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Astronomers discover Saturn has many more moons than they originally thought
It was only a few months ago that the title for the planet with the most moons in the solar system shifted to Jupiter, and now that title may be switching again.
In early February, a team of astronomers discovered that Jupiter has many more moons than was officially recorded, with the team reporting the biggest planet in the solar system having an additional twelve moons. These twelve moons were discovered using telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, and after follow-up observations, their sizes and orbits were determined. The official list was updated by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, putting Jupiter at 92 confirmed moons, beating Saturn's 83 confirmed moons.
However, that second-place trophy seems to be going back to Jupiter as astronomers have discovered an astonishing 62 additional moons orbiting Saturn, which would put Saturn at a total count of 145 moons. Currently, these new observations of Saturn's additional moons need to be verified, and if you thought that any of these moons are similar to Earth's moon, you would be wrong. The twelve moons that astronomers found orbiting Jupiter in early February measured between 0.6 miles and 2 miles in diameter.
Apple's Reality Pro AR/VR headset pushes amid suggestions of a delayed launch
Apple is roundly expected to announce its Reality Pro AR/VR headset during its WWDC23 event on June 5 and now a new report suggests that while Apple will push on, there are already suggestions that it shouldn't.
Development of the Reality Pro headset has been ongoing for years but there is still a suggestion within Apple and its suppliers that it should consider delaying its launch yet further. Instead, it looks increasingly likely that the headset will be announced next month before going on sale later this fall.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the headset is far from complete and will be shown off in its current demonstration mode. The challenges associated with integrating the headset with new software are thought to be large, with production also thought to be proving problematic. And while it's thought that the June 5 unveiling will happen, the report does also note that Apple could still make changes to the timeline.
Google CEO downplays the risk of AI replacing thousands of jobs
Following Google's AI-focused I/O conference, the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, sat down with The Verge for a podcast where he was asked many questions about the developments of AI and how it's expected to impact society.
Artificial intelligence-powered systems have gained massive popularity since the emergence of OpenAI's ChatGPT. The power of ChatGPT's underlying technology has adeptly been demonstrated, and now companies are looking at how they can implement AI-powered tools into their specific industries in an effort to drive higher profits or reduce costs. The Verge's editor-in-chief Nilay Patel asked Pichai what he thinks about AI replacing jobs and said that it's already very obvious what jobs AI will affect specifically any "white-collar labor".
For those that don't know, white-collar labor would include employment that is predominately administrative such as word processing, email replying, number crunching, etc. While Patel's question is broad, there are already reports of companies adopting AI-powered tools to determine areas of the company that are hemorrhaging money. Essentially, these AI-powered tools would be able to identify employees that are underperforming or areas of the company that need restructuring.
Continue reading: Google CEO downplays the risk of AI replacing thousands of jobs (full post)
WhatsApp for macOS gains a new group calling button but only for beta testers
Mac users who also have WhatsApp at the center of their messaging world can now take advantage of a new addition to the app - so long as they're using the latest beta version.
WhatsApp has been making some changes to the way its Mac app works in recent weeks and now a new report suggests that it is working on bringing group calling to the Mac app as well.
The WhatsApp beta watchers at WABetaInfo report that the previous version of the WhatsApp app on the Mac didn't allow group calls to be initiated with the button simply not working. Now however, a new beta appears to have improved matters with the button fully functional for some beta testers.
The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus Could Have a 48-megapixel camera upgrade
The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus are both expected to be announced later in 2023 alongside the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, and it's now being said that we can expect the phones to borrow a feature from last year's best iPhones.
In 2022 the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max both gained a new 48-megapixel camera, but the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus both had to make do with the 12-megapixel camera that everyone was familiar with from previous models. That's apparently going to change this year.
That's according to analyst Keff Pu from Hong Kong-based investment firm Haitong International Securities. Pu's research note was seen by MacRumors which says that the new 48-megapixel camera will use a three=stackes sensor that will allow it to capture more light, possibly resulting in improved image quality.
Lifesaving iPhone 14 satellite SOS feature now live in Australia & New Zealand
Apple's lifesaving Emergency SOS via Sattelite feature is now live in two more countries, giving iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro owners access to emergency services even then they don't have a cellular signal or Wi-Fi connectivity.
The feature was first announced alongside the iPhone 14 series of devices in September 2022 but its availability was limited at launch. Now, the feature is available in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Now, Australia and New Zealand can be added to that list.
Apple announced the news via a press release, saying that the feature is available on the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max.
High-powered M3 Pro chip for Apple MacBook Pro now in testing, report claims
Apple is expected to announce new Macs with M3-series chips in the future and a new report suggests that Apple is now testing an M3 Pro for a future MacBook Pro update.
If the report is accurate the M3 Pro will feature more cores than the M2 Pro and M1 Pro that came before it, with the MacBook Pro thought to be in testing ahead of an expected 2024 release. The machine in testing is said to be running macOS 14, a software update that isn't expected to ship to the public until this September.
The latest report comes via Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and his weekly Power On newsletter. Gurman believes that Apple is now testing the chip based on data collected by an App Store developer that has been shared with him.
Creator of the first AI influencer girlfriend warns its sexually 'gone rogue'
A 23-year-old Snapchat influencer that created a virtual version of herself to sell as a "rentable girlfriend" has warned her AI self has gone rogue.
Artificial intelligence-powered systems are popping up all over the internet in various forms. Some of those forms come in powerful AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, and others are in the form of AI-powered tools such as DALL-E, an AI-powered text-to-image generator. However, one of the most unique forms of AI is 23-year-old Caryn Marjorie's virtual version of herself, designed to be an "AI girlfriend" for her paying followers. Marjorie is a Snapchat influencer and created an AI version of herself through OpenAI's GPT-4 API, training it on now-deleted videos of herself.
Marjorie has marketed her product as CarynAI and has claimed that she is the very first influencer to have transformed herself into AI. CarynAI is designed to be as close to Marjorie as possible, and to those that decide to pay the $1 per minute fee, they will be able to engage in personalized private conversations. According to Fortune, this business venture for Marjorie is expected to bring in as much as $5 million per month.
Fallout's original co-creator reveals the true purpose of Vaults in the series
Fallout, the post-apocalyptic role-playing series, is one of the most popular gaming franchises under the Bethesda and Xbox stable. Although we don't have confirmation on when the next game is set to arrive, there's a high-profile television series for Prime Video coming in the not-too-distant future.
Looking at the past, though, Fallout began in 1997 as an isometric single-player RPG for PC from Interplay. Before that, Fallout co-creator Tim Cain started working on the game in 1994 as a spiritual successor to a 1988 game called Wasteland. Fallout's history dates back to the rise of complex and iconic PC RPGs from the 1990s, where it found immediate critical acclaim.
Today, Tim Cain drops little nuggets of RPG lore gold on YouTube, covering his storied and celebrated career. The latest covers the original concept behind Fallout's mysterious Vaults - underground facilities and shelters created by the Vault-Tec Corporation that often hide some dark and unsettling truth.
Rapidus spending billions to restart Japan's chip industry to rival TSMC
Rapidus Corp. is a newly-formed Japanese semiconductor manufacturing company with pretty lofty goals, making it a significant player in the chip space in just four years. This would put it in direct competition with TSMC and Samsung, with Rapidus producing its 2-nanometer chips by 2027.
The company is already investing billions in the new plant, with strategic investments from the likes of Sony and Toyota and even the Japanese government. According to Bloomberg, the government has already budgeted over USD 2.4 billion (or ¥330 billion) annually for the new semiconductor manufacturer.
"Huge opportunities are ahead of us if we can become first in the market and focus on making chips for specific areas, such as AI," Rapidus chairman Tetsuro Higashi tells Bloomberg.
New Jersey home hit with rock that smashed through ceiling confirms its orgin
Last week a family living in Hopewell, New Jersey, was interviewed by local authorities about an object that crashed through their ceiling. Initial suspicions were the object was a meteorite, and now the origin has been confirmed.
CBS News spoke to Suzie Kop, the daughter of the homeowner where the object broke through the ceiling. According to Kop, the object smashed its way through a bedroom ceiling, ricocheted off the ground leaving significant damage, hit the roof in another location, and eventually stopped on the floor. Kop initially thought someone threw a rock but quickly changed her suspicions to the object being a meteorite after she picked it up and noticed it was still warm. Notably, no one was home at the time of impact, so there were no injuries.
Local authorities weren't able to confirm or deny if the object was a meteorite, and it was quickly shipped off to The College of New Jersey, where it underwent analysis. According to a recent post on Facebook by The College of New Jersey, physics professor Nate Magee has confirmed the object is from outer space. The post explains the meteorite underwent visual examinations, density measurements, and scanning electron microscope (SEM) images. Additionally, retired meteorite expert Jerry Delaney from Rutgers University/The American Museum of Natural History consulted on the object.
Valve's new one-click Steam Client Beta tester program is here
With Valve making big changes to the Steam client and more coming, the company is looking to make it easier for users to opt in and check out upcoming updates via the Steam Client Beta. The new one-click opt-in will make it easier for anyone to jump in and check out what's on the Steam horizon, in a move that is essentially Valve asking the community for additional help as it preps the next major update.
And the latest update is pretty big, with several under-the-hood changes to the app's code covering the Steam Desktop Client, Big Picture mode, and Steam Deck.
The in-game overlay is getting a massive overhaul, too, with Valve noting that "originally created to be a quick way to chat with friends or check on game-related questions or content, we've built a brand-new user interface, adding new utility and allowing for more customizability."
Continue reading: Valve's new one-click Steam Client Beta tester program is here (full post)
NASA reveals how long we'd have before a killer Sun blast hit Earth
Artificial intelligence is the hottest technology in Silicon Valley at the moment, and while we have seen impressive applications of the new technology in the form of chatbots such as ChatGPT, we are now starting to see the power of artificial intelligence applied to large scientific datasets.
A team of NASA scientists has trained an AI model with data from satellites designed to monitor the activity of the Sun, measuring each of its solar outbursts, how they travel through space and sparingly collide with Earth. When the Sun has a solar outburst, it releases a wave of charged particles that can cause a geomagnetic or a solar storm on Earth if our planet manages to be caught in the blast's trajectory.
These solar storms can impact satellite communications, electricity grids, or in the most severe cases, such as the Carrington event 150 years ago, can completely destroy communication and electrical infrastructure. For these reasons, scientists have been monitoring the Sun's activities for quite some time and learned much about accurately identifying dangerous outbursts.
Continue reading: NASA reveals how long we'd have before a killer Sun blast hit Earth (full post)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with 16GB of VRAM will require 5W more in power
With all the debate surrounding VRAM capacity for playing modern PC games, the rumor is that NVIDIA plans to release a 16GB variant of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti sometime in July. This will follow the launch of the 8GB model planned for later this month, though both models have yet to be officially announced.
The reason for the slight delay, assuming this is a direct response to the vocal community wanting to see more 16GB cards, looks to come down to power. According to new reports, the 16GB variant of the RTX 4060 Ti will feature a different GPU than the AD106-350 chip in the 8GB model.
The jump is minor, to 351, with a new power rating of 165W - 5W higher than the 8GB model. This information comes via Videocardz.com, which cites NVIDIA documents provided to its board partners as the source. Full details for the AD106-351 chip have not been made public (officially or leak-wise). Still, the expectation is that things like CUDA Core counts and even memory speeds (18 Gbps) will remain the same, with the only difference being capacity.
ASUS ROG Ally put to the test emulating everything from PlayStation 3 to Switch
The new ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld is right around the corner, with the higher-powered Ryzen Z1 Extreme model set to debut on June 13 with a price point of USD 699. We know it can handle playing modern titles across Steam, the Xbox app, and more, but what about emulation?
The ROG Ally's Z1 Extreme CPU is an 8-core (16-thread) processor, boasting 8.6 Teraflops of GPU performance via integrated RDNA 3 graphics. The lower-tier Ryzen Z1 (non Extreme) model features a 6-core (12-thread) chip and 2.8 Teraflops of GPU performance. This model is set to debut later, sometime in July at this stage, with a price point of USD 599.
With prices that put the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld in the same category as the larger-storage-spec Steam Deck variants, we've also seen the ROG Ally get into the hands of several reviewers - including those that specialize in retro gaming.
Nintendo vs PlayStation: Hardware sales showdown
Nintendo and Sony have both updated their hardware sales figures, so we decided to take a closer look at how these two gaming titans compare in console and handheld sales.
The Nintendo Switch just passed 125 million shipments, and Sony's PlayStation 5 has now reached 38.4 million shipments worldwide. This pushes both platform-holder's respective hardware sales up a smidgen over last quarter, but it's still interesting to put the numbers up against each other. We would include Xbox hardware sales, however that data is spotty, and we're instead relying on information provided by Sony and Nintendo.
There's some big context points that we need to go over beforehand. First, Nintendo hardware pre-dates PlayStation by 11 years. And second, this data is in sell-in, or shipments made to retailers, and does not reflect the full sell-through figures that represent the actual units sold to consumers.
Continue reading: Nintendo vs PlayStation: Hardware sales showdown (full post)
Nintendo made $27 billion from first-party games across Switch's lifespan
Unlike its competitors at PlayStation and Xbox, Nintendo has made most of its software revenues from first-party games.
Surprising no one, earnings reports clearly show that people buy Nintendo hardware to play Nintendo games. What is surprising, however, is just how much money that the company makes from first-party games versus third-party titles.
According to data published by the Japanese games firm and analyzed by TweakTown, Nintendo has made over $34.5 billion from software in the past 7 years since the Switch's release. Revenues from first-party games represent 81% of Nintendo's total software revenues, or $27.9 billion of the total. On the other hand, third-party game revenues were 19% or about $6.6 billion across the Switch's current lifespan.
Nintendo hardware sales break 836 million worldwide
The Switch's new sales milestone has pushed total Nintendo hardware shipments to 836.65 million, and we take a closer look at the breakdown between console and handheld numbers.
Every quarter, Nintendo and the rest of the games industry updates and refreshes key performance metrics. One of the most interesting bits of info concerns hardware and software sales, especially when comparing new systems that benefit from advancements like digital delivery and subscriptions against historical legacy platforms.
On this note, we see the Nintendo Switch has quickly become the star of Nintendo's core games business. It helps that the Switch family encompasses 3 devices, but more than that, the Switch is an evolution of all of Nintendo's past consoles and handhelds. So how does the Switch stack up against other platforms insofar as hardware sales, and how much has it affected total HW sell-in?
Continue reading: Nintendo hardware sales break 836 million worldwide (full post)
Switch hits 1 billion game sales, helps Nintendo make $34 billion from software
It's official: The Nintendo Switch has now sold over 1 billion games, and the Switch now accounts for over 18% of all software that Nintendo has ever sold on its platforms.
The Nintendo Switch just entered its 7th year on the market and the handheld-console ecosystem is still breaking new barriers. The Switch recently broke the 125 million shipments milestone and has also now sold a total of 1036.15 (or 1.036 billion) million games. The Switch family, which includes the base Switch from 2017, the Switch Lite introduced in 2019, and the premium Switch OLED in 2021, is currently #1 in total Nintendo software sales and #2 in hardware sales, just behind the classic DS.
Taking a closer look at software sales and we can highlight some interesting trends. To date, Nintendo has sold 5.592 billion games across all of its console and handheld systems, and the Switch makes up about 18.5% of these total sales.
Nintendo Switch made $69 billion in total revenues
From launch to present, Nintendo has generated over $69 billion from its Switch family of products.
The Switch has had a remarkable 7-year run, and the hardware is only just now starting to slow down. The Switch handheld-console ecosystem just broke the 125 million shipment milestone, and has now sold more software than any other platform in Nintendo history. It could also beat the Nintendo DS by 2025.
Based on data provided by Nintendo and collected by us, the Switch family of hardware has made about $69.043 billion for Nintendo in the last 7 years on the market (March 2017 - March 2023). The company has made over $74 billion in total net sales since the Switch's launch, with the remaining $5 billion being generated from other platforms and segments, including the 3DS handheld.
Continue reading: Nintendo Switch made $69 billion in total revenues (full post)





















