Latest News - Page 846

Ever wondered what your face looks like while you are bouncing on a trampoline? The Slo Mo Guys have done the test, and the results are hilariously surprising.

When people hear the word g-force, they are either thinking about NVIDIA's GeForce graphics cards, or what fighter pilots experience when they are flying around at extremely high speeds. More specifically, g-force is the measurement of force, typically through acceleration, that causes a perception of weight to be experienced. An example of this would be a fighter pilot pulling up hard and fast, or simply bouncing on a trampoline at home.

The Slow Mo Guys demonstrate that bouncing on a trampoline, at least in the video linked above, resulted in 7.5Gs being generated. However, these g-forces are only experienced for a split second, but while they are being experienced, the face of the human bouncing completely contorts, much like a fighter pilot while they are pulling up. The slow-motion footage captured showcases the skin on the face stretching for a split second and then bouncing back to its normal place once the g-forces have passed.

YouTube has rolled out a new feature to YouTube Premium subscribers that enables video playback speed to be increased much easier.

The new feature will be greatly appreciated by users that are avid podcast or lecture listeners, especially considering the ease of access to the new feature. According to reports from 9to5Google, to adjust playback speed now users need to press the screen, navigate and press the settings option (gear icon), then select the desired speed. YouTube's new feature only requires users to hold down on the video for two seconds, as this will enable 2x speed playback.

Once the gesture is completed YouTube will notify the user with a "Playing at 2x speed" message at the top of the window. Notably, this new feature is only available for YouTube Premium members and is currently undergoing a testing phase that will end on August 13. If you are interested in testing some of YouTube's coming features you can opt in here.

A few days ago, a story began going viral about a French woman that claimed she was hit in the rib cage by a meteorite.

Reports indicated that the woman was sitting with her friend, enjoying a cup of coffee, when they heard a noise on the roof above them. The noise was quickly followed by the woman being hit in the chest with what she claims is a fragment of a meteorite.

The above image showcases the purported meteorite, and now scientists are chiming in, saying that the imaged rock is definitely not from outside of Earth's atmosphere as meteorites that make it to Earth's surface are smooth due to the extreme heat they experience while plummeting through Earth's dense atmosphere.

Diablo 4's Season 1, dubbed the 'Season of the Malignant,' will go live in all regions on Thursday, July 20. And with that, Diablo 4 just got a massive 1.1 patch ahead of the new Season that brings several changes to the game, buffs, nerfs, new Unique and Legendary Aspects, and more fixes than you can shake a Wirt's Leg at. In case you were wondering, that's a deep-cut reference to Diablo 2.

For those wondering what existing skills and builds have been nerfed, it looks like Barbarian Hammer of the Ancients, Druid Werewolf Shred, Necromancer Bone Spear, and Sorcerer Ice Shard builds have been scaled back. The good news is that the patch is mostly about buffing other skills and abilities to broaden the options for players.

One nerf that will affect most players, especially those diving into the first Season, is that the experience points rewarded to players for killing enemies that are at a much higher level than them have been scaled back. "We have observed that the experience bonus rewarded for killing higher-level monsters escalates too fast compared to the relative challenge involved," Blizzard writes. With this, players will get +1.5% experience per level higher than the player up to a maximum of 15% at 10 levels.

TikTok is looking to challenge the biggest music streaming platforms with its own service called "TikTok Music," and it's rolling out the service in three markets.

The new app is being rolled out in Australia, Mexico, and Singapore, and according to TikTok, users within those regions are invited to join a beta test that begins on July 19. Users will need to download the TikTok Music app from either the App Store or the Google Play Store by visiting the music.tiktok.com webpage and signing up for the beta. All users will be able to sign into the new app with their TikTok account, and beta participants will receive a free three-month trial of the new service.

ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, has already acquired songs from labels such as Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music. As with all music streaming services, users will be able to stream music, download it and share songs.

Last week we reported on the news that Intel was no longer in the business of making its impressive NUC (Next Unit of Computing) devices, which are compact and powerful Mini PCs that take up very little space. At the time, Intel noted that it would pivot its strategy to enable its "ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth."

Well, it looks like all that pivoting has already happened, with Intel announcing that it has partnered with ASUS to "manufacture, sell and support 10th to 13th Gen NUC systems product line and to develop future innovative NUC systems product designs." So, Intel NUC PCs are still a thing but will now be produced and sold by ASUS in partnership with Intel.

ASUS has a great track record for creating and releasing its own line-up of Mini PCs, so this collaboration makes a lot of sense. How this partnership will affect ASUS's existing product line-up and the development of future Mini PCs remains to be seen. However, the line about the "future innovative NUC system" highlights that the current plan is for this to be a long-term partnership.

Researchers from Harvard and MIT have penned a new paper that explores the reversal of aging in cells, and according to the results of the study, there are some treatments humans can take.

The promising new study has been published in the journal Aging by a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The researchers explain that they've identified six treatments that convert cells into a more "youthful state". Notably, the press release states that these six different cocktails of chemicals also don't cause any damage, which is typically the case with age-reversing treatments.

As you can probably imagine, there are some downsides to the study, or at the very least, the breakthrough findings. According to the press release, these results are derived from mostly tissue experiments in a lab, and trials on mice/monkeys provided "encouraging results". As for human experiments, the lead principal investigator on the project David Sinclair, said that preparations for human trials are ongoing.

NVIDIA RTX IO was first revealed in 2020, during the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 Series era, with the new technology all about offloading texture decompression and other data tasks from the CPU onto the GPU by taking advantage of modern NVMe and PCIe Gen storage.

NVIDIA RTX IO uses the technology seen in Microsoft's DirectStorage, GDeflate, an open GPU compression standard that NVIDIA helped create. In most modern games, we see data sent from the disk drive to the CPU, which is then decompressed via system memory and sent to the GPU. With the massive gains we've seen in PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 storage, it's a process that doesn't take advantage of their speed and capabilities when it comes to PC gaming.

The result is longer load times and things like texture pop-in, even though storage speeds have doubled or tripled. This is where NVIDIA RTX IO comes in. "NVIDIA RTX IO dramatically increases IO bandwidth by letting compressed data be delivered to GPU memory with minimal staging in the CPU system memory," writes NVIDIA.

Twitter is preparing to release a new feature that will enable users to post long-form articles, or even if an entire book.

The in-development feature was confirmed by Twitter owner Elon Musk who replied to a tweet from a user that noticed Twitter quietly renamed its Twitter Notes feature to Twitter Articles. Musk confirmed the name change and wrote that users will be able to post "very long, complex articles with mixed media," which is presumably a mixture of embedded GIFs, video, images, and audio. Moreover, Musk said that you will be able to "publish a book if you want".

For those that don't remember, Twitter announced its Notes feature last year, and it was rolled out to select regions such as Canada, Ghana, the UK, and the United States. However, the new feature buried in the news that Elon Musk was interested in purchasing the company, and according to reports, this is the first time the company has officially recognized the feature since it was first announced and tested.

In December 2022, NVIDIA released Portal with RTX - a stunning path-traced and fully ray-traced remaster of Valve's iconic puzzle game that took full advantage of modern rendering and the company's DLSS 3 Frame Generation technology. A glimpse at the future of lighting in games through the guise of one of the best first-person puzzle games in recent times.

Created in part with NVIDIA RTX Remix, the company's modding platform that can transform any older title to bring it into the RTX era, it's one of those releases that is a must if you've purchased one of the new GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards.

Today comes word from NVIDIA that it has used the same RTX Remix toolset to remaster one of Portal's most enduring mods - Portal: Prelude from creator Nicolas "NykO18" Grevet. Set before the game's events, this unofficial and award-winning prequel in RTX form includes enhanced materials, full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 3, and NVIDIA Reflex support.

NVIDIA has quietly launched the new GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB variant, which features the same hardware seen in the 8GB model but with the memory capacity doubled to 16GB. It seems that GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB models have simply made their way to retail without being sent to media beforehand - so there are currently no reviews for the GPU online.

With the same underlying hardware and 128-bit memory interface, there won't be a massive difference in game performance outside of a few cases where the limitations are mainly due to running out of memory capacity. Titles like the Resident Evil 4 remake with max settings.

Interestingly, the 16GB model features the same TDP power rating, so doubling the VRAM capacity won't impact the card's impressive power efficiency. The big downside is that to get an extra 8GB of VRAM, the price for the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti jumps up from USD 399 for the 8GB model to USD 499 for 16GB. This just about puts the GPU into a brand-new pricing tier, so comparisons between it and other GPUs must be adjusted accordingly.

Back in July 2003, Troika Games laid out a very interesting proposal for Baldur's Gate 3 that deviated from classic cRPG norms.

With Baldur's Gate 3 releasing in August, games industry vet Tim Cain takes curious gamers back to the past to discover Troika Games' unique vision for a third Baldur's Gate game on PC.

"It was in real-time [...]This whole thing was a very action-oriented version of D&D," Cain said in a recent video.

Cloud Imperium Games, the company that makes the mega-popular Star Citizen space sim game, has merged with its long-time game development partner Turbulent.

As Star Citizen continues expanding, so too must the teams behind the decade-long live game. CIG has announced that it is joining forces--and companies--with its 11-year partner Turbulent to continue its ambition to disrupt the video games landscape. And, of course, deliver the anticipated Squadron 42 campaign to Star Citizen players.

So who exactly is Turbulent? The studio has worked on various dimensions of Star Citizen, including the game's original website, its StarMap, social systems, and also helped worldbuilding and concept creations.

Global entry! We have teamed up with Kingston to give away a couple of its awesome products to one very lucky winner.

The winner will take home a Kingston KC3000 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD and a Kingston FURY Beast DDR5-6000 RGB 32GB memory kit.

Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD delivers next-level performance using the latest Gen 4x4 NVMe controller and 3D TLC NAND. Upgrade the storage and reliability of your system to keep up with demanding workloads and experience better performance with software applications such as 3D rendering and 4K+ content creation. With formidable speeds up to 7,000MB/s1 read/write, it ensures improved workflow in high-performance desktop and laptop PCs making it ideal for power users who require the fastest speeds on the market.

If you've been enjoying Instagram's Threads you're in for a treat, because it's just gotten a whole lot better. Although you'll need to be using an iPhone to enjoy them for now.

That's because Instagram has now released an updated version of its iPhone app that includes a number of fixes and new features that have been requested since it was released. However, while this update does appear to be related to an iOS update it is also linked to a server-side change. With that in mind, it might take a little while before you see the changes on your own device. Instagram software engineer Cameron Roth suggests that you could try force-quitting and restarting the app if you want to check if your account has the new goodies enabled.

Roth also shared details about what's gone into this new update, and there are some big improvements. At the top of the list are new translations for posts as well as a follows tab on the activity feed that shows people that you are following on the platform. Beyond that, users can now subscribe to unfollowed users while tappable reporter labels and a ton more. Roth also says that there are a handful of other small bugs included, too.

Samsung is expected to announce not just one but two new flagship foldable devices this July 26 and the cases that will sell alongside them have already leaked ahead of time.

With Samsung set to announce the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5 expectations are already high that we could be in for some big upgrades. But new images shared by leaker Evan Blass on Threads show that the new phones will also come with new cases, complete with a PopSocket-like attachment that can be used as a kickstand.

The idea of an attachment like this isn't new of course. PopSockets have been popular for years and it appears that these cases will do much the same thing. People will be able to hold onto the attachment when they need a better grip, while a ring can also be folded down to form a kickstand for consuming media. That's likely to be more useful for the larger Galaxy Z Fold 5 for obvious reasons.

New reports from Reuters indicate that Microsoft and Activision are continuing discussions on a merger deadline extension.

The Microsoft-Activision merger deadline is tonight, July 18 at 11:59PM. If the deal is not closed by that time, then Microsoft or Activision can walk away from the deal, triggering a $3 billion termination fee that Microsoft will pay to Activision. Walking away seems quite unlikely and risky for the billion-dollar video games publisher, and reports suggest that an extension of the deadline is the most likely outcome.

While the merger is essentially free to close in the United States following the FTC's recent loss in court, the deal's approval is still in limbo in the UK. Microsoft is making major headway in UK, though, and is one step closer to winning over antitrust regulators at the CMA. Microsoft will formally notify a new restructured deal to the CMA that is expected to alleviate many of the agency's concerns about the merger, but this formal assessment process could take up to 20 days' time. With the merger deadline looming, time is something that Microsoft and Activision don't have.

Both Activision and Microsoft are preparing for their impending merger with big moves with the Call of Duty franchise.

Microsoft's post-merger intentions with Call of Duty have been illustrated with recent advancements. First, Microsoft and Activision have discounted every single Call of Duty game that's available on the Xbox store. Some games are discounted by as much as 70%, with a number of fan-favorite Call of Duty games being as cheap as $10.

This maneuver wasn't just to sell a bunch of games ahead of Call of Duty's eventual post-merger rollout on Game Pass, though. It was a strategic effort to also capitalize on engagement across the Xbox ecosystem. Coupled with the massive sale on Call of Duty games, Activision has also fixed matchmaking servers in old Call of Duty Xbox 360 games including Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2, which has led to a massive influx of players. This is by design. Microsoft is already using Call of Duty to ramp up engagement and playtime across its service ecosystem, which is one of the main reasons it sought to acquire Activision in the first place.

A new leak on Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh desktop processors backs up previous theories about the Core i7-14700K getting more cores - but also knocks back another rumor about the same being true of the Core i5-14600K.

The leak comes from Benchlife, a Chinese tech site - so add the usual heap of seasoning - and it contends that the Core i7-14700K will have 8 performance cores alongside 12 efficiency cores.

That's a few sources now claiming this, so this particular rumor is starting to carry more weight - which is great news and likely to make this a popular chip among the Raptor Lake Refresh line-up.

The UK regulators at the CMA are the last hurdle for the Microsoft-Activision merger. Things are moving fast, and here a breakdown of what's going on.

Following many months of investigation, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a final report that suggested the Microsoft-Activision merger should be blocked. The antitrust agency argues that the Microsoft-Activision merger will create SLC (Significant Lessening of Competition) effects in cloud and subscription.

Now the UK regulators are having a change of heart. Microsoft has offered new proposals that have convinced the CMA that Microsoft is capable of addressing their concerns in these relevant markets.