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Meta released Threads under its Instagram subsidiary on Wednesday, and the app has already reached a milestone amount of users.

The news was confirmed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who took to his personal Threads account to announce that Threads reached 100 million sign-ups over the weekend and that the new text-based app, that's a direct competitor to Elon Musk's Twitter, achieved this through "mostly organic demand" as the company hasn't even "turned on many promotions yet".

The same shocked sentiment was echoed by the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, who wrote on his personal Threads account that he's struggling to make sense of the fact that 100 million people have signed up for Threads.

Martin Lewis, a financial journalist, and broadcaster, has announced there is an investment scam circulating social media that is a deepfake video of him.

The BBC reports that the scam advertisement has "widely circulated" on social media platforms, in particular, Facebook. The video was created using AI-powered deepfake technology that was trained with video and audio of Martin Lewis. Once the model is trained, its creator is able to get Lewis to say anything, and in this case, to promote a scam that encourages people to sign up for a project that's "backed" by Elon Musk. The project was described as a "great investment" and "legit".

Lewis spoke to BBC Radio 4's Today and said, "My name and face have been the subject of scam adverts for many years, I get countless reports every day. This is the first deepfake I've seen with me in it... it's already difficult enough to persuade people [about scams]. I've had friends of mine get in touch with me at times saying 'hey, I've just put some money in that investment scheme you're advertising'. I don't advertise, I don't do investment."

A group of robots that were presented at the AI for Good conference in Geneva were interviewed by human press, in what Reuters reports as the "world's first human-robot press conference".

These nine robots were asked a series of questions by various reporters, who were attempting to probe the AI-powered machines about how they think they will integrate into the world. Many reporters asked questions about how AI-powered humanoid machines will impact jobs, to which Grace, a medical robot dressed in a blue nurse's uniform, replied, "I will be working alongside humans to provide assistance and support and will not be replacing any existing jobs."

Grace's creator, Ben Goertzel from SingularityNET, chimed in and said, "You sure about that, Grace?" and Grace replied, "Yes, I am sure," sparking a room of nervous laughter. Another robot that wore overalls recommended that there needs to be "urgent discussion" on AI and recommended that "we should be cautious about the future development of AI". Some journalists asked the robots if they would ever rebel against their creators, Ameca's response can be found below.

NASA has released a new video that showcases a 3D visualization of flying past all of the galaxies the James Webb Space Telescope has observed in a specific region of space.

NASA has announced the release of this video on the Webb Telescope website, as well as its social media channels, with the space agency explaining that the data used to create the visualization was obtained through the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, or CEERS Survey. The blog post states that the video represents Webb's exploration of the region of space called the Extended Groth Strip.

This specific region of space contains thousands of galaxies and, as shown in the video, ends on Maisie's Galaxy, one of the oldest galaxies ever discovered and a prime example of what Webb's infrared instruments can achieve. Maisie's Galaxy is 13.4 billion light years away from Earth, and according to NASA, it formed approximately 390 million years after the Big Bang. NASA notes that every second of the above and below gifs represents seeing 200 million years into the past.

A team led by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has claimed they may have found fragments of alien technology. These pieces were from a meteor that landed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Papa New Guinea.

The Harvard team went on an expedition to the estimated crash site of the meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere in January 2014, and ran a magnetic sheet over the seafloor, gathering these fragments.

Loeb says during the CBS interview that the meteor was moving "too fast" to have come from within our solar system, meaning it's an "interstellar object", an object from out of the solar system. Making this the first time humans have put their hands-on an object that has come from outside the solar system.

It's a common belief that DRM in PC game releases, specifically the popular Denuvo Anti-Tamper anti-piracy software, adversely impacts performance. If a PC game is rocking DRM, you're looking at a noticeable drop-off in performance compared to a version of the same PC game without DRM-a pirated copy.

The Denuvo platform is owned by digital security company Irdeto, who bought Denuvo in 2018. In an interview with Ars Technica, Irdeto Chief Operating Officer of Video Games Steeve Huin, said, "There is no perceptible impact on gameplay because of the way we do things." Adding that anti-piracy measures are a benefit to both game publishers and players as it ensures that it protects investments and leads to more games in the future.

"Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it," Steeve Huin says. "We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger." Translation, the people behind Devuno have a different take and want to prove it.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, head of the Galileo Project, an initiative dedicated to conducting a systematic scientific search for evidence of alien life and extraterrestrial artifacts, has announced the team has found something.

Loeb has appeared on multiple news channels announcing that his recent expedition to the crash site of a meteor that entered Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in 2014 was a success, as the team managed to recover 50 tiny spherical fragments of unknown origin. Loeb's team investigated a January 2014 fireball that the US Space Command confirmed with 99.99% percent accuracy came from outside the solar system.

The Harvard astrophysicist took a magnetic sled and scoured the sea floor in a 10-kilometer radius, which is approximately the size of Boston, and discovered, "We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," Loeb explained. "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."

Sometimes a deal is too good to be true, which Roman 'der8auer' Hartung found out in his latest deep dive into a supposed Samsung 980 EVO M.2 4TB SSD purchased for around USD 44 from an AliExpress seller. The first red flag is naturally the price, but a bigger one would be that Samsung doesn't offer a Samsung 980 EVO - let alone a 4TB variant.

As expected, these drives are fake, with false branding, warranties, and other info - but it gets even worse once 'der8auer' decides to benchmark the drive using the popular CrystalDiskMark tool. Even though there was some good news with Windows recognizing the capacity of 3.72TB, things took a turn for the abysmal when the read speed was noted as 36.25 MB/s and the write speed an even worse 0.84 MB/s.

This makes the so-called NVMe storage solution sold as a Samsung SSD worse than a cheap USD thumb drive you can pick up for a few bucks. The thought of firing up or installing a game like Call of Duty Modern Warfare II on this (which has a 150GB install size) is enough to make you sweat.

Last week we saw American overclocker Allen "Splave" Golibersuch break the 4.0 GHz barrier using the flagship liquid-cooled ROG Matrix GeForce RTX 4090 all-in-one from ASUS. An impressive milestone and a conclusion of sorts to a race that was heating up between Splave and German overclocker CENS that saw a back-and-forth over the course of days and weeks to see who could get to 4.0 GHz first.

For a brief moment, CENS held the crown by pushing a Colorful GeForce RTX 4090 iGame LAB to an incredible 3.975 GHz. And although the race to 4.0 GHz is over, this hasn't stopped CENS from grabbing some LN2 and going again with the overclocker posting "a fun one" with a 4095 MHz GPU clock speed, or basically 4090 MHz to match the naming of the GeForce RTX 4090.

CENS posted the results on Twitter with an accompanying picture showing his setup, and it's very cool to see what it looks like when a GPU is pushed beyond what we thought was possible.

NVIDIA is planning to launch the new 16GB variant of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti this month, but with an MSRP of USD 499, the consensus is that, sure, more VRAM is great to see, but the price is too high for a GPU with the same underlying specs as the 8GB variant.

For MSI and its premium GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Gaming X Slim, we'll see the revised 2-slot cooling design that debuted at Computex 2023 in the stylish white color. Images of the GPU have appeared online via Twitter user hongxing2020, and it also looks like this GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB will use a 16-pin power connector even though it's a 165W graphics card.

It's hard to tell without full specifications, but the connector could also be the new 12V-2x6 power connector seen on the GeForce RTX 4070 Founders Edition model. Interestingly, due to low power requirements, most RTX 4060 Ti models feature the standard 8-pin power connection, so there shouldn't be an issue with the switch to 16-pin.

BioWare loses another long-time employee that helped define its landmark RPGs.

Days ago, Jay Watamaniuk announced that he's leaving BioWare after more than 21 years of writing stories and content for some of BioWare's biggest games.

"Alas, my 21 year journey with BioWare has come to an end. I wanted to thank the exceptional team of writers who taught me the business of creation with empathy, patience and humour. Whatever the future holds, my work will be forever shaped by their lessons. It was a privilege," Watamaniuk said on Twitter.

EA today announced it has opened up a new studio called Cliffhanger Games to work on an all-original Black Panther game.

Electronic Arts is ramping up its studios to deliver the trio of new Marvel games that it promised back in October 2022. The latest reveal is a big-budget AAA Black Panther game that will be led by the newly-revealed Cliffhanger Games, which is run by ex-Monolith Productions general manager Kevin Stephens. At WB Games, Stephens served as Monolith's GM for 9 years before moving over to Cliffhanger, and according to Stephens' LinkedIn, Cliffhanger has been established for over 2 years.

The new Black Panther game will be a third-person singleplayer adventure with an all-original storyline and an emphasis on details. Past reports indicate that Black Panther is targeting a 2025 release.

FTC v Microsoft court documents highlight just how successful Call of Duty is on PlayStation.

In badly-redacted court documents that were uploaded to the FTC v Microsoft public docket, Sony revealed key information about Call of Duty's performance on its industry-leading platform. According to the document, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II sold 4.4 million copies in its first week on PlayStation, beating out the previous record-holder FIFA 23, which had sold 3.8 million copies.

A quick bit of math shows that, at minimum, PlayStation made up around 30% of Call of Duty Modern Warfare II's record $1 billion in sell-through. We're not sure if the 4.4 million sales figure for digital-only purchases on the PlayStation Store or if it also includes sales from retailers.

Intel's Core i7-14700K has been spotted in leaked benchmarks where it's a good deal faster than its predecessor, the 13700K.

The Cinebench R23 and CPU-Z results were flagged up on Twitter by @wxnod, and as ever, put on your skeptical hat (which should be donned for any leakage, which may or may not be genuine).

If true, the 14700K's Cinebench R23 result comes in at 2192 points and 36296 for single-core and multi-core respectively, which is 4% and 17% faster than the 13700K as VideoCardz (which spotted the leak) points out.

Final Fantasy XVI's success has pushed total franchise sales past 180 million worldwide.

The Final Fantasy franchise broke 180 million sales shortly after Final Fantasy XVI's release. The latest entry in the RPG series managed to sell 3 million copies in combined digital sales and physical shipments in its first week, which is noteworthy given the game is a PS5 exclusive. It remains to be seen if Final Fantasy XVI will live up to Square Enix's sales expectations, and we've outlined the reasons why it is tough to compare Final Fantasy XVI's sales to its predecessor, Final Fantasy XV.

The previous update pinpointed Final Fantasy franchise sales at 173 million. That was as of March 2022, so in little over a year, the franchise has sold 7 million copies--nearly half of which were made in the first week of Final Fantasy XVI's launch.

NVIDIA's RTX 4060 Ti with 16GB of VRAM has been a controversial graphics card since it was first announced, and just ahead of its launch, the divisive feelings around this model are very much still present.

This time we're hearing from NVIDIA's partners who manufacture graphics cards using Team Green's chips, via Andreas Schilling, editor of a German tech site.

Note that we must be cautious about rumors on Twitter, but we're told that Schilling spoke to some add-in board (AIB) makers and that it looks like "very few" are interested in promoting the graphics card in a "big way," as you can see in the tweet.

Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh processors will launch in the week of October 17, according to the latest rumor.

This one is from a well-established leaker, Enthusiastic Citizen (ECSM), who posted on Chinese site Bilibili to let us know that the 14th-gen desktop chips will debut between October 17 and October 23 (which is 'WW42'). Or, to put it another way, just after mid-October, as another leak previously indicated.

As we've also already heard, that will be the launch of the first batch of chips, the 'K' models (unlocked), with non-K (locked) Raptor Lake Refresh processors emerging in the first week of 2024, which surely means a CES launch.

The creator of the account dedicated to tracking the location of Elon Musk's private jet has popped up on Threads, reigniting the public appeal of knowing where Musk is flying to.

Jack Sweeney, the creator of what was the Twitter bot account called ElonJet, has brought the bot back from the dead on Meta's newly launched Threads app. The app created quite a stir when it was available on Twitter, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers and the attention of Elon Musk, who offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account. Sweeney declined the offer, and when Musk bought Twitter, he banned the account.

Musk claimed that his son was followed by a "crazy stalker" due to the actions of the account, and threatened legal action against Sweeney if he continued operating it. Notably, Sweeney has other bot accounts dedicated to tracking private jets of prominent figures, such as Russian oligarchs.

NASA's humanoid robot named Valkyrie is going to be tested in Western Australia before its sent off to assist astronauts in space.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce that Valkyrie is heading to Woodside Energy, a Perth-based company that has entered into an agreement with NASA that stipulates the collaboration is "reimbursable", meaning Woodside Energy will pay for all of NASA's expenses and in return Woodside Energy will get to test the robot, collect relevant data and contribute to NASA's effort of developing "remote mobile dexterous manipulation capabilities" for taking care of uncrewed facilities.

NASA explains in its blog post that with the data Woodside Energy will be able to provide, engineers will be able to progress development on remotely operated robots that will eventually be on the lunar and Martian surface. These robots would enable constant progress to be achieved on both extraterrestrial surfaces from the safety of Earth. Valkyrie runs on two Intel Core i7 processors and a 1.9kWg battery, and will be working as an oil rig attendant.

The United States has announced that it has destroyed its entire supply of chemical weapons, according to a new report by The Guardian.

The stockpile of toxic weaponry included 51,000 M55 rockets that contained GB nerve agent, or more commonly known as sarin gas. These rockets have been in storage since the 1940s and have been since been "irreversibly destroyed". The effort by the US to remove its stockpile of chemical weapons has been decades-long, beginning after the cold war when the country was harboring more than 30,000 tons of chemical weaponry.

However, that effort has now come to its end, ahead of schedule as well as the United States had until September 30 to complete its elimination of chemical weaponry, per the international Chemical Weapons Convention, which took effect in 1997 and was joined by 193 countries.