Latest News - Page 1382

Xbox Design Lab is back and now allows players to customize the new Xbox controller variants.

Microsoft has brought back Xbox Design Lab due to popular demand and gamers can now customize their new-gen Xbox controllers. The controllers start at $69.99 and offer lots of paint job variations and unique designs, including custom share/back/options buttons, unique D-Pad schemes, and more.

"We had to take a pause when we launched the latest generation Xbox hardware, but now we're back. There's tons of color options, you can choose from 18 different colors for the pieces on the exterior. Three of those colors are new to Design Lab: Shock Blue, Pulse Red, and the Electric Volt."

Today Ninja Theory confirmed Hellblade II: Senua's Saga isn't in full production yet, meaning it could be a while before it releases.

Hellblade II was missing from the Xbox E3 2021 show for a good reason: There's not a whole lot to show just yet. Ninja Theory says the game isn't in full-scale production yet and the teams are currently ramping up assets across the board, from motion capture and real-world photogrammetry captures.

"We're building a big chunky slice of the game before we move onto full production to build out the rest of the game," Ninja Theory boss Tameem Antoniades said.

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy has yet to experience a competitor, but that time has come to an end, as a new Lord of the Rings movie will be coming out.

The new movie will focus on Helm's Deep, and more importantly, Rohan, or more accurately put, the Rohirrim. The announcement for the new film comes from Warner Bros. Animation and New Line Cinema, and it will be directed by Kenji Kamiyama, who has previously directed titles such as Ultraman and Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045. It should be noted that this new LOTR movie won't be live-action. Instead, it will be anime.

The new movie will key in on Helm Hammerhand, a legendary king of Rohan, and according to Warner Bros. Animation head Sam Register, while the movie will be a standalone story, it will feature stylistic elements from Peter Jackson's trilogy, as well as deep lore from Tolkiens books. The studios have said that the anime film is a "companion piece" to the original movie trilogy. Additionally, the animation will be done by Sola Entertainment.

A group of scientists, for the very first time, has happened the gigantic protective bubble that is located near the edge of our solar system.

This gigantic protective bubble is called the heliosphere, and according to the new study published in the Astrophysics Journal, the researchers used data from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite that is designed to observe and collect data regarding the interactions between solar winds from our Sun and interstellar wind.

The group of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory used the data from IBEX to create a map of the heliosphere. Dan Reisenfeld, the lead author on the paper, explained, "Just as bats send out sonar pulses in every direction and use the return signal to create a mental map of their surroundings, we used the Sun's solar wind, which goes out in all directions, to create a map of the heliosphere." The creation of the map marks the very first three-dimensional map of the heliosphere, which is the boundary of interstellar space.

A newly published study has claimed to have found evidence that life on Mars exists, but it's not in the form of a small green martian alien.

The study claims that the "evidence" of life that was discovered was actually mushroom-like life-forms growing on the surface of Mars. According to Space.com, these mushroom-like life-forms aren't life-forms at all but are actually small spherical-shaped pieces of the mineral called hematite.

Hematite is a combination of iron and oxygen, and scientists believe that the rocks could have formed from volcanic activity or accumulating in slowly evaporating water environments. The exact origin of the material is yet to be confirmed by scientists as it's still being debated. However, the suggestion that these "mushrooms" are life-forms is incorrect, as researchers have spotted them around Opportunity's landing site as well as underground, and even between rocks. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Back in late 2019 and early 2020, astronomers were puzzled at the star Betelgeuse mysteriously dimming, but now the answer has been uncovered.

The Great Dimming of Betelgeuse stumped the astronomy community for some time, with some researchers even saying that the star could go supernova relatively soon. However, as with most space phenomena, there is a logical and boring explanation that explains the occurrence, and in the instance of Betelgeuse's dimming, researchers found that a cloud of dust covered the star.

Miguel Montarges and his team used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) to examine Betelgeuse and found that the star had changed brightness. The team published a new study in Nature, which details that the Betelgeuse dimmed due to a veil of dust around the star that caused its temperature to drop. The team says that Betelgeuse released a large gas bubble from a patch of its surface that then floated away from it. That patch on its surface then cooled down, causing the gas bubble to condense into dust.

In an effort to stop Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos from ever putting two feet on the ground again, thousands have signed a petition to deny him entry back Earth.

For those that don't know, Bezos will be taking the first tourist flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket to the outer edges of Earth's atmosphere (62 miles above average sea level). Bezos announced on June 7 that he would be taking the flight with his brother Mark and one other person. Bezos also owns Blue Origin, and when the flight occurs on July 20, it will mark the first human space trip for the company.

The petition was created on Change.org by Jose Ortiz, who wrote, "Jeff Bezos is actually Lex Luthor, disguised as the supposed owner of a super successful online retail store. However, he's actually an evil overlord hellbent on global domination." The petition received nearly 7,000 signatures, with the target being 7,500. The other person that will be on the space flight with Bezos bid $28 million for the seat next to the Amazon billionaire. However, the identity of the individual is still a mystery.

Humans will soon be sending the world's first wooden satellite to space in an effort to test a special type of plywood.

A Finnish company called Arctic Astronautics is behind the project and will be sending the WISA Woodsat, a nanosatellite that only measures in at 4 by 4 by 4 inches, and only weighs 2.2lbs. The researchers behind the project plan on testing the durability of specially coated plywood panels in extreme space environments. The results of the mission will determine if these types of panels can be sustainable for future missions.

The tiny satellite will be equipped with two cameras, one will be attached to a selfie stick that will allow for researchers on the ground to observe the panels and their condition. Researchers behind the small satellite have coated the plywood with aluminum oxide, which Woodsat chief engineer Samuli Nymanm, who is also the Arctic Astronautics co-founder, said should stop the plywood from releasing any gas in space as well as protects it against corrosive atomic oxygen.

For quite some time now, conspiracy theorists believe there is already proof of alien life on the baron red planet we call Mars.

Now that talk of aliens is in the news again, with Congress expecting a detailed report on UFO sightings by US intelligence agencies before the end of the month, now is a good time to look at what the internet has previously considered as "evidence" of life extraterrestrial life. For many years NASA's probes have been exploring the surface of Mars and sending back images that have been published online for public viewing. Most of these images show a baron wasteland planet with large quantities of rocks.

Some onlookers of these images claimed that the pictures were actually revealing evidence of current/past life existing on Mars. However, NASA scientists have said that what we see in these images can be attributed to a phenomenon called pareidolia, which is basically when the human brain sees an object that is similar to an object it has previously recognized and thinks that it's there when it's not.

NASA has big plans for getting humans back onto the moon, but they aren't the only ones as a very ambitious roadmap has been released by Russia and China.

The joint announcement from Russia and China occurred on June 16 at the Global Space Exploration (GLEX), where both nations announced they would be constructing a joint lunar space station called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). The announcement by Russia and China rival that of the US's announcement of the Artemis program, which aims to put humans back on the moon in the coming years and construct a lunar base.

So, what is the roadmap? The first phase of the ILRS will be a data-gathering phase that will entail numerous soft-landing lunar missions with China and Russia's respective landers between 2021 and 2025. The second phase has two parts, the first is the construction of infrastructure for communications, energy needs, and more. The second part of the second phase includes cargo missions to the surface of the moon, sample return missions, and joint operations. The second phase will happen between 2026 and 2035.

Intel won't be launching its next-gen Alder Lake-S platform and new flagship Z690 chipset until later this year in Q4 2021, and then after that, we have Raptor Lake-S with the even more next-gen Z790 chipset.

Both of Intel's new Z690 and Z790 chipsets will have the same LGA 1700 socket, with the new Z790 chipset launching alongside the Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake-S CPUs dropping in Q3 2022. The new rumors are coming from PJ, an editor and reviewer with Uniko's Hardware.

The new Z790 chipset will support both the 12th Gen Core and 13th Gen Core CPUs, so if you buy a CPU later this year you'll be able to put it into a next-gen motherboard next year.

I'm sure we've been communicating with other forms of life and civilizations than most would like to admit, but according to physicist Mark Buchanan -- contacting aliens could result in the "end of life on Earth".

Buchanan wrote a panic-fueled piece in the Washington Post, frightened that if we made contact with another civilization that they'd just end our existence on the spot. He goes back and forth between seemingly wanting it (alien disclosure) to happen and tinfoil hat fear that makes even the biggest "conspiracy theorist" seem calm in comparison.

Buchanan feels like Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, where he was filled with pure hate and resentment for Superman. As he said: "if there's even a 1% chance that he (Superman) is our enemy, we have to take it with an absolute certainty".

The Chinese government has now chimed in on the situation going on outside of Hong Kong with a nuclear power plant suspected of leaking radiation -- you know, Chernobyl style -- but everything is OK says the CCP.

China's National Nuclear Safety Administration has said that regulators have reviewed, and approved limits on how much radioactive gas is allowed to accumulate in the water at the reactor. The statement from China's safety regulator explains: "At present, monitoring results of the radiation environment around the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant show that there is no abnormality in the radiation level around the nuclear power plant".

There are over 60,000 nuclear fuel rods inside of Reactor No.1 at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant, which is located around 80 miles southwest of Hong Kong. This has obviously raised concerns not just for Hong Kong and China, but worldwide.

We've seen how SpaceX's Starlink satellite dish continues to work in super-cold ice-covered environments, but what about the heat? 122F+ and the satellite dish goes into thermal shutdown.

A post on Reddit is now providing some updates on the upper limits of what the Starlink satellite dish can handle thermally, where in hot environments the dish can hit 122F and it'll go into thermal shutdown. One of Starlink's customers in Arizona saw his satellite dish go into thermal shutdown when temperatures popped over 122F in Arizona recently.

Another user shared their experience about hot temperatures in Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday where they hit 111F -- but his Starlink internet service was fine. His terminal didn't shut down, and no service outages were reported -- this is a better result than SpaceX said last year.

If you haven't heard about the nuclear plant having issues in China, well the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant is having a "performance issue" but it is operating under safety parameters.

This is what the French joint operator -- Framatome -- said during a recent media conference, where Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said: "With regards to foreign media reports about a nuclear plant in Taishan, Guangzhou, the Hong Kong government is highly concerned".

The Taishan Nuclear Power Plant is jointly owned by China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group and French multinational electric utility Electricite de France, which is the main owned of Framotome, which also helps operate the nuclear plant.

Rainbow Six: Siege has received its new update that enables NVIDIA's amazing DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology that boosts performance by up to 50% at 4K. Check it out in action:

NVIDIA can now say that all of their GeForce RTX GPUs can offer over 100FPS+ when gaming at 4K with DLSS and Rainbow Six: Siege, which is an impressive feat. All you need to do is make sure your Rainbow Six: Siege installation is fully updated, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU installed into your PC, and then to enable DLSS.

Note: This is for the Vulkan version of the game, which you'll have to choose to boot into as you load into the game. DLSS is not available for the DirectX 11 version of the game.

AMD has unleashed its ultra-performance Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled graphics card, cooled with a large AIO cooler.

The new Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled graphics card has AMD overclocking the TBP to 330W, and the 16GB of GDDR6 memory to 18Gbps. These two tweaks provide enough performance that AMD says the new Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled can better battle NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards.

The GPU itself has a game clock of up to 2250MHz, boost clock of 2435MHz -- 235MHz and 185MHz overclocked over the air-cooled version of the Radeon RX 6900 XT, respectively.

Nintendo announces a new 2D Metroid game to help celebrate the franchise's 35th anniversary.

Metroid Dread came out of nowhere yesterday and surprised millions of fans. The game is a direct sequel to Metroid Fusion and continues the storyline of the original NES and SNES games like Metroid, Metroid II, and Super Metroid. It's also a 2D game, marking a big departure from Samus' most recent adventures.

The new Metroid takes big cues from previous games like Metroid: Samus Returns, making big innovations on existing moves and abilities like the melee parry attack.

Microsoft will start releasing next-gen exclusive Xbox games in 2022, but last-gen Xbox One owners won't be left behind.

Microsoft re-confirms that Project xCloud game streaming will allow Xbox One owners to play next-gen exclusives like Starfield, Fable, The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and the new Perfect Dark shooter.

"For the millions of people who play on Xbox One consoles today, we are looking forward to sharing more about how we will bring many of these next-gen games, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, to your console through Xbox Cloud Gaming, just like we do with mobile devices, tablets, and browsers," Microsoft wrote in their E3 blog.

The long-awaited sequel to Psychonauts has finally received a release date at the Microsoft/Bethesda E3 broadcast.

The announcement aired on June 13, and fans of the 16-year-old title were undoubtedly pleased to see that Psychonauts is getting a sequel, Psychonauts 2. Unlike many of the other titles that were announced at this year's E3, Psychonauts 2 will be releasing this year on August 25. To go along with the announcement, Microsoft has released a new trailer that shows off some hilariously fun gameplay.

For those that haven't played the original Psychonauts, here's a quick synopsis of the game; Psychonauts is a platformer adventure title that introduces players to a character called Raz that has psychic powers. Raz is a Psychonaut-in-training or, "Psycadet", and throughout the game, players will jump through people's minds to help them overcome their fears. Psychonauts 2 will also feature Raz as the main character, but this time he's a graduated intern at Psychonaut Headquarters. Psychonauts 2 will drop on August 25 on Xbox and Windows.