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NASA researchers and engineers have been left in disbelief after the space agency's new rover Perseverance collected its first martian sample, only to discover the sample of rock vanished.

Last week, NASA's Perseverance rover began its long search for signs of ancient martian life in the Jezero Crater as researchers believe the crater was once a large lake that may have hosted life. Perseverance used its instrument to drill into the ground to collect a rock sample from deep beneath the martian surface, but when the sample tube was raised to the surface, nothing was inside of it.

NASA has said that the problem doesn't lay with Perseverance, but actually with the rock that the rover is trying to sample from. According to Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching, "It appears that the rock was not robust enough to produce a core". Essentially, NASA believes that the rock that was drilled into was much too powdery to be collected. "The material from the desired core is likely either in the bottom of the hole, in the cuttings pile, or some combination of both," Jandura said.

Astrophysicists have located what is believed to be the oldest planet in the Milky Way, and it makes Earth look very young.

According to astrophysicist Harvey Richer, who spoke to The Daily Galaxy, back in 2003, researchers gathered data about a planet that is located in the constellation Scorpius and is orbiting a white dwarf star. The planet is located around 5,600 light-years from Earth, and using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers were able to estimate its age, which they found to be twice as old as Earth's.

Richer explains that the planet is around 13 billion years old, twice as old as Earth which is 4.5 billion years old. According to Richer the planet isn't habitable as the ancient M4 cluster where it resides "is poor in metals needed for life. The planet is more like Jupiter than the Earth, with no solid surface, and it might have survived a supernova explosion (the neutron star in the system was likely the end product of this explosion)." If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

NVIDIA has just released its new GeForce Game Ready 471.68 WHQL drivers, with Game Ready support for the new Back 4 Blood Open Beta, and Nakara: Bladepoint.

Nakara: Bladepoint and Back 4 Blood both feature NVIDIA's kick-ass DLSS technology, so you'll get some major performance improvements at high resolutions. Nakara: Bladepoint launches on August 12, and will have DLSS ready to go -- offering up to 60% more performance at 4K.

The new NVIDIA GeForce 471.68 drivers are also Game Ready for the Back 4 Blood Open Beta, which kicks off August 12 on the PC -- and it also features NVIDIA DLSS technology for major performance improvements.

AMD just launched its new Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card, with the Navi 23 GPU and 8GB of GDDR6 memory offering some great 1080p performance... but wow, the crypto mining performance on the RX 6600 XT is pretty damn good.

I'm about halfway into my own ETH crypto mining article using the Radeon RX 6600 XT, but ahead of that I've just seen that VideoCardz is reporting from a report on Reddit that someone has got the Radeon RX 6600 XT mining ETH at 32MH/s at just 55W of power... which is insane. Quite possibly the best crypto mining GPU ever released.

For me, out of the box my XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT Speedster MERC 308 Black was pushing 29MH/s for a shave under 100W of power... already impressive. But then Dizzy Mining reduced the GPU clocks on his Radeon RX 6600 XT down to 1.2GHz, and the GDDR6 clocks up to 2.2GHz -- this pushed the ETH mining performance up to 32MH/s and the power consumption down to just 55W.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics saw 8K 60FPS HDR video being broadcasted, right up into the cloud -- all powered by Intel Xeon CPUs.

8K 60FPS HDR streams aren't easy, with the encoding servers that Intel provided were powered by 4 x Xeon 8380H processors -- each of these CPUs has 28 cores and 56 threads. Each individual encoding server would then have 112 cores and 224 threads, with a super-fast 480GB Intel Optane 900P SSD and 384GB of DDR4-3200 memory.

All of the 8K 60FPS HDR streaming and decoding was done on the CPU exclusively, with no discrete GPU used. That's a pretty big deal right there. Intel recommended that for 8K playback capability requires an 8K TV -- well, duh -- and HDMI 2.1 connectivity. As for the recommended PC specs for 8K video playback, Intel recommends their in-house Xeon W-2295 processor with 18 cores and 36 threads and 64GB of RAM.

STALKER 2 will be powered by Epic Games' next-gen Unreal Engine 5, confirmed by the official Unreal Engine Twitter account.

The official STALKER account said "feel free to mention we're running on UE5" to which the official Unreal Engine Twitter account replied with a quick-witted "Hey, sure thing! We thought it was a secret though..." but I guess not. Unreal Engine 5 will make STALKER 2 look truly incredible, gives me another reason to not want to wait too much longer to play it.

So it seemed it wasn't meant to be revealed, but these days it is something that could be part of a larger marketing campaign. Lots of secrets were kept during Chernobyl, and maybe lots of secrets are here with STALKER 2 and its new "reveal" that it's powered by next-gen Unreal Engine 5 technology.

Capcom isn't ready to commit to $69.99 pricing for its next-gen games just yet, and instead will monitor industry trends and data to make a decision.

Big publishers like Take-Two, EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Sony have established a new $69.99 price for PS5 and Xbox Series X games (they've also started to cut out free next-gen upgrades). Other games-makers like Capcom are hesitant to raise the price tag of their games and want to see how the market reacts to the new schemes. Remember that publishers still expect most of their game sales to be on current-gen PS4 and Xbox One consoles due to the high install base.

In a recent investors Q&A, Capcom management was asked outright if a price hike was planned. The executives responded: "For new titles, we would like to set prices that are appropriate, based on market data."

Capcom's latest franchise sales figures show strong growth in some of gaming's most powerful IPs, including Monster Hunter and Resident Evil.

Capcom kicked off its FY2021 period with a massive spike in game sales. Q1 net sales revenue was up 104% to 48.2 billion yen, driven by a staggering 13.3 million games sold during the period. Resident Evil made up over half of these quarterly sales with 7 million units sold digitally and physically.

Taking a closer look at Capcom's top 5 franchises and we see clear trends that help define the company's long-term business. While the new RE Village mostly made up total RE sales growth, Capcom did sell a bunch of older games like RE5, RE6, and RE7. Meanwhile, sales of Monster Hunter World have slowed down to 500,000 units during Q1, bringing total game sales to 17.3 million.

Capcom's top-selling Resident Evil franchise moved a huge 7 million units in its Q1 period, the largest QoQ growth in the last 3 years.

With 4.5 million units shipped to date, Resident Evil Village has helped supercharge overall franchise sales in a critical post-pandemic period. Capcom's latest sales figures show the horror series has now sold 117 million units worldwide, with 7 million RE titles sold in the Q1 period from March - June 2021.

In fact, Resident Evil made up over half of Capcom's total game sales for the quarter. The company managed to sell 13.3 million copies of games during Q1'21, and most of the revenues from these sales were digital.

Diablo II Resurrected's upcoming open beta will kick off next week on all platforms, allowing console players to experience the legendary aRPG for the first time ever.

Diablo II Resurrected's release is right around the corner and the devs are holding two separate playtests this month: One early access test from August 13-16 that's exclusive to anyone who pre-orders the game, and another open beta from August 20-23 where anyone can join. The open beta will be offered on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, and PC via Battle.net. Sadly there won't be any tests for the Switch.

These tests are multiplayer-only and offline singleplayer won't be offered. Necro and assassin classes won't be playable and only Acts I & II are playable, but console gamers will get to try Diablo II with a controller. This is a big deal for console players like myself who have always wanted to play D2 with a controller; Blizzard did it back in the day with Diablo 1 on the original PlayStation and again with Diablo III, so D2 was just the missing link.

Respawn confirms a next-gen patch for Apex Legends is currently in development on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, but there's no ETA just yet.

In a recent Reddit AmA, Respawn confirms Apex Legends will soon run better on PS5 and Series X/S hardware. Exact details are light but we should expect better frame rates, resolution boosts, and ultra-fast loading via each console's respective PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

"Oh man, I wish I had an update to share but we can't say anything definitive at the moment-so can't spoil anything here. Trust us though, it's in the works and we're excited about it too," said Respawn's director of communicators Ryan Rigney.

NASA launched its Juno mission ten years ago, and since then, the space agency has been monitoring Jupiter and everything around it via its Juno space probe.

Juno has been relaying valuable data back to researchers for quite some time now, and during its last orbit around Jupiter, the space probe was able to capture a stunning infrared image of Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system. The last flyby occurred on July 20 when Juno used its Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument to measure the levels of infrared light, which was then relayed back to researchers who created a new map of infrared map of Ganymede.

Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said on NASA's post, "Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury, but just about everything we explore on this mission to Jupiter is on a monumental scale. The infrared and other data collected by Juno during the flyby contain fundamental clues for understanding the evolution of Jupiter's 79 moons from the time of their formation to today."

In the 1920s humans broke through to the age of the skyscrapers, where skyscrapers were being constructed at an unprecedented rate. Now, a new age is upon us.

One of the most recognizable pictures from this era in time is a team of builders sitting atop a skyscraper in 1932 eating lunch, hence the name "Lunch atop a Skyscraper". The image is quite captivating and reflects the era humans were in back then. On Friday, Elon Musk posted a very similar image, but instead of builders on a skyscraper, it was SpaceX engineers standing beneath Starship, as it was slowly being lowered onto the first-stage rocket for attachment testing.

The image really represents how far humans have come in the last 100 years, highlighting how the era of bleeding-edge construction has changed. ArsTechnica's Eric Berger writes that Musk was sending a clear message to the Federal Aviation Administration with the image, as it represents that regulators must do their part in not holding back the human race from exploring and ultimately progressing as a species. If you are interested in reading more about this interesting image, check out this link here.

A real-life 'Jurassic Park' is going to be constructed despite the warnings from a United Nations organizatioin.

A tourism project that has been titled "Jurassic Park" on social media will be continuing on the island of Rinca, despite warnings from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Last month officials from the UN committee said to a World Heritage Committee conference that the project needed to have an environmental assessment completed as there was a potential risk to the Komodo dragon's natural habitat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

UNESCO said during the meeting last month that it had requested an environmental impact assessment from the Indonesian government but didn't receive any response. Wiratno, a senior official at Indonesia's environment ministry, said to Reuters, "This project will proceed...it's been proven to have no impact", adding that a new assessment could be sent in September. Details of the tourism project have been kept under wraps, but according to the Indonesian government, who was asked last year, it's building a "premium tourism spot" on the island.

A new study has identified a planetary system that is relatively close to Earth and may have the right conditions to support life.

The new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics puts forward evidence of planets orbiting the star L 98-59 located just 35 light-years from Earth, possibly having the right atmospheric conditions for life. The planetary system contains three planets, one is an ocean world, another is half the mass of Venus, and the last is located in what researchers call the star's "habitable zone" - where it's not too hot or cold (like Earth).

Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astronomer at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid and co-author of the study, said in an ESO that the planet located in the habitable zone "may have an atmosphere that could protect and support life." The researchers used European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile to observe the planets.

The core of the Earth has remained a mystery to researchers for quite some time, and for one simple reason, we can't drill down to the core to collect a sample.

Some of the most basic questions, such as 'how and when did the core form?' and the answers to those questions are currently being worked on by numerous seismologists and geodynamicists. In the new study, the researchers used seismic observations and geodynamic modeling with estimations of how iron alloys conduct themselves at high pressure and found that the Earth's inner core was growing faster on one side.

It should be noted that this study has its limitations, and the model that was created by the authors only works if it's if Earth's inner core consists "of one specific crystalline phase of iron", per Inverse. The created model allowed researchers to estimate that the Earth's inner core is between 500 million and 1.5 billion years old. Relatively speaking, that would make Earth's inner core quite young, as it would only be between a ninth and a third as old as Earth itself.

Mexico is no stranger to dumping human waste into the ocean, but now the country has forced the closure of a US beach due to contamination.

A new report from KUSI has revealed that Mexico has dumped human sewage into the ocean, causing the water in Imperial Beach to be seriously contaminated and the beach to be closed. According to KUSi's Dan Planete, who has been reporting on this problem that has been occurring for the last forty years, the increase in visitors to the Playas de Tijuana beach in Mexico has caused the increase in the amount of dumping into the ocean.

The closure of the US beach comes just two days after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that they were on their way to help the situation in Mexico. The dumping in the ocean is a result of a lack of sewage system, hence EPA's announcement of coming to the country's assistance. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

A newly published study has caused researchers to rethink their theory of the moon and update it with new information.

The first humans landed on the moon 52 years ago, and when the astronauts were on the surface of the moon, they collected samples to be studied. From the samples, researchers found they had magnetization, leading to the theory that the moon, at some stage, had a protective magnetic field throughout its 4.53 billion-year history. Researchers believed this magnetization could be coming from the mingling of liquid iron deep in the moon's core. However, that isn't the case.

According to John Tarduno, a geophysics professor at the University of Rochester in New York, the previous experiments that have resulted in this long-standing theory about the moon may have provided inaccurate results. Tarduno and colleagues inspected the samples acquired from the Apollo missions with advanced carbon dioxide lasers and highly sensitive magnetometers. What the researchers found was that the moon never had a magnetic field.

NASA has come out and said that due to delays, the space agency won't be able to put humans back on the moon by 2024.

The original plan from NASA was to get the next man and the first woman on the moon by 2024, but now according to a new audit released by NASA, it doesn't seem that is going to happen. According to the audit, the delays in development for the new lunar lander that were caused by the dispute between Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Elon Musk's SpaceX, and the Government Accountability Office contributed to the now delayed launch.

The audit reads as follows, "These delays - attributable to funding shortfalls, COVID-19 impacts, and technical challenges - have left no schedule margin for delivery of the two flight-ready xEMUs. Given the integration requirements, the suits would not be ready for flight until April 2025 at the earliest".

GIGABYTE has confirmed it has been hacked, with hacking group RansomEXX claiming it had access to 112GB of confidential information that included secret goodies about AMD, Intel, and AMI documents.

The huge 112GB amount of documents and data is a very large amount, where it could be the very foundations and blueprints of next-generation technologies, product roadmaps, security keys for UEFI/BIOS/TPM data/keys, and so much more.

A message that TechPowerUp posted says that the hackers will only speak with an "OFFICIAL REPRESENTATIVE" of GIGABYTE, and they must have the power to act on behalf of the company -- if someone without that power contacts them, the ransom will be "RAISED" warns the hackers.