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A new study from researchers who have investigated rock sediments from east India believes they have found evidence that suggests Earth's first continents rose out of the ocean far earlier than previously thought.

The researchers looked at samples derived from Singhbhum, near the city of Kolkata, and extracted the minerals zircon, which was then blasted by a laser to measure the number of elements released. With these results, the scientists were able to estimate the age of when the first continents rose out of the water, placing the date anywhere between 3.3 to 3.2bn years ago - 700 million years earlier than previously estimated.

Dr. Priyadarshi Chowdhury of Monash University, the study's lead author, said, "We have plate tectonics today to control the elevation. When two continents' [plates] collide, you form Himalayas, you form Alps." However, this wasn't the case when the first landmasses emerged. Researchers hypothesize that 300 to 400 million years of violent volcanic activity of a continual build-up of lava from the seafloor caused the first continents to rise. The lava "becomes so thick and it just floats up above the water ... like an iceberg floating on water".

A new paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed has revealed that gravitational wave detection, first proposed by Albert Einstein, can be detected much more frequently than previously thought.

The paper has appeared on the preprint server arXiv and explains that a team of researchers used the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is renowned as the world's largest gravitational wave observatory, along with another gravitational wave instrument called Vigo, located in Italy to detect 35 of these events. Astronomers believe that the collision between two black holes engulfing each other or a black hole and a neutron star colliding is the source of these gravitational waves.

Susan Scott from the Australian National University, an astronomer and co-author of the paper, said, "These discoveries represent a tenfold increase in the number of gravitational waves detected by LIGO and Virgo since they started observing." Adding, "We've detected 35 events. That's massive! In contrast, we made three detections in our first observing run, which lasted four months in 2015-16." The majority of the detected events are believed to be a result of two black holes merging, creating a much larger black hole that's called a "supermassive black hole". There is a supermassive black hole located at the center of our Milky Way called Sagittarius A*.

3.9 billion years ago, the Moon experienced a large number of asteroid impacts, and a new study published in the journal Science Advances explores where these asteroids may have come from.

The planetologists analyzed lunar samples that contain very small metal globules that formed during the asteroid impacts. What the researchers found through looking at the isotopic composition of these samples was that the asteroids that impacted the Moon didn't come from outside of our solar system and were consistent with the bodies that formed Earth and the Moon itself.

Dr. Emily Worsham, a planetologist and the lead author on the study, said, "Our research shows that the bombardment of the moon was by the same bodies that formed the earth and moon." Phys.org explains that the research indicates that the asteroids that impacted the Moon were the same bodies that were a part of Earth's formative years. If you are interested in reading more about how this research ties into the solar system's evolution, check out this link here.

Disney has teamed with IMAX on a new collaboration that has 13 separate Marvel movies presented in the beautiful, eyeball-orgasm IMAX Expanded Aspect Ratio on Disney+ starting November 12, 2021.

Disney+ will be kicking things off by having an IMAX aspect ratio version of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which debuts on Disney+ on November 12. There'll also be MCU movies like Black Widow which has 22 minutes of IMAX Expanded Aspect Ratio footage -- so if you've got the right TV, you're going to love it.

But then there's MCU movies like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which were both shot entirely in IMAX format, and while IMAX traditionally projects a squarer-style 1.43:1 format, the IMAX Expanded Aspect Ratio bumps things to 1.90:1 -- closer to your 16:9 aspect ratio TV.

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Skyrim's new fishing update will add 20 species of fish that gamers can catch, cook, eat, brew, and even save as pets for their homes.

Skyrim is about to turn 10 years old. To celebrate, Bethesda will release new free mod content, a new free next-gen upgrade on PS5 and Series X, and a new $50 Anniversary Edition version of the game. The biggest free mod is a fishing update which allows players to partake in one of gaming's fondest past times. Fishing poles and been in Elder Scrolls games but we haven't been able to actually fish until now.

The fishing update will be available for everyone who owns Skyrim Special Edition, and is also included in the new Anniversary Edition. It adds 20 new fish that can be collected in a fishing mini-game (rods and reels can also be used as weapons). There's a lot you can do with your piscine catches: You can cook and eat them, sell them (raw or cooked), use them as ingredients for portions, and even keep them in special aquariums in your Hearthstone home.

NVIDIA is expected to unveil its new flagship Ampere laptop GPU at CES 2022 in January, with a new entry onto the Geekbench list for an Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" CPU with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU.

The new posting includes some new details, with the laptop SKU rocking the GA103S GPU with 58 Compute Units which will translate to 7424 CUDA cores (256 CUDA cores disabled). NVIDIA should offer the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU with 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6 memory, depending on the configuration, on a 256-bit memory bus.

We should expect the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to beat everything on the market obviously, and will find its way into the next-gen flagship laptops of 2022 powered by CPUs like Intel's new Core i9-12900HK mobile processor under the new Alder Lake CPU architecture.

Samsung's next-gen Galaxy S22 series family of smartphones could use Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 898 chipset exclusively, and not use its own in-house Exynos SoC at all according to new rumors.

The rumors from our friends at Lets Go Digital add that Samsung could be "completely abandoning the Exynos 2200 for the Galaxy S22 series. For many this will be a disappointment". The new Samsung Exynos 2200 has been talked about for a while now, as it involves a custom GPU based on AMD's own RDNA 2 GPU architecture, which was meant to be something quite special.

Maybe we'll see Samsung save its super-fast in-house Exynos 2200 SoC for a new smartphone the company hasn't announced yet, a new premium smartphone outside of the Galaxy S and Galaxy Z Fold, Z Flip families of handsets. The Galaxy Note seems to be retired, but maybe a powerhouse new smartphone might be announced exclusively using Samsung's in-house Exynos 2200 SoC while the mainstream Galaxy S22 series is powered by Qualcomm's mighty Snapdragon 898 SoC.

AMD announced its next-gen Zen 4-based EPYC "Genoa" CPUs today at its Accelerated Data Center event, as well as the world's first MCM-based "Aldebaran" GPU that will power AMD's new Instinct MI250X and MI250 accelerators.

AMD also had a huge announcement in that they have secured Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, as a new customer. Meta will be using AMD EPYC CPUs inside of its data centers, and from that news alone AMD shares skyrocketed over 11%.

The company showed off its new 3rd Gen EPYC CPUs that have AMD's exciting new V-Cache technology, with the EPYC "Genoa" CPUs launching with up to 96 cores in Q1 2022. AMD EPYC "Genoa" will be followed up with AMD "Bergamo" that will have the newer Zen 4c architecture and a hugely boosted CPU core count of 128 cores and 256 threads.

The Switch has transformed Nintendo's business since it released in March 2017 in both revenues and overall scope.

The Nintendo Switch is one of Nintendo's most successful systems yet. The Switch represents the union of decades' worth of home entertainment and portable systems, and saw Nintendo merge its console and portable business units into one. This is what Nintendo has been working towards since the NES' launch in 1983.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at just how much money Nintendo has made since the Switch's launch. The handheld-console hybrid has generated a number of milestones for Nintendo, including 92.87 million unit sales, making it the fourth best-selling console of all time, and 681 million game sales (making it the third console in software). The Switch also helped Nintendo achieve all-time profit highs and the second-largest net sales revenues since the thunderous Wii's reign in the late 2000's.

AMD has just confirmed its new EPYC "Genoa" and EPYC "Bergamo" CPUs at its Accelerated Data Center event -- where we were just introduced to the NVIDIA-destroying Instinct MI250X accelerator with its MCM GPU and 128GB of HBM2e memory.

The new AMD EPYC codename "Genoa" CPU will be based on the new Zen4 processor architecture from AMD, and will have a huge 96 cores -- just as the rumors said it would -- and support PCI 5.0 technology, the new DDR5 memory standard, and will be AMD's first platform with CXL interface support.

AMD's new EPYC "Genoa" is going to be based on the Zen 4 architecture, while the higher-end EPYC "Bergamo" that we've also been hearing lots about, will arrive on the "Zen 4c" core. EPYC Genoa will have 96 cores, while EPYC Bergamo ramps things up to a huge 128 processor cores -- the first of its kind, from AMD, again.

AMD has finally announced its next-generation MI200 HPC GPU codenamed Aldebaran, based on the new CDNA 2 architecture on the 6nm process node.

The first MCM technology is now here in the form of the codename Aldebaran GPU, offering up 2 x GPU chiplets and an enormous 128GB of ultra-fast HBM2e memory. There's an incredible amount of GPU horsepower, memory bandwidth, and so much more going on inside of the AMD Instinct MI200.

Inside, the new Aldebaran GPU has two dies: one secondary, and one primary. Each of the GPU dies has 8 Shader Engines each, for a total of 16 Shader Engines while each of the Shader Engines has 16 Compute Units with full-rate FP64, packed FP32, and 2nd Generation Matrix Engine for FP16 and BF16 operations.

Everyone is getting in on NFTs and blockchain. Square Enix, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts all want to embrace the new tech, and EA even says it's the future of the games industry. Sadly, it looks like EA might be right.

NFTs, crypto, and blockchain are the latest buzzwords making the rounds right now, but the reality is billion-dollar games giants have been researching this tech for years. EA has its SEED experimental R&D division, and Ubisoft has its own Innovations Lab that has literally made a game called HashCraft that rewards users with crypto the more they play. Back in 2018, I predicted this would ultimately be a new way to monetize games.

Now that looks to be the case. While we don't 100% know how the new digital economies will work, the play-to-earn schemes may revolve around token exchanges that will allow gamers to earn money from playing a game. Think of it like selling your items on Diablo 3's Real Money Auction House, only with an extra step. Your items would be converted into a special in-game crypto token, which is then exchanged for real-world crypto. Game-makers would generate revenue based on each exchange.

Nintendo is planning to spend up to 450 billion yen on games development, R&D, services and eshop expansion, and non-gaming multimedia.

Nintendo has made billions from the Switch's strong yearly sales, and now the company wants to reinvest that money into its future. Nintendo has allocated 450 billion yen (nearly $4 billion) to spend on significant expansion across transmedia, developing new first-party games for the Switch and upcoming hardware, and most interestingly, bringing the eShop platform and its associated services to new worldwide markets.

The bulk of the spending will be used on content and services expansion. This includes MyNintendo account expansion as well as launching the eShop to other areas of the globe, building up Switch Online services, new apps, and other initiatives that will carry on for multiple years. 100 billion yen will be spend on actual games development and 50 billion will be put towards merchandising and non-gaming deals like the new Mario movie from Illumination.

KIOXIA has just unveiled the industry's first EDSFF E3.S SSD that was designed with next-gen PCIe 5.0 technology in mind, so we're looking at the new drives being optimized for 32GT/s x2 performance which saves valuable PCIe lanes.

The new KIOXIA CD7 series EDSFF (Enterprise & Data Center SSD Form Factor) E3.S Data Center NVMe SSDs are available in 1.92TB, 3.84TB, and 7.68TB capacities and are NVMe 1.4 specification compliant. The new drives are in the flash-optimized EDSFF E3.S 7.5mm form factor, and sport KIOXIA's proprietary controller, firmware, and BiCS FLASH 96-layer 3D TLC memory.

KIOKIA is using its 7th generation flash die failure protection on the new KIOXIA CD7 series EDSFF E3.2 SSDs, with the company promising "consistent performance and reliability in 24x7 enterprise and hyperscale environments", while the drives have been "designed for high-density storage deployments".

Recently Earth has been dealing with the awakening of our local star, and as a result, our blue planet has been battered with geomagnetic storms.

The Sun goes through what is called a solar cycle that ranges about 11 years, and during this cycle, the star goes through peaks and valleys of solar activity. Magnetic storms on the Sun's surface are called sunspots, and these sunspots can lead to solar flares happening, which are large ejections of radiation into space. Additionally, coronal mass ejections (CME) can also accompany a sunspot or a solar flare, and these CMEs are large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun's corona.

When facing Earth, these charged particles ejected from the Sun can cause geomagnetic storms in Earth's upper atmosphere. The impact of the charged particles can result in power grids being affected, GPS communications being lost, and satellites malfunctioning. With all that in mind, officials have said that the Sun is entering its most active part of its cycle as we are seeing a ramp-up of solar activity.

A Spanish politician suggested a solution for the seemingly never-stopping lava rivers that are spewing out of the La Palma volcano. The volcano has been erupting for 42 days.

Casimiro Curbelo, the president of the municipal council of La Gomera, an island that neighbors La Palma, said that the lava rivers could be diverted to new locations through bombing runs made by an airplane. Curbelo made the statement during a debate on the Canary Islands' Radio Faycan where he said, "Isn't there a plane that could fly and drop [a bomb]? It arrives, drops and boom. And it sends the lava in a different direction?" Adding, "Maybe it's madness, but I get the impression from a technological point of view that it should be tried."

This suggestion of using bombs to divert the flow of lava has been made before, and attempts have been made. Back in 1983, a team of engineers placed 900 pounds of explosives near a river of lava that was erupting from Mount Etna. The idea was to create a new trench for the lava to move into and divert its original course away from a nearby village.

The successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope has reached the spaceport where it will launch from, but before its launch, it's been unboxed.

No one is more terrified for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope than NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and every individual that has worked on the project since its fruition more than 10 years ago. Now, the next-generation space telescope is nearing the end of its development and is going through its last checks before it's packed into an Ariane 5 rocket for its launch scheduled in December 2021.

Before everyone nervously watches the launch of the extremely expensive Hubble successor, the European Space Agency has posted a video that showcases Webb being unboxed in the cleanroom at Europe's Spaceport. The video shows Webb being transported from its ship onboard a truck to the facility, where it's then slowly and meticulously unboxed. Webb will keep the world on edge for 29 harrowing days, and to find out why check out this link here.

Reports indicate that NASA has warned of an asteroid estimated to be around the size of the Eiffel Tower approaching Earth.

The asteroid is dubbed 4660 Nereus and is deemed "potentially hazardous", which means that its orbit brings it within 4,647,790 miles of Earth and has a diameter of more than 460 feet. The space agency predicts that 4660 Nereus will pass within 2.4 million miles on December 11 and has a diameter of 1082.68 feet. However, the agency says that the asteroid doesn't pose a threat of impact to Earth.

Additionally, The Independent reports that the asteroid is predicted to make 12 more close approaches to Earth within the coming decades, with the closest being on February 14, 2060, when it will come 745,645 miles away from Earth. For a visual comparison of how close that is to Earth, the Moon is located around 239,000 miles from Earth. If you are interested in finding out if an asteroid has hit Earth before, check out a NASA expert answering that very question here.

Intel might have just launched its new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs but even in the months leading up we were enjoying leaks and rumors of the 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs, and today we have a new tease.

The new Intel 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs will arrive in 2022, and according to Tom @ Moore's Law is Dead, Raptor Lake will also support DDR5 and DDR4 memory, just like the just-launched 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs and the new Z690 chipset.

We will see Intel launch its new 700 series chipset with the flagship Z790 chipset lighting up next-gen Raptor Lake-ready motherboards in 2022. If you've got some good DDR4 memory now and didn't want to upgrade to Alder Lake, you should be fine when Raptor Lake launches and not need to buy new DDR5 RAM.