James Cameron and his team in New Zealand will be resuming production of Avatar 2 sometime "next week", now that COVID-19 calms down in the country.

Jon Landau, a long-time collaborator, producer and friend of James Cameron, shared a new image on his personal Instagram. The photo showed that the Avatar 2 sets are "ready" and that the production crew will be returning to New Zealand sometime "next week" post Memorial Day.

Landau writes: "Our Avatar sets are ready -- and we couldn't be more excited to be headed back to New Zealand next week. Check out the Matador, a high speed forward command vessel (bottom) and the Picador jetboat (top) -- can't wait to share more".

NASA is looking for US citizens to sign up for an 8-month study into social isolation, something it is doing to prepare for future missions to both the moon, and Mars.

The US space agency will be studying the effects of social isolation and confinement on US citizens, where successful applicants would work towards completing simulated science missions. NASA will be pushing the boundaries of your mind during these times, where participants will be thrusted into the same environmental aspects that future astronauts will experience on Mars.

NASA is forming a small international crew that will be living together in isolation for 8 months "conducting scientific research", where successful applicants would be using VR and performing robotic operations, as well as a bunch of other tasks. The research will concentrate on the "effects of isolation and confinement as participants work to successfully complete their simulated space mission. Results from ground-based missions like this help NASA prepare for the real-life challenges of space exploration and provide important scientific data to solve some of these problems and to develop countermeasures".

We're getting close to the halfway point of 2020, with Microsoft hard at work on some new updates for Windows 10 -- but now we're hearing some rumblings about the first big update to Windows 10 in 2021.

Windows 10 21H1 which is also known as Windows 10 Iron (Fe) is the first big update of 2021 for Microsoft's flagship OS, and it should sport Start menu improvements, and more. Microsoft first teased the new Start menu and parts of a refreshed UI a couple of months ago that moved away from Live Tiles.

If you're a Fast ring insider then you're going to get access to Windows 10 2021 codenamed Iron (Fe) in June 2020, which is just weeks away. The news came directly from an official Microsoft blog, but it was quickly edited -- with the codename of the new Windows 10 21H1 removed.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is shaping up beautifully, with a batch of new screenshots released to prove it. The new screenshots come from the on-going alpha build of the game, and tease the new Boeing 747-8i, too.

The new screenshots of Flight Simulator come from a new post on the official website, with alpha testers submitting their screenshots. These alpha testers include Simtom112, King6EAR, Speedwoblz, Anark1a2004tj, Superdelphinus, OperatorLand468, SulfonicCarp982, R4microds, and BER811.

The Flight Simulator team teased that there will be new invites being sent out in the coming hours, with a new patch arriving to the game on May 28. A bunch of stuff was tweaked with the new Alpha 3 (built 1.3.9.0) that was released on May 14, with a gigantic list of full patch notes here.

EK has just announced something very special for its most patriotic American fans to celebrate Memorial Day Weekend, with a new limited edition Velocity CPU water block beautifully designed in a special red, white, and blue style like the American flag. Check it out:

The company will be making just 200 limited edition Velocity CPU water blocks, with 100 of them made with an Intel mounting frame while the other 100 have an AMD mounting frame. EK is hoping to sell all 200 of them, and will make a donation of $20,000 to Shellback Tech, a rapidly growing Disabled Veteran-founded charitable organization.

Edvard Konig, founder of EK explains: "Being a globally successful company also means that we have the ability and responsibility to make a difference and give something back to the community. We have decided to jump on a project that will make our most loyal fans happy, and at the same time, help those who are in need".

With millions at home right now, it is the time to strike if you're making malicious software -- and disguising coronavirus phishing campaigns through Excel spreadsheets? That's nasty.

Recently, the Microsoft Security Intelligence Team discovered that there are two rather large phishing campaigns that are fooling people into downloading, and then opening malicious Excel files. Once they do, hackers have remote access to their PCs and it is game over.

The emails get disguised to look like they're coming from the likes of Johns Hopkins University, while other emails coming through are personal COVID-19 testing solutions, and more. The emails themselves arrive with Excel documents attached, with click bait-y titles such as "WHO COVID-19 SITUATION REPORT" that once opened, will install NetSupport Manager -- a remote desktop access tool.

The US Navy has tested a new laser weapon system, with the video below showing the docked USS Portland testing its new laser weapon system that is capable of blowing an aircraft up out of the sky mid-flight.

In the video above, the US Navy has its USS Portland testing "the first system-level implementation of a high-energy class solid state laser". The laser disables a drone mid-flight, where you can see in the second half of the clip the drone burning from being hit by the laser.

We don't know how strong the laser itself is, but according to a report published in 2018 from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, it's expected to be at least a 150-kilowatt laser. That's some serious laser weaponary right there, but the US Navy hasn't provided any specifics.

There are hundreds of millions of people stuck at home right now over the COVID-19 pandemic, with millions of them working from home -- and NVIDIA knows that, and embraces the fact.

During NVIDIA's recent Q1 2021 earnings call, company CFO Colette Kress said that gaming hours on their GeForce platform saw an uptick of 50% in the recent quarter. This is all thanks to those people forced to stay at home, and now many of them are gaming far more.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that the work-from-home model that companies are pushing, with the likes of the largest social media company in the world -- Facebook -- wanting to see 50% of its workforce working from home by 2030.

The Embracer Group (formerly THQ Nordic) now has a staggering 118 projects in development across its myriad of studios, up from Q3's 96 projects.

In its recent earnings report, The Embracer Group outlined its new slate of in-development games. Embracer now has 118 games in the works, up 22 games from last quarter's numbers. And 69 of them haven't been revealed.

So what changed? Embracer's buyout of Saber Interactive raised the project count, along with other unannounced titles from other studios.

Atari has teamed up with Litecoin to help kick off their new Atari Token cryptocurrency, and you'll actually be able to use Litecoin to buy the new Atari VCS console.

Atari is kind of a strange company. First, they announced the Atari VCS, a new re-vamped console that merges old-school and modern gaming together for a rather steepish $249 price tag. Then they announced special gaming-themed hotels and resorts (which actually sound pretty awesome). Now they've confirmed more plans to jump into crypto and are partnering with the Litecoin Foundation to make it happen.

This team-up establishes an exchange between Litecoin and Atari Token. Users can trade Litecoin for the Atari Token, and even use Litecoin to buy Atari products like its upcoming VCS console.

2020's big Call of Duty game is called Black Ops: Cold War, sources familiar with Activision's plans tell Eurogamer.

There's been lots of rumors about Call of Duty 2020, and now we have multiple high-level sources corroborating past reports. While Activision has yet to formally announce the game, we actually know a fair amount about Black Ops: Cold War.

Rumor has it the game spans the multi-decade timeline of the Cold War, from the 1950s all the way to the Vietnam era. This year's Black Ops game, sub-titled Cold War, will be a prequel to the best-selling mainline series and should explore and connect the different timeframes.

Doom Eternal's inclusion of Denuvo Anti-Cheat has been massively contested from PC fans, and now id is taking it out. But the developer asserts anti-cheat wasn't causing the performance crashes from Update 1.

In a recent Reddit post, id Software's Marty Stratton outlined some interesting info about Doom Eternal and DAC. After Update 1, which introduced enhanced demons alongside the kernel-level DAC, gamers reported crashes and other stability issues. id says these hitches were caused by VRAM/memory code changes, and a cosmetic skin bug.

"Through our investigation, we discovered and have fixed several crashes in our code related to customizable skins. We were also able to identify and fix a number of other memory-related crashes that should improve overall stability for players. All of these fixes will be in our next PC update. I'd like to note that some of these issues were very difficult to reproduce and we want to thank a number of our community members who worked directly with our engineers to identify and help reproduce these issues.

CD Projekt RED has two franchises, full stop: Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher. So what's next after Cyberpunk? A new Witcher game, of course. It's a long ways away, but CDPR teases that it could be a prequel starring Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon.

In a recent interview with VG247, CDPR's writer Jakub Szamałek says they want to develop Ciri's character more and highlight more of her story. This could happen in a new fully-fledged AAA Witcher game, and if so, it'd be a prequel that maps out the events before the major Geralt-focused Witcher series.

"I regret we didn't get to explore Ciri's past a bit more. She's such an amazingly rich and complex character," Szamalek said.

Can you believe that Solitaire is 30 years old? Microsoft originally launched Solitaire as a part of Windows 3.0 all the way back on May 22, 1990 -- and since then, has become one of the most iconic pieces of software in OS history.

Solitaire was originally created by Wes Cherry, who was a bored intern at Microsoft who started in 1988. Cherry told the Great Big Story back in 2017 that he "was not paid a single cent" for his work in Solitaire, which Microsoft says that 500 million people have played in the last 10 years -- and has 100 million hands played each and every single day.

Microsoft expanded Solitaire into its own beast, with the Microsoft Solitaire Collection which contains Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid, and TriPeaks -- as well as the original Klondike. They have transitioned to mobile over the years, and each pack things like XP and monthly subscription options.

AMD will be launching its next-gen Radeon graphics cards later this year, but now we're hearing more on Navi21 (aka Big Navi / Navi 2X -- more on that here), but also an upcoming Navi Refresh, something that should accompany the Matisse Refresh and purported Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 5 3600XT -- you can read about those here.

The new leaks are coming from HardwareLeaks, which "rogame" (on Twitter) operates -- has the Navi21 GPU IDs to share with the world. From these leaks, we get a picture of what AMD is going to do with the Navi Refresh and its upcoming Navi21 GPUs -- of which there will be 10 different SKUs released according to these GPU IDs.

We can see the flagship Navi21 XTX GPU that will be "similar to" the Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition graphics card, while the next one down on the list is the Navi21 XT which will replace the flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card. From there is the Navi21 XL which will be "similar to" the RX 5700, while the Navi21 XE will be "similar to" the RX 5600 XT.

I didn't think I'd be typing this news up -- but sometimes stories just write themselves. A team of scientists in Canadian have discovered at least 13 strains of cannabis sativa that could prevent, and even treat COVID-19.

The researchers wrote in their paper: "We have developed over 800 new Cannabis sativa lines and extracts and hypothesized that high-CBD C. sativa extracts may be used to modulate ACE2 expression in COVID-19 target tissues".

They continued: "Screening C. sativa extracts using artificial human 3D models of oral, airway, and intestinal tissues, we identified 13 high CBD C. sativa extracts that modulate ACE2 gene expression and ACE2 protein levels. Our initial data suggest that some C. sativa extract down-regulate serine protease TMPRSS2, another critical protein required for SARS-CoV2 entry into host cells".

Cloud Imperium Games has made Star Citizen free-to-play for the next 11 days, with teh developer unleashing Star Citizen as a free download until June 1, 2020.

You will have the chance to take some ships out for a flight as well, with in-game ship manufacturers rotating their selections of ships so that each time you log back into Star Citizen, you can try out something new.

Not only that, but Cloud Imperium Games is letting Star Citizen's check out the Hologram Hall, where it will tease a bunch of ships that are in production. The game is still in its alpha stage, and has been for a considerable chunk of time now -- even after raising a record-breaking $300 million and new investments of $17.25 million in the latest rounds of funding.

We all know that Sony's next generation PlayStation 5 console is going to be much faster than the current-gen PlayStation 4, but 100x faster? Yeah, that is kinda bonkers. It's all thanks to the ultra-fast custom SSD the PlayStation 5 has, which you can read more about right here.

Sony president and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida released the hype engines on the PlayStation 5, where he recently said that the PS5 will be "100 times faster" than the PS4. Yoshida hyped the PlayStation 5 up during Sony's recent corporate marketing strategy meeting, where he said that the PS5 is "100 times faster" than the PS4.

Yoshida continued: "In order to further enhance the sense of immersion in games, we expect to improve not just the resolution, but the speed of games. For example, through a custom‐designed high‐speed SSD, we plan to realize game data processing speeds that are approximately 100 times faster than PS4".

No matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter how much money you've got -- you do not have an internet connection anywhere near this good.

Australian researchers have developed a new internet connection that is capable of driving up to a truly mind-boggling 44.2 Tbps, or 44 terabits per second. This is around 1 million times faster than the average American's internet speed, which is around 50Mbps. 1 million times faster, just let that sink in.

How is it done? Through using an optical device known as as "microcomb" that replaces the traditional 80 lasers or so found inside of modern telecom equipment. Phys.org explains a microcomb as it: "generates very sharp and equidistant frequency lines in a tiny microphotonic chip".

We first heard wind of AMD's upcoming Matisse Refresh in some leaked news barely 24 hours ago, but now we have some even juicier stuff to talk about: the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, Ryzen 5 3600XT.

That's right, according to our friends at Wccftech, AMD is about to launch the Matisse Refresh with the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, Ryzen 5 3600XT processors. The new Ryzen 3000 series CPUs would adopt the "XT" branding, something that Radeon fans will remember and love to see back in the ring.

The new rumor has AMD replacing the Ryzen 9 3900X, Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 5 3600X with the new Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, Ryzen 5 3600XT processors -- but increasing the CPU clocks, having enhanced overclocking support, and dropping the price on the current-gen CPUs that they replace.