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A team of scientists has caught a giant deep sea creature on film that resides at a depth of the ocean where sunlight can't even reach.

The only natural light source at depths of 3,300 to 13,100 feet is bioluminescence or organisms that produce their own light source. While that just simply won't do for researchers, robots are equipped with torches to see in extreme darkness.

Researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute took their remote-operated research vessel called Falkor to Costa Rican waters, where they descended to the "midnight zone" and captured rare footage of a giant phantom jelly - an animal scientists know very little about, per the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The Schmidt Ocean details the discovery in an X post where it states this giant phantom jelly has four tentacles that can grow up to 10 meters in length (33 ft) a 3.28-foot-long pulsing, umbrella-like bell.

Sony has teamed up with accessibility experts to create a new controller that is designed for disabled gamers, removing the need to purchase additional third-party accessories and manually wire them into a controller.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has partnered with AbleGamers in the US to create a new controller called the "Access Controller," which features a "highly customizable kit" of various buttons and triggers, enabling the gamer to set up a controller that is specifically suited for their needs.

The release of the Access Controller is a first-of-its-kind product from Sony and the PS5, and the idea behind it is to remove the need to purchase additional third-party accessories and buttons and wire it all together, per Alvin Daniel, Senior Technical Program Manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

The new GIGABYTE AORUS CO49DQ Gaming Monitor features a massive 49-inch QD-OLED panel with a curved 32:9 aspect ratio and Dual QHD resolution of 5,120x1,440 pixels. Alongside impressive specs that make it another OLED gaming monitor we'd love to go hands-on with, regarding GIGABYTE and AORUS' 'OLED Care' feature, the company claims that its AI-based algorithm will help minimize the risks of burn-in.

Although OLED panel technology has come a long way quickly, burn-in or permanent image retention can still crop up. This recent long-term study highlights the improvements made and shows that no panel is safe from OLED burn-in. Burn-in is the reason why companies like GIGABYTE include tech to protect and ensure their OLED panels go the distance.

GIGABYTE's OLED Care suite includes a 'Pixel Clean' or pixel refresh option, 'Static Control' to reduce brightness when images remain static, 'Pixel Shift' screen movement, and an option called 'Sub-Logo Dim' to reduce the brightness of the taskbar and logo when running Windows.

For those that need a little refresher, AMD's Fluid Motion Frames (or AFMF) is the company's driver-based version of Frame Generation - as seen in NVIDIA's DLSS 3 and AMD's FSR 3. This version of the technology is a potential game-changer because it allows for Radeon RX 7000 and Radeon RX 6000 GPU owners to enable frame generation in all DirectX 11 and 12 titles. That's right, per-game support isn't required.

Still in its pre-release 'AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition Preview Driver for AMD Fluid Motion Frames' form, AMD quietly dropped a new update late last week. Promising improvements to "stutter and pacing" and "general improvements to the stability" of AFMF technology bring the tech one step closer to full release.

Though as to when that will be is anyone's guess. The good news is that the update aligns the Preview Driver with the latest AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.12.1 release - so if you're keen to check it out, now's the time.

Very few games have development cycles that last longer than a decade, and if they do, it's often for reasons that can be boiled down to "development troubles." Skull and Bones is one of these games, with Ubisoft Singapore kicking off development on the pirate-themed game after it worked on all of the cool pirate-themed stuff found in 2013's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

Turning that into a full-fledged game was always an excellent idea, but Skull and Bones has been in a sort of development limbo since 2013 - and with Rare's Sea of Thieves and other open-world games with boats, it's no longer an original or fresh concept. But, after nine delays, a reboot, and a few closed beta tests, Ubisoft is finally ready to launch Skull and Bones on February 16, 2024.

The game is set to hit PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on this day, with a Closed Beta coming this weekend - running from December 15 to 18.

Skyrim Together Reborn is a popular mod for Skyrim that adds co-op for up to eight players (with support for 30+) and has been downloaded well over a million times. With Bethesda Game Studios' Starfield release this year, many fans have been expecting to see a multiplayer Starfield Together mod arrive at some point.

If one does show up, it won't be from one of Skyrim Together's key developers, Robbe Bryssinck or Cosideci. It turns out that even though there were plans to port the Skyrim Together mod over to Starfield, that has changed. The reason? The game. It's no secret that the critical and fan response to Starfield has been mixed, with some loving the game, others liking it, and some outright disappointed by its shortcomings.

Cosideci falls into the latter camp, taking to Discord (via Reddit) to state, "When the game released, I was hyped, like a lot of people, but probably for different reasons. I spent launch day and a few days after reverse-engineering the game and porting over gameplay hooks from Skyrim Together to a potential Starfield Together mod. I ported about 70% of Skyrim Together reversed code to Starfield Together."

Former Epic Games creative exec shares the idea that unlocked Fortnite's billion-dollar success.

Fortnite was an ambitious game right from the get-go, and the free-to-lay sensation owes its success to a spoke diagram drawn on a dry-erase board way back in 2017. Ex-Fortnite creative officer Donald Mustard recently shared what appears to be Epic's 'north star' for the battle royale. I

t's called The Fortnite Hub, and it aimed to transform Fortnite from a game into a digital space with its own social ecosystem and game modes. This could be one of the earliest plans for gaming's growing metaverse aspirations. Fortnite has defined social gaming for years with its live concerts and in-game events, not to mention the plethora of crossovers with billion-dollar brands across multiple industries.

KIOXIA RM7 Series SSDs are all about value and delivering high performance with a focus on reliability, lower latency than SATA SSDs, and speeds of up to 12Gb/s using the SAS interface (SAS-3). With capacities starting from 960GB and going up to 7.68TB, RM7 Series Value SAS SSDs are now available in HPE's ProLiant Gen11 servers.

And to make the news just that little bit cooler, KIOXIA has confirmed that in addition to ProLiant servers for enterprise, KIOXIA RM Series Value SAS SSDs are also being used aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2). SBC-2 is currently being used to conduct scientific experiments in orbit around Earth. HPE's next mission to the ISS is scheduled for January.

"With outer space being the most rugged and the furthest edge environment there is, we are very excited to have Value SAS as the core storage technology supporting HPE SBC-2 over the next several years, targeted for the International Space Station," said Faraz Velani, senior director and head of Go-to-Market for the KIOXIA SSD Business Unit.

Acer is the second system builder that we know of to have its own GeForce RTX 4090, after LENOVO and its RTX 4090 LEGION, with the new Acer RTX 4090 Predator being independently tested by our friends at KitGuru.

The company is now shipping its new GeForce RTX 4090 Predator graphics card with an interesting hybrid-style cooler inside of its high-end Predator Orion X Gaming PCs. The first review unit has reached KitGuru, who has pulled apart the RTX 4090 Predator graphics card inside of it. The card doesn't actually have a name, but given that it's inside of a Predator gaming PC, it should be the RTX 4090 Predator, right?

Acer's custom GeForce RTX 4090 Predator graphics card is a triple-slot beast, that is almost -- but not quite as -- big as NVIDIA's in-house GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition. It weighs slightly less as well, at 1.8kg for the RTX 4090 Predator compared to 2.19kg for the RTX 4090 FE. Acer uses a matte black plastic shroud with embedded RGB accent LEDs that can be controlled through Acer's in-house Predator software.

AMD is smiling proudly with its RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs flying through the world of Pandora, pumping 100FPS+ inside of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Check it out:

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is powered by Ubisoft's impressive Snowdrop engine, the same engine that powers The Division 2 and other Ubisoft titles. It looks gorgeous, enabling beautiful ray-traced visuals that create immersive gaming environments like we see in Frontiers of Pandora.

AMD worked closely with Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment to ensure a smooth, high FPS gaming experience at Ultra settings with ray tracing enabled across its AMD Radeon graphics cards and AMD Ryzen processors. What kind of performance can we expect? Well, over 100FPS, starting with the Radeon RX 7600... here's the full list:

TCL is on a gaming monitor announcement spree, where it has teased an interesting new dome-shaped 4K 120Hz OLED gaming monitor... as well as a new 27-inch 8K panel, 65-inch 8K OLED panel, and a gargantuan 57-inch 8K 240Hz mega gaming monitor of the future. You'll need an RTX 5090 or maybe even an RTX 6090 for 8K 240Hz insanity.

The company says it has "redefined the future" with its new monitor technologies, showing TCL's commitment to making a "more advanced, connected and healthy display future". That is being done with a super-dense 27-inch 8K monitor with an adjustable light zone that also packs eye tracking... interesting to see.

TCL also unveiled the first 65-inch 8K 120Hz IJP OLED curved monitor, boasting its huge 33 million pixels at a super-smooth 120Hz refresh rate. 7680 x 4320 @ 120Hz with a 1800R curve... that would be a sight to see, with TCL teasing that "every pixel is viewed, and the frame is perceived in a fully immersive environment".

Intel has announced that it will have its CEO Pat Gelsinger on stage at CES 2024, providing a keynote, where CNBC correspondent Kristina Partsinevelos will join to talk about all things AI.

We know that AI will be a focus of all major tech companies moving forward, with Intel's upcoming "AI Everywhere" event penciled in for December 14, which is just a few days away. We will find out more details about Intel's new Core 100 series codenamed Meteor Lake, which is one of the more interesting CPU designs the company has pumped out, and all eyes are focused on it.

AI, on the other hand, is the core focus of Intel right now... however, the CES 2024 keynote will see Intel talk about its Core 100 series and the Meteor Lake architecture in general and how it is powering waves of new laptops and other Meteor Lake-powered products. Intel will be hosting an Open House at CES 2024 that will be led by Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the GM of Intel CCG (Client Computing Group) where people on the ground will be able to get their hands on some Intel Core Ultra demo systems.

TCL CSOT just announced a bunch of new displays, with its interesting new dome-shaped 4K 120Hz OLED gaming monitor for the PC.

The new gaming monitors were unveiled at DTC 2023 (Global Display Tech-ecosystem Conference 2023), which is being held in Wuhan, China (ooooh). The new gaming monitor features a 31-inch dome-shaped 4K 120Hz OLED panel, with the dome shape helping provide a "3D" feel to the monitor as it would wrap around your face more than a flat or even curved OLED panel.

We don't know much else about the new TCL gaming monitor outside of the 31-inch dome-shaped 4K 120Hz OLED panel, but I'd love to have my eyes in front of one. I reviewed the TCL C825 TV and walked away quite impressed with the 55-inch 4K 120Hz Mini-LED TV; fantastic if you've got a high-end GeForce RTX 4090 to use it with... games like Overwatch 2 and Alan Wake 2 would look astounding on it.

Following its loss in the Gen8 console race, Microsoft shifted its business towards content and services rather than hardware. The bet is paying off.

Xbox has changed in the years leading up to the Activision Blizzard King acquisition. Xbox went from a console to a service that bridges consoles, PCs, mobile phones, and even smart TVs. Xbox even has a very powerful presence on competitor systems thanks to heavy-hitters like Minecraft, Elder Scrolls Online, and Fallout 76. The company prepped its infrastructure throughout 2013-2015 by unifying Windows PCs and Xbox Ones, and now services have accelerated dramatically with the popular Xbox Game Pass subscription.

Microsoft's core strength has always been services, software, and subscriptions, and it made sense to adapt Xbox into this model--After all, hardware isn't a very high-margin business, and for Xbox, it's actually a negative-margin business because no Xbox console has ever been sold at a profit. Microsoft makes its money back from software, content, monetization, digital advertising, and subscriptions. Based on Xbox's recent record-breaking $16.2 billion revenues for FY22, ths plan appears to be working well.

It was only a few days ago that Elon Musk rolled out the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Grok, developed by his AI company xAI.

Grok was rolled out to Premium+ X subscribers across the United States, and according to official statements, the new chatbot is powered by the generative model called Grok-1. That is an important fact, as it's a different underlying model powering OpenAI's ChatGPT, which is currently GPT-4. Notably, Grok differentiates itself from other competing chatbots by incorporating real-time data from X, enabling it to provide responses on posts occurring on X in real-time.

Now, all AI-powered chatbots are prone to hallucinations, which is when the chatbot provides a response that contains false or misleading information. This phenomenon occurs in all Large Language Models (LLMs), which is the underlying technology powering the experience (Grok-1, or ChatGPT's GPT-4).

Xbox financial exec Tim Stuart explains the core heartbeat of the games business, outlining a strategy that emphasizes expansion and utilization of high-margin models.

Xbox has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. To stay competitive, Microsoft has snapped up first-party studios, built its entire games business around content and services, and disrupted the market with Game Pass. This plan has seen Xbox's gaming slate expand horizontally as well as vertically, as Microsoft built and secured multiple millions-strong live service games with recurring revenue streams.

Wrap those live games alongside premium singleplayer titles into a content-delivery subscription service with a low monthly fee that's spread across multiple platforms, and you have Microsoft's main business ethos: diversity. Xbox's multi-faceted business incorporates numerous billion-dollar models centered around multi-access endpoints and digital online monetization, and after the ABK buyout, Microsoft has attained one of the highest-margin publishers on the planet.

There are now more social networks out there than ever before and some of them are actually rather good, including Threads. The Meta-owned social network continues to grow with new features being added all the time. Now, the Instagram-linked social network has gained new support for tags but they're very different from the hashtags that you're familiar with on Instagram itself.

Tags have long been used in posts on special networks like Twitter and the aforementioned Instagram as a way for people to link multiple posts together. If you tag a post with #cats, that post will then show up in all searches for that tag, creating something of a saved search scenario. It's great for discoverability, and now Threads has tags of its own.

But where Threads differs from the norm is the way tags actually work. For starters, they don't have anything before them which means that the ugly hashtag has been removed entirely. Instagram's Adam Mosseri detailed how the new feature works, saying that people can choose any word to be a tag, and that tag can have special characters inside it. They can even have spaces, making for an easier reading experience.

If you're a YouTuber who has found themselves on the receiving end of trolling or just plain old hate in the comments you'll know that just turning them off is probably the best way to go. But YouTube has now rolled out another option that it hopes will act as a happy middle ground between letting people comment and blocking them for good.

The new feature, pausing of comments, allows people to pause comments to prevent new ones from being added. Those that are already approved will remain visible, but the addition of new ones will stop until the YouTuber chooses to reenable them. YouTube says that the aim here is to give people more flexibility rather than just turn comments off and lose all of those that were previously there.

The new feature is one that YouTube has been experimenting with since October with TechCrunch reporting that the experiment group reported they felt less overwhelmed when trying to manage the inflow of comments. Pausing them will allow time for the previous comments to be vetted without the backlog constantly being added to, something that can no doubt help with the anxiety created by having to vet the comments in the first place.

Apple is well aware that iMessage is a key driver for people buying iPhones and for that reason, it has so far refused to open the instant messaging platform up to allow it to be offered on Android. That's something that seems set to remain the case for the near future after Apple blocked Beeper, an app that sought to bring Apple's messaging platform to Android phone owners for $2 per month.

Beeper made a splash last week when it announced that it had found a way to hook into Apple's iMessage without any of the messy workarounds or hacks that had been used by similar services in the past. That was supposed to ensure a couple of things. First, it would allow for increased privacy, and second, it was supposed to make it harder for Apple to block Beeper.

A few days later, Apple had already blocked it.

Apple has yet to announce a new iPads in 2023 and as the year starts to come to a close there is little chance of that changing. But 2024 is already shaping up to be the year of new tablets with new iPad Air and iPad Pro models tipped. Now, we can apparently add a new entry-level iPad to the mix with a new report claiming that Apple will ship such a tablet in the second half of the year.

That report comes via Nikkei Asia and claims that Apple is working with China's BYD, a company that assembles iPads, to move production to Vietnam. It's expected that the engineering verification stage of production, one that will see the tablets produced in a test environment to ensure the company is ready for mass production, is expected to start around the middle of February. With that in mind, it's likely that the tablet will ship at some point in the second half of the year.

Little is known about the new tablet, likely to be called the 11th-gen iPad, but we can expect Apple to want to keep the price as low as possible. The current iPad starts at $449 and comes with a USB-C port, A14 Bionic chip, and a 12-megapixel camera. It also has a 10.9-inch display, the largest offered on an entry-level iPad to date.