Latest News - Page 1446

The next-gen ASUS Z690 motherboards are still a little while out but thanks to the latest version of HWiNFO, the software now includes support for the unreleased Z690 chipset and the ASUS ROG Maximus XIV family of motherboards.

Intel's next-gen LGA 1700 socket will be the star of the show on the Z690 motherboard, which will launch alongside and support the 12th Gen Core CPUs otherwise under the Alder Lake architecture. The new Alder Lake-S flagship CPU should end up being the Core i9-12900K -- and will work on the new Z690 chipset.

The new Alder Lake-S platform will also deliver PCIe 4.0 like Rocket Lake-S recently did, but we'll be getting some next-gen DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 support. The flagship Z690 chipset looks to be the only one that supports DDR5-4800 memory, while lower-end H670, B650, and H610 chipsets will support up to DDR4-3200 memory.

Can you believe we're barely a month out from NVIDIA revealing new graphics cards already? Computex 2021 is right around the corner -- if you can believe that we're nearly half way through the year already -- meaning it's new hardware time (again).

The last that we heard, NVIDIA had pulled the reveal of its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card up to May 18, from a May 25 announcement, but now VideoCardz says it can confirm NVIDIA is planning to announce the new GPU on May 31 alongside the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti.

NVIDIA is reportedly setting product review NDAs separately for the two cards, with the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti review NDA lifting on June 2 while the higher-end GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review NDA lifts on June 9. As for when the new GPUs will be released... well we don't know that exactly, but it shouldn't be long after the reviews -- will you be able to find one, that's an entirely different question altogether.

I think that even if you were living under a rock you'd have to have known about the "Disaster Girl" meme purely with a 1-second look, with the super-popular internet meme selling for over $500,000 in NFT form.

The NFT (non-fungible token) version of Disaster Girl recently sold for 180 Ethereum, which at the time was worth $500,000 and at the time of writing was worth just over $550,000. The original photo of "Disaster Girl" saw then-four-year-old Zoe Roth standing in front of her father's camera in front of a burning house.

The house wasn't exactly burning normally, as firefighters had intentionally set fire to the house and then let the kids play around with the fire hose and pumping water into the house on fire. The picture set the internet on fire, pun intended, and became an instant meme of the ages. Even the NFT caption explains it perfectly: "Discovered by internet connoisseurs it rapidly spread to every corner of the world, becoming one of the most recognizable images of the 21st century".

Call of Duty: Warzone was recently updated and included with it NVIDIA's magic DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology which provides a gigantic injection of performance for GeForce RTX gamers. COD: Warzone actually hits 8K 60FPS on the GeForce RTX 3090 with DLSS on Ultra Performance mode.

The new Warzone update with DLSS enabled and turned onto "Performance Mode" sees the GeForce RTX 3090 going from 100FPS average at 4K to a huge 151FPS average... around 50% free performance turning DLSS on. But what about 8K? That's where the fun really begins, and something I just personally did a few days ago on my Dell UP3218K monitor, the Core i9-10900K processor and MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X graphics card.

Call of Duty: Warzone at 8K simply requires the GeForce RTX 3090, it's unplayable at anything less than 60FPS or so at 7680 x 4320 as its driving those 33 million pixels in front of your eyeballs and melting your graphics card in the process.

Bill and Melinda Gates have announced their divorce after 27 years of marriage, with the ex-CEO of Microsoft taking to Twitter to announce the news.

The now-split couple wrote together, but published on Bill Gates' personal Twitter: "After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage. Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives".

"We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives. We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life".

Microsoft's technical wizards have worked their magic and now 97 Xbox games support FPS Boost on Xbox Series X/S consoles.

Freed by the shackles of outdated CPU, GPU, and limited RAM, a bunch of Xbox console games can finally hit 60FPS on the new Series X/S duo. Microsoft has worked closely with developers to add FPS Boost to a multitude of new Xbox games on top of the native enhancements that next-gen consoles already offer. The result is last-gen games shooting up to 60FPS and even up to 120FPS on Series X. The Series S can even hit 120Hz in games like Hollow Knight.

Back in March, FPS Boost only applied to a handful of games. Today 97 games support the feature. Microsoft is careful to say that FPS Boost can lower resolution in some games in order to hit the frame rate target, so it won't be ticked on automatically. FPS Boost lowers res in games like Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Far Cry 5, Wasteland 3, and Titanfall 2. These games will automatically have FPS Boost turned off, and you have to manually turn the feature on via Xbox console settings.

A week-long exercise led by NASA has shown that space agencies wouldn't be able to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth even if they had 6 months to prepare.

The simulation, or hypothetical scenario, posed an asteroid located 35 million miles away that was anywhere between 114 feet to half a mile in size was going to hit Earth in 6 months. Experts were tasked with developing ways to save Earth, and participating experts found that with the given timeframe, it wasn't possible to launch any type of spacecraft out to it in time to change its trajectory.

The participants said, "If confronted with the 2021PDC hypothetical scenario in real life, we would not be able us to launch any spacecraft on such short notice with current capabilities." Experts also considered launching nuclear weapons at the asteroid to knock it off its hypothetical course with Europe. "Deploying a nuclear disruption mission could significantly reduce the risk of impact damage", said the participants. However, due to the size of the asteroid fictitiously named 2021PDC, the chance of a nuke being effective was unclear.

Venus is a neighboring planet of ours, and despite its close position to Earth, there is still quite a lot of things we don't know about it.

One of those mysteries was 'how long is a day on Venus?'. Now, researchers from the University of California have managed to figure it out after 15 years of observations. The researchers used a radar to bounce radio signals off of the surface of the planet. From doing this, the researchers learned not only how long a day is on the sister planet but also the actual size of the planet's core, as well as how much it's tilted.

The researchers found that one day on Venus is 243.0226 Earth days or two-thirds of an Earth year. The reason for a day on Venus being 243 Earth days is because Venus rotates extremely slowly. Researchers suspect that Venus' thick layer of sulfuric acid clouds may be impacting the speed at which the planet is rotating. As for the core, researchers found that the planet's core is 2,200 miles across, which is similar to the size of Earth's core. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Last week, China launched its first piece of its own space station that is expected to be completed by 2022.

Unfortunately, the launch wasn't all sunshine and rainbows as a 21-tonne rocket that carried the space station module to space is now going to crash back down to Earth. SpaceNews has reported that the Long March 5B rocket is out of control, and is likely to crash back down to Earth in the coming days. The rocket is currently travelling at 16,000 mph, and is circulating the Earth every 90 minutes.

Another unfortunate factoid is that due to the ever-changing variables of the rocket it's almost impossible to predict where it's going to land. At the moment projections estimate that the rocket could land anywhere between New York in the northern hemisphere and Wellington, New Zealand, in the southern hemisphere. Luckily, majority of the planet is covered in water, so the chances are it will land somewhere in the ocean, and not in someones backyard. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

On April 29, 2021, the world's largest plane officially completed its flight test over California's Mojave Desert.

Developed by Stratolaunch, the "Roc" plane now holds the crown for the world's largest plane as it has a wingspan of 385-feet, and a length of 250 feet, which is slightly bigger than the world's largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380. The Roc has six engines in total and 28 wheels to stabilize it when it lands on the runway.

On Thursday, April 29, Stratolaunch took the Roc out to Mojave Air and Space Port, which is about 70 miles north of Los Angeles. This test flight marked the first time Roc has flown in two years, and during the flight, the massive plane climbed to an altitude of 14,000 feet. Roc stayed in the air for 3 hours and 14 minutes, and the team behind the craft deemed the entire test flight a success. See the above videos to watch the bird in action!

Giant squid caused many people to tell tales of what was known in folklore as the Kraken. Now, researchers have found the real-life "Kraken", the Architeuthis dux.

The Architeuthis dux (A. dux) is the world's largest known squid, and while it's not as big as the folklore tales describe the Kraken to be, it's still incredibly large growing to about 46 feet, or about the length of a semi-trailer. These giant squid are hardly spotted in their natural habitat, but that all changed back in 2012 when a team of marine scientists managed to capture a young A. dux 2,000 feet below the sea in south Japan.

A new study has explored why these giant squid, despite their size, are so hard to capture in their environment. The researchers explain that part of the reason the giant squid is so hard to observe in its natural habitat is because of its massive eyes. Due to the A. dux living so far beneath the ocean's surface, the creature has developed the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, as no sunlight can penetrate to the depth of its natural habitat.

NVIDIA is ramping into the announcement and release of its new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti which will pack 12GB of GDDR6X memory, with some online retailers teasing custom GIGABYTE and MSI models early.

The new listings for MSI's upcoming custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Ventus 3X OC have appeared on Polish retailer X-Kom, as well as Australian and New Zealand outlets listing GIGABYTE and MSI custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards.

The pricing of the custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards from these early listings has it pegged at between $1300 or so through to an insane $2250. These are most likely placeholder prices so I wouldn't be putting away the Benjamins or Dogecoin just yet -- and yeah I'm serious about buying your GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with Dogecoin because Newegg will do that for you.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is still many years away but that doesn't stop the hype engines from being fired up every now and again... with a "well-known movie scooper" known as ViewerAnon teasing GTA 6 news.

ViewerAnon said that Grand Theft Auto 6 will not be coming out for a few years yet, with Rockstar Games having an internal release set for late 2023 but I'm sure we're looking at that being pushed back because of various reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic has wrecked havoc on virtually every inch of the planet, and next-gen consoles are here so Rockstar will want to take full advantage of them.

It can't be another Grand Theft Auto release if it's not going to blow gamers away, and I'm sure that GTA 6 is going to be something truly special. GTA V wasn't enough of a leap for me, I want to feel that same GTA 2 > GTA 3 leap with GTA V > GTA 6.

Last Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it will be working towards banning menthol cigarettes across the US.

The FDA Commissioner, Janet Woodcock stated that the reason the FDA is looking to ban menthol cigarettes is because it will help save lives. Woodcock says, "Armed with strong scientific evidence, and with full support from the [Biden] Administration, we believe these actions will launch us on a trajectory toward ending tobacco-related disease and death in the U.S."

Additionally, the FDA said that the menthol flavor masks the harshness of tobacco products, which makes them easier to start using, thus making them more addictive and harder to quit "by enhancing the effects of nicotine." 18.6 million people in the US smoke menthol cigarettes, and out of all Black smokers 85% smoke menthol cigarettes, while 30% of White smokers smoke menthol, according to the FDA.

The United States wants to leave behind the way it has fought previous wars and move into something that is "very different".

According to speech excerpts provided to Reuters, United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says, "The way we'll fight the next major war is going to look very different from the way we fought the last ones". Speech excerpts called for harnessing technological advances, as well as implementing military operations globally as it will allow the US to "understand faster, decide faster, and act faster."

The speech excerpts didn't mention rival nations such as China or Russia, but the speech excerpts have been published right as President Joe Biden has ordered US troops to withdraw from Afghanistan. Austin also states that the last two decades have been spent "executing the last of the old wars", and understanding the mistakes that were made. It should be noted that Austin didn't make any statements regarding what the US will be doing specifically and to what country.

More than 2,000 years ago, a Greek mathematician proved that the surface of the Earth was curved and not flat.

That mathematician was Eratosthenes, who was a geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. So, how did a mathematician debunk the modern-day theory that the Earth is flat 2,000 years ago? As explained by Carl Sagan in the above video, Eratosthenes planted a stick in the ground in Syene, a city south of Alexandria, and another in Alexandria. The distance between the two sticks was 800 kilometers.

Now, if both of the sticks that were planted casted an identical shadow at the same time of day, it would suggest that the surface of Earth is flat. However, Eratosthenes found that the shadow casted by one of the sticks wasn't identical to the other, in fact, the difference between the shadow casted in Alexandria, and the one in Syene was 7 degrees.

We are still quite far away from the release of AMD's next-gen RDNA 3 architecture, but early rumbles of the Navi 33 are now making their way out of the cracks of the internet.

KittyYyuko posted on Twitter that Navi 33 (or something close to that) is like the Navi 21 (a flagship GPU) but with "Next Gen IP Core" (which would be RDNA 3). The new Navi 33 GPU is reportedly based on a new GPU architecture, and has 80 compute units (CUs) and 5120 cores.

With this much raw power inside of the Navi 33 we would expect the Radeon RX 7600 XT, or whatever it is named, should have similar power to the current near flagship Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards. That would be a big deal for AMD, and great for gamers -- if there's enough of these new Navi 3X cards to go around whenever they make it to market.

I don't know about you but I would do anything to fly around in one of these Gravity Jet Suits, just like the Royal Marines did during a successful training exercise using the Iron Man-like jet suits. Check them out, taking off, flying up and next to and then landing on the ship.

The Royal Marines are using Gravity Industries' own Gravity Jet Suit here for their operations, with 1000bhp of Jet Engine power to fly around with. The marines look so awesome easily flying off from their boat onto the ship, flying up to it and gracefully landing onto it -- reminding me of the graceful way Christopher Reeves' Superman used to land in the original Superman movies.

Former Oil Trader & Royal Marines Reservist, Richard Browning, founded Gravity Industries in March 2017 to introduce what will be a part of the future of combat -- taking "human flight into an entirely new era" explains the company on their YouTube video.

Elon Musk might be going from strength to strength with Tesla and SpaceX -- but brain-computer interface startup Neuralink lost its co-founder Max Hodak quietly "a few weeks ago".

Hodak took to his personal Twitter to announce the news, where he said: "I am no longer at Neuralink (as of a few weeks ago). I learned a ton there and remain a huge cheerleader for the company! Onward to new things". Neuralink hasn't announced a replacement for Hodak at the time of writing.

Musk and Hodak started Neuralink together, with Hodak barely even a month ago saying that the technology exists right now to "build Jurassic Park if we wanted to". Because that isn't a scary thought at all, given how that went in all of the Jurassic Park movies. In departing Neuralink, Hodak was asked what he plans to do next where he simply replied "Not Jurassic Park".

TSMC has announced that it is using AMD EPYC processors in its general workload, and even R&D teams to make the very latest technology on the planet.

In a new post on AMD's website titled "TSMC optimizes workloads with AMD EPYC CPUs" the company explains how it has been deploying AMD's industry-leading EPYC processors across its company. It started off with pushing the high core count beasts into their general workload, and then quickly into the R&D heart of TSMC.

Simon Wang, Director of Infrastructure and Communication Services Division at TSMC explains: "We first introduced AMD EPYC processors into the general workload and they are being deployed with our research and development team".