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Take my micro-transaction.

We may be on track to our own version of the Oasis after an announcement yesterday from Epic Games that it has raised $1 billion to put towards building “the metaverse.”

Epic Games has created multiple hugely popular video games, including Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed, and Godfall. An eye-popping demo released last May shows off Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, its next-gen computer program for making video games, interactive experiences, and augmented and virtual reality apps, set to be released later this year. The graphics are so advanced that the demo doesn’t look terribly different from a really high-quality video camera following someone around in real life—except it’s even cooler. In February Epic unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, an app that creates highly realistic “digital humans” in a fraction of the time it used to take.

So what’s “the metaverse,” anyway? The term was coined in 1992 when Neal Stephenson published his hit sci-fi novel Snow Crash, in which the protagonist moves between a virtual world and the real world fighting a computer virus. In the context of Epic Games’ announcement, the metaverse will be not just a virtual world, but the virtual world—a digitized version of life where anyone can exist as an avatar or digital human and interact with others. It will be active even when people aren’t logged into it, and would link all previously-existing virtual worlds, like an internet for virtual reality.

Continue reading “Epic Games Raised

Take my micro-transaction.

We may be on track to our own version of the Oasis after an announcement yesterday from Epic Games that it has raised $1 billion to put towards building “the metaverse.”

Epic Games has created multiple hugely popular video games, including Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed, and Godfall. An eye-popping demo released last May shows off Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, its next-gen computer program for making video games, interactive experiences, and augmented and virtual reality apps, set to be released later this year. The graphics are so advanced that the demo doesn’t look terribly different from a really high-quality video camera following someone around in real life—except it’s even cooler. In February Epic unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, an app that creates highly realistic “digital humans” in a fraction of the time it used to take.

So what’s “the metaverse,” anyway? The term was coined in 1992 when Neal Stephenson published his hit sci-fi novel Snow Crash, in which the protagonist moves between a virtual world and the real world fighting a computer virus. In the context of Epic Games’ announcement, the metaverse will be not just a virtual world, but the virtual world—a digitized version of life where anyone can exist as an avatar or digital human and interact with others. It will be active even when people aren’t logged into it, and would link all previously-existing virtual worlds, like an internet for virtual reality. Billion to Fund Its Vision for Building the Metaverse” | >

With full court approval.

In what’s believed to be an unprecedented move, the FBI is trying to protect hundreds of computers infected by the Hafnium hack by hacking them itself, using the original hackers’ own tools (via TechCrunch).

The hack, which affected tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server customers around the world and triggered a “whole of government response” from the White House, reportedly left a number of backdoors that could let any number of hackers right into those systems again. Now, the FBI has taken advantage of this by using those same web shells / backdoors to remotely delete themselves, an operation that the agency is calling a success.

“The FBI conducted the removal by issuing a command through the web shell to the server, which was designed to cause the server to delete only the web shell (identified by its unique file path),” explains the US Justice Department.

Continue reading “The FBI is remotely hacking hundreds of computers to protect them from Hafnium” | >

Physicists from Swansea University are part of an international research collaboration which has identified a new technique for testing the quality of quantum correlations.

Quantum computers run their algorithms on large quantum systems of many parts, called qubits, by creating quantum correlations across all of them. It is important to verify that the actual computation procedures lead to quantum correlations of desired quality.

However, carrying out these checks is resource-intensive as the number of tests required grows exponentially with the number of qubits involved.

Read more | >

Donna butts — executive director, generations united — focusing on the psycho-social aspects of healthy aging and wellness.

Donna Butts is the Executive Director of Generations United, an organization with a mission to improve the lives of children, youth, and older people through intergenerational collaboration, public policies, and programs for the enduring benefit of all, a position she has held since 1997. For more than 30 years, Ms. Butts has worked tirelessly to promote the well-being of children, youth and older adults through nonprofit organizations across the country and around the world. She began her career in her home state of Oregon as a youth worker with the YWCA, where she worked one-on-one with teens and saw the positive effects of intergenerational programs firsthand.

Ms. Butts has held leadership positions with Covenant House, a New York-based international youth serving organization, and the National 4-H Council. She served as the Executive Director for the National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting and Prevention before taking the helm of Generations United.

Continue reading “Donna Butts, Exec. Director, Generations United — Health, Aging, And Intergenerational Collaboration” | >

Covid variants will be the next big challenge. Can vaccines protect us?

All viruses mutate. They do this to adapt and survive better in their specific host. The virus that causes Covid-19 is no different: it has moved from the animal realm, where it most likely originated in bats, to the human world. Since then, scientists have been locked in a battle between the spread of the virus and the ability to immunise against it. We now have the vaccines to protect us against Covid-19 – but what happens when this virus mutates further, as it likely will? ”“{“uid”:0.9208093413637026,” hostPeerName”:” https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.

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A never-before-seen particle has revealed itself in the hot guts of two particle colliders, confirming a half-century-old theory.

Scientists predicted the existence of the particle, known as the odderon, in 1973, describing it as a rare, short-lived conjointment of three smaller particles known as gluons. Since then, researchers have suspected that the odderon might appear when protons slammed together at extreme speeds, but the precise conditions that would make it spring into existence remained a mystery. Now, after comparing data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring-shaped atom smasher near Geneva that’s famous for discovering the Higgs boson, and the Tevatron, a now-defunct 3.9-mile-long (6.3 km) American collider that slammed protons and their antimatter twins (antiprotons) together in Illinois until 2011, researchers report conclusive evidence of the odderon’s existence.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX added more money to its February equity raise, with the amended total reaching nearly $1.2 billion.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX added more money to its most recent equity raise, according to a securities filing on Wednesday.

SpaceX held a second close of about $314 million, adding to the $850 million that CNBC reported the company raised in February. The amendment brings the round’s new total equity raised to $1.16 billion, which the company raised at a valuation of about $74 billion.

Strong demand for the company’s shares centers around its ambitious Starship and Starlink projects.

Continue reading “SpaceX adds to previous equity round, pushing Elon Musk’s last raise total to nearly

Elon Musk’s SpaceX added more money to its February equity raise, with the amended total reaching nearly $1.2 billion.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX added more money to its most recent equity raise, according to a securities filing on Wednesday.

SpaceX held a second close of about $314 million, adding to the $850 million that CNBC reported the company raised in February. The amendment brings the round’s new total equity raised to $1.16 billion, which the company raised at a valuation of about $74 billion.

Strong demand for the company’s shares centers around its ambitious Starship and Starlink projects..2 billion” | >