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A team of archaeologists in Japan has discovered a massive iron sword that was buried to protect the dead from evil spirits.

In an email to LiveScience, Riku Murase, an archaeologist for Nara City who dug up the burial mound and found the sword, said they were "surprised" at the discovery, and they doubted the existence of the tomb for "so long". The discovery took place last November at the burial mound of Tomio Maruyama, located west of Nara, a city in Japan. The tomb dates back to the fourth century A.D. (1,600 years ago) and contained a Dako, a type of sword known for its wavy, snake-like shape.

Commenting on the discovery of the sword, Murase said that it's twice as big as any other sword that has been found in Japan so far. The below image showcases an X-ray photograph of the sword's original shape and size. Archaeologist Stefan Maeder, an expert in Japanese swords and ancient swords in general, explains that dako swords found in burial mounds are mainly for ceremonial purposes, but aren't "common" as they are "prestigious objects of high society".

Google announced it was going to reveal a new artificial intelligence system earlier in the week system and that it will revolutionize Google Search.

It was only a few days ago that Google sent initiations to certain members of the press informing them that they will be hosting an AI event on February 8, where they will explain more about their developments with artificial intelligence technologies. Ahead of that event, Google has taken to its blog with Sundar Pichai, Google, and Alphabet CEO, introducing the world to Bard, Google's new AI that is powered by its in-house Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short).

Pichai explains that Bard will be designed to enable human-like conversations via a text box where a user can ask it a variety of questions, from drills to increase soccer performance to simplifying complex topics down so a 9-year-old can understand them.

According to a new report, a Judge in Colombia has used the popular AI chatbot system ChatGPT to help with a court ruling. The case in question involved a dispute with a health insurance company and whether or not an autistic child was eligible for treatment. "The arguments for this decision will be determined in line with the use of artificial intelligence (AI)," Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia wrote in the official decision, confirming that Chat GPT was used to assist in the ruling.

Questions like "Is an autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?" and "Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favorable decisions in similar cases?" were posed to ChatGPT. Not only that, but the AI's responses were included in the decision-making process. The Judge notes that the AI responses were used to expand or extend his own decisions, which was also a part of the decision.

There are no laws in Colombia forbidding the use of AI in court decisions. However, it's still strange to see the AI tool used this way when it has come under scrutiny for potentially offering biased or incorrect responses. Even OpenAI has stated that it should not be used for consequential decision-making.

When it comes to handheld gaming in 2023, there's the Nintendo Switch, and then there's Valve's Steam Deck - one being a traditional Nintendo-style console and the other being a portable gaming PC. What if you could hack the Switch to make it run Steam and fire up PC games? Wouldn't that turn it into a Nintendo Switch Deck or a Steam Switch?

That's the question YouTuber SpikeHD set out to answer and hopefully pull off - except it was impossible using existing tools and hacks. The idea is sound; a jailbroken Switch can run Ubuntu, so there should be a way to run the Linux version of Steam on the Nintendo console.

It's worth pointing out that only older models (from the console's launch) can be hacked in the first place, but that wasn't what ultimately led to the Steam Switch journey ending. Even though that requires a lot of SD card action bypassing boot loaders and compiling and even shorting connections on the Joy-Con rails to get working.

As GPU sizes increase due to more advanced cooling that requires all manner of fans, chunky heatsinks, and vapor chambers, the idea of an all-in-one water block solution is enticing. Not only does it dramatically reduce the physical slot size of the GPU proper (sure, you've still got a sizable radiator), but it offers what many see as a better cooling idea for overclocking or simply playing games without having to worry about temperatures and fan noise.

The PowerColor RX 7900 XTX Liquid Devil is the first water-cooled Radeon RX 7000 GPU, with a waterblock designed by EK - a name and brand trusted by many. It's a sleek unit, too, with the first pictures of the GPU surfacing via CornerJack from Overclocking.com on Twitter.

This requires an existing liquid loop to work, so it isn't an all-in-one solution but a solid (or liquid) option for those looking to get a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. With three 8-pin connectors, the board will likely be similar to what's found in PowerColor's Red Devil range.

Integrated graphics are always interesting, as you've got something that isn't explicitly designed for gaming used to do precisely that. And with that, there's never any expectation that integrated graphics would outperform a dedicated discrete GPU - but AMD's latest sounds pretty impressive.

The first benchmarks for the upcoming RDNA 3-based AMD Radeon 780M have surfaced on a Chinese tech forum (as spotted by Tom's Hardware), where the latest AMD APU was put to the test using the DirectX 12-based 3DMark Time Spy. With two separate tests running different memory (LPDDR5X-7500 and DDR5-5600), the integrated graphics of the Radeon 780M perform around 25% faster than the Radeon 680M using the higher specced memory.

Naturally, this is still behind the classic GeForce GTX 1060 6GB in terms of overall score (3000 versus 4203), but it's within striking distance of the GeForce RTX 2050 Laptop GPU and faster than the GeForce GTX 1050 Laptop GPU. And for those wondering, our recent RTX 4080 Time Spy score of 24113 should serve as a reminder that there's still an enormous gulf between APUs and GPUs.

MSI's first Radeon RX 7000 GPUs have hit the US retail market, with the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic listed for USD 1099.99 on Newegg and the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XT Gaming Trio Classic listed for USD 949.99. In terms of cooling, these feature custom designs separate from AMD reference designs, namely MSI's recognizable Gaming Trio design.

Similar in look and feel to the Gaming Trio designs seen in MSI's Radeon 6000 GPUs, both cards use MSI's TRI FROZR 2 thermal system with TORX FAN 4.0 technology, enhanced PCB materials, and an anti-bend backplate. Interestingly both cards feature a 2.5-slot design as opposed to the more prominent real estate we've seen in high-end GPUs of late. Both cards also feature 3 x 8-pin power connectors, so there might be room to overclock manually.

Here are the specs for the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic.

Earnings report cards for gaming's Big 3 are currently being tallied up but we've already spotted some interesting figures from top players Microsoft and Sony.

Note: The following figures are approximated, converted and rounded.

Both Microsoft and Sony recently announced their Holiday 2022 financials and gave us all the data required to make a full-year earnings analysis. In this article we'll be solely focused on the video game segment revenues and not total company numbers for the tech giants.

The rise of artificial intelligence is happening right now, and hustlers have already jumped on the bandwagon to push services such as ChatGPT as a way to get rich quick.

OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November last year, and since then, the AI has taken the world by storm, going viral on almost every social media platform and making numerous headlines across multiple prominent publications. While the technology behind ChatGPT is limited to its relatively small data set (compared to the data set that is coming in the next iteration of ChatGPT), its capabilities are still very impressive. ChatGPT being openly available has given the power of digital automation to the public, which has led to users suspecting that the emergence of AI will disrupt many industries around the world.

The unquestionable power of AI and the demonstrations provided by ChatGPT has garnered the attention of hustle culture, or people that create content that informs other people on how to make money. The Verge has reported several instances of hustlers claiming that ChatGPT is "one of the craziest softwares I've ever seen on planet Earth, and you can become a millionaire just using ChatGPT, I guarantee you", and "If you start today, you could literally have a million-dollar course creation business by this time next year."

Microsoft is reportedly moving to integrate OpenAI's viral sensation ChatGPT into its very own search engine, Bing.

A student and designer, Owen Yin, took to Twitter on February 4 to reveal screenshots of the new Bing search engine that he says just appeared when he loaded up his Microsoft Edge browser that is set to Bing. Yin says he "didn't do anything to find it," and only after a couple of minutes of him using it stopped working.

The designer explained his experience with the updated Bing in a Medium blog post where he noted that the typical Bing search engine was replaced by a chat box that read "ask it anything!" and allowed the user to enter 1,000 characters or less.

Scientists are sharing a new level of both excitement and confusion at the vortex that just formed near the north pole of the sun.

Space weather forecaster Tamitha Skov took to Twitter to share video footage captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which showcases a large filament of solar plasma snapping off of the sun's surface and forming a vortex that moved towards the sun's north pole. According to Skov, there are large implications for this event as it could unlock a deeper understanding of the sun's atmospheric dynamics close to its poles, a region that currently isn't very well understood.

Other scientists, such as Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, spoke to space.com and said that he has never seen a vortex quite like this and that research suggests that this event occurs once every 11 years. Notably, the vortex happened at the sun's exact 55-degree latitudes, and while scientists know that it happens once every 11 years, they don't know why it happens or the driving force behind it.

The US government has successfully shot down a Chinese "spy balloon" that was passing over strategic American military facilities.

American military fired missiles at the balloon on Saturday as it was flying approximately 60,000 feet above sea level six nautical miles off the shore in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Reports indicate that the balloon measured about three school buses in length and that US President Joe Biden gave the approval to bring the balloon down above water and not land to avoid any potential danger to Americans.

Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration (FDA) and Coast Guard cleared the potential landing site for the destroyed balloon before it was brought down. An F22 pilot was given the all-clear to fire a missile at the balloon. Many spectators saw the collision, and according to reports, the beaches in the surrounding region significantly increased in activity as people attempted to piece together what was going on.

A team of researchers has successfully cloned three "super cows" that are capable of producing nearly double the amount of milk than a typical dairy cow.

According to an article written in the Chinese state-run publication Global Times, a group of scientists from the Northwest University of Agricultural and Forestry Science and Technology has cloned three "super cows". The researchers report that three new calves have been born through surrogacy, the first was on December 30 and weighed 120 pounds, requiring cesarean section due to its immense size. So, why are they "super cows"?

What makes these cows "super" is that they originate from the Holstein Friesian breed that can be traced back to the Netherlands. These cows can produce as much as 18 tons of milk per year, or 100 tons of milk, throughout their lifetime. In comparison, only five in 10,000 cows have a chance at producing 100 tons of milk in their lifetime, and in most cases, it's discovered later in the cow's life that they have achieved this level of production, making breeding these "super cows" particularly difficult.

Chalk another one up on the board for TweakTown, as our very own Senior Hardware Editor has broken the PCMark 10 Extended Benchmark world record with an overall score of 18,101 - which, in case you're wondering, wasn't easy to pull off. It required some of the best hardware across CPU, GPU, RAM, and SSD storage - all tweaked and configured to perfection.

PCMark 10 isn't limited to GPU and gaming performance; it measures your entire PC. And with that, it's as much about the CPU, storage, and memory as the GeForce RTX 4090 found inside. On that front, Jon Coulter's World Record rig runs a Zotac-branded NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with an average clock frequency of 2,703 MHz.

Where it gets exciting is the rest of the build; a water-cooled Intel Core i9-13900KS CPU with an average clock frequency of 6.3 GHz. A built-for-overclocking GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS TACHYON motherboard tweaked and configured to deliver performance. TeamGroup 7200 DDR5 memory at an eye-watering 8000 MT/s CL34.

ASUS is rolling out a GPU trade-in program in the UK where you can hand in your old NVIDIA or AMD graphics card for a discount towards a brand-new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti or RTX 4080 GPU. The promotion is live now, will end on March 17, 2023, and isn't something we've seen before. At least, I haven't.

Typically, second-hand GPUs are on-sold to friends of a friend or a workmate. Or put up on Facebook Marketplace or another auction platform. And with that, even though the amounts and cash-back offered by ASUS might not be up there with second-hand pricing, it covers pretty much every major GPU release for the past several years - and is an excellent little all-around promotion. So yeah, we'd love this to make its way to the US or Australia.

ASUS has listed the participating retailers where the cash-back offer is available for the following GPUs.

NVIDIA's AD106 chip from its new Ada Lovelace GPU range is rumored to power the GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, which has yet to be formally revealed. According to a new listing and 3DMark benchmark results (via Chiphell), the AD106 GPU from NVIDIA boasts 4608 CUDA Cores, a 2535 MHz boost clock, a 128-bit memory bus, and a power rating of only 180W.

The benchmark results compare the chip to GA104 (the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti) and TU104 (the older GeForce RTX 20 Series). And based on the results, it looks either faster or slower than the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, depending on the test. DirectX 12 and raytracing look to be the clear winner. Still, the big takeaway is that the generational jump means that the level of performance for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060's AD106 will be RTX 3070 Ti at around 27% less power.

Harukaze5719 on Twitter has posted the results in a handy chart you can see here, where apparent wins in 1080p and 1440p tests like FireStrike and TimeSpy showcase that NVIDIA will be positioning AD106 GPU products as mainstream. As x060 class GPUs from NVIDIA are always the most popular, it will be interesting to see what price point the RTX 4060 eventually hits.

Back in the day, graphics cards from 3dfx Interactive - namely those with the Voodoo name - were what you craved to play cutting-edge games like Quake and Unreal. And although the rise of GeForce and Radeon slowly overtook Voodoo as the PC gaming GPUs of choice, those that have a fondness for classic late-'90s PC games and tech will no doubt have fond memories of 3dfx hardware.

This makes this eBay listing for a Voodoo 5 6000 interesting because it was the last 'Voodoo' card from 3dfx and a product that never actually made it to market. One of the reasons it never did come out was its use of multiple chips and four 166 MHz VSA-100 processors, each with 32 MB of 166 MHz SDRAM. The Voodoo 5 6000 was going to be the first 128 MB graphics card, and according to reports, it went through various prototype stages with only test cards produced. This is why this for-real Voodoo 5 6000 (Rev 3700A) on eBay currently has a bid of USD 9,500.

As per the seller, gtastuntcrew302.

As per our report last week, it has been over two months since AMD released a driver update covering RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 GPUs and older. The past four driver updates have been exclusive to the new RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs, which launched in December 2022. Even though it makes sense for AMD to focus on the new product launch and fix any issues that might have been discovered in the following weeks, it's still strange.

Namely, because day-one drivers are critical for new game releases, ensuring performance and compatibility is where it needs to be. On this front, high-profile PC games like Forspoken (an AMD-sponsored title) and the impressive Dead Space remake have launched without non-RDNA 3 Radeon driver support.

Naturally, the community has been wondering what's happening - especially when unified drivers are supposed to be the norm. On the NVIDIA front, even with the arrival of the GeForce RTX 40 Series, the current 528.24 WHQL GeForce Game Ready Driver still supports GeForce GTX 10 Series GPUs.

Sony has been accused of lying to European Commission regulators in a possible effort to derail approval of the Microsoft-Activision merger.

Reports indicate that Sony may be spreading disingenuous information to European regulators in an attempt to thwart approval of Microsoft's $68.7 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard King. Like the FTC and the CMA, the European Commission has been critical of the merger and has publicly stated concerns about reduced competition.

Now Microsoft's communication lead Frank Shaw says that Sony representatives are misleading regulators with false information regarding Call of Duty content. Microsoft has publicly announced a 10-year offer to continue bringing Call of Duty to PlayStation and PC with 100% content parity, and Microsoft even extended the deal to include Nintendo.

Sony has taken drastic measures to ensure it does not miss out on more PlayStation 5 console sales.

2020 was a terrible time for a console launch. The entire global supply chain was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and electronics production was affected. Lockdowns had also forced consumers to change their habits. Everyone was buying games, and practically everyone wanted a new PlayStation 5 console. The demand was incredibly high but Sony simply didn't have enough PS5 consoles to meet the demand.

Now all of that has changed. Throughout 2022, Sony aggressively invested in PlayStation 5 console production and shipping logistics. Sony rolled out a new console revision that used TSMC's 6nm chip production method to yield more silicon, which would lead to more hardware units. The new PS5 models also shaved off weight to reduce Sony's worldwide shipping costs.