Spaceflight history has been made after samples from the dark side of the Moon landed back on Earth, marking a massive milestone for global space exploration.

The honors of the achievement have been earned by the China National Space Agency (CNSA) with its Chang'e mission, which returned the samples back to Earth's surface on Tuesday at 2:07 am EDT. The far side of the Moon samples touched down in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and consists of approximately 4.4 pounds of lunar material that was acquired by the CNSA's Chang'e 6 lander located on the far side of the Moon.

The journey back to Earth began around June 21, and while space agencies in the past have returned lunar samples back to Earth, none have been from the far side of the Moon. Earth's closest neighbor is tidally locked to the planet, meaning only one side of the Moon is facing Earth, while the other is in perpetual darkness. With the darkness due to a lack of sunlight comes extremely cold temperatures and other challenges that make its exploration more difficult than the Earth-facing side.

The life of the Nintendo Switch is coming to a close, but before the popular gaming handheld is discontinued it will more than likely break another record.

According to Mat Pscatella, an analyst for Circana, formerly The NPD Group, the Nintendo Switch unit sales total was only just behind the total sales of the PlayStation 2 in the US. The discrepancy between the two juggernaut consoles only being 1.4 million units as of May 4, 2024, and it's been two months since those figures updated, meaning its more than likely the Switch has already broken the record.

How does the Nintendo Switch tee up against the best-selling consoles globally? Nintendo's now 8-year-old gaming handheld ranks 3rd on the all-time list with 141.32 million units, coming in behind the Nintendo DS, which has 154.02 million and Sony's PlayStation 2 with 155 million. It remains unclear if the Switch will have enough legs in it to take the global crown, but that all depends on when Nintendo announces the Switch successor.

Two AI startups, one founded by former Google DeepMind employees and the other in partnership with Microsoft for integration into its Copilot AI, are being sued by some of the biggest record labels in the music industry.

The lawsuit has been organized by the Recording Industry Association of America, Sony, Warner Brothers, Universal, and others and has been filed against Uncharted Labs and Suno, the creators of Udio, and Suno, two AI music generators. Notably, Uncharted Labs was founded by former Google DeepMind employees, while Suno has been engaging in a partnership with Microsoft to integrate its AI music generation software into Copilot.

In what appears to be an exponentially growing number of AI-based lawsuits, the record labels are all claiming the companies behind the AI music generators stole copyrighted music to train their AIs. This isn't the first time copyright claims have been thrown against an AI company, as the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, for allegedly using the Times' articles without its permission.

In early March, a man from Naples, Florida, took to X to report an object crashed through the roof of his house, splintering through two floors and almost hitting his son, who was home at the time of impact.

An investigation was launched into the object, and it was later confirmed to be a piece of space debris that had been jettisoned from the International Space Station (ISS). The homeowner is Alejandro Otero, and on March 8, the two-pound object smashed through his roof. The object was recovered, and NASA launched an investigation into its origins, eventually tracing it back to old batteries being launched from the ISS into an uncontrolled orbit on March 11, 2021 - three years ago.

The object was taken to NASA's Kennedy Space, where it was confirmed to be a piece of the EP-9 support equipment that was used to mount batteries, as shown above. At the time, NASA expected the debris to "harmlessly" burn up in Earth's atmosphere as it made its reentry, with it beginning as more than 2.6 metric tons, or 5,800-pound refrigerator-sized pallet, and eventuating into what was discovered in Otero's living room.

It was only a few weeks ago that NVIDIA passed Apple in being the most valuable publicly traded company, and then a week later, NVIDIA received a staggering $3.3 trillion market valuation, making it the most-valuable publicly traded company in the world.

After reaching the top of the company valuation food chain, the green team decided to dilute its shares, bringing its price per share down to $150. However, as the market opened on Monday, NVIDIA's share price took a downward turn, dropping to $118.11 per share and marking the third consecutive day of reducing prices.

Since its peak, NVIDIA's share price has dropped 13%, which is also being felt across many other technology companies that are involved in the mass development of AI-powered products and services. For example, Super Micro Computer, which sells servers outfitted with NVIDIA's AI GPUs, dropped 8.7%, and Dell, which also competes in the same market, fell 5.2%. Furthermore, chip designer Arm dropped 5.8%, and semiconductor giants Qualcomm and Broadcom fell 5.5 and 3.7%, respectively.

The company behind the immensely popular AI-powered tool ChatGPT has announced it's acquiring a startup company called Multi.

The latest acquisition by OpenAI could be a clue to what features its AI systems will be adopting in the future. What makes Multi so special? According to a statement on the company's blog, Multi is a company that works on advanced screensharing and collaboration tools, which are specifically designed for software engineers. The tool enables screensharing with up to 10 people, and shared cursors.

While this tool may seem useful for a very niche number of people, combining the technology with the power of OpenAI's systems could provide a new way for humans to interact with desktop PCs. Multi's goal, as outlined in its blog post, was to make desktop PCs "inherently multiplayer", and set out to achieve this by asking themselves "how we should work with computers. Not on or using computers, but truly with computers."

A team of scientists created a new gene-editing tool that they claim is more accurate than the industry standard, CRISPR.

Researchers from the University of Sydney, Australia, developed what is called SeekRNA, a new gene-editing tool that uses a programmable ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand capable of identifying and inserting itself into specific sites in genetic sequences. The team behind the project is being led by Dr. Sandro Ataide in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, and their findings have already been published in Nature Communications.

The team explained that while CRISPR is the industry standard when it comes to genetic engineering, having revolutionized multiple industries such as medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology, it doesn't come without any problems. According to Dr. Ataide, SeekRNA differentiates itself from CRISPR in various ways, such as by not requiring any extra components to be cut and pasted into genetic sequences. SeekRNA is a stand-alone cut-and-paste tool that has higher accuracy.

Jefferies analysts are happy right now. In a new note released on Monday, they raised their price target for NVIDIA shares from $135 to $150.

The analysts just enjoyed a recent Asia trip and upcoming meetings with "key players" in the AI space. In its most recent note, Jefferies analysts said that while NVIDIA and Broadcom are big winners, there are "growing concerns" regarding AMD and Marvell, noting that it's "too early to call any losers for 2025".

The analysts at Jefferies calls NVIDIA "both king and kingmaker" within the AI ecosystem, and that their upcoming "AI Bus Tour" will see the analyst firm get some great insights from industry leaders, including management from AI kingmaker NVIDIA.

Apple is reportedly gearing up to establish a new data center in Taiwan, and negotiations with third-party manufacturers are underway.

Apple would join US technology giants Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA with Taiwan-based datacenters after a "new wave of AI server purchasing momentum" is occurring, and a rush to buy "green electricity" reports UDN.

The outlet reports that the industry is optimistic about Foxconn and its long-term collaboration with Apple -- Foxconn is a contract manufacturer that makes the iPhone and other products for Apple -- and is now the world's largest AI server foundry. Once Apple's new data center lands in Taiwan, Foxconn will benefit "the most," reports UDN, as the "best ally and landlord". Meanwhile, Quanta, Wistron, and Inventec are "also expected to enjoy good fortune".

LG Display has just announced it has started mass production of the industry's first 13-inch Tandem OLED panel for laptops, which will debut inside of Dell's new XPS 13 2024 laptop.

The company is targeting the OLED market with the higher performance and lower power consumption of Tandem OLED technology, first commercialized by LG Display in 2019; Tandem OLED's advantages are achieved by combining two stacks of RGB OLEDs.

Working together in tandem -- get it, Tandem OLED -- these layers offer superior durability and performance when compared to single-layer OLED panels, as well as boasting longer life spans and even higher peak brightness. Tamdem OLEDs first appeared in automotive OLEDs that have "particularly high quality standards" said LG Display, to disperse energy and allow them to operate more reliably over longer periods of time.

Uhh... so the United States Federal Reserve has been hacked, with a new post on a Dark Web leak site associated with ransomware group LockBit, holding 33TB of incredibly confidential financial data from the Fed.

On June 23, 2024 at 8:27 UTC, LockBit announced it had hacked into the systems of the Federal Reserve, with 33TB of sensitive banking information taken. The data includes confidential details of American banking activities, which if veritified, would make this one of the largest breaches of financial data in history.

The post reads: "Federal banking is the term of a way the Federal Reserve of the United States distributes its money. The Reserve operates twelve banking districts around the country which oversee money distribution within their respective districts. The twelve cities which are home to the Reserve Banks are Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Richmond, Atlanta, Dallas, Saint Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and San Francisco".

Julian Assange is finally free, released from Belmarsh maximum security prison today after 1901 days under 23-hour isolation. The news was announced on the official Wikileaks account on X:

Assange was granted bail by the High Court in London, released to the Stansted airport in the afternoon, and was aboard a plane back to his home country, Australia. Wikileaks says that this is a result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations.

Wikileaks adds that this created space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, "leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalized," and that they will "provide more information as soon as possible".

Intel is gearing up for the launch of its new Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" and Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" processors for laptops and desktops, respectively.

In a new report from Benchlife, we've got the launch date plans from Intel for its Core Ultra 200 series CPUs on both Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake. Lunar Lake is very special here: it features an entirely new CPU and GPU architecture, with on-package memory that will take the fight (and most easily beat) to Qualcomm and its new Snapdragon X series processors.

Benchlife suggests that we'll see Intel launch its new Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors between September 17-24, while the Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake-S" platform will drop a month later in October. In between all of this, we've got AMD launching its new Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APUs and Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" CPUs in July, and then X870 and B650 motherboards from AMD sometime in Q3 2024.

Windows 11's Phone Link app has been worked on quite extensively by Microsoft of late, so it's clear the company wants to tie Android smartphones (and iOS devices) more tightly into its desktop OS - and another useful feature just popped up in this regard.

Phone Link recently got the ability to swiftly pipe photos from your smartphone across to your Windows 11 desktop, and the new trick is the ability to copy text from those photos.

The 'Scan Text' option in the Phone Link app is OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capable of detecting characters in an image, and copying them out for you. Windows Latest spotted that this functionality has now rolled out to all Windows 11 (and Windows 10 users), where previously it was in testing.

Apple has internally greenlit a plan to reduce the total number of workers on the assembly line of the iPhone by implementing automation.

According to a new report from The Information, Apple has ordered managers to reduce the headcount of workers on the assembly line for the iPhone, particularly the final assembly lines. Apple reportedly told managers that it wants the final assembly line headcount reduced by as much as 50% over the next few years and that supply chain and automation projects Apple previously ruled out due to high up-front costs have now been greenlit.

This move by Apple has fallen in line with its overall downward trend in the total number of monitored employees at Apple's manufacturing partners, with figures falling from 1.6 million in 2022 to 1.4 million in 2024. Furthermore, the report states these orders have come from Sabih Khan, Apple's senior vice president of operations, along with Peter Thompson, an operations vice president at Apple. At the moment it remains unclear how many jobs will be lost to this automation.

Intel announced its new Gaudi 3 AI accelerator earlier this year, rocking up to 128GB of HBM2e memory with up to 3.7TB/sec of memory bandwidth... but how does it stack up against NVIDIA's dominant Hopper H100 80GB AI GPU?

Well, that comes down to cost -- Intel's new Gaudi 3 AI accelerator costs just $16,000 per AI accelerator with 128GB of HBM2e memory, compared to $30,000+ for NVIDIA's Hopper H100 AI GPU with 80GB of faster HBM3 memory. Intel is charging around $65,000 per 8 x Gaudi 2 accelerators on a baseboard, and $128,000 per 8 x Gaudi 3 AI accelerators on a baseboard.

This means that a single Gaudi 2 AI accelerator costs around $8125, while Gaudi 3 costs $15,650, when purchased in bulk, with the baseboards, of course.

NVIDIA's new GB200 Superchip is getting another supplier according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, reporting that Alpha and Omega Semiconductor Ltd (AOSL) is to join the GB200 AI server train.

In a new post on Kuo's own Medium blog and a post on X, the analyst said: "Alpha and Omega Semiconductor Ltd (AOSL) is poised to become a new GB200 supplier and one of the leading beneficiaries of NVIDIA's certification process change".

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said recently that the company will be releasing new versions of its flagship AI chips annually, and while this will absolutely enhance NVIDIA's competitiveness, it introduces other issues. Execution, acceleration of supplier certification processes, as well as accelerating system development.

A team of scientists have penned a new article in Nature Reviews Materials outlining the challenges of creating an edible robot, and it appears we aren't necessarily too far away at all.

Technology developments move in leaps and bounds, making it very hard to predict what the next big thing will be that is mass-adopted. Edible robots may not be at the top of everyone's prediction list, but they could be for some doctors who are looking to give extremely precise care to a patient through accurate assessment of areas of the body or performing internal general tests.

An edible robot isn't completely out of the question, and RoboFood researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) explored the idea in a new report that says it doesn't have all the necessary parts for an edible robot, but some main components have been crossed off the list. For example, the team created a working battery out of food items, which could be used to power an edible robot.

Apple has already teased us with its new TSMC-made M4 chip with its addition to the company's iPad Pro line-up, but when is the new chip coming to Apple's Mac family?

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple will be implementing its new M4 chip into its entire Mac family, from its most affordable Macbook Air all the way up to its most expensive Mac Studio. This move will be a first-of-its-kind for Apple, as Gurman writes iMacs, MacBook Pros (both high/low-end), along with Mac Minis (both high/low-end) will be arriving with different variations of the M4 chip.

As for Apple's laptops, the new MacBook Airs will be coming in the Spring of 2025, and the Mac Pro and Mac Studio M4-powered models will be coming in the second half of next year. Since Apple's entire Mac family line-up will be adopting its new M4 chip we can expect to see different variations such as the M4 Pro, M4 Max, and eventually the M4 Ultra.

Intel hasn't said much about its new Arrow Lake CPUs, but now some log files have revealed some key details about what we can expect performance-wise.

X user @InstLatX64 shared some log files that revealed three new chips: Arrow Lake-S 24-core, Arrow Lake-HX 24-core, and Arrow Lake-H 16-core. The log files reveal that the Arrow Lake-S 24-core and 24-thread chip has a base clock speed of 3.6 GHz, which, if proven to be true, would mean a 600 MHz increase compared to the previous desktop flagship CPU, the Raptor Lake Core i9-14900K.

Also featuring a significant clock speed improvement is the Arrow Lake-HX 24 core and 24 thread chip with a 3.0 GHz, an 800 MHz increase compared to the Core i9-14900HX, the previous gen HX flagship. However, that isn't the biggest increase with these new Arrow Lake CPUs, as the Arrow Lake-H SKU, a 16-core and 16-thread CPU whose base clock is 1200 MHz faster than the previous gen Core Ultra 9 185H.