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Probably the most widely believed theory for how the Moon came to be is a singular collision occurring billions of years ago with a very young Earth.

However, a new study that has been recently published in The Planetary Science Journal has suggested a new theory that builds upon the main one. Erik Asphaug, a professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and fellow colleagues, have conducted computer simulations involving a celestial body the size of Mars (named Theia) colliding with a proto-Earth around 4.4 billion years ago.

Rolling back the clock through these simulations, researchers found that a new theory was much better suited to the end result of what we observe today. The researchers suggest that Theia collided with Earth at a much faster speed than previously anticipated, which caused a "hit and run" incident that teed up Theia and Earth to collide again sometime 100,000 to 1 million years after the initial collision.

Hurricane Sam has been officially categorized as a Category 4 storm that has winds topping 150 mph. Will it reach land?

Storms are highly unpredictable and can change direction and speed at any given moment. However, that doesn't mean approximate forecasts can't be done. A meteorologist from AccuWeather, Bernie Rayno, said that a due west path for Hurricane Sam isn't very like, "But if that jet stream dip sets up farther west or meanders westward, then there is room for Sam to get very close to the U.S. next weekend."

Due to how large Sam is, meteorologists are still dropping warnings for a possible rise in ocean levels along the Atlantic coast from central Florida to Maine, as well as dangerous surf and rip currents. Officials expect that the aforementioned effects of Sam being east of the U.S. will begin along the southern U.S. coast this week as the storm continues on its path north over the weekend, where those same effects will occur in surrounding locations.

The space industry is just starting to heat up with billionaires such as Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos bringing a lot of attention to a new form of tourism - space tourism.

While the overall impacts of privatizing space have positives for everyone on a long enough timeline, some individuals aren't too thrilled about seeing humans start to explore the last frontier and leave Earth behind. During an interview with CBS' James Corden, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates were asked his thoughts on the emerging industry.

Gates said that he has become obsessed with diseases such as Malaria and HIV over space. "I don't know - I've become obsessed with things like Malaria and HIV and getting rid of those diseases, and I probably bore people at cocktail parties talking about diseases. Space? We have a lot to do here on Earth." James Corden responded quickly after Gates finished and said that was the "classiest burn" he'd ever heard. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

A team of researchers has found a new mechanism that can impact the rate of human-induced global warming.

The new study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of researchers from Princeton University and the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The new paper explores the effects of global warming and the intensification of the global hydrological cycle as a result of the warming.

As the planet warms, ocean heat uptake is increased, which has been found to also influence the salt levels in the water. Global warming results in salinity levels in the ocean being increased in salty regions, which causes denser seawater and an increase in ocean heat uptake. An increase in ocean heat uptake reduces the temperature of surfaces and influences the rate of global warming.

It was only a few months ago that reports from astronauts aboard the International Space Station raised concerns about the floating laboratory's longevity or lifespan.

The reports from a few months ago revealed that the International Space Station is cracking, or at least there are new cracks being found. Now, former NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd who has been aboard the ISS, has warned Congressional representatives that the cracks on the floating laboratory are a "serious issue" and that there are "probably other cracks we haven't found yet".

Additionally, the former astronaut also said that while the cracks are small at the moment, "quite small - they look like scratches on the surface of the aluminum plate, there are probably something like a half dozen of them." Shepard explained that the astronauts or the ISS itself aren't in "any immediate danger," but the cracks could certainly reduce NASA's projected lifespan of the ISS if they continue to spread. Shepard recommended, "before we can clear the station for another so many years of operational use, we should better understand this."

Someone with access to Facebook's unreleased hardware might be in trouble right now. Last week, a pair of screen captures depicting a new set of Oculus controllers popped on Imgur, and there's a good chance they belong to the rumored Quest Pro headset.

The leaked screenshots appear to depict a modified Quest 2 Touch controller. The controller's shell is the standard white color of the Quest 2, and it has the same trigger and side grip buttons as the Quest 2 controller.

A notable difference between this leaked controller and the standard Quest 2 controllers is the lack of a tracking halo. Since the first generation, Oculus Touch controllers have always featured a halo that wraps around your hand and houses the tracking LEDs. This new controller doesn't have a tracking halo. Instead, it appears to have embedded cameras for spatial tracking.

DecaGear is preparing to release the details about its upcoming VR motion controllers. The company posted a screenshot early Friday morning showing off the new design and hinting at a few details.

DecaGear popped up out of nowhere about a year ago with a bold claim of releasing a biometric-enabled VR headset. The DecaGear 1 is scheduled to launch early next year with a built-in face tracking sensor and eye-tracking cameras. The new headset will also include a DecaMove locomotion controller and a pair of wand controllers.

DecaGear's new controller design borrows several features from Valve's Index controllers. The controllers feature thumbsticks and two face buttons on each side, which has become a standard input layout for VR controllers. The face of each controller also includes a menu button, which may support fingerprint scanning. DecaGear said that the menu button would eliminate the need for passwords, but it didn't specify how.

Intel is set to dominate AMD with its upcoming 12th Gen "Alder Lake" CPU family, with its new flagship Core i9-12900K processor teased again and it really whoops AMD's ass.

The new Core i9-12900K was benched against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor, where in the built-in CPU-Z benchmark it is 27% faster. If we add this with the last Core i9-12900K benchmarks with the Cinebench R20 and Cinebench R23 results, Intel could have the fastest desktop CPU ever made with its Core i9-12900K.

In the screenshots leaked on Bilibili, the new Core i9-12900K scores 825 points in the CPU-Z built-in benchmark. This is up 27% from the Ryzen 9 5950X which scores 647 while the Core i9-11900K scores 682. There's no multi-thread performance numbers here, but we should expect near identical performance between the Core i9-12900K and Ryzen 9 5950X processors as the blue/purple bars are the same length here in the benchmark results.

In a move that would have people thinking "why did it take so long?" a crypto mining company has purchased itself an early Christmas present: an entire powerplant to power its Bitcoin mining operations, and expand it in a gigantic way.

Stronghold Digital Mining has just purchased the Scrubgrass power plant located in Venango County, Pennsylvania. The powerplant is able to power around 1800 Bitcoin mining machines right now, but the company has plans to expand that to support over 20,000 miners sometime in 2022.

The plant will be burning waste coal to power on-site mining hardware, which will be housed in shipping containers that are placed next to the Scrubgrass power plant. The not-so-environmentally-friendly coal power plant isn't a good choice for Stronghold, which advertises itself as an "environmentally beneficial and vertically integrated Bitcoin miner".

NVIDIA is welcoming developers of all kinds to come and use their powerful supercomputers and test out the latest builds of their DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling).

The company is wanting developers to test out the new DLSS builds and then provide feedback about their experiences on the developer forum of their website. The company explains: "NVIDIA is enabling developers to explore and evaluate experimental AI models for Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Developers can download experimental Dynamic-link libraries (DLLs), test how the latest DLSS research enhances their games, and provide feedback for future improvements".

"Powered by dedicated AI processors on NVIDIA RTX GPUs called Tensor Cores, NVIDIA DLSS technology has already been adopted and implemented in over 100 games and applications. These include gaming franchises such as Cyberpunk, Call of Duty, DOOM, Fortnite, LEGO, Minecraft, Rainbow Six, and Red Dead Redemption, with support coming soon for Battlefield 2042".

I wanted to be more excited about Battlefield Mobile but the recent Beta gameplay footage that has been leaked doesn't inspire much confidence. Before I dive into it, check it out:

There's two parts to this with the first above, and the second below -- uploaded by Techzamazing on YouTube from the Battlefield Mobile Android beta version of the game. Battlefield Mobile has recently kicked off with regional testing in Indonesia and the Philippines, and this is now our first look.

It doesn't look too bad with the environments large for a mobile game, but the graphics are a far cry from the screenshots the developer -- in this case Industrial Toys -- showed off when Battlefield Mobile was very first announced.

GIGABYTE has just unveiled a beast new workstation that packs AMD's core-packed Ryzen Threadripper 3995WX processor, which offers 64 cores and 128 threads of Zen 3 processing power.

The new GIGABYTE W771-Z00 workstation packs AMD's flagship Ryzen Threadripper 3995WX processor, offering 64 cores and 128 threads, as well as support for 8-channel DDR4 RAM which supports up to 2TB of system memory for high-end workstation use.

You can't have 64 cores and 128 threads of CPU power and 2TB of RAM if you're not going to have a ballistic amount of GPUs inside, with GIGABYTE's new W771-Z00 workstation capable of having 4 x dual-slot GPUs with PCIe 4.0 x16 lanes ready for all those GPUs.

Right up until now, I've been referring to the Intel Arc series GPUs as the Intel ARC -- will be not be capitalized and I totally agree with Usman Pirzada at Wccftech when he said he's disappointed Arc isn't capitalized. I agree with how NVIDIA is capitalized, and personally, I think that is more powerful.

I hate to say it, but the capitalization in some branding works wonders. AMD wouldn't be as powerful as AMD, but Apple would look kinda weird as APPLE. Intel is fine, but INTEL would be weird... but ARC looks natural, while Arc feels weaker. Arc just doesn't feel or look as good as ARC.

Disappointment of Arc not being capitalized aside, the new Intel Arc GPUs will reportedly be named Arc a170, Arc a150, and Arc a130. Wccftech has put some guesswork into the naming schemes, where we could see Intel Arc a300, a500, and a700 as well as the Arc a130, a150, and a170 that will be joined by the Arc A800, a600, and a200.

Intel will have multiple of its ARC Alchemist series graphics cards next year, with Tom from Moore's Law is Dead giving us some more rumors to nibble on.

MLID is reporting that there will be at least 3 different Intel ARC Alchemist GPUs launching next year: one with 512 EUs, another with 384 EUs, and another with 128 EUs -- EUs being Execution Units. Each of the cards should have varying levels of GDDR6 memory.

The high-end Intel ARC Alchemist with 512 EUs will reportedly have 16GB of GDDR6 memory at 16Gbps, although we could see this ramped up to 18Gbps but this hasn't been confirmed yet. Board power-wise we're looking at this card requiring 8+6-pin PCIe power connectors and a 225W TDP.

Halo Infinite's shock rifle can do interesting things like create electrified traps out of dropped weapons.

Players can drop weapons in Halo Infinite with a button press. Weapons also fall when you die, so enemies can pick up that rocket launcher or sniper rifle. Halo Infinite's new shock rifle can actually turn these items into dangerous AOE traps.

The new shock rifle in Halo Infinite is a lot of fun. It can zap players with a stream of lightning that would make Tesla proud. You can also make your own Death Sentry straight out of Diablo 2 by shooting dropped weapons with the shock rifle. The electricity will pass through the guns in a crackling line of death--turns out Infinite's weapons are all highly conductive. The zaps only last for a bit (a couple of seconds) but it's enough to strip shields and even kill players.

Halo Infinite's new repulsor equipment is transforming the game's competitive landscape.

Halo Infinite introduces two new abilities that have dramatically changed how gamers play: The grappleshot and the repulsor. The repulsor is something we saw in early teasers--its how the Spartan reflected the plasma pistol shot back at the enemy--and players are doing some insane things with the new equipment.

The repulsor does exactly that. It propels things with repulsion. You can launch yourself in the air from the ground, bounce off of walls, fling weapons to allies, use it to blast the flag across the map, bounce sticky grenades back at enemies, and best of all, utterly demolish vehicles by pushing them off the map. This piece of equipment has far-reaching implications for the meta.

Apple will continue exercising its legal right to keep Fortnite banned from the App Store.

The Epic Games vs Apple trial is now over, and the fallout sees some things changing--and more things staying the same. District court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple is not monopolistic nor did it violate antitrust laws, and it has the right to keep Fortnite--and Epic Games--off of its platform for as long as it likes.

Epic didn't like this ruling. In fact, Epic mostly lost the trial; The court only ruled in favor of Epic in one complaint--that Apple's 30% commission was unjustified, excessive, and "supracompetitive". Apple isn't antitrust, but it is showing signs of becoming antitrust through anti-competitive policies. Apple was forced to allow developers to offer in-game payment links that would bypass Apple's 30% revenue cut, letting app and game devs keep 100% of earnings.

Halo Infinite's second technical preview shows big visual upgrades over the controversial 2020 reveal.

Halo Infinite's graphics have changed dramatically over the last year. The game looks good now. Actually, it looks really good on both PC and Xbox Series X. Some big improvements include high-resolution textures, significantly upgraded lighting effects with light and shadow rolling off of detailed weapon textures, reflective surfaces that gleam brightly, and impressively layered environments that add lots of immersion.

Sony started planning out the PlayStation 5's M.2 external SSD support way back in 2018, roughly 2 years before the console launched.

There was a time when Sony wasn't sure if the PS5 would support PCIe 4.0 SSD expansion. In fact, Sony was planning support as early as 2018 before the first PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSD was on the market. While it was designing the PS5's custom 12-channel Marvell Titania 2 memory controller, the high-speed configuration, and advanced decompression tech, the games-maker took a gamble and decided to allow storage drives that technically didn't exist yet in an effort to future-proof the PS5. The gambit worked and the PS5 now supports blistering-fast PC-grade SSDs in excess of 7GB/sec.

"We knew any capacity we put into the machine as storage, one day you'll hit the capacity. We wanted to provide options. It was important for us to enable upgrade capability for users. We designed the M.2 SSD feature back in 2018. At that time, we were not sure if Gen4 SSDs were coming up or not, but we believed they were," SIE SVP of Platform Experience Hideaki Nishino said in a PlayStation Blog interview.

Is Respawn working on Titanfall 3, or a new Titanfall game? It's complicated.

Respawn is very busy right now. The studio is making Jedi: Fallen Order 2, continuing new Apex Legends updates, and even working on a new singleplayer title that's in early incubation phases. So where's Titanfall 3? Don't expect it any time soon.

Respawn has clarified multiple times that it's not making Titanfall 3 right now, and community dev Jason Garza also said this days ago: "Don't get your hopes up, man. I've said this before. We don't have anything in the works. There's nothing. We've got too many other games in the works right now."