Mr.Shehbaz

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May your leadership continue to inspire — happy birthday, legend!

We're always keeping our eye on the ever-shifting fortunes of Steam's most-wishlisted games, and there have been some interesting developments lately. A few weeks ago there was the whole The Day Before debacle(opens in new tab), where one of the most-wishlisted games on Steam abruptly vanished due to a trademark dispute, a story that managed to only get weirder(opens in new tab) from there. And this week horror survival sandbox Sons of the Forest(opens in new tab) took over the top wishlist spot from Starfield, Bethesda's intensely-anticipated RPG. It looks like more Steam users are now interested in exploring a single creepy island than they are in visiting 1,000 planets in outer space. 'Course, there are few explanations for why an indie survival game just trumped Bethesda's next RPG on players' shopping lists. Starfield is coming to PC Game Pass at launch, so I'm sure tons of Steam users won't even be playing it on Steam. And despite loads of speculation(opens in new tab), Starfield still doesn't have a gott-dang release date yet. Also… why even bother wishlisting Starfield? It's not like you'll need an email reminder from Valve when it finally launches. You'll hear about it from every streamer, YouTuber, and gaming site in the world. But it's still a pretty amazing feat for a game about chopping down trees and hacking up cannibals in the woods, especially considering developer Endnight Games announced only two weeks ago that Sons of the Forest will launch into early access(opens in new tab) on February 23, rather than as a full release. The words "early access survival game" typically doesn't strike confidence into the hearts of gamers. Cool, cool. But what the heck is Sons of the Forest? If you're not familiar with Sons of the Forest, it's the sequel to another survival game, The Forest, which hit early access in 2014 (back when Steam Greenlight was still a thing). Marooned on an island, you had to build a shelter, craft weapons and tools, gather food and water, and deal with the island's scary-as-hell inhabitants, a tribe of vicious cannibals. The Forest had a pretty shaky start, as unfinished games often do, but it also showed tons of potential with striking visuals, horrifying enemies, and memorable survival and combat systems (you could use a severed leg as a melee weapon). Over the next several years the developers patched it repeatedly, added new features like co-op and even VR support, and eventually drew a crowd. More importantly, the crowd stayed: there are still thousands of people playing The Forest every day, and its peak consecutive player count of over 76,000 happened only a few months ago. So, The Forest became a sort of cult hit, and the sequel has some fun goodies planned. This time you're visiting an island to locate a missing billionaire, and you're not alone. Not only can you play Sons of the Forest in co-op, but you'll have a companion to help you out, too. As revealed by IGN(opens in new tab) last month, an AI-controlled survivor named Kelvin will pick up the slack by chopping wood, stockpiling resources, and handling other mundane chores while you focus on building or exploring. There are apparently other companions you can recruit later in the game, including a three-legged mutant. That's definitely intriguing enough for me to put it on my own wishlist. According to its Steam page(opens in new tab), Sons of the Forest plans to remain in early access for 6-8 months, though that could change depending on player feedback. It's set to launch on Feb 23. link: https://www.pcgamer.com/this-early-access-survival-game-just-climbed-over-starfield-to-become-the-most-wishlisted-game-on-steam/

National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022, according to their statement. Hubble's time-lapse movie of the aftermath of DART's collision reveals surprising and remarkable, hour-by-hour changes as dust and chunks of debris were flung into space, NASA said in their statement. Smashing head on into the asteroid at 13,000 miles per hour, the DART impactor blasted over 1,000 tons of dust and rock off of the asteroid. The Hubble movie offers invaluable new clues into how the debris was dispersed into a complex pattern in the days following the impact, NASA said. This was over a volume of space much larger than could be recorded by the LICIACube cubesat, which flew past the binary asteroid minutes after DART's impact, they said. The primary objective of DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was to test our ability to alter the asteroid's trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos, the agency said. Though neither Didymos nor Dimorphos poses any threat to Earth, data from the mission will help inform researchers how to potentially divert an asteroid's path away from Earth, if ever necessary, the statement said. The DART experiment also provided fresh insights into planetary collisions that may have been common in the early solar system. "The DART impact happened in a binary asteroid system. We've never witnessed an object collide with an asteroid in a binary asteroid system before in real time, and it's really surprising. "I think it's fantastic. Too much stuff is going on here. It's going to take some time to figure out," said Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. The study, led by Li along with 63 other DART team members, was published on March 1 in the journal Nature. The movie shows three overlapping stages of the impact aftermath: the formation of an ejecta cone, the spiral swirl of debris caught up along the asteroid's orbit about its companion asteroid, and the tail swept behind the asteroid by the pressure of sunlight, resembling a windsock caught in a breeze, the statement said. The statement described that the Hubble movie starts at 1.3 hours before impact. In this view both Didymos and Dimorphos are within the central bright spot; even Hubble can't resolve the two asteroids separately. The thin, straight spikes projecting away from the center (and seen in later images) are artifacts of Hubble's optics. The first post-impact snapshot is 2 hours after the event. Debris flies away from the asteroid, moving with a range of speeds faster than four miles per hour, fast enough to escape the asteroid's gravitational pull, so it does not fall back onto the asteroid, the statement said. The ejecta forms a largely hollow cone with long, stringy filaments. At about 17 hours after the impact the debris pattern entered a second stage. The dynamic interaction within the binary system starts to distort the cone shape of the ejecta pattern, the statement described. The most prominent structures are rotating, pinwheel-shaped features. The pinwheel is tied to the gravitational pull of the companion asteroid, Didymos. "This is really unique for this particular incident," said Li. "When I first saw these images, I couldn't believe these features. I thought maybe the image was smeared or something." Hubble next captures the debris being swept back into a comet-like tail by the pressure of sunlight on the tiny dust particles, the statement said. This stretches out into a debris train where the lightest particles travel the fastest and farthest from the asteroid. The mystery is compounded later when Hubble records the tail splitting in two for a few days, the statement said. A multitude of other telescopes on Earth and in space, including NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Lucy spacecraft, also observed the DART impact and its outcomes. This Hubble movie is part of a suite of new studies published in the journal Nature about the DART mission. link: https://www.gadgets360.com/science/news/nasa-hubble-telescope-captures-collision-dart-asteroid-dimorphos-3834581

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) are advanced machine learning techniques that can generate three-dimensional (3D) representations of objects or environments from two-dimensional (2D) images. As these techniques can model complex real-world environments realistically and in detail, they could greatly support robotics research. Most existing datasets and platforms for training NeRFs, however, are designed to be used offline, as they require the completion of a pose optimization step that significantly delays the creation of photo realistic representations. This has so far prevented most roboticists from using these techniques to test their algorithms on physical robots in real-time. A research team at Stanford University recently introduced NerfBridge, a new open-source software package for training NeRF algorithms that could ultimately enable their use in online robotics experiments, This package, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is designed to effectively bridge ROS (the robot operating system), a renowned software library for robotics applications, and Nerfstudio, an open-source library designed to train NeRFs in real-time. "Recently members of my lab, the Stanford Multi-robot Systems Lab, have been excited about exploring applications of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) in robotics, but we found that right now there isn't an easy way to use these methods with an actual robot, so it's impossible to do any real experiments with them," Javier Yu, the first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. "Since the tools didn't exist, we decided to build them ourselves, and out of that engineering push to see how NeRFs work on robots we got a nice tool that we think will be useful to a lot of folks in the robotics community." NeRFs are sophisticated techniques based on artificial neural networks that were first introduced by the computer graphics research community. They essentially create detailed maps of the world by training a neural network to reconstruct the 3D geometry and color of the scene captured in a photograph or 2D image. "The problem of mapping from images is one that we in the robotics community have been working on for a long time and NeRFs offer a new perspective on how to approach it," Yu explained. "Typically, NeRFs are trained in an offline fashion where all of the images are gathered ahead of time, and then the NeRF of the scene is trained all at once. In robotics, however, we want to use the NeRF directly for tasks like navigation and so the NeRF is not useful if we only get it when we arrive at our destination. Instead, we want to build the NeRF incrementally (online) as the robot explores its environment. This is exactly the problem that NerfBridge solves." NerfBridge, the package introduced by Yu and his colleagues, utilizes images captured by the sensors and cameras integrated in physical robots. These images are continuously streamed into Nerfstudio's powerful NeRF training library, enabling the creation of NeRFs that are constantly updating themselves and improving as the robot captures new images of its surroundings. To demonstrate the potential of their method, Yu and his colleagues used it to train a NeRF based on images captured by a camera mounted on a quadrotor, a drone with four rotors, as it flew around in both indoor and outdoor environments. Their results were remarkable, highlighting the value of NerfBridge for facilitating the use of NeRFs in robotics research. This promising method could thus soon be used by other researchers to train NERFs and test their algorithms on physical robots as they navigate their surrounding environment. Meanwhile, Yu and his colleagues plan to explore additional strategies that could broaden the use of NeRFs in robotics. "Ultimately, we hope that NerfBridge will lower the barrier of entry for other researchers to start looking at applications of NeRFs in robotics, and to test their new algorithms on robots in the real world," Yu added. "Moving forward from NerfBridge, we are going to be looking into methods for improving NeRF training when images come streamed from a robot and demonstrating the concrete advantages of using NeRF-based maps for other tasks in robotics like localization and navigation."

Just over 24 hours ago we announced a serious error on the part of the Gigabyte company. A bug in its latest firmware update left a major security gap in many board models. Today it seems that they recognize their mistake and launch a readjustment so that all affected users can do it as soon as possible and thus avoid security problems. BIOS update If you have a Gigabyte board, it is more than likely that you have been affected, so it is very interesting that you take into account what the company has launched a few hours ago to heal you. This update consists of a BIOS update that improves the signature verification process. It is not a permanent solution, but the company recommends doing it to avoid any unnecessary risk as much as possible, since they guarantee that the validation process for downloaded software and files is more secure, and installing something that compromises our files would be a more difficult task. Therefore, although the gap is still there, the temporary barrier that Gigabyte offers us can save us from some scare. As a second change, they have activated cryptographic verification, which consists of making sure that all downloaded files come from verified servers, certified and considered safe. The update also covers motherboards that were not affected by the problem such as the Intel 500/400 and AMD 600 series. We assume that they were afraid that another door would be found that would open more models and preferred to cover their backs. Therefore, with these two changes, the peace of mind that they offer us is somewhat greater than what we could have yesterday where there was no type of solution from them and we were sold waiting for such news. That doesn't change that the bug is very serious and hopefully they keep that in mind for future changes, where we will see updates tested and proven in a much more robust way. They also recommend putting a password to access the BIOS settings, something quite simple, which is not a major problem for us and which closes the door to unwanted activities. On the other hand, Eclypsium, the company that revealed the error, has also added that the previous version (with the error) automatically connected to 3 websites from which it downloaded software without our permission, these would be: http://mb.download.gigabyte.com/FileList/Swhttp/LiveUpdate4 https://mb.download.gigabyte.com/FileList/Swhttp/LiveUpdate4 https://software-nas/Swhttp/LiveUpdate4 Because of that, they recommend accessing the motherboard and from the firewall disable the "APP Center Download & Install". What will ensure that these types of actions are not carried out automatically, and we have to manually decide what we want to download and, above all, update. With all these changes and advice we hope that no user has been affected by this vulnerability and that everything has been a little scared. Of course, we will have to be aware of all the updates that come to us from now on if we have one of the affected boards. It's not going to happen to them again.

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