A new study published in the scientific journal Environment International has analyzed radio wave exposure to the human brain to see if it causes any form of brain cancer in hopes of putting to bed the widespread concern smartphones and other radio-wave-emitting devices cause brain cancer.

The widespread concerns that wireless devices cause cancer can be traced back to many different sources, particularly one study from 2011 that resulted in the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifying radio waves as a carcinogen or cancer-causing. However, the new study published in Environment International used a much larger data set than the 2011 study, leading the researchers to be much more confident in their conclusion, which was that radio-waves wireless technologies, including smartphones, don't cause cancer and cause no physical harm to human health.

Notably, the study was a review of previous studies commissioned by the World Health Organization. In the final analysis, 63 studies on the same subject were included, and the aforementioned conclusion was reached-wireless technologies don't cause any physical harm to humans. Moreover, the team found that even if a human used a smartphone for more than 10 years with an increased call rate that resulted in the device being placed near the head, there was still no association between smartphones and brain cancer.

There are many objects out in deep space that humans have yet to discover, but NASA can add one more to the "discovered" list and that is a fossil lurking millions of light years away from our planet.

The newly discovered object is called the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy, and it's located approximately 3 million light years away from Earth. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has honed its extremely sensitive instruments on the location of the galaxy, revealing some of its contents, which are believed to be groups of billions of old stars.

Now why would old stars be of any use to astronomers? NASA explains this galaxy is referred to as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy, which a smaller galaxy that contains stars that aren't very bri due to their old age. Additionally, these galaxies contain a small quantity of dust, making visibility much easier for optical space telescopes such as Hubble. Notably, the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy is approximately 3.6 million light years away from the center mass of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes our own Milky Way galaxy.

Instagram users will soon be able to comment directly on Instagram Stories, rather than a comment being sent directly to the account that posted the Story via private-message.

The new feature will enable people to interact with Instagram Stories more publicly, as the comments on Stories will be displayed to other users, unlike the previous setup where comments were sent directly to the posters private messages. However, users will only be able to comment on a story if they follow the account posting and if that account follows them back.

Additionally, the comments on Stories will only last 24 hours and users will be able to choose to turn Stories comments on or off for each Story. It appears Instagram is leaning more towards providing new features for users to enjoy that promote user engagement. In other Instagram related news, Meta was recently associated with "Active Listening" software through a leaked pitch deck from one of its partners.

Although it might be a little late to the party, Acer is joining the PC gaming handheld market with the new Acer Nitro Blaze 7, which it's calling an 'AI-powered' handheld thanks to the AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS chip. However, the Ryzen 7 8840HS's 38 TOPS of AI performance falls short of Microsoft's Copilot+ PC minimum of 40 TOPS. Still, it's enough to run rudimentary AI workloads.

The Acer Nitro Blaze 7 will be the latest Windows 11 gaming handheld to feature a Ryzen chip with integrated Radeon 780M graphics, so performance should be on par with the ROG Ally. No pricing has been set for the Acer Nitro Blaze 7, but its specs and features outside the Radeon 780M graphics sound impressive.

The handheld ships with a 7-inch 1080p IPS display with a 144 Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness, 100% sRGB coverage, and AMD FreeSync Premium technology. Although not OLED, the display sports a relatively low 7ms response time and doubles as a 10-point touchscreen.

Acer debuted a very cool concept at the IFA conference in Germany, the Acer Project DualPlay gaming laptop. As the images showcase, the large touchpad doubles as a game controller that pops out - where, after flipping it around, you've got a traditional gamepad. Another interesting feature is that it includes 5-watt pop-out speakers on either side of the laptop to create a more immersive audio experience.

"This Predator concept embraces the latest gaming trends, unleashing a new dimension of versatile and shared PC gaming experiences that converge in one powerful device," Acer writes in the press release. As a potential Predator gaming laptop, we'd love for this to get an actual release, as the integrated controller concept is fantastic.

The controller is wireless and charges when you pop it back onto the laptop's 'electromagnetic lock.' It can also be separated Nintendo Switch style and turned into two controllers.

Most people have encountered the strange coincide of having a conversation about a topic and then picking up their phone, opening a social media app and seeing an advertisement for that very thing that was just being discussed.

Some people, including myself, have reported this coincidence happening multiple times, leading to the assumption tech giants have access to the microphone in a smartphone and listen to people's conversations to better hone targeted advertisements. Despite this anecdotal evidence, social media giants such as Meta's Facebook have denied using any listening software for advertising purposes, but a recent report by 404 Media revealed through leaked pitch decks the technology exists.

The 404 Media report cited a leaked pitch deck about "Active Listening" software that accessed a smartphone microphone to monitor conversations and gather data. That data was then combined with behavioral data for more precise targeted advertising per user. The leaked pitch deck came from Cox Media Group (CMG), which cites Amazon, Google, and Facebook as partners. Following the release of the report, Google has since dropped CMG from its Partner Program list.

A few select companies in the technology sector are leading the exponentially growing push into artificial intelligence (AI) development, and Elon Musk has seemingly pushed ahead of everyone by switching on what he's calling the world's most powerful AI training system.

According to Musk, the team at xAI began working on the AI training system 122 days ago, and they were able to stand it up completely in that brief amount of time. The new system consists of 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and has been named "Colossus". Additionally, Musk revealed that Colossus isn't completely finished, as it's expected to gain another 100,00 NVIDIA H100 GPUs over the "next few months".

Musk's claim that xAI has built the "most powerful" AI training system is based on the number of GPUs or training horsepower the system has available to it, which is estimated to be more than any other system publicly revealed. Musk's new AI training model will likely be used to train X's large language model, which powers the social media platform's AI chatbot, Grok.

Brazil recently ordered its telecommunications regulator to block access to X following a Supreme Court Justice's determination that X violated federal regulations on content moderation and failed to appoint a legal representative in the country.

The debacle between Elon Musk's social media platform and Brazil revolves around Brazilian courts demanding X remove content the court believes harms democratic institutions in Brazil, which could impact an upcoming election. The Supreme Court also ordered X to have a legal representative in the country per its federal laws, which the social media platform failed to do.

Moreover, the Supreme Court's orders involved freezing the financial assets of Starlink, a product created and produced by SpaceX, Elon Musk's privately owned space-fairing company. Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court Justice that signed off on the orders viewed Musk's social media platform X and Starlink as one in the same. Furthermore, the freezing of financial assets in Brazil was to reportedly ensure SpaceX paid its court-ordered fines.

A beluga whale was discovered with a camera mount harness that stated "Equipment of St. Petersburg," which led to online speculation the whale was used for covert Russian intelligence operations.

The whale was originally discovered in 2019 and quickly gained the attention of thousands of people for the ambiguity surrounding its camera harness. Over the next five years, the whale, which was promptly named Hvaldimir, was spotted several times and has even been the star of a few viral clips that depicted the whale returning a dropped GoPro and even playing fetch with humans.

Unfortunately for those fond of the whale, and perhaps even Russian intelligence agencies, Hvaldimir was recently discovered deceased by Norwegian non-profit Marine Mind, which has been tracking the location of the whale for quite some time. The team posted the news on Instagram and wrote that it's not obvious how Hvaldimir died, and that the whale was only approximately half of its total lifespan.

A new Bloomberg report has revealed that NVIDIA is being investigated for antitrust violations related to its market dominance in the AI chip market.

According to the report, NVIDIA and other companies in the space have received subpoenas or legally binding requests to provide information on their AI chip practices. The investigation into NVIDIA specifically will look into whether the company is "making it harder to switch to other suppliers and penalizing buyers that don't exclusively use its artificial intelligence chips."

Furthermore, before the reports about NVIDIA being hit with subpoenas, the company's stock price fell by approximately 9% on Tuesday, resulting in more than $279 billion in market value being wiped away. While that definitely sounds like a bag Tuesday, it hasn't even made a dent in NVIDIA's overall growth, as the company has still more than doubled its stock value since the beginning of the year.

The portable PC gaming handheld market is rapidly growing thanks to Linux devices like the Steam Deck and Windows handhelds like the ROG Ally, Legion Go, and MSI Claw. So much so that the integrated GPUs inside the Steam Deck and the Radeon 780M found in a range of Windows handhelds are now some of the most popular AMD GPUs, according to the latest Steam hardware survey.

For several years, the Chinese-based Ayaneo has been developing and creating impressive PC gaming handhelds, using the Indiegogo platform to offer its products to a range of international PC gamers. Highly sought after, with stylish designs and powerful hardware, this week we've got some excellent news for US shoppers - Ayaneo handhelds are now being stocked at retailer Best Buy.

However, it's not quite a slam dunk. Only two Ayaneo handhelds are currently available, with the high-end Ayaneo Kun, which features an 8.4-inch 1600p display and AMD Ryzen 7 7840U chip, currently priced higher than its direct competition - a somewhat eye-watering $999.00 USD.

Acer has just unveiled its new Predator Orion 7000 desktop PC which is the world's first system to have Intel's next-generation Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake-S" desktop CPUs.

The new Predator Orion 7000 systems will feature Intel Arrow Lake-S processors, up to 128GB of DDR5 memory, and an NPU integrated into the Arrow Lake CPU for AI workloads just like the just-released Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" laptop processors.

Inside, Acer is baking in a custom Cyclone X 360 system fan and CPU cooler, a 360mm AIO liquid cooling system that is engineered to maintain optimal temperatures, combining enhanced airflow, efficient heat dissipation, and superior thermal management to ensure your system performs at its best during intense gaming and heavy workloads. It also looks fantastic.

OpenAI is close to releasing new AI models that will be 100x more powerful than GPT-4, with OpenAI Japan teasing GPT-Next, and it's 100x more powerful than GPT-4 without wasting more computing resources.

The new codenamed "Strawberry" AI model was teased alongside "Orion", with Strawberry ending up as GPT-Next and expected by the end of the year, while Orion will be unleashed in 2025. OpenAI's new GPT-Next aka Strawberry has something researchers call "System 2 thinking".

What is System 2 thinking? This will allow GPT-Next to take the time to deliberate and reason through problems, versus just predicting longer and longer sets of tokens to complete its responses. System 2 thinking has impressive results: scoring over 90% on the MATH benchmark, a collection of advanced mathematical problems, reports Reuters.

China has threatened "severe economic retaliation against Japan" if Tokyo continues restricting sales and servicing of chipmaking equipment to Chinese companies, reports Bloomberg.

In the report, the outlet adds that this complicates US-led efforts to cut the world's second-largest economy off from the world of advanced technology, mostly semiconductor manufacturing equipment, although Chinese companies are still getting ASML machines into the country.

Senior Chinese officials have "repeatedly outlined" that position in recently meetings with Japanese officials, "according to people familiar with the matter". One of the fears in Japan is that Toyota Motor Corp. privately told officials in Tokyo that Beijing could react to new semiconductor controls by cutting Japan's access to critical minerals that are essential to automotive production.

AMD has announced that its new Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APU-powered laptops will be getting their big Copilot+ updates in November, unleashing new AI features in Windows 11.

The company launched its new Strix Point APUs in July, with laptops powered with the new Ryzen AI 300 series processors that started shipping last month. I've walked away very, very impressed with the new ASUS Zenbook S16 OLED laptop with its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU doing an incredible job using just 33W of power.

But, the AI-powered Copilot+ functionality is next to useless on AI processors right now, but with the free Windows update in November, we'll get support for AMD's new Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" processors and some AI functionality at last with Copilot+ support.

Surprising no one, WB Games is heavily prioritizing the development of Hogwarts Legacy 2.

A follow-up to Hogwarts Legacy is in the works at Warner Bros Discovery's video games division. The news comes a year after the game broke $1 billion in sales shortly after launch, and amassed over 22 million copies sold throughout 2023.

At a recent Bank of America conference, WB Discovery chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels revealed that a Hogwarts Legacy sequel is of utmost importance for its gaming unit, and strongly hinted that the game could have online multiplayer of some sort as well.

Nintendo's R&D spending hit a new record high in Fiscal Year 2024 as the company prepares to launch new Switch console hardware.

Evidence strongly suggests that the new Switch 2 system has entered--or may be entering--mass production. Two of Nintendo's component suppliers (Hosiden and Weltrend) are ramping up spending on production lines. Nintendo, in turn, has also been boosting its R&D spending throughout the years, and in FY24, it reached a new all-time high.

According to Nintendo's financial records, the Japanese games company spend a record 137.7 billion yen (or around $911 million) on research and development throughout the April 2023 - March 2024 period. This represents 8% of its net sales for the fiscal year.

Increased spending at Hosiden, the Japanese component manufacturer that helps make Nintendo's current-gen Switch JoyCons, indicates that Nintendo's new Switch 2 console may be entering (or may have already entered) mass production.

As per MST Financial analyst David Gibson, Japanese electronics firm Hosiden has ramped up capital expenditures on production equipment for its amusement segment. Gibson goes on to say that Nintendo is Hosiden's main buyer in this segment, and apparently the company provides analog sticks for Switch JoyCons and also helped make the Switch's AC adapter. This increased spending could point towards Switch 2 systems entering principal production and assembly at hardware plants.

The news also lines up with previous reports that further indicate Switch 2 consoles are gearing up for mass production for global markets. Chinese electronics company Weltrend is readying power management integrated circuits (PMICs) for "new models" of the Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation consoles.

Windows 11 is getting a new layout for its virtual keyboard specifically tailored to allow those with a gamepad to type on it using the peripheral.

The nifty innovation for those of us who like to use an Xbox controller with their PC has been introduced with the latest Windows 11 preview build in beta. Build 22635 actually came out last week, but has just been updated with this additional piece of functionality.

Microsoft tells us:

Intel's new Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" processors ship with next-gen Xe2 "Battlemage" integrated GPUs that offer some gigantic improvements in performance, right after AMD launches its Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APUs with upgraded RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 890M GPUs.

The new Xe2 "Battlemage" GPU has a 50% performance increase over Xe "Alchemist" inside of Meteor Lake, with more improvements in ray tracing through improved ray tracing units, better utilization of the CPU cores versus Alchemist Xe-LPG GPUs.;

Intel compares its Xe GPUs on the Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" CPU against the new flagship Core Ultra 9 288V "Lunar Lake" CPU in a bunch of games, delivering a 31% uplift in performance, and in some games, over 60-70% more performance over Alchemist. Very nice to see.