Latest News Posts - Page 2

DirecTV is now racing to remove a satellite from Earth's orbit because if the company waits too long the satellite could explode and turn into dangerous space junk.

In a report from Space News, DirecTV has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a temporary rules waiver so the company can bring down the Spaceway-1 satellite. In the FCC filing from DirecTV, the company explains why the spacecraft needs to be taken down immediately, here's a snippet of what was said; "In December, Spaceway-1 suffered a major anomaly that resulted in significant and irreversible thermal damage to its batteries.

The report continued, "Boeing, the spacecraft manufacturer, concluded based on all available data that the batteries' cells cannot be guaranteed to withstand the pressures needed to support safe operation of the spacecraft in eclipse operations; rather, there is a significant risk that these battery cells could burst. The risk of a catastrophic battery failure makes it urgent that Spaceway-1 be fully de-orbited and decommissioned prior to the February 25th start of eclipse season."

The Wuhan virus that is currently sweeping the news has been subjected to a bit of controversy surrounding the topic of what animals caused this virus to spread to humans.

The virus, which is called 2019-nCoV, is a coronavirus, and just yesterday, I reported on a research paper that claimed that the virus' most likely origin was snakes. Now, other scientists have said that the research team has no proof to make the claim that the virus' origin comes from snakes; instead, it should only be able to infect mammals and birds. David Robertson, a virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK, says, "Nothing supports snakes being involved".

Paulo Eduardo Brandao, a virologist at the University of Sao Paulo is currently investigating whether snakes can contract coronavirus says, "They have no evidence snakes can be infected by this new coronavirus and serve as a host for it. There's no consistent evidence of coronaviruses in hosts other than mammals and Aves (birds)." It seems that there is a lot of confusion towards what animal has caused this outbreak, and at the moment, no one really knows which animal it is. Only time will tell. For more information on this topic, check out this article from Nature here.

Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S20 family of smartphones are not really a mystery with all the leaks, but now we have another confirmation of its 100x camera -- something Samsung will call 'Space Zoom'.

Now there's some official press renders of Samsung's flagship Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, which confirms the 100x camera that Samsung will call its 'Space Zoom' camera. We don't know much about how it works, but we know that the flagship Galaxy S20 Ultra will pack a 108-megapixel camera with '100x Space Zoom'.

The rear-facing camera rig on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is hectic, and takes up a gigantic chunk of the top half of the phone. Samsung will have 10x optical zoom and then the mysterious 100x digital zoom AKA 'Space Zoom'. We will know more about Samsung's new Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20+ and Galaxy S20 Ultra smartphones at Unpacked 2020 on February 11.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was one of the biggest releases of last year, and now we have some data that highlights its success on the PC -- and more so, its boosted success on Steam.

SuperData's latest report shows us that Red Dead Redemption 2's sales more than doubled once it reached Steam, with SuperData's report also shows that Rockstar Games' announcement that it was coming to Steam meant that people held off buying it on the Epic Games Store.

The report reads: "Digital unit sales more than doubled from 406K in November to 1.0M in December. The game became available on Steam on December 5, one month after releasing elsewhere including the Epic Games Store and Rockstar Games Launcher. This brief exclusivity window was advertised in advance, so many players simply waited a short period to play the game on their preferred launcher".

Samsung will be unveiling its new flagship Galaxy S20 family of smartphones at its Unpacked 2020 event on February 11, where we will also be introduced to the new Galaxy Z Flip foldable smartphone.

The new Galaxy Z Flip smartphone has received a few more details in the last day or so, with a new report suggesting it will have "Ultra-Thin Glass" with a Dynamic AMOLED display underneath. There will still be a crease in the display, just like Samsung's flagship Galaxy Fold, but it will have a much, much smaller footprint.

Samsung will reportedly use a much smaller display on the front of the Galaxy Z Flip, with the smaller display used to show users battery information, and more. The smaller display on the front of the Galaxy Z Flip would also be used as a viewfinder for the rear-facing cameras for those ever-important selfies, as well as notifications.

AMD is kicking off the new decade with a collaboration with Corsair on its new Vengeance gaming PC, which is powered by all-AMD goodness packing a kick-ass Ryzen 7 3700X processor and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

Corsair has its new Vengeance 6100 series systems with the Vengeance 6180 and Vengeance 6182 gaming PCs packing AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, meaning we have 8 cores and 16 threads of CPU power. Both of the new Corsair Vengeance 6100 series PCs also include the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

Since it's a Corsair gaming PC, the cooling is handled by Corsair using their in-house H100i RGB Platinum AIO cooler, which is then installed into the Corsair Crystal Series 280X RGB case. You'll also find the rest of the components to be from Corsair too, with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO DDR4-3200 RAM, a Corsair RM650 PSU, and a 2TB HDD.

ASUS has just taken the wraps off of its beyond-enthusiast flagship TRX40 motherboard, introducing the new ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha which packs just about everything apart from the kitchen sink.

The new ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard has been designed to house the ridiculous AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor, packing an equally insane 64 cores and 128 threads of CPU power. The board has some crazy amounts of power coursing through its veins (or is that PCB) with ASUS packing in 3 x power connectors: 8+8+6-pin PCIe power connectors are required on the ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard.

ASUS supports up to 256GB of RAM on the board with up to 4733MHz supported, 4 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and a huge 5 x Gen 4 M.2 slots for mass amounts of ridiculously fast storage. Speaking of mass amounts of ridiculously fast storage, ASUS includes support for its new Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 card which will open up the flood gates to an insane 15 x M.2 drives supported on the ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard. If that wasn't enough, you've also got 8 x SATA III ports and a slew of USB ports all across the board.

The hoopla of the Radeon RX 5600 XT is all here with it leading into me writing an article about how much of a mess the launch itself was, but now AIB partners are unleashing faster Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards which benefits us all.

The latest with a new custom Radeon RX 5600 XT is ASUS, introducing its new Radeon RX 5600 XT ROG STRIX TOP graphics card. ASUS has 3 different custom Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards, starting with the TUF X3, and then the already-introduced ROG STRIX OC model and now joined by the new ROG STRIX TOP model.

ASUS will have 1660/1670MHz game clock on the GPU, while the boost GPU clocks will hit 1750/1770MHz -- identical GPU clocks between the ROG STRIX OC and ROG STRIX TOP models. The difference? The 6GB of GDDR6 memory boosted up to 14Gbps for the ROG STRIX TOP model, an increase from the 12Gbps frequency on the ROG STRIX OC and TUF X3 models.

Microsoft's new Xbox Series X is getting more and more detailed, with a new video from Italian designer and newly-minted LetsGoDigital staffer Giuseppe Spinelli now made into gorgeous 3D renders.

My previous post on the Xbox Series X renders from LetsGoDigital had USB Type-C connectors, but these new ones do not. These renders, if you'll notice, see the USB Type-A port on the front of the Xbox Series X console is not labelled 'SS' which means it is not a SuperSpeed port.

On the back of the Xbox Series X render we have a HDMI output, 2 x USB ports (both SuperSpeed), an Ethernet connector, digital optical audio output, and the power connector at the bottom.

Sony is working on a new horror IP for its next generation PlayStation 5 console, with new rumors teasing that the new horror game is being worked on "by a very well respected horror game director".

The new rumor is coming from entertainment insider Emre Kaya, who looks to have a fresh contact at Sony and some big, big news. The new "horror IP" is headed to the PlayStation 5, but the follow-up tweet with a GIF of legendary (and PlayStation exclusive) game developer Hideo Kojima is a huge hint.

This isn't confirming that Kojima himself is making the new game, but we could see a next-gen version of Silent Hills for example. Whatever it is, a new horror game with a totally next-gen console that has all sorts of new technology and features that will provide some of the best lighting, shadows, and possibilities in a game yet? Color me excited.