NASA has pulled off a world's first by successfully colliding a man-made spacecraft into a distant asteroid with the goal of altering its orbit.

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) recently struck the binary asteroid system Didymos-Dimorphos, located approximately seven million miles from Earth. The DART spacecraft impacted the smaller of the two asteroids, Dimorphos, which orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. NASA's goal was to prove that a spacecraft approximately the size of a vending machine, when traveling at extremely high speeds, is capable of changing the orbit of an asteroid - the world's first planetary defense demonstration.

Astronomers on Earth gazed up at the asteroid system on the day of the impact, looking for any changes in the asteroid. Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi live-streamed his observations via the Virtual Telescope project, which showcased Dimorphos gaining in brightness following the impact of the DART spacecraft. The above GIF showcases the increasing brightness, which, according to Masi, completely exceeded his expectations for the event.

New reports surfacing online have revealed that Twitter ran advertisements from prominent companies on profiles that were spreading child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

A new report from Insider states that the publication learned Twitter had run certain advertisements for products or services on profiles that were spreading CSAM and that following the discovery, Twitter has informed marketers that the social media platform has suspended the profiles in question. Advertisements that were run on these egregious profiles were from companies such as Coca-Cola, Disney, and NBC Universal, whose ads appeared next to the explicit and banned content.

The problem of CSAM material appearing on Twitter and other social media platforms has been around for quite some time, and Twitter last stated that it has implemented software that removes 91% of CSAM-spreading accounts. Notably, Twitter also said that during the second half of 2021, it removed 31% more profiles related to CSAM material. Reuters has reported that in light of these advertisements being misplaced, companies such as Dyson and Mazda have either suspended marketing campaigns with Twitter or decreased advertisements.

Intel hosted its recent Innovation 2022 event in San Jose this week, unveiling the new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs, announcing the release date and price of its new Arc A770 graphics card, and had custom Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards on display.

GUNNIR's new custom Arc A770 graphics card

We can see that the GUNNIR Intel Arc A770 while ASRock had two cards teased: the Phantom Gaming Arc A770, and Challenger Arc A750 graphics cards. We should expect a little bit of overclocking fun on the custom Arc graphics cards, with one of them an "OC" model that should have GPU clocks higher than Intel's own Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card.

GUNNIR's new custom Intel Arc A770 graphics card was on display, teased with a triple-fan cooler and 2.2-slot design with dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors (up from the 8+6-pin PCIe power connectors on the Intel Arc A770). I really dig the design here, as it feels like it's the best of the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition + Radeon VII graphics cards.

Intel's new Arc A310 graphics card has just been teased on the official Intel website, with some specifications on Intel's new entry-level desktop Arc GPU.

The specifications for the Intel Arc A310 point to the entry-level GPU featuring 6 Xe-Cores clocked at either 2100MHz or 2000MHz -- as there's some conflicting information here -- with Intel making the Arc A310 graphics card on TSMC's N6 process node.

Intel's entry-level Arc A310 graphics car has 4GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 15.5Gbps on a 64-bit memory bus, with up to 124GB/sec of memory bandwidth and a 75W TDP. Intel's own website says that the Arc A310 launches in Q3 2022, meaning we only have a couple of days left for that to happen or someone is going to have to go in and ninja-edit that entry.

AMD's next-gen Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series "Storm Peak" CPU has been teased, packing 64 cores and 128 threads of Zen 4 processing power on the new 5nm process node at TSMC.

A new entry for a chip with the ODN code "100-000000454-20_Y" with the CPU finding itself in the "Family 25 Model 24 Stepping 1" which makes it part of the Zen 4 architecture. It looks like AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series CPU is being teased here, codenamed "Storm Peak".

We have 64 cores and 128 threads for the HEDT market and desktop PCs with a Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series "Storm Peak" CPU, which matches the max 64C/128T of CPU power that the current-gen Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX-series CPUs: but they're based on the older Zen 3 architecture.

Intel has launched its XeSS technology which has found its way into Death Stranding Director's Cut, as well as Shadow of the Tomb Raider... now updated on the PC with support for XeSS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider received its new patch over Steam, and then was confirmed with the new Steam notes for the game where the developer explains it "added XeSS graphics support for DX12-compatible systems". CapFrameX has already used an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with XeSS enabled -- remember, XeSS works on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics cards -- with some surprising results.

In the benchmarks, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was running at 3840 x 1600 (not quite 4K) on Ultra settings with RT enabled on the Radeon RX 6800 XT with XeSS enabled. With XeSS disabled, the RX 6800 XT is capable of 46FPS average, while with XeSS on Performance mode the RX 6800 XT drives far higher frames up to 75FPS average.

Death Stranding Director's Cut has just been updated on the PC, adding support for Intel XeSS technology... before Intel Arc GPUs are even on the market, ironically.

Hideo Kojima's last game is now upgraded with Intel's AI-enhanced upscaling technology, delivering 4K visuals at performance levels of lower resolution rendering to create a "more immersive experience" in Death Stranding Director's Cut, explained in a post detailing the update on Death Stranding's Steam page.

It's good to see that a big title like Death Stranding has Intel XeSS technology support, but as big as the game is, it doesn't have a gigantic player base. Secondly, Intel (like AMD and NVIDIA do) throw money at developers like Kojima Productions, but it doesn't matter: XeSS needs to be in as many games as possible, as soon as possible.

It looks like Sony is about to deliver another PlayStation 5 game to the PC with Returnal teased, packing NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR upscaling technology support.

In the leak, we can see the PC graphics settings of Returnal which details DLSS without knowing which version (we should expect DLSS 2.x) while FSR is the same (we should expect FSR 1.x unfortunately, and not FSR 2.x) as FSR is listed as "spatial upscaler" in Returnal.

Returnal is a third-person shooter developed by Housemarque and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, released over a year ago in April 2021. It seems we have to wait over a year before Sony pushes its PS5 exclusives to the PC, but that's alright with me... it means we have some exciting PS5 games to look forward to on the PC in the future. Returnal seems to be another one of those, after the fantastic PC port of Marvel's Spider-man Remastered.

NVIDIA's next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU architecture will deliver the world DLSS 3 technology, exclusive to the new GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards... and now Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered has been put through its paces with the Ada-powered AI upscaling tech.

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered with DLSS 3 on the RTX 4090: BEAST MODE ENABLED

We've seen NVIDIA tease the performance of its new GeForce RTX 4090 with DLSS 3 in games like Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, and more... but now the folks at Digital Foundry are testing with the RTX 4090, DLSS 3, and Spider-Man Remastered.

Digital Foundry has already played around with Cyberpunk 2077 and its update that will usher in Overdrive RT + DLSS 3 support, but also early drivers to the GeForce RTX 4090. The team at DF posted an article and large 30-minute video, showing off DLSS 3 with side-by-side comparisons in Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered against DLSS 2 and native 4K.

Researchers from Oregon State University want to find out if robots can improve the mental and physical wellbeing of veterans. The university is working with the Edward C. Allworth Veterans' Home in Oregon on a project with federal funding from the National Science Foundation's National Robotics Initiative.

During the initial phase of research, OSU engineers want to analyze physical therapy programs and cognitive exercise for veterans, which can be led by robots. Assuming the robot is streamlined and easy to operate, they tend to be extremely more immersive than something on a laptop, tablet, or a virtual reality system.

Robots have a certain appeal both in the home and in a veterans' home, where it can be used in group sessions - and alleviate nurse and worker burnout. The staff and residents of the veterans' home will be interviewed to figure out what specific needs they have which can be assisted by OSU researchers and their robotic research.