Latest News - Page 1427

Astronomers have no discovered the oldest spiral galaxy yet, which has helped them answer a burning question in astronomy - "How and when did spiral galaxies form?".

Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and located a galaxy that had a spiral that dated to 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery of this galaxy has broken all previous records before it and is now the most ancient spiral galaxy humans have ever observed. For those that don't know, 70% of galaxies are spiral galaxies, and one of those galaxies is ours - The Milky Way Galaxy.

However, looking back in time at the history of the universe, astronomers found that the proportion of spiral galaxies began to decrease, which suggests that there was a time when spiral galaxies began to form. Leading from that question is "why and how".

SpaceX will be using its Falcon 9 rocket to transport Firefly Aerospace's lunar lander that's carrying NASA payloads to the moon.

SpaceX has been awarded a new between Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based aerospace firm, and NASA. SpaceX will be using its Falcon 9 rocket to transport the Blue Ghost lunar lander, which was named after a rare species of firefly. Blue Ghost will be transporting 10 payloads for NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, which is a part of a $93.3 million task order that NASA gave to Firefly Aerospace.

Shea Ferring, Firefly's SVP of spacecraft, said, "Firefly is excited to fly our Blue Ghost spacecraft on the highly reliable Falcon 9, which will deliver NASA instruments and technology demonstration payloads that support NASA science goals and NASA's Artemis program." Adding, "The high performance of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle permits a lunar transit using minimal Blue Ghost propulsion resources, thereby allowing the lander to deliver more than 150 kg of payload to the lunar surface."

One of Mark Cuban's websites has revealed that he has backed Polygon, a cryptocurrency that aims to transform Ethereum into a multi-chain ecosystem with secured Layer 2 chains.

Cuban has confirmed the news to Coindesk in an email where he said that he found himself using Polygon more and more, "I was a Polygon user and found myself using it more and more". Cuban also mentioned that he will be integrating Polygon into Lazy.com, which is one of Cuban's companies that allows users to show off their non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

However, Cuban did say, "Having more TPS and lower gas fees is not enough. There must be a CURRENT network effect and significant user growth. This is a challenge for most L1s and L2s because [with] few exceptions, marketing in the crypto universe is beyond awful." Polygon recently saw its user-base grow exponentially as investors are avoiding the painfully high gas fees that come with trading on the main Ethereum network.

A report from Russian state news agency Sputnik has revealed that Russia is planning on launching a nuclear-powered spacecraft towards Jupiter.

According to the report, Russia is scheduled to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft that has been dubbed "Zeus". The spacecraft is designed to transport heavy cargo deep space, and is essentially a small-scale nuclear power plant. Currently, spacecrafts use solar power or gravity to accelerate in space, but according to NASA, nuclear-powered spacecrafts could speed up the return trips for astronauts.

With current means of acceleration, it would take three years for a return trip to Mars, but NASA says a nuclear-powered spacecraft could reduce that return trip time down to two years. Russia has launched more than thirty nuclear reactors into space, while the US has only ever put one nuclear reactor to space back in 1965. Zeus is powered by a 500-kilowatt nuclear reactor that it will use to propel itself.

The world of cryptocurrencies has been very turbulent following the news news of Tesla no longer accepting Bitcoin as payment, and China announcing its own crackdown on Bitcoin.

The price of Bitcoin dived by more than 40% following the announcements from both Elon Musk and China, and now expert investors are warning people shouldn't be investing into cryptocurrency purely based off Elon Musk's tweets. William Quigley, Managing Director of Magnetic, a cryptocurrency investing firm, said in a recent interview on CNN Business said, "Do not pay attention to Elon Musk's comments about anything in crypto at least over the longer term."

Quigley went on to say, "Tesla until very recently was going to accept bitcoin as a payment. That alone told me he didn't really understand how to think about bitcoin" and "please don't pay attention to what Elon Musk says about crypto because he is simply not an expert". Many people have taken to Twitter to express their anger with Musk, some even going as far to say that they hate him. In response to these angry comments, Musk has said that "the true battle is between fiat & crypto. On balance, I support the latter."

Bernie Sanders is coming between NASA funding and Jeff Bezos' space exploration company Blue Origin.

In April this year, the Endless Frontier Act was created with the main objective being to keep the US space program competitive with other countries around the world. On Monday, Sanders submitted an amendment to the act that states its purpose is to "eliminate the multi-billion dollar Bezos Bailout."

The "Bezos Bailout" is referencing an amendment submitted by Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, which asked NASA for an additional $10 billion in funding and instructed NASA to select a second company to construct a moon lander for the coming Project Artemis lunar landing missions. Both amendments come after Elon Musk's SpaceX won the original $2.9 billion NASA contract to construct moon landers that will carry astronauts to the moon.

Virtuix today announced that more than 6500 investors participated in its recent SeedInvest Series A-2 financing round, raking in $19 million to help Virtuix bring its first consumer product to the market.

Virtuix kicked off the latest round of funding last year when it revealed the Omni One, the company's first consumer-focused home VR treadmill. Virtuix founder and CEO Jan Goetgeluk offered investors a slice of his company for as little as $1000, and more than 6500 people took advantage of the offer.

"We're impressed by the outpouring of investor support for Omni One," said Goetgeluk. "More than two million players have experienced the thrill of walking around inside videogames at our commercial venues around the world. Given our success in the out-of-home market, our investors believe we're well-positioned to bring our popular gaming experience to millions of homes around the world."

The first four days of the new category hitting Twitch it has garnered more than 1.4 million hours of watch-time.

Twitch decided it was launching a new category on Friday, May 21. That new category is called "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches", and as you may have already guessed, the category if filled with predominately female streamers sitting in a pool or a hot tub interacting with their audiences. As for the "beaches", funnily enough the sixth most-watched channel in the new category was actually MarineMammalRescue.

The new category's viewership managed to placed it in the same league as games such as Teamfight Tactics, Genshin Impact, PUBG, and Overwatch. As for it's overall popularity, according to data by research firm Rainmaker and StreamElements, Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches is currently ranked at 26th out of all content on Twitch. Hot Tub streamer Amouranth, seen in above image, had nearly 500,000 hours watched out of overall total.

A man who spent more than 100,000 Bitcoin on just pizza over the summer, which is now worth $3.8 billion today, says he doesn't regret his decision.

Back in 2010, California student Jeremy Sturdivant, 19, saw a post on a cryptocurrency forum that was asking for two large pizzas in exchange for 10,000 Bitcoin. Little did Sturdivant know that this transaction between himself and Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz, 28, would later become a pivotal moment in Bitcoin's life history as it was the first physical purchase made with Bitcoin in the history of the currency.

Now, the coins that Sturdivant received for delivering the pizza is worth more than $365 million. Sturdivant also didn't save any of the coins for the future, he spent them all on traveling. However, Sturdivant doesn't say he regrets his decision at all and instead says that he is "proud to have played a part" in the "global phenomenon."

A new message on the GameStop website has revealed the company is planning on launching its own NFT platform and cryptocurrency token.

According to the announcement GameStop is currently looking to hire developers, marketers, gamers, designers and other specialists to work on the project which will eventually be brought to market for consumers to enjoy. Additionally, GameStop representatives have posted a link to a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain called "Game On Anon".

The smart contract reveals a GameStop token being issued, and this token would be directly linked to the price of GameStop's stock GME. Since this announcement, the price of GME stock has risen 18%, and the volume of trading has increased drastically. The project is an ambitious one, but since GameStop is in a losing battle to digital media, they are in dire need to flex into a different market. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Get ready to hit the virtual slopes. Carve Snowboarding debuts this Thursday on Oculus Quest.

Chuhai Labs today confirmed that Carve Snowboarding is coming out this week. The indie developer announced on Twitter that the game would be available on Thursday, May 27.

Carve Snowboarding is Chuhai Labs debut VR game but the team behind Carve Snowboarding is no stranger to delivering games. The creator of 1080 Snowboarding for the Nintendo 64 is the CEO of Chuhai Labs (and he just did an AMA on Reddit), which means there are few studios with the know-how to build this game.

One of the best horror games on the Oculus platform is now available on SteamVR.

Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife is no longer an Oculus exclusive title. Fast Travel Games released the SteamVR version today, giving Vive and Index owners a chance to play the game.

Wraith: The Oblivion - Afterlife is a story-driven horror game that relies on tension and suspense to give you the chills rather than cheap jump scares. The game is set in the World of Darkness universe, the same universe as Vampire: The Masquerade. You play the role of Ed Miller, a photographer who met his death during a seance, and you must uncover the mystery of how you died.

Intel's next-gen Alder Lake-S processors will arrive on the new LGA1700 socket, which is codenamed Socket V, with the new CPU package and the socket being thinner.

The new information is coming from Igor Wallossek who posted the schematics and drawings of Intel's new cooling for Socket V (LGA1700). Intel looks to be changing the z-height by at least 1mm for Socket V versus Socket H (LGA1200). The lowered z-height on Socket V will see lower loads compared to Socket H, but the new LGA1700 socket will have a new hole pattern.

There's also a tease of preliminary schematics of high-performance thermoelectric cooling, where we should expect similar for LGA1700. Intel worked with Cooler Master on the launch of its MasterLiquid ML360 Sub-Zero cooling, which uses a Peltier effect to create a heat flux between two types of materials.

Luxury brand empire owner Bernard Arnault briefly became the world's richest man, with a net worth of $186.3 billion at the time... versus Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his net worth of around $186 billion ($300 million less).

Well, it has been barely 24 hours and those few hundred million dollars matter a great deal when you're this rich and want that coveted "world's richest person" title. Well, Arnault is out -- his real-time net worth has dropped to $188 billion, meanwhile, Bezos has his net worth jump to $188.9 billion.

Bezos was behind by $300 million yesterday and is now $900 million ahead... all in less than 24 hours. I cannot fathom having that much money ($900 million) let alone $188 billion behind it. We should expect this fight to continue until one of their companies sees its share value drop by a few percentage points, but who will be first? Bezos or Arnault?

Intel has just confirmed that its next-next-gen 14th Gen Core "Meteor Lake" compute tile has taped in, meaning that the design is finalized and can be completed to tape out the whole chip.

Intel confirmed the news with Executive Vice President & GM of Intel's Client Computing Group, Gregory M Bryant, tweeting out that it was a "Great way to start the week! We are taping in our 7nm Meteor Lake compute tile right now. A well-deserved celebration by the team on this milestone".

The new Meteor Lake architecture should be powering Intel's next-next-gen 14th Gen Core CPUs which are expected in 2023, they will be following up the next-gen 12th Gen "Alder Lake" CPUs coming in 2022 with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support and the 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs after that.

AMD has been ahead of the curve for a while now, with its chiplet-based Zen CPU architecture making waves through the industry... but the industry moves so fast it's always time for change. Well, that change comes in the form of "X3D" packaging, and it's coming to codename Milan-X.

Patrick Schur tweeted out today that AMD is "working on a new CPU" that is codenamed Milan-X that will use stacked dies. ExecutiveFix backed up the leak, saying that codename Milan-X will use X3D stacking technology and will feature the Genesis-IO die, which is the codename of the current-gen Zen 3-based EPYC architecture.

This won't be inside of your new Ryzen CPU, but rather it will be what AMD will use to fight its competitors in the data center market. AMD recently teased a simplified diagram during its Financial Analyst Day that packed four compute tiles in a 2 x 2 pattern, with stacked memory surrounding the chip. This hybrid approach is called X3D, as it combines Hybrid 2.5 and 3D stacking technologies.

We are so close to the new Battlefield that I can almost smell it, with EA's next-gen FPS nearly revealed, here's everything we know about the new Battlefield 6 aka Battlefield aka BATTLEFIELD.

The new Battlefield had some major leaks last week with purported screenshots from the upcoming Battlefield trailer, and then a video was dumped onto the internet but I'm not going to post it here for obvious reasons (and it's been taken down in multiple places at the time of writing).

So let's dive right into what we know so far based on what EA itself has said, Battlefield leaker Tom "one-man-marketing-team-for-Battlefield" Henderson, and everything in between.

AMD's next-gen Zen 4 "Raphael" LGA1718 package has been teased, this time through a new mockup that will eventually be what we'll see as the Ryzen 7000 series CPUs.

The new Raphael CPUs will reportedly have a flagship 170W TDP model, but for the most part will be 120W TDP designs. AMD will have DDR5 support with its new AM5-based motherboards, meanwhile, Intel will support DDR5 on its higher-end boards, but will offer DDR4 support on other Intel 600-series chipsets.

Zen 4 will have 28 PCIe 4.0 lanes on offer, an upgrade over the 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes on the Zen 3 series. Intel will have next-gen PCIe 5.0 connectivity on its upcoming 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" processors, which will be directly battling against AMD's new Zen 4 "Raphael" CPUs.

Microsoft is about to reveal the next-generation of Windows, with CEO Satya Nadella teasing big things are coming to Windows very soon.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during his Build 2021 keynote this morning: "Soon we will share one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade to unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators. I've been self-hosting it over the past several months, and I'm incredibly excited about the next generation of Windows. Our promise to you is this: we will create more opportunity for every Windows developer today and welcome every creator who is looking for the most innovative, new, open platform to build and distribute and monetize applications. We look forward to sharing more very soon".

We might not find out everything about the next-gen Windows during Build 2021, but it seems that we're going to see Microsoft at least outline what it wants to do with the future of its desktop OS over the coming days. This will have ripple effects throughout workstation or casual users, professionals, and gamers once the new Windows (11?) is announced.

Subscribers of Ubisoft's $14.99 a month on-demand PC gaming service will now get in-game freebies every month.

The new Ubisoft+ Rewards program will give out free in-game cosmetics, boosters, and items to active subscribers on PC. Gamers can choose what freebies they get in what game and the in-game freebies will compound the longer users stay subscribed. For example, if you stay an active subscriber for 7 months, you'll be promoted to the Platinum tier and receive 4 in-game rewards per month.

The items are yours to keep even if your Ubisoft+ subscription lapses.