Tech

After seven years of meticulous planning and execution, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission has achieved a historic milestone by safely delivering a capsule containing rocks and dust from asteroid Bennu to Earth.The capsule touched down at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City on Sunday morning, September 24. Shortly after landing, the capsule was transported to a temporary clean room to initiate a "nitrogen purge" process, designed to protect the precious sample from earth-based contaminants. NASA shared that nitrogen, a non-reactive gas, will ensure that the sample remains in its purest form, ready for rigorous scientific analyses.Scientists believe that the analyses of the Bennu samples will provide insights into planet formation and the origins of life-sust...

Microsoft has just announced the latest devices in its popular Surface line at a media event in New York City. The brand also unveiled that Copilot, its latest venture into AI that was announced earlier this year, will be woven into the fabric of its Windows 11 operating system and will be available natively across a variety of tasks and applications.The updated Surface Laptop Studio 2 is the clear standout and happens to also be the most powerful Surface the brand has ever released. It builds on its predecessor's success by introducing speed and power the brand claims will rival the best laptops out now, going so far as to claim this new device can demonstrate "up to 2x more graphics performance than MacBook Pro M2 Max". Microsoft's new flagship laptop includes the latest Inter Core proce...

Microsoft has finally received preliminary approval from the UK’s regulatory body, the Competition and Markets Authority (or CMA), to buy Activision Blizzard.The company first announced its intention to acquire Activision in January 2022 but the move hasn’t been without roadblocks. Following months of deliberation, the CMA gave its stamp of approval on an amended version of the $69 billion USD deal.In its ruling, the CMA detailed why the original deal had been blocked: the likelihood that Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision would harm competition in the cloud gaming market. In August, Microsoft submitted a revised version of the deal that would see the company sell off Activision’s cloud gaming rights to Ubisoft, which would step in to fill in the role Activision held in the cloud gaming...

Amazon is putting its money behind Anthropic, an AI startup dedicated to building systems and language models. The company shared that it has invested $4 billion USD to help the startup advance its development of generative AI.Anthropic was notably founded in 2021 by former employees at OpenAI, who departed after taking issue with OpenAI’s work with Microsoft. In the time since then, it’s raised over $500 billion USD in funding.Anthropic will be using Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to build and train its future models. In exchange, Amazon will become the “primary cloud provider” of Anthropic, helping to execute both research and the deployment of AI models.Amazon now has a minority ownership take in the company and its web services customers will be among some of the first to be gr...

If you're lonely, desperate, thirsty, have some serious cash to burn or all of the above, Tinder's just-announced $499 USD-per-month Tinder Select membership may be exactly what you're looking for. What do you get for your money? In short, ease of use and exclusivity. Tinder Select members are guaranteed to be seen by more users including the app's "most sought-after profiles" and are offered a line of direct unsolicited communication as they can DM other users without matching up to twice a week. Tinder says that less that 1% of its users will be "allowed" to join Tinder Select, and Select users can even choose to display their status with an exclusive profile badge. Tinder's parent company Match Group alluded to Tinder Select back in August when they stated that they'd launch a high-end ...