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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked over a week before launch and sent Nintendo into a frenzy, with the company firing off copyright takedowns to Discord, Twitch, Twitter, and more. Now the game is officially out, but some pirates are still illegally downloading the game, and Nintendo is watching. Read more... View the full article

Link gets most of the Purah Pad’s fancy abilities before he descends onto Hyrule’s surface in Tears of the Kingdom’s intro. However, there are a few you have to go out of your way to find, and one of them is the camera function. This allows you to take photos of all your adventures through Hyrule, and it would be a… Read more... View the full article

Ubisoft quietly stopped talking about NFTs a while ago, but the controversial idea is now back in the form of new licensed collectibles for Assassin’s Creed. Come along for the ride and we can suffer through this together. Read more... View the full article

Ten thousand years after the last woolly mammoths vanished with the last Ice Age, a team of computational biologists is on a mission to bring them back within five years. Led by synthetic biology pioneer George Church, Colossal Biosciences is also seeking to return the dodo bird and Tasmanian tiger, as well as help save current-day endangered species. “The woolly mammoth is a very iconic species to bring back,” said Eriona Hysolli, head of biological sciences at Colossal Biosciences, which is based in Austin, Texas. “In addition, we see that pipeline as a proxy for conservation, given that elephants are endangered and much of this work directly benefits them.” There’s plenty of work to be done on endangered species, as well. Critically endangered, the African forest elephant has declined by nearly 90% in the past three decades, according to Colossal. Poaching took more than 100,000 African elephants between 2010 and 2012 alone, according to the company. “We might lose these elephant species in our lifetime if their numbers continue to dwindle,” said Hysolli. Humans caused the extinction of many species, but computational biologists are now trying to bring them back with CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies, leaps in AI, and bioinformatics tools and technology, such as the NVIDIA Parabricks software suite for genomic analysis. To bring back a woolly mammoth, scientists at Colossal start with mammoth and elephant genome sequencing and identify what makes them similar and different. Then they use Asian elephant cells to engineer mammoth changes responsible for cold adaptation traits, transferring the nuclei of edited cells into elephant enucleated eggs before implanting them into a healthy Asian elephant surrogate. Tech Advances Drive Genomics Leaps It took enormous effort over two decades, not to mention $3 billion in funding, to first sequence the human genome. But that’s now been reduced to mere hours and under $200 per whole genome, thanks to the transformative impact of AI and accelerated computing. It’s a story well known to Colossal co-founder Church. The Harvard Medical School professor and co-founder of roughly 50 biotech startups has been at the forefront of genetics research for decades. “There’s been about a 20 millionfold reduction in price, and a similar improvement in quality in a little over a decade, or a decade and a half,” Church said in a recent interview on the TWiT podcast. Research to Complete Reference Genome Puzzle Colossal’s work to build a reference genome of the woolly mammoth is similar to trying to complete a puzzle. DNA sequences from bone samples are assembled in silico. But degradation of the DNA over time means that not all the pieces are there. The gaps to be filled can be guided with the genome from an Asian elephant, the closest living relative for the mammoth. Once a rough representative genome sequence is configured, secondary analysis takes place, which is where GPU acceleration with Parabricks comes in. The suite of bioinformatic tools in Parabricks can provide more than 100x acceleration of industry-standard tools used for alignment and variant calling. In the alignment step, the short fragments, or reads, from the sequenced sample are aligned in the correct order, using the reference genome, which in this case is the genome of the Asian elephant. Then, in the variant-calling step, Parabricks tools identify the variants, or differences, between the sequenced whole genome mammoth samples and the Asian elephant reference. In September, Colossal Biosciences spun out Form Bio, which offers a breakthrough computational life sciences platform, to aid its efforts and commercialize scientific innovations. Form Bio is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that provides companies with technology support and AI platforms guidance. Parabricks includes some of the same tools as the open-source ones that Form Bio was using, making it easy to replace them with NVIDIA GPU-accelerated versions of those tools, said Brandi Cantarel, vice president of bioinformatics at Form Bio. Compared with the open-source software on CPUs, Parabricks running on GPUs enables Colossal to complete their end-to-end sequence analysis 12x faster and at one-quarter the cost, accelerating the research. “We’re getting very comparable or exactly the same outputs, and it was faster and cheaper,” said Cantarel. Analysis Targeting Cold Tolerance for Woolly Mammoth A lot is at stake in the sequencing and analysis. The Form Bio platform hosts tools that can assess whether researchers make the right CRISPR edits and assist in analysis for whether cells are edited. “Can we identify what are the targets that we need to actually go after and edit and engineer? The answer is absolutely yes, and we’ve gotten very good at selecting impactful genetic differences,” said Hysolli. Another factor to consider is human contamination to samples. So for each sample researchers examine, they must do analysis against human cell references to discard those contaminants. Scientists have gathered multiple specimens of woolly mammoths over the years, and the best are tooth or bone samples found in permafrost. “We benefit from the fact that woolly mammoths were well-preserved because they lived in an Arctic environment,” said Hysolli. An Asian elephant is 99.6% the same as a mammoth genetically, according Ben Lamm, Colossal CEO and co-founder. “We’re just targeting about 65 genes that represent the cold tolerance, the core phenotypes that we’re looking for,” he recently said on stage at South by Southwest in Austin. Benefits to Biodiversity, Conservation and Humanity Colossal aims to create reference genomes for species, like the mammoth, that represent broad population samples. They’re looking at mammoths from different regions of the globe and periods in time. And it’s necessary to parse the biodiversity and do more sequencing, according to researchers at the company. “As we lose biodiversity, it’s important to bring back or restore species and their ecosystems, which in turn positively impacts ecology and supports conservation,” said Hysolli. Population genetics is important. Researchers need to understand how different and similar these animals are to each other so that in the future they can create thriving populations, she said. That ensures better chances of survival. “We need to make sure — that’s what makes a thriving population when you rewild,” said Hysolli, referring to when the team introduces the species back into an Arctic habitat. It’s also been discovered that elephants are more resistant to cancer — so researchers are looking at the genetic factors and how that might translate for humans. “This work does not only benefit Colossal’s de-extinction efforts and conservation, but these technologies we build can be applied to bettering human health and treating diseases,” said Hysolli. Learn more about NVIDIA Parabricks for accelerated genomic sequencing analysis. View the full article

Chip manufacturing is an “ideal application” for NVIDIA accelerated and AI computing, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday. Detailing how the latest advancements in computing are accelerating “the world’s most important industry,” Huang spoke at ITF World 2023 semiconductor conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Huang delivered his remarks via video to a gathering of leaders from across the semiconductor, technology and communications industries. “I am thrilled to see NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI in service of the world’s chipmaking industry,” Huang said as he detailed how advancements in accelerated computing, AI and semiconductor manufacturing intersect. AI, Accelerated Computing Step Up The exponential performance increase of the CPU has been the governing dynamic of the technology industry for nearly four decades, Huang said. But over the past few years CPU design has matured, he said. The rate at which semiconductors become more powerful and efficient is slowing, even as demand for computing capability soars. “As a result, global demand for cloud computing is causing data center power consumption to skyrocket,” Huang said. Huang said that striving for net zero while supporting the “invaluable benefits” of more computing power requires a new approach. The challenge is a natural fit for NVIDIA, which pioneered accelerated computing, coupling the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs with CPUs. This acceleration, in turn, sparked the AI revolution. A decade ago, deep learning researchers such as Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton discovered that GPUs could be cost-effective supercomputers. Since then, NVIDIA reinvented its computing stack for deep learning, opening up “multi trillion-dollar opportunities in robotics, autonomous vehicles and manufacturing,” Huang said. By offloading and accelerating compute-intensive algorithms, NVIDIA routinely speeds up applications by 10-100x while reducing power and cost by an order of magnitude, Huang explained. Together, AI and accelerated computing are transforming the technology industry. “We are experiencing two simultaneous platform transitions — accelerated computing and generative AI,” Huang said. AI, Accelerated Computing Come to Chip Manufacturing Huang explained that advanced chip manufacturing requires over 1,000 steps, producing features the size of a biomolecule. Each step must be nearly perfect to yield functional output. “Sophisticated computational sciences are performed at every stage to compute the features to be patterned and to do defect detection for in-line process control,” Huang said. “Chip manufacturing is an ideal application for NVIDIA accelerated and AI computing.” Huang outlined several examples of how NVIDIA GPUs are becoming increasingly integral to chip manufacturing. Companies like D2S, IMS Nanofabrication, and NuFlare build mask writers — machines that create photomasks, stencils that transfer patterns onto wafers — using electron beams. NVIDIA GPUs accelerate the computationally demanding tasks of pattern rendering and mask process correction for these mask writers. Semiconductor manufacturer TSMC and equipment providers KLA and Lasertech use extreme ultraviolet light, known as EUV, and deep ultraviolet light, or DUV, for mask inspection. NVIDIA GPUs play a crucial role here, too, in processing classical physics modeling and deep learning to generate synthetic reference images and detect defects. KLA, Applied Materials, and Hitachi High-Tech use NVIDIA GPUs in their e-beam and optical wafer inspection and review systems. And in March, NVIDIA announced that it is working with TSMC, ASML and Synopsys to accelerate computational lithography. Computational lithography simulates Maxwell’s equations of light behavior passing through optics and interacting with photoresists, Huang explained. Computational lithography is the largest computational workload in chip design and manufacturing, consuming tens of billions of CPU hours annually. Massive data centers run 24/7 to create reticles for new chips. Introduced in March, NVIDIA cuLitho is a software library with optimized tools and algorithms for GPU-accelerated computational lithography. “We have already accelerated the processing by 50 times,” Huang said. “Tens of thousands of CPU servers can be replaced by a few hundred NVIDIA DGX systems, reducing power and cost by an order of magnitude.” The savings will reduce carbon emissions or enable new algorithms to push beyond 2 nanometers, Huang said. What’s Next? What’s the next wave of AI? Huang described a new kind of AI — “embodied AI,” or intelligent systems that can understand, reason about and interact with the physical world. He said examples include robotics, autonomous vehicles and even chatbots that are smarter because they understand the physical world. Huang offered his audience a look at NVIDIA VIMA, a multimodal embodied AI. VIMA, Huang said, can perform tasks from visual text prompts, such as “rearranging objects to match this scene.” It can learn concepts and act accordingly, such as “This is a widget,” “That’s a thing” and then “Put this widget in that thing.” It can also learn from demonstrations and stay within specified boundaries, Huang said. VIMA runs on NVIDIA AI, and its digital twin runs in NVIDIA Omniverse, a 3D development and simulation platform. Huang said that physics-informed AI could learn to emulate physics and make predictions that obey physical laws. Researchers are building systems that mesh information from real and virtual worlds on a vast scale. NVIDIA is building a digital twin of our planet, called Earth-2, which will first predict the weather, then long-range weather, and eventually climate. NVIDIA’s Earth-2 team has created FourCastNet, a physics-AI model that emulates global weather patterns 50-100,000x faster. FourCastNet runs on NVIDIA AI, and the Earth-2 digital twin is built in NVIDIA Omniverse. Such systems promise to address the greatest challenge of our time, such as the need for cheap, clean energy. For example, researchers at the U.K.’s Atomic Energy Authority and the University of Manchester are creating a digital twin of their fusion reactor, using physics-AI to emulate plasma physics and robotics to control the reactions and sustain the burning plasma. Huang said scientists could explore hypotheses by testing them in the digital twin before activating the physical reactor, improving energy yield, predictive maintenance and reducing downtime. “The reactor plasma physics-AI runs on NVIDIA AI, and its digital twin runs in NVIDIA Omniverse,“ Huang said. Such systems hold promise for further advancements in the semiconductor industry. “I look forward to physics-AI, robotics and Omniverse-based digital twins helping to advance the future of chip manufacturing,” Huang said. View the full article

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Back in 2011, a mech combat game was announced that blew the internet’s socks clean off. With a Maschinen Krieger-inspired aesthetic and fast-paced, stomping robot action, Hawken looked like one of the coolest video games the world had ever seen. Read more... View the full article

For the past year a company known as Irreverent Labs have been working on a game called MechaFightClub, which was to be driven by NFT sales and be based on the proud and ancient sport of cockfighting. Read more... View the full article

Hello Poseido666, Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask. Poseido666 joined on the 05/15/2023. View Member

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There are two ways you can approach Crusader Kings III. On the one hand it’s a sprawling grand strategy game where you’re in control of a Kingdom’s entire economy, military, society and faith. On the other, it’s a big ol’ RPG. Read more... View the full article

Everyone seems to be playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and my Switch won’t let me forget it. This weekend, as I too paraded around Hyrule exploring the Breath of the Wild sequel, I kept experiencing mild interruptions as the many other heroes of Hyrule with whom I’m acquainted picked up their Switches. Read more... View the full article

2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a smash hit, and many of its beloved maps have continued to pop up in subsequent CoD entries over the last 15 years. Classics, I’m sure you agree. But it turns out that one of the most popular (and smallest) maps in Modern Warfare only accidentally got included after a… Read more... View the full article

When The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild launched in 2017, I found it pretty overwhelming in scope and complexity. To some extent, that feeling is still pretty pervasive in its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. The game is all about trial and error, learning as you go, and finding your own way without a ton of… Read more... View the full article

Since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom dropped on May 12, fans have been obsessed with the game’s new creation abilities. Thanks to Link’s new skills, particularly Fuse and Ultrahand, players are building absurdities like planes and tanks to commit war crimes in Hyrule Kingdom. But there’s one object folks… Read more... View the full article

Internet archivists have finally found and uploaded a long-lost Cartoon Network segment in which ‘90s toon star Johnny Bravo did color commentary on a sped-up episode of the formative shonen anime Dragon Ball Z, and it’s now on the Internet Archive for your viewing pleasure. Check it out and be amazed that Bravo’s… Read more... View the full article

Jeff Bezos’ evil empire isn’t done with The Lord of the Rings just yet. Following the nearly billion-dollar debacle that was the first season of The Rings of Power, Amazon is planning to launch a new MMO based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy universe. The good news is that it’s being made by the developers behind the hit… Read more... View the full article

Last night’s episode of Succession featured a breakneck, stressful presidential race to 270 electoral votes that threatened to upend my delicate cocktail of Lexapro and weed—but it wasn’t that poll that had Twitter shook. No, it was an entirely different one that asked who’s hotter: young Al Pacino or young Robert… Read more... View the full article

If you’re like a lot of people playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you might still be trudging through the first area of the game. Players have reported spending four to seven hours in the tutorial section, which is a fairly surprising amount of time for anyone who just wants to jump into the main… Read more... View the full article

Pretty far into Respawn and EA’s new Star Wars game, Jedi: Survivor, you’ll encounter a difficult boss fight on Jedha against a powerful foe who can easily kill you in a few hits. But to talk about this boss fight in any more detail requires spoiling a big moment from the game’s second half. So if you haven’t reached… Read more... View the full article

CD Projekt Red has a bunch of Witcher games in various stages of development, and one of them appears to have just undergone a major overhaul. Project Sirius, a multiplayer Witcher spin-off has “changed,” and the studio is laying off close to 30 developers who are working on it, CDPR confirmed to Kotaku. Read more... View the full article

Link meets a pretty colorful cast of characters during his journey through Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. While there are plenty of love stories throughout the game, fans are starting to speculate that one male character might have feelings for another man based on a diary entry in Kakariko… Read more... View the full article

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is finally out on Nintendo Switch, and players are having the time of their lives with Link’s new rune abilities. From crafting absurdly long bridges to constructing flamethrowing dicks, there’s no shortage of stuff you can create in Link’s latest open-world adventure. In… Read more... View the full article

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a beautiful, occasionally breathtaking, and often reaffirming adventure through a fantasy world filled with whimsy and wonder. But it has a deep, dark underbelly. No, I’m not talking about Ganandorf and the gloom flowing out of the pit beneath Hyrule castle. I’m talking… Read more... View the full article

Last month, regulators blocked Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard in the UK, seemingly spelling doom for the $69 billion deal. On May 15, however, European Union regulators announced it has been approved on the continent, giving the gaming companies some fresh momentum as they seek to salvage the mega merger. Read more... View the full article