Microsoft announced the price of the Xbox Series X , one day after the Xbox Series S price and positioning leaked. Finally. Now that they have, we know the bigger, more powerful platform will be $499. That’s an amazing price, given the quality of the hardware under the hood. The Xbox Series X features an eight-core Ryzen CPU based on the Zen 3 architecture, clocked at either 3.8GHz or 3.6GHz with SMT enabled. It has a 52 CU version of RDNA2, when the RDNA architecture AMD launched last year with just 40 CUs is more than a match for the RTX 2070.
There are numerous risks associated with sending someone into space — it’s a completely foreign environment where even a small mistake can spell disaster. Our squishy Earth-bound bodies are so unaccustomed to space that simply being in microgravity can be dangerous long-term. The key to safer human space travel could be . Scientists have found that blocking a protein in mice makes them resistant to muscle and bone wasting in space. Could humans be next? The story actually starts 20 years ago when researchers at Johns Hopkins University discovered myostatin, a protein that limits muscle growth. Researchers Se-Jin Lee and Emily Germain-Lee showed at the time that deleting the gene caused mouse muscles to grow about twice as large.
The 2021 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan will envelop the driver and passengers in unparalleled layers of comfort, safety, technology, and — this is a German car, after all — performance. Most active and passive safety technology comes standard, which is both good and about what you’d expect when the least expensive S-Class sold in the US starts at $96,000 (estimated). The S-Class sold fewer than 71,000 units worldwide last year, mostly in China, Germany, and the US. But the midsize E-Class and compact E-Class each sold five times as many units, and much of the S-Class tech trickles down quickly.
Even if you never had an aptitude for electronics or programming, you probably wished you could build your own robot. Sure, you probably weren’t seriously thinking R2-D2 or Data or WALL-E, but if you could cobble together a mechanical creation that moved and operated and reacted on its own, that would have been the pinnacle of your engineering powers for all time. Geeek Club understands this primary dream to create robotic life. With the , they’ve fashioned a cool, yet realistic way for even the non-tech inclined among us to assemble and program our own robot curiosities. This project far exceeded expectations when it landed on Kickstarter last year, racking up pledges almost 20 times over their modest $7,000 goal.
By all accounts, the tumult of 2020 has severely affected Google’s phone launch plans. The Pixel 4a was delayed for months, and the rumored Pixel 5 is shaping up to be less powerful than the Pixel 4. Now, a mysterious device that looks like the Pixel 5 has appeared online, courtesy of a Mexican radio broadcaster. However, this is the Pixel 5s. And what’s that? No one knows, but there is some useful speculation. We have a few solid details on Google’s upcoming semi-flagship Pixel release. The Pixel 5 will reportedly drop Face Match, returning to a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor.
AMD has just announced major events on Oct 8 and October 28, focused on Zen 3 and RDNA2, respectively. While the PC market has been pretty quiet as far as new launches lately, that’s about to change with hardware refresh cycles for consoles, gaming PCs, and Intel’s mobile Tiger Lake all coming in the last few months of the year. Join us on October 8 and October 28 to learn more about the big things on the horizon for PC gaming. — AMD Gaming (@AMDGaming) Nvidia hasn’t launched Ampere yet, but one thing is obvious: The existing GPU price structure isn’t long for this world.
Adata’s XPG SX8200 Pro is fast SSD capable of transferring data at speeds up to 3,500MB/s, making it one of the fastest M.2 SSD drives on the market. It’s also on sale with its price cut in half. Adata has made quite a name for itself in the SSD market by offering affordable high-performance SSDs. This model of the company’s popular XPG SX8200 Pro product line has 512GB of storage space and it’s one of the fastest NVMe SSDs on the market with a read speed of 3,500MB/s. Right now this SSD is marked down from $129.99 to just $64.99, which makes it an excellent deal.
With the OM 4 smartphone gimbal ($149), DJI continues to impress with its ability to innovate. When I first reviewed the Osmo Mobile 2, its features were impressive, but it was a massive device to have to carry just to improve your smartphone photography. With the Osmo Mobile 3, DJI addressed that issue by creating a clever folding system. However, using it was still a little painful, as you had to fiddle with the clamp each time you wanted to mount your phone. Unless you have two phones and can leave one in it, that’s quite a hassle. I’ve been using a review unit of the new DJI OM 4 (DJI shortened up the name from Osmo Mobile to OM) for a few days now, and its new magnetic mounting system makes those worries a thing of the past.
Image credit: Earlier this year, Western Digital got caught when it came to disclosing that certain drives used shingled magnetic recording (SMR) instead of conventional magnetic recording (CMR). Now, the company has been caught misrepresenting how fast certain hard drives spin — and trying to weasel out of it with reference to a marketing claim that doesn’t mean what it used to. Apparently, enthusiasts have been trying to prove Western Digital hard drives spin at the wrong speed for . While WD Red drives are listed as “5400 RPM class” in Western Digital’s literature, the drives actually spin faster than that, at 7200 RPM.
