Latest News - Page 1274

Recently four astronauts that lived on the International Space Station (ISS) for six months returned back to Earth safely with SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule.

The four astronauts, NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan, took off from the ISS and touched back down on Earth on Monday. SpaceX celebrated the safe arrival by posting to its Twitter with the following message, "Splashdown of Dragon confirmed - welcome back to Earth", and "The Crew-2 astronauts and Dragon spent 199 days in orbit, the first U.S. spacecraft to reach that milestone!"

Dragon spent nine hours navigating Earth's upper atmosphere before reaching the thick atmospheric layers. Upon getting lower into the atmosphere, Dragon was spotted by several people in separate locations across the U.S. Residents in New Orleans were happy to see the SpaceX crew and astronauts travel through the sky in a fiery hot blaze as Dragon re-entered the atmosphere. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk even saw a video of Dragon re-entering and said, "Dragon enters like a shooting star".

Some social media users and tourists are taking it upon themselves to inspect the simulated Mars base that is being used for research purposes.

In an op-ed published in Space.com, Dr. Shannon Rupert, the director of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) that she has chased more people off the premises than welcomed them. The MDRS used the Utah desert to create a simulated Mars environment that is used to conduct research that will become valuable information for future astronauts that may live on Mars one day.

The director explains that some people are just tourists and are very polite, while others have resulted in the local police being called and them being removed from the property. Additionally, Dr. Rupert writes that some intruders are using drones to take images of the area to post online, which only attracts more curiosity from the public.

The largest and most technically challenging space telescope to ever be created stands at three stories tall and as wide as a tennis court.

NASA and the European Space Agency, along with the Canadian Space Agency, are gearing up to launch the James Webb Space Telescope after many long years of development with countless expensive setbacks and delays. NASA has debuted a new video series titled "Elements of Webb," which informs viewers why engineers behind the next-generation space telescope chose to use the materials the JWST is constructed of.

Additionally, the video explains that the JWST is "one hundred times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope but at half the weight" and is designed to look back further in time than another other space telescope. The JWST is designed to see the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, and hopefully, with its discoveries, researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the formation of the universe and the events that took place right after the Big Bang occurred.

NASA's Perseverance rover is back online exploring its surroundings and doing what it does best, take samples of the Martian terrain.

In a new post on NASA's official Twitter for the Perseverance Mars Rover, the rover writes in first-person that it has looked inside "something no one's ever seen". The post continues and explains that a small patch of rock was abraded to remove its surface layer so observations could be made for what was inside. In a separate post, two more images were released that show some layered rocks may have formed by water millions of years ago.

The rover continued and said that these could hold clues about the history of the rocks and, therefore, the geological evolution of the area. Perseverance is tasked with examining viable areas for inspection and finding rocks such as these are essentially gold mines of information for researchers back on Earth that are trying to understand Mars' history. Perseverance is also taking samples that are stored on the rover until they are transported back to Earth.

NASA has published a new image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and this time around, we are taking a look at "cosmic ribbons".

The image has been published on the NASA website and showcases DEM L249, that's located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. DEM L249 is the result of the death of a white dwarf star through the massive stellar explosion called a supernova, and the leftover remnants of this explosion are believed to be ribbons of gas.

NASA explains that white dwarf stars are usually stable, but in the event of the white dwarf having a companion star, dubbed a "binary system", the white dwarf's gravitational pull can rip enough matter from its neighboring star that it reaches critical mass and explodes. Astronomers investigated DEM L249 and found that the gas was much hotter than the remnants of a typical Type 1a supernova, which leads the researchers to suspect that the white dwarf star that exploded was much larger the previously anticipated.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has observed a solar flare occurring on the Sun.

The update has been published to NOAA's SPWC website and states that a long-duration M2 X-ray solar flare occurred at 1702 UTC (12:02 ET) on 9 November 2021. The update goes on to describe that the event took place on the northwest limb of the Sun, facing away from Earth, and that the flare was associated with a coronal mass ejection (CME) burst.

Additionally, the SPWC writes that the CME that was associated with the flare is currently under analysis, but early indicators suggest that it poses no danger to Earth. The M2 flare is categorized as a "minor" flare, with R1 (Radio Blackout) being the lowest level of classification on the five-level scale - R5 being the most extreme. Officials warn that X-rays from the flare may cause a radio blackout over the Americas - a map can be found below.

The online poker experience is about to get a major upgrade as the beta launch for Polker is about to go live.

Polker has been created using Unreal Engine 4 and is the first free-to-play play-to-earn poker game that is designed to be an immersive experience that allows players to interact with each other in a highly detailed world. Since the game is built on Unreal Engine 4, the developers are able to provide a virtual experience for gamers, which as Cointelegraph reports, "really sets this metaverse into a league of its own." Additionally, users will be able to personalize their gaming experience by customizing their own world.

Reports also indicate that the next-generation poker game will be the first of its kind in how NFT's are integrated throughout the game's structure. For example, gamers will be able to earn NFTs while they enjoy the game, and these NFTs will grant access to more features to enjoy, such as special deals, new game launches, and tournaments. The developers plan on integrating the VR experience by Q2 of 2022. The entire Polker ecosystem is run off the Polker (PKR) coin, and due to the hype that is circulating the game and the upcoming beta testnet launch, the coin has seen a steep rise in value.

EVGA's new Precision X1 OC software is here, and it packs a new VF Curve Editor and frame rate synchronization which syncs your frame rate limit with the NVIDIA Control Panel.

Not only do we have the synchronization of the built-in frame rate limit between Precision and NVIDIA Control Panel, but you can tweak that sucker all the way to 1000FPS -- while there's also some fixed issues with the LED temperature mode fails and resets to rainbow mode and VF curve value is cleared when Apply is used on another page both fixed.

1000FPS + EVGA doesn't feel right, not after the EVGA GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs that were being killed from super-high FPS inside of Amazon's new game New World.

NVIDIA has just announced its new A2 Tensor Core, its latest entry-level Ampere-based accelerator using the GA107 GPU which packs 1280 CUDA cores, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

The new NVIDIA A2 Tensor Core is quite a bit cut down compared to the A16 Tensor Core, which has 4 x GA107 GPUs compared to the 1 x GA107 GPU on the new A2 Tensor Core. That huge cut down means the TBP (total board power) drops to just 60W, but you can also support it at 40W, meaning you don't need external power.

NVIDIA is clocking the GA107 GPU at 1440MHz base, 1770MHz boost, offering up to 4.5 TFLOPs of single-precision compute power. This means the low-end GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile GPU beats the A2 Tensor Core, with the RTX 3050 Ti Mobile GPU packing up to 7.1 TFLOPs of compute performance.

OWC has just announced their new Accelsior 8M2 SSD, which is the world's fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD with up to 64TB capacities and record-breaking 26GB/sec (26,000MB/sec) reads which is crazy.

It all fits into a single-slot PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, with the new OWC Accelsior 8M2 offering a blistering 12,000MB/sec (12GB/sec) on the PCIe 3.0 x16 standard and up to an eye-watering (and PCIe 4.0 bandwidth watering) 26,000MB/sec (26GB/sec) reads on PCIe 4.0 x16.

OWC is offering its new OWC Accelsior 8M2 SSD in 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 16TB, 32TB, and 64TV capacities with different sized SSDs along the way. The 2TB version ($1299) features 8 x 240GB NVMe M.2 SSDs while the 8TB version ($2479) features 8 x 1TB NVMe M.2 SSDs, but the big daddy 64TB version ($12,999) packs 8 x 8TB NVMe M.2 SSDs and those monster 26,000MB/sec speeds.

Todd Howard pretty much confirms Creation Club will continue, and may even find its way into future games like Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI.

From the sound of it, Bethesda's unpopular "paid mods" Creation Club program won't end with the new Skyrim Anniversary Edition releasing this month. In a recent IGN Unfiltered interview, Todd Howard made the case that Bethesda is very passionate about the modding community and offering ways for creators to turn their hobby into a possible career.

"When you think about the legacy of our games...you know, one of the reasons we're sitting here 10 years later is because of our modding community and what they've done with the game," Howard said, acknowledging that Bethesda has hired a bunch of Creation Club modders.

Bethesda Softworks' head honcho and chess club enthusiast Todd Howard delivers necessary praise to the Skyrim and Elder Scrolls modding community.

Bethesda's relationship with the modding scene can best be described as estranged. The games-maker simultaneously attracted and alienated modders with the Creation Club, and has frustrated many mod-makers by breaking script extenders and forcing lots of updates for critical mods (Bethesda will do this again with the release of Skyrim Anniversary Edition).

Despite the friction, Todd Howard has lots of respect for modders and recognizes that the user-made creations help carry a game like Skyrim across a 10-year span.

Rumor has it Rockstar Games will release another big Grand Theft Auto remaster in 2023 on current-gen and next-gen consoles.

Grand Theft Auto IV remastered is rumored to release in 2023. The news comes from RalphsValve, a Twitter user who has released tons of info on Modern Warfare II that has been somewhat corroborated by other industry sources like Tom Henderson. While the total veracity of the report can't be confirmed, it could be possible that Rockstar wants to buy more time for GTA 6 with multiple remasters and GTA Online content.

If this is true, Rockstar Games could technically have a new Grand Theft Auto product released every year from 2021 to 2023, with the GTA trilogy remaster in 2021, the upcoming GTA V Enhanced & Expanded in 2022, and possibly GTA IV in 2023.

Konami delivers updated sales figures for Metal Gear Solid and confirms it is the second best-selling franchise in the company's history.

The Metal Gear franchise has sold over 57.7 million copies since September 2021, Konami confirms in its latest company profile briefing. These numbers affirm the 34 year-old series as a strong pillar in Konami's premium games lineup, with the games-maker referring to Metal Gear as a "high-profile" title series.

Although Konami is shifting more towards digital with its new free-to-play PES Soccer entry, the company isn't giving up on bigger premium experiences just yet. Sources say Konami has licensed its Metal Gear and Silent Hill franchises out to third-party studios for new games and remasters, including a new Metal Gear Solid trilogy remaster collection and a fully-fledged remake of Metal Gear Solid 3.

Nintendo has briefly mention its next-gen hardware plans but there's admittedly not much to go on.

In Nintendo's recent quarterly Q&A session with investors, company CEO Shuntaro Furukawa confirms that a single concept or design hasn't been locked in just yet.

"With regards to the next game system, we are considering many different things, but as far as the concept and launch timing are concerned, there is nothing we can share at this time," Mr. Furukawa said.

NVIDIA has just announced its next-gen InfiniBand networking platform, NVIDIA Quantum-2, which offers next-generation performance, security, accessibility, and more for cloud computing companies and supercomputing centers.

The new NVIDIA Quantum-2 features a huge 400Gbps InfiniBand networking system that packs the new NVIDIA Quantum-2 switch, ConnectX-7 network adapter, BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU) and all of the software required for the new architecture -- in total, the NVIDIA Quantum-2 has a huge 57 billion transistors.

NVIDIA is leaping ahead in the networking and supercomputing markets, with the new Quantum-2 including key features for "demanding workloads running in either arena. Supercharged by cloud-native technologies, it provides high performance with 400 gigabits per second of throughput and advanced multi-tenancy to accommodate many users".

The position humanity has been in since its existence will be fundamentally changed forever once a space agency identifies the next Earth.

Every ten years National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine release a report that has analyzed the most compelling science goals and presents a program that will give an idea of how government space agencies, such as NASA, can invest in technologies, space-based activities that would achieve discoveries in the recommended areas.

The report boils down astronomy's conundrums into three key scientific challenges for the next ten years; finding an Earth-like habitable world, understanding black holes, and galaxy evolution. The report recommends that to find an exoplanet that is habitable and Earth-like, NASA needs to build a new telescope that features all of the necessary instruments to detect and inspect exoplanets for atmospheric readings, in hopes of identifying any fingerprints of life. Axios reports that this telescope would cost around $11 billion and would be launched sometime in 2040.

Heinz is looking to the future of human space travel and has asked the question - "will there be Heinz Tomato Ketchup on Mars?". The answer is yes, or at least it is "yes" for the time being.

Heinz has stepped out of the box and thought years down the line when humans are attempting to grow foods on other planets and to test out if it's possible to grow tomatoes in harsh conditions, Heinz partnered with astrobiologists at the Florida Institute of Technology's Aldrin Space Institute to grow tomatoes in the same conditions as Mars. The team used the same premium tomatoes that are found in normal Heinz products but grew them in very harsh conditions. The end result is a product that "Heinz Tomato Ketchup Marz Edition".

While the product itself won't be available to purchase, it has provided quite a lot of scientific value as the project has successfully demonstrated that tomatoes could one day be harvested on Mars, as well as pioneering into a relatively new field of research for Martian botany. Dr. Andrew Palmer, from the Aldrin Space Institute and the lead of the team behind the research, said, "Before now, most efforts around discovering ways to grow in Martian-simulated conditions are short-term plant growth studies."

The Sun has seen a lot more activity than what usually occurs recently as our solar star moves further into the most active part of its 11-year solar cycle.

Researchers are estimating that there will be a variation in the number of sunspots that appear on the surface of the Sun and that the activity will reach its peak sometime in 2025. As a result of the increase in solar activity, the Sun has been emitting flares and CMEs more often, some of which have impacted Earth directly, causing minor to moderate geomagnetic storms that create spectacular auroras in the night sky.

European Space Agency's astronaut Thomas Pesquet tweeted out an image of one of these auroras and said that the team was able to experience "the strongest auroras of the entire mission, over North America and Canada." The aurora that Pesquet witnesses was caused by a series of outbursts from the Sun that happened last week. The outbursts occurred in quick succession, with the second was traveling much faster than the first, resulting in the first being cannibalized and a larger cloud being created.

The Sun will eventually die, and it's unknown if humans will even be around to witness it, or hopefully, if they are around, be able to survive it.

The Sun, much like other stars like it, will eventually burn all of the hydrogen, which will cause the core of the star to begin to cool and contract. This interaction then causes a disruption between the inward pressure from gravity and the outward pressure created by the core fusion. As a result of this imbalance, an excess of hydrogen will enter the shell around the core, igniting it, causing the star's edges to swell massively and its mass to be launched off into directions all around it.

Eventually, the star's core will collapse and convert into a white dwarf, and an example of that process can be seen in the above image. Hubble has taken an image of the nebula named NGC 2438, and what can be seen in the image is the star's ejected material still continues to expand after a cataclysmic explosion.