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Scottsdale, Arizona, resident and astrophotographer Mark Johnston pointed his photography instruments at our local star and captured solar activity in great detail.

Using his 60mm hydrogen alpha-modified refractor, Johnston managed to snap some incredible images of the solar activity occurring on the surface of the Sun. More specifically, the images showcase the chromosphere, which is a thin layer of plasma that is positioned between the Sun's visible surface (the photosphere) and the corona (the Sun's upper atmosphere). Within the chromosphere are what we see in the images: swirls of filaments, prominences, and spicules.

Solar filaments are large regions of very dense, cool gas held in place by magnetic fields. These filaments can extend outwards beyond the surface of the Sun, which changes their name to solar prominences. As for spicules, these are dynamic jets of plasma within the Sun's chromosphere, and they are as wide as 186 miles and can travel between 9 and 110 miles per second.

Global PC shipments rose by 3% for this year's second quarter, marking two consecutive quarters of growth after an alarming two years of decline. PC shipments hit 64.9 million units for the three months ending in June, which is great news for the industry as we head into the AI PC era. However, even though everyone's talking about and pushing AI, it sounds like regular PC sales are driving the growth, especially those from Apple.

According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Apple's shipments increased by 20.8% for the quarter, followed by Acer, whose shipments grew by 13.7%. Even though Apple saw significant growth, its market share of 8.8% sits below that of companies like Lenovo (22.7%), HP Inc. (21.2%), and Dell Technologies (15.5%).

Looking at the top five companies, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer, only Dell saw a 2.4% decline in shipments. With Microsoft's new Copilot+ PCs recently debuting and more AI-ready mobile hardware on the way from AMD and Intel later this year, it will be interesting to see what impact AI PCs have on global PC shipments.

Apple is expected to unveil its new line-up of iPhones later this year, and now new reports have teased the Cupertino company may have implemented battery life improvements.

Battery technology has somewhat stagnated in terms of getting more capacity in the same size footprint, and efforts have instead been put toward making efficiency as good as possible. An Apple example of this is the common misconception that fully exiting apps by swiping up in iOS saves device battery. In fact, more battery is being used when an app is closed. Despite this and many other battery efficiency techniques Apple has implemented into its devices, it's slightly behind the competition when it comes to charging speeds.

Reports from ITHome state Apple is pushing toward doubling its charging speeds to 40W with the iPhone 16 line-up. This would be an increase of double compared to the previous generation iPhone 15 line-up. Rumors indicate Apple is looking to also increase battery capacity, with the iPhone 16 Pro Max being equipped with a 4,676 mAh battery, versus the iPhone 15 Pro Max's 4,422 mAh battery.

AYANEO has recently released several gaming-oriented handhelds for Android and Windows. The company's latest is the AYANEO Pocket EVO, which is described as the world's first Android handheld with a 7-inch 1080p OLED 120Hz display. Handhelds with OLED displays will always grab our attention because the panel tech is incredible for making games look better.

The AYANEO Pocket EVO is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 Gaming Platform, so it won't have any issues running the most demanding Android releases in addition to being able to emulate several generations of classic handheld and console gaming hardware. AYANEO confirms that the chip's 15W mode is tuned for high-performance gaming.

There's more to the AYANEO Pocket EVO than powerful hardware and a vibrant OLED display. The sleek and ergonomic design is equally impressive, with hall-sensing joysticks, triggers, and premium components.

Amazon AWS has just shown off its fourth-generation general purpose processor -- the new Graviton4 -- with 3x the compute power and memory over Graviton3.

The next-gen Graviton4 chip also has 75% more memory bandwidth than Graviton3 and 30% more performance. Amazon AWS adds that the new Graviton4 processors are rented out for $0.02845 per second of compute power. Yahoo! Finance reports that the price-performance ratio is "crucial" for AWS, as it uses its proprietary chips to power its cloud infrastructure and servers.

Rahul Kulkarni, Amazon's director of product management for Compute and AI, said: "Collectively it's delivering more price performance, which means for every dollar spent, you get a lot more performance".

Intel has released a new Non-WHQL driver for discrete Intel Arc GPUs and built-in Arc Graphics for its Intel Core Ultra CPUs. Intel Arc Game On Graphics Driver version 32.0.101.5762 adds support for a couple of new PC game releases, Once Human and Zenless Zone Zero. The latest Beta driver also significantly increases the performance of Blizzard's Diablo IV.

Intel Arc graphics card owners can expect up to 30% faster performance at 1080p and up to 35% faster performance at 1440p when playing the game using the Ray Tracing Ultra preset. Diablo IV featured ray-traced shadows and reflections, so there's a performance hit when enabling them, which makes this new driver a game changer for Diablo fans with Intel Arc graphics cards.

The new driver release fixes a few lingering issues; however, there's still a long list of known issues for both Intel Arc GPUs and the Arc Control software. Here are the full release notes.

AMD has announced a major move into the AI industry, and it appears to be undoubtedly a strategic acquisition to gain a foothold in the growing sector currently dominated by NVIDIA.

Reports indicate AMD is purchasing for $655 million Finnish start-up Silo AI, an AI software company that focuses on integrating AI solutions into already operating businesses. The transaction will grant AMD access to several prominent brands, such as Rolls-Royce, Unilever, Alliance, and Phillips. The idea behind the acquisition is AMD will be able to power and scale Silo AI's software, which includes multi-lingual large language models (LLMs).

AMD will be able to achieve this through its AI-capable chips, which, at the moment, are the types of chips that couldn't be in more demand. NVIDIA becoming the world's most valuable company is a testament to the demand of AI chips, and this acquisition by AMD is certainly a move by the Red Team to eventually steal away some of NVIDIA's market dominance.

At the end of last month Boeing's Starliner transported two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), and it was discovered both prior and during the launch the Starliner spacecraft was leaking.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were safely transported to the floating laboratory, and then it was later discovered Starliner had accrued more leaks throughout its voyage. NASA quickly launched an investigation into the space vessel and assured the public that Wilmore and Willians weren't in any way pressed for time to get back to Earth as the ISS had plenty of supplies for a prolonged stay.

What was more concerning was NASA's announcement on June 21 that it doesn't currently have any plans for a Starliner return journey. Now, NASA writes in a July 10 blog post that it's still working with Boeing to increase an understanding of Starliner's propulsion system before both of the NASA astronauts make the return journey home. These tests are being conducted on the ground at the agency's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.

The founder of Facebook and the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has been threatened with imprisonment over his alleged involvement in swaying a presidential election.

The allegations come from the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, who took to the social media platform Truth Social to remind Mark Zuckerberg of their long-time-running combative history by saying, "They have no shame! All I can say is that if I'm elected President, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time." Adding, "We already know who you are. DON'T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!"

These comments from Trump come after a 2023 post on Truth Social that claimed the Meta CEO was swaying the presidential election, which cited a Fox News report that stated Zuckerberg's $2 million donation to a Georgia election board was being investigated. In September 2022, the Federal Election Commission unanimously voted to dismiss nonpartisan election administration grants funded by Mark Zuckerberg, clearing his name of any election swaying.

There are many mysteries about the universe, and some don't reside millions of light-years away; some are just within our solar system and involve our local star, the Sun.

One of the mysteries surrounding the Sun includes the decades-old discovery of radio waves that present themselves in solar flares and massive solar eruptions called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). The aforementioned solar activity is a key driver in space weather experienced on Earth, which can impact satellite communications and other forms of technology on Earth's surface.

So, to answer these questions, NASA has launched the CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment (CURIE), which took off from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on July 9, 2024. The CURIE mission involves two spacecraft that together are no larger than a shoebox, and these spacecraft will orbit Earth at a distance of two miles apart. NASA explains the separation between the two satellites will enable researchers to measure the tiny differences in the arrival time of radio waves following solar activity.

Microsoft is looking to combat its sharp increase in CO2 emissions, which have been caused by the creation of new datacenters to power the ever-growing AI industry.

It was quite some time ago Microsoft announced its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030, but since that announcement, artificial intelligence has emerged, and while the new technology is incredibly impressive, it's also extremely energy-demanding. With the rise of these datacenters and, as a result, CO2 emissions, Microsoft is looking at ways to offset its carbon footprint, and according to reports, Redmond is ready to put down hundreds of millions to do so.

Microsoft has signed a deal with Occidental Petroleum to buy 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal "credits" over the course of six years, and according to The Financial Times, the deal is "worth hundreds of millions of dollars". At the moment, the specifics of the deal haven't been made public. So, how do carbon credits work?

The world's most popular operating system, Windows 10, is slowly losing market share to Microsoft's latest OS, Windows 11, according to the latest figures from Statcounter.

The newly released data sheds some light on Microsoft's market share issue ahead of the company's announced end-of-support date for Windows 10. As you can imagine, Microsoft wants all of its Windows 10 users to make the jump from Windows 10 to Windows 11, but it appears that isn't happening as fast as Redmond would like, as it was only earlier this year that Windows 11 became the first Microsoft OS to lose users to its previous generation. However, the recent data indicates those numbers are turning around.

While Microsoft doesn't reveal official market share numbers for its operating systems, Statcounter does give us an approximate insight into the current situation. The latest numbers state Windows 10 still doubles the market share of Windows 11, with the previous OS commanding 66% and the latest OS inching close to 30%.

AMD's next-generation Zen 5-based Ryzen 9 9950X "ES" processor has been benched ahead of its launch later this month, beating the Intel Core i9-14900K in Blender while just sipping 120W of power.

The new information on the Ryzen 9 9950X "ES" processor -- ES is an engineering sample, not retail -- is from AnandTech forum member "Igor_kavinski" who has the new 16-core, 32-thread Zen 5 processor showing us the incredible scaling of the Zen 5 chip at lower TDPs in the Blender benchmark. The tests so far have 60W and 90W PPT, but now we've got the higher 120W PPT results with even better results.

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X engineering sample processor that was used should have slightly lower CPU clock speeds than the retail chip, where at 60W the 9950X was coming close to the Core i9-12900K boosting at up to 4084MHz, while at 90W the chip beat the Ryzen 9 5950X boosting up to 5053MHz.

The Sphere, located in Las Vegas, is an impressive feat of engineering-a massive circular dome that is also the world's largest display. The Sphere's LCDs cover 750,000 square feet inside and outside the entertainment venue. Not only that but with a resolution of 16,000 × 16,000 pixels for the interior display, it's the highest-resolution screen in the world. So then, what sort of hardware do you need just to 'press play' on a video with that resolution?

According to NVIDIA, the 16K x 16K 60 frames per second display for the Sphere's interior is powered by 150 NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs - valued at around $1 million. The NVIDIA RTX A6000 is a powerful workstation card with 48GB of GDDR6 memory, 10,752 CUDA Cores, 336 Tensor Cores, and 84 RT Cores. Put 150 of these together, and you've got some serious GPU horsepower, enough that they also power the 1.2 million programmable LED pucks on the Shere's exterior.

In addition to the hardware, the Sphere also uses NVIDIA's network connectivity technology to ensure that all GPUs work together with minimal latency, plus the NVIDIA Rivermax SDK framework for media streaming. However, with this level of hardware and 7.2 TB of VRAM, we'd love to see some PC games running on the Sphere.

For those who were around and used a PC back in the 1990s, you'll undoubtedly remember the hype surrounding the release of Microsoft's groundbreaking operating system, Windows 95. It was a strange time because the release of Windows 95 was treated like a new Star Wars movie or some sort of massive cultural event.

Microsoft spent an eye-watering $300 million on marketing for Windows 95, which in 2024 would be around $620 million - including a commercial that licensed The Rolling Stones' 1981 single "Start Me Up" because Windows 95 introduced the Start button. Microsoft also spent money producing the first "cyber sitcom," with Friends stars Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. It has not aged well.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that this week, we got a glimpse at a piece of history, with ex-Microsoft executive Brad Silverberg posting an image of the very first copy of Windows 95 that was sent to him straight from the production line.

Earlier this year, we reported on one of the most popular and iconic games in the Need For Speed franchise getting the RTX Remix treatment, with alessandro893's impressive Need For Speed: Underground (RTX Remix) mod. As a game from 2003, it's the perfect candidate for NVIDIA's groundbreaking RTX Remix tool, making it easier to bring full ray-tracing and modern rendering tech to classic games.

RTX Remix also makes it easy to replace in-game textures and materials with PBR or Physically Based Rendered versions, allowing advanced lighting, depth, and other effects. In addition, RTX Remix includes baked-in support for DLSS upscaling, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation to improve image fidelity and performance. NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios made Portal with RTX using the RTX Remix toolset, which is so impressive that it looks and feels like a build-from-the-ground-up remake.

Earlier this week, the Need For Speed: Underground (RTX Remix) mod got updated to Version 0.1, and it's shaping up nicely.

AMD has revealed detailed information on its new technology, designed to decrease the storage space that games require. AMD Neural Texture Block Compression, or NTBC for short, compresses high-quality textures without impacting overall performance and maintaining 'reasonable quality.' AMD claims that NTBC can reduce a game's storage footprint by up to 70%, which would shrink the installation size of Call of Duty from 150GB to just 45 GB.

Game sizes are increasing as fidelity increases, and even though 'block compression' is used to reduce the overall size of textures, the fixed compression ratio can only do so much when dealing with hundreds or even thousands of high-quality 4K textures. As the name suggests, AMD Neural Texture Block Compression adds neural network-based image compression into the mix.

AMD's Shin Fujieda and Takahiro Harada have released the full technical paper on Neural Texture Block Compression and how it works.

Minisforum has just launched its new AtomMan G7 PT Mini-PC, the fastest gaming PC that the company has released so far. Check it out:

The new Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT is the world's first AMD Advantage-certified Mini-PC, packing the AMD Ryzen 7 7945HX processor and Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU, even boasting an ultra-fast Gen5 SSD for storage. The new AtomMan G7 PT Mini-PC could be considered a spiritual successor to the Intel NUC Enthusiast systems, but now that the ASUS ROG NUC systems are here, gamers are flocking to those Mini-PCs.

The new ASUS ROG NUC systems feature higher-end Intel Core Ultra 9 185H "Meteor Lake" processors and up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPUs, which are components commonly found in higher-end gaming laptops. But, this is where ASUS has hefty pricing on its new ROG NUC, and now... there's a cheaper alternative with the Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT Mini-PC which starts at just $999.

NATO is preparing most of its undersea internet cables in case of an attack. If communication systems are attacked through hostile actions like a terrorist attack, they'll automatically reroute subsea internet and data traffic to satellites.

Most regular people think internet communications are mostly done through satellite, but it's mostly transmitted through undersea cables, which has forced researchers from the US, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland are working with NATO to build a system that would automatically reroute internet data and traffic from subsea cables, to satellite communications if they were attacked.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Science for Peace and Security Programme has approved a grant of up to $433,600 for the $2.5 million project, with research institutions providing in-kind contributions, reporting Bloomberg. Eyup Kuntay Turmus is an advisor and program manager at the NATO program, confirmed the project was recently approved, and told Bloomberg by email that the project will start "very soon".

AMD is reportedly working on a new member of its Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APU family, with the rumored Ryzen 7 8745HS, which will drop the XDNA-based NPU for AI workloads.

The purported Ryzen 7 8745HS APU will be virtually identical to the Ryzen 7 8845HS APU, but without the NPU, according to insider and leaker "Golden Pig Upgrade" with a post on Chinese social media. The post teased that the "Ryzen 7 8745HS = Ryzen 7 8845HS-NPU is coming soon, the naming is really interesting".

We should expect the new AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS "Hawk Point" APU to feature 16 cores and 32 threads of CPU power based on the Zen 4 architecture, 16MB of L3 cache, and 8MB of L2 cache. CPU clock speeds should see up to 5.1GHz boost and 3.8GHz base, with the same integrated Radeon 780M GPU with 12 compute units based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture that'll clock at up to 2700MHz.