Latest News - Page 1313

A part of NASA's "We Asked a NASA Professional" series on YouTube, the space agency has answered the following question - "Is there oxygen on Mars?"

The short answer is "yes", but it's hardly the amount that we have here on Earth and definitely not enough for a human to breathe while walking around on the surface. To put it into perspective of how little oxygen Mars' atmosphere contains, NASA says the amount of oxygen present in Mars' atmosphere is 0.13%, compared to 21% in Earth's atmosphere. What Mars' atmosphere is rich in is carbon dioxide, which can be useful.

NASA technologists have created a piece of technology called MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. NASA has equipped Perseverance with a MOXIE, and only a few months ago, the rover was able to successfully extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere. The amount of oxygen that was extracted was only small, but the experiment proved the concept works.

Microsoft has just unveiled its next-gen Surface Pro 8 which delivers upgrades in virtually all areas, and especially in its operating system department -- Windows 11.

The new Surface Pro 8 features a lush 13-inch "PixelSense Flow Display" offering a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, a larger, faster display than any Surface Pro before. We also have Dolby Vision and Adaptive Color Technology on the display, with the Surface Pro 8 running at 60Hz by default, and only ramping to 120Hz when performing specific tasks or using the pen accessory.

Microsoft is tapping into the Dynamic Refresh Rate feature built into Windows 11 to increase battery life, because having the display at 120Hz the entire time would suck the battery down considerably.

GIGABYTE is working on a plethora of 600-series motherboards, ready for Intel's unleashing of its 12th Gen "Alder Lake" CPUs that are not too far away now.

We have the flagship GIGABYTE Z690 AORUS EXTREME motherboard which will feature what should be a beautiful, kick-ass monoblock and rock out with its new RAM out in DDR5 support. There'll also be AORUS MASTER and AORUS TACHYON motherboards, exclusive with next-gen DDR5 RAM.

GIGABYTE will be looking after DDR4 owners with the AORUS ELITE, AORUS PRO, and AORUS ULTRA which will all include DDR4 RAM support. GIGABYTE is reportedly introducing a new model in the AORUS ELITE STEALTH, so expect to see more on that over the coming months.

AMD has just launched its RDNA 2-powered Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card and now we're ramping up into the Radeon RX 6600 non-XT launch.

AMD's new Radeon RX 6600 has already been teased but we're expecting AMD to require all AIB partners to list their samples by last week, on September 15 -- these samples can start shipping on September 29, but they're not allowed to arrive before October 4.

The NDA for the Radeon RX 6600 is reportedly October 13... and the GPU itself will feature 1792 Stream Processors and 28 Compute Units on the kick-ass RDNA 2 graphics architecture, with 8GB of GDDR6 memory joining the mid-range 1080p gaming GPU party.

The United Nations has cranked its fear-mongering blaster that has been fixated on the planet for a while now, to 11, with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warning the world and the nations that attended the 76th General Assembly session -- with Bill Gates even attending -- that all 193 member states need to do what Neo was asked to do by Trinity in The Matrix and "wake up" as solidarity is the only way out of this. Right.

Guterres said: "We are on the edge of an abyss. We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes".

He added: "Human rights are under fire. Science is under assault. And economic lifelines for the most vulnerable are coming too little and too late -if they come at all. A surplus in some countries. Empty shelves in others. This is a moral indictment of the state of our world. It is an obscenity. We passed the science test. But we are getting an F in Ethics".

Bitcoin has been hovering at around $50,000 for a while now but BTC flash-crashed down to just $5402 on Pyth Network oracle's BTC/USD feed... the problem caused liquidations to happen on an insane, flash-crashed price.

BTC was staying at the $50,000 or so during the first week of September 2021, before dropping down to $45,000 or so last week, and now down to $40,000 or so this week before climbing back up to $43,000 at the time of writing.

The price of Bitcoin flash-crashed to $5402 between the hours of 12:21 and 12:23 UTC on Monday, while BTC was trading for $43,500 on most centralized exchanges. The Pyth Network is a Solana-based oracle network that acts as a bridge between blockchains and real-world data, adding that the flash-crash down to $5402 was caused because two of its data sources published a near-zero price, and received a relatively higher weight from the network's aggregation logic.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is enjoying its extended open beta right now, but Call of Duty: Warzone and Black Ops Cold War is about to enjoy Season 6 and its huge launch in October, the month before Vanguard launches.

We should expect to see Call of Duty Season 6 drop somewhere around October 7, with Season 6 most likely being the last slab of content for Black Ops Cold War since Vanguard launches on November 5. Warzone will see the injection of WWII-based settings, weapons, and more -- including a new Warzone Pacific map later this year.

Warzone just enjoyed its Hardcore mode "Iron Trials 84" mode, but the new Season 6 update will include the usual tweaks to the battle royale mode. Season 5 added new modes, operators, weapons, and more. -- so we should expect Season 6 to continue that with new weapons, a new battle pass (like every other season) and many cross-over bits with Vanguard.

Blizzard is giving away an ultra-demonic custom Xbox Series X to celebrate Diablo 2 Resurrected's incoming release.

After 20 years, Diablo 2 is coming back. D2 Resurrected launches tomorrow on PC, consoles, and Switch, and Blizzard has been celebrating with some awesome giveaways. The first phase included two custom high-end PCs, and the second one, which is live now until 3AM EST, offers up a custom Series X with the Lord of Hatred himself slapped on the case.

You can enter for a chance to win by sharing your most prized Diablo possession via a Twitter response. Winners will be contacted via direct message, and Blizzard says the custom Mephisto-themed Xbox Series X console retails for a huge $889 USD.

Nintendo should reveal its mysterious new Switch controller during tomorrow's special showcase.

Right on cue, Nintendo confirms a special Nintendo Direct stream tomorrow at 6PM EST. The news is rather timely; just yesterday users spotted the FCC confidentiality agreement for Nintendo's mysterious new controller will lift on the 24th, which usually means a reveal would happen the day of or the day before.

Nintendo registered the device for FCC testing a bit ago, and the filing confirms it's a new controller peripheral. The controller model HAC-043 doesn't match up with any existing models, but the HAC moniker confirms Switch connectivity, and the filing diagrams also confirm the device uses USB-C and can be hooked up to the Switch's power supply.

The PS4's latest update may be bricking consoles, but it's also fixed the controversial CBOMB CMOS battery issue.

PS4 v9.0 firmware is trading one brick for another. The system update is reportedly soft- and hard-bricking PlayStation 4 consoles, leading to tons of errors, and other headaches for players to navigate. There's a silver lining, though: v9.0 has fixed an issue that turned every PS4 console into a brick by default.

Multiple users including YouTuber ModernVintageGamer report that Sony has fixed the PS4's CMOS battery issue which effectively prevented owners from playing games while offline. Sony used the PS4's built-in clock as a security mechanism, and if the clock was reset, the system would have to re-connected to the PlayStation Network to sync up. If the console couldn't connect, then it would go into lockdown mode and prevent users from playing both disc-based and installed games.

NASA has taken images of astronomical observations and has converted them into "musical pieces" for your listening pleasure.

So, how does NASA do this? NASA takes observations made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Space Telescope and other ground-based telescopes and through a process called sonification, the space agency is able to convert the images into sound.

Three new sonifications have been released and they are sourced from observations made of the black hole named Messier 87, a cluster of young stars that are only a couple million years old and supernova explosion.Visualization scientist Kimberly Arcand, from the Chandra X-ray Center along with astrophysicist Matt Russo and musician Andrew Santaguida are responsible for the creation of the sonifications. If you are interested in learning more about the sonification process, check out this link here.

NASA has announced that it is pivoting the space agency's infrastructure to position itself better for the next 20 years.

The announcement came from NASA's Administrator Bill Nelson who said that the space agency will be separating the current "Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate into the new Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) and Space Operations Mission Directorate." Jim Free will be returning to the agency as associate administrator of ESDMD, and Kathy Lueders will be associate administrator of Space Operations Mission Directorate.

So, why did NASA do this? According to the press release, the space agency wants two separate missions with separate teams providing focused oversight on each respective mission. Splitting the mission up will allow the space agency's respective teams to focus on their areas, ultimately allow the team members to execute each mission with high success.

An asteroid that could be anywhere between 425 and 985 feet in diameter is approaching Earth at tens of thousands of miles per hour.

The asteroid is named 2021 NY1, and according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near-Earth-Object (NEO) tracking website, the asteroid will pass Earth safely at a distance of about 970,000 miles. NASA categorizes any object that passes within 120 million miles of the Sun as a NEO, hence asteroid 2021 NY1's classification.

In terms of distances in space, 970,000 miles is quite close to Earth as the Moon is only 238,855 miles away. NASA's NEO database describes 2021 NY1 as being roughly between three and six Statues of Liberty tall and that the space rock is traveling at around 21,000 mph, which is about 27 times the speed of sound. If you are interested in what asteroid has come the closest to Earth, that would be asteroid 2020 QG, which passed over the Indian Ocean at just 1,830 miles.

A surprise discovery has led researchers to believe that black holes may be more complex than what was initially thought.

According to a new study published in the journal Physical Review D, astronomers Xavier Calmet and Folkert Kuipers of the University of Sussex studied the changes in gravitational forces that are changed by quantum particles located at the edge of the black hole. What they found after running their calculations was an anomaly appeared that they couldn't explain. The researchers concluded that what they saw in their calculations was black holes have pressure.

Xavier Calmet, Professor of Physics at the University of Sussex and an author on the study, explained, "Our finding that Schwarzschild black holes [static black holes without electric charge and angular momentum] have a pressure as well as a temperature is even more exciting given that it was a total surprise. I'm delighted that the research that we are undertaking at the University of Sussex into quantum gravity has furthered the scientific communities' wider understanding of the nature of black holes."

NASA has detailed an upcoming mission that is part of its Artemis program, which is slated to put humans back on the Moon.

The mission involved a rover called "Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover," or VIPER for short. NASA has said via the above YouTube video that the VIPER mission will be the very first resource mapping mission to ever be conducted on the surface of another celestial body. VIPER will be landing in the Nobile Crater located at the Moon's South Pole and will be searching for water in its designated area.

VIPER will be traversing 10 to 15 miles of the Nobile Crater that cover approximately 36 square miles. The rover will be visiting carefully selected locations of scientific interest, such as craters that are permanently in darkness, water-ice locations, and more. The rover will collect samples from three drill locations, and each of the locations varies in temperature.

Google's upcoming Pixel 6 family of smartphones will include the Pixcel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro phones very soon, after their announcement last month, but now we have our first hands-on before the launch.

The new Pixel 6 Pro was teased by Brandon Lee from This is Tech Today, where it appears he has a pre-production unit but it should be virtually identical to the retail handset when it launches. The video teases -- seriously it teases, it's just 8 seconds long -- but it's enough to see how it'll look in your hand.

Google is using a curved display on its new Pixel 6 Pro smartphone, and that camera bump on the back is seriously massive. A nice thin case would be beautiful on the Pixel 6 Pro, if it's thin enough to meet, and just cover the camera bump that would be great. The grey-black scheme looks good here too, but I want to see it in my hands.

Imagine a future where houses are painted with a specific paint that reflects virtually all of the sunlight, keeping your house cooler and thus requiring less electricity -- massively better for the environment.

Purdue University researchers have created an ultra-white paint that is not just the whitest paint ever made, but this new paint could eventually reduce or even remove the requirement for having an air conditioner. The researchers began their journey looking to reflect sunlight away from buildings, but it has turned out so good that the team made it into the Guinness World Records.

The new white paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation, while it also emits infrared heat -- thanks to it absorbing less heat from the sun that it emits -- the surface of anything that this paint covers would be cooler below the surrounding temperature, without using power. This is quite the reverse of an AC unit and even regular commercial white paints.

HP seems to be getting ready to launch its new ENVY 34 All-In-One PC with NVIDIA's unannounced GeForce RTX 3080 SUPER graphics card.

We should expect to see HP launch its new 34-inch AIO system to also rock AMD's unreleased codenamed Rembrandt CPUs in the new Ryzen 6000 series. Both the GeForce RTX 3080 SUPER and AMD Ryzen 6000 series chips should launch at CES 2022 in January.

HP's new system will go on sale next month, so maybe we'll see the first wave of ENVY 34 AIO systems come out with different GPU offerings and then an updated model would launch in early 2022 with the new GeForce RTX 3080 SUPER graphics card. The model launching next month will cost $1999, rocking what should be a beautiful 34-inch 5K Ultra-Wide 21:9 display and an Intel 11th Gen Core i9 processor.

If you've been holding off on buying an AMD Ryzen CPU with the new Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 series, then the motherboard you've been waiting for is here: EVGA's new super-enthusiast X570 DARK motherboard.

EVGA's new X570 DARK motherboard has its AMD AM4 socket rotated 270 degrees, and just 2 x DIMM slots which is the optimal for extreme overclocking (1 DIMM per channel). There are 2 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, and a single M.2 NVMe SSD. You won't need much on this board, but with 4TB+ capacities on super-fast PCIe 4.0 SSDs you can build quite the beast with the EVGA X570 DARK.

Enthusiasts will be buying the EVGA X570 DARK motherboard for its 17-phase Digital VRM, with the huge power delivery cooled by extensive finned heat sinks. The aluminum-finned heat sinks cool the VRMs and the PCH through a large copper heat pipe. The dual DIMM slots limit you to 64GB, but there's not many situations where you'd be buying a motherboard like this and wanting to put 128GB into this board.

NVIDIA has just released its new GeForce 472.12 WHQL drivers which offer official Windows 11 support, with Microsoft's new OS just weeks away with a release on October 5.

The new drivers give GeForce RTX games support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, as well as enhancing SDR games with Microsoft's built-in Auto HDR, as well as DirectStorage which is all ready to crank your games to the next level on Windows 11.

There's also some tweaks and improvements that are included in the new GeForce 472.12 WHQL drivers, including improvements to Microsoft Teams and NVIDIA Broadcast thanks to the new features in Windows 11. NVIDIA has also taken the time to add 28 games supporting DLSS, which has super-speeded along thanks to DLSS powering Unreal Engine 4 and Unity including DLSS plugins.