Latest News - Page 4

Swedish "buy now, pay later" company Klarna is laying off 10% of its workforce, but did it in a rather robotic way: with a prerecorded video message.

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski informed its near-7000 employees that 10% of them would be out of a job, leaving around 700 people unemployed. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in the prerecorded video message: "When we set our business plans for 2022 in the autumn of last year, it was a very different world than the one we are in today".

Siemiatkowski continued: "Since then, we have seen a tragic and unnecessary war in Ukraine unfold, a shift in consumer sentiment, a steep increase in inflation, a highly volatile stock market and a likely recession. All of which have marked the beginning of a very tumultuous year". He did note that workers based in Europe would get an "associated compensation", while severance packages for US staffers would "look different" depending on the location.

Just like the original Modern Warfare reboot, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 will release in October.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 will launch on October 28, 2022, Activision has announced. Leaked files show the game is coming to both current-gen (PS4, Xbox One) and next-gen (PS5, Xbox Series X/S) consoles.

The announcement also reveals Modern Warfare's playable tactical team which includes renowned characters like Price, Soap, and Ghost, alongside some new faces.

Apex Legends has made over $2 billion in revenues since launching in 2019, making it one of EA's most valuable IPs.

Right on schedule, Apex Legends has made over $2 billion in three years on the market. The free-to-play shooter remains one of the most powerful games in EA's live service arsenal and is set to grow with a mobile version that's launching soon.

"Our healthy live services growth was driven by strength across our broad-based portfolio, most notably by Apex Legends and FIFA," EA chief financial officer Chris Suh said in a recent Q4 earnings call.

Snap shares have fallen through the ground, dropping by a hefty 40% and dragging other tech stocks like Apple, Twitter, and Meta (the parent company of Facebook) at the same time.

The huge 40% sea of red for Snap shares means we're looking at $13.42 at the time of writing, down from ~$30 or so back on April 25. Snap's market cap has dropped, down to $21.9 billion. A recent SEC filing seems to have dragged down the share price of Snap, but there are other moving parts.

The SEC filing reads: "Since we issued guidance on April 21, 2022, the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated further and faster than anticipated. As a result, we believe it is likely that we will report revenue and adjusted EBITDA below the low-end of our Q2 2022 guidance range".

A study on the socially aware robot titled "High-efficiency cooling via the monolithic integration of copper on electronic devices" is available on the pre-print server arXiv.

Researchers from the University of Toronto (U of T) have devised a new method for robots to move through the world without colliding with people. Their robot uses Spatiotemporal Occupancy Grid Maps (SOGM) to predict where dynamic obstacles like people will move to with time. This video shows a real-life perspective of the robot moving paired with its internal digital representation.

"The principle of our work is to have a robot predict what people are going to do in the immediate future. This allows the robot to anticipate the movement of people it encounters rather than react once confronted with those obstacles," said Hugues Thomas, a post-doctoral researcher at the U of T Institute for Aerospace Studies in Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

A study on the new cooling method titled "High-efficiency cooling via the monolithic integration of copper on electronic devices" has been published in the journal Nature Electronics.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have invented a new cooling solution for electronic devices, dramatically increasing space efficiency and the power per unit volume of the devices. The team sought to address three shortcomings they identified in current cooling solutions.

The first is that they "can be expensive and difficult to scale up." Secondly, conventional heat spreaders or heat sinks are attached to the top of a device, while most of the heat is typically generated underneath the electronic device, so the cooling solution is less efficient. Thirdly, thermal interface materials (TIMs) like thermal paste or pads are necessary to connect such cooling solutions to electronic devices and have their own inherent inefficiencies.

AMD has outed its enthusiast-grade X670E + X670 chipsets and a bunch of new motherboards are being announced, with MSI accidentally revealing AMD's new DDR5 memory overclocking technology.

MSI outed AMD's new "EXPO" technology, which popped its head up inside of MSI's own X670 launch slides... but AMD didn't make a mention of it. MSI has asked other websites to remove the post, as it seems mentions of EXPO is triggering alarm bells for the company, or it could be completely wrong.

We have no idea what AMD's new EXPO technology is going to do exactly, but there are some things that AMD didn't share, that MSI shared through the leaked slides. We know that AMD is claiming just 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes, but MSI is saying there will be 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes (this could change, could be a mistake, or could be a future SKU).

NASA's Lucy space probe had a unique perspective of the recent total lunar eclipse on the night of May 15th.

Here on Earth, during a total lunar eclipse, the Moon takes on a reddish appearance due to the remaining red wavelengths of sunlight that make their way around Earth and onto the surface of the Moon. However, the Lucy probe operated by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was able to observe the Moon and Earth while about 100 million kilometers (65 million miles) from the latter.

"While total lunar eclipses aren't that rare - they happen every year or so - it isn't that often that you get a chance to observe them from an entirely new angle. When the team realized Lucy had a chance to observe this lunar eclipse as a part of the instrument calibration process, everyone was incredibly excited," said Principal Investigator Dr. Hal Levison of the SwRI.

MSI has proudly announced its new flock of X670E and X670 motherboards, ready for the new worlds of AMD's next-gen Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series "Raphael" CPUs.

The star of MSI's new X670 family of motherboards is the new flagship MEG X670E GODLIKE, followed by the MEG X670E ACE motherboard. MSI's huge new MEG X670E GODLIKE motherboard features an E-ATX form factor, with 24+2 VRM phases and 105A Smart Power Stage.

We have 4 x DDR5 RAM slots for up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM, as well as 1 x PCIe 5.0-ready M.2 slot (PCIe 5.0 x4) while there's 4 x on-board M.2 slots on the board. MSI even includes an M.2 XPANDER-Z GEN5 DUAL add-on card with the MEG X670E GODLIKE motherboard, giving you another 2 x more PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slots.

The cancer-killing virus has been used in a human patient for the first time in a new clinical trial.

The experimental virus is called CF33-hNIS, otherwise known as Vaxinia, and was developed by Australian biotech-company Imugene and the City of Hope cancer care and research center in Los Angeles. The drug candidate is what's known as an oncolytic virus, meaning a virus that selectively infects and destroys only cancer cells.

Previous research conducted with animals has shown the potential for the drug also to spur the immune system to become more proficient in destroying cancer cells. If clinical trials go well and the drug is safe for use, more trials involving combinations with currently used cancer therapies such as pembrolizumab will be carried out.