICE and its just-launched Battlefield 2042 -- with Vanguard now at the cheapest price I've seen: $39.

Call of Duty: Vanguard at $39 was available early for Walmart+ subscribers, but this afternoon the discounted Vanguard was open for everyone else. Walmart is running the $39 deal on Call of Duty: Vanguard through to November 29, unless they are sold out -- and at $39, that could very well happen at many Walmart stores across the US.

You can buy Call of Duty: Vanguard for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S at $39. This is quite the deal considering Vanguard costs $70 at retail cost, so this is close to half price. You can't get the PC version at this cost which sucks, but Call of Duty sales on the consoles are huge so this is a big deal for Walmart right now.

Qualcomm is hosting its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit starting on November 30, where we'll be introduced to a new flagship Snapdragon chip, a larger 5G push, and Qualcomm's continued success on its leadership in 5G, and some big changes coming to the Snapdragon branding.

The company is making changes to how the world sees the Snapdragon branding, where it will be removing "Qualcomm" from the chip names of its new Snapdragon SoCs. Qualcomm is still there and making the chips but instead of the future "Qualcomm Snapdragon 898" or "Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1" SoC dropping the "Qualcomm" name from the chip name altogether.

Snapdragon chip naming will change as well, instead of what was expected as the purported Snapdragon 898 turning into the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 -- this is Qualcomm using a single-digit series and generation (so, Snapdragon 8 is the series and the "Gen1" is the generation). The recent rumors of the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 now make sense, and have further confirm the recent rumbles of Snapdragon branding changes.

PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny has come out detailing the PlayStation 5 hardware in a new interview with WIRED, where he said that we're in a "third era" of gaming history.

Cerny pushes the world of ray tracing in games right now as being as big of an upgrade from 2D pixelated graphics to 3D polygonal graphics in the 1990s. Cerny said: "If you look at the 50 year history of games, it splits pretty neatly into two eras. The first era -- Pac Man, Sonic the Hedgehog -- is games that are built entirely out of flat components. The second era -- Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted -- these are games built out of 3D triangles with effects on them".

He continued: "Thanks to ray tracing, we're now entering a third era, and the visuals have the capacity to be like nothing we've ever seen before. Ray tracing is radically different technology; it's pure computation. There's a database in RAM that contains a description of the video game world, mostly triangles and boxes. And then there's support in the GPU hardware for seeing if a line intersects that geometry. If the hardware is fast enough, that unlocks new approaches to lighting, shadows and reflections".

Call of Duty: Warzone will soon morph into Warzone Pacific, with Raven Software soon kicking off a couple of limited-time events that will let gamers wave goodbye to Verdansk.

The developer has announced the new Call Of Duty: Warzone Secrets Of The Pacific event which starts on November 24, after the still-going Operation: Flashback event in Call of Duty: Warzone right now. In the new Secrets of the Pacific event, we should be provided with some more details on the new Caldera map, as well as secrets that will be uncovered once you've completed challenges in not only Warzone, but the newly-launched Call of Duty: Vanguard.

We might see weapons and cosmetic options from Warzone Pacific that you can get for completing objections, but the developer hasn't said anything in detail just yet. We're hours away from November 24, so I'm sure we'll get many more details then. As a huge Warzone fan (Rebirth) I can't wait for the new Warzone Pacific update, and the new Caldera map and new weapons, customizations, and more.