meteorite

The PC had been gaining ground on consoles for years. Steam Machine is directly a meteorite to extinguish them

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What has been rumored around Valve for a long time has happened. No no ‘Half Life 3‘, but the return of Steam Machines. It was something that had been circulating for a while, but yesterday seemed like the day and Valve did not disappoint. They presented a new Steam Controller (with looks better than the first), the Steam Frame glasses and the cherry on top for many: its new Steam Machine. Its appearance is that of a Xbox Series Xbut flatter, and it is not only that it has all the external appearance of being a console, but that it aims to be the device that, finally, presents the PC as a serious threat to the console segment. Your argument? Which has the ease of use of a console, but also the versatility of a PC. We are not going to go into detail about its characteristics because we have already told everything there is to know about the inside of the Steam Machine and it is already estimated that its performance would be similar to that of a PS5. What I am going to do is theorize about why Valve’s new console can be the meteorite for consoles. And for Windows PCs. Now the Steam Machine can work. We have seen it on Steam Deck This thing about Steam Machines is nothing new. Not only the Steam Deck is a “Steam machine”, but because Steam Machines already existed a decade ago. At the end of 2013, Valve presented Steam OSa hybrid system between Linux and Steam focused on video games. It was green, but they wanted it to be the heart of the, also recently presentedSteam Machines. In their day, these first machines They were nothing more than pre-assembled computers thanks to the Valve partnership with brands such as Dell, Asus, Gigabyte or AlienWare. They had Steam OSthey were powerful, the hardware could be upgraded and… they didn’t make sense. Its high price, that at the time ‘gaming’ in Linux was not so developed and that to buy a PC like this, you would assemble one piece by piece, meant that Steam Machines did not take off. The fronts will be customizable In fact, all Steam hardware stumbled, from computers to the curious Steam Controller, to a steam link that was liquidated on Steam next to the command. It didn’t catch on, but Valve continued developing the idea and things were different with the Steam Deck. Following the Switch model, the Steam Deck was portable, but it could also output images to a television. It runs the games very well, it has generated a great community and it does not have Windows, but Linux and Steam OS have been its great strength. What didn’t work a decade ago works now thanks to Steam putting a lot of effort into making everything playable on the Deck: from native Linux games to Windows games that they run perfectly with something called Proton. Broadly speaking, it is a “translator” of Windows instructions so that Linux understands them and, thus, can run its games. Plus, everything is easy, intuitive, and if you just want to play, you don’t have to do weird things with the Deck. Bringing that concept from a laptop to a desktop PC was the natural step, and the new Steam Machine has something that the previous ones didn’t have. absolute support from Valve. The ecosystem That is, the company wanted the previous ones to work, but Steam OS was not mature nor did they have control over what the hardware companies did. The new Steam Machine IS from Steam, and that means that they have optimized software and hardware to make it work perfectly. It is something similar to what Apple does or what Sony and Microsoft do with AMD– PC-like components, but tweaked and tuned to meet your console needs. It seems that Valve is going with everything, which is what it did not do 10 years ago Valve itself has confirmed that they are currently fine-tuning some components, such as the GPU, with AMD. The TDP of the discrete GPU is 100W, but they have confessed who are working in a range between 100 and 130 together with the hardware company. That total control was something they didn’t have in the past, and something that didn’t happen years ago was that the components lasted as long. Like it more or less, the arrival of artificial intelligence tools in video games is showing that obsolete hardware (like the Steam Deck) can stay fresh thanks to image reconstruction tools and frame generation. When the Steam Machine arrives in early 2026your hardware will not be cutting edge (in fact, the GPU is based on RDNA3not in RDNA 4), but those AI tools are what gives valve confidence that everything will run smoothly. 4K60 thanks to FSR. Point directly to the living room It is exactly the same philosophy as a console: Closed hardware. Components adjusted by the system designer. Operating system optimized for those components. Direct support from the company that releases the hardware. And, as I said, Valve now has a reputation for supporting gaming hardware, something it has been demonstrating for years with the Steam Deck. The Steam Machine is a threat to consoles, Xbox and… the PC That’s why a Steam Machine that didn’t work in 2015 can work in 2026but there is something else: the market itself. Although consoles continue to have a high share (Sony has confirmed that a PS5 that is having a fairly weak generation in launches It has already sold more than 80 million units), things are very different now. No more big exclusives: everything comes out on PC. Excluding a Nintendo that, with nintendo switch 2 and its intellectual properties, it goes at its own pace, of course. Xbox launches its games directly on computers and consoles (in fact, it is already more third than first, becoming a heavyweight within PlayStation’s own video games) and Sony has been releasing its … Read more

We thought dinosaurs were on the verge of extinction before the meteorite. we were wrong

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The most emblematic mass extinction in Earth’s history without a doubt occurred up to 66 million years ago. It marked the end of an era like the Cretaceousand with it, the disappearance of dinosaurs that were not birds. But what was that extinction really like? This is the big question that experts have asked themselves and that it is already beginning to have light. For decades the scientific community has debated whether dinosaurs were already in decline before they abruptly went extinct or whether they were wiped out while they were still thriving. This is where the new has had an impact published study in the magazine Science in which the Spanish researcher Jorge García-Girón from the University of León participates, who sheds light on this debate. Simply put, the research refutes the idea of ​​a prolonged decline and suggests that dinosaurs were diverse and divided into distinct ecological regions just before the asteroid impact. The fossils of the south. Much of the uncertainty about this issue comes from a bias in the fossil record. The only well-dated faunas that span the extinction boundary come from northern North America (in the famous Hell Creek Formation). This made it impossible to know whether the extinction pattern observed there was a global or local phenomenon. In this case, the research team focused on a fossil-rich unit much further south, in the San Juan basin of New Mexico, known as the Member Naashoibito. The age of this formation has been a matter of controversy for years and was often considered much older. But now by applying geochronology techniques with Argon dating and magnetostratiography, the study has finally achieved precise dating. The results are conclusive: the Naashoibito Member dates back to the latest Cretaceous, which corresponds to up to 66 million years. This means that the fossils found there, which include a variety of species, preserve some of the last known non-avian dinosaurs. They lived a maximum of 340,000 years before the asteroid impact and were contemporaries of the Hell Creek fauna. Separated by weather. This finding is crucial because, for the first time, it allows us to compare two different faunas from the same end of the Cretaceous. And the result refutes the idea that we had all about decline in our minds. And the study not only dates the fossils, but also uses powerful ecological models to analyze the diversity of terrestrial vertebrates throughout North America. The results show that, far from forming a homogeneous and cosmopolitan fauna, the dinosaurs maintained high diversity and clear endemism until the end. In other words, it can be said that the dinosaurs were “strong” and divided into distinct regional assemblages. In this case, the study identifies two clear bioprovinces in the north and south that remained stable during the late Cretaceous. What separated these faunas? The analysis suggests that the main factor was temperature. More than a simple geographic division, different dinosaur communities were adapted to different climates. For example, the data propose that warmer southern regions may have been more tolerable for sauropods, while colder, more temperate northern regions were more suitable for hadrosaurines. The conclusion. The sum of the evidence points directly to the fact that non-avian dinosaurs were abruptly annihilated at the end of the Cretaceous. They were not in a decline as was thought, so they did not have this factor on top of them that would already condemn them to extinction if the disastrous event on Earth had passed. Instead, it has been seen that its ecosystem was diverse and biogeographically compartmentalized. Extinction in this way was sudden and, as the later fossil record demonstrates, was followed almost immediately by the rapid diversification and rise of mammals. Images | Vaibhav Pixels In Xataka | A museum kept bones for 20 years that they thought were rubble. Now we know that Mexico had its own T-Rex

According to NASA, there has only been one person injured by a meteorite. The Ottoman Empire has another opinion

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It could be a trivial question: how many people have been injured by the impact of a meteorite? The official answer, the only documented by NASA, is one. Only one. His name was Ann Hodges. He was taking a nap on the couch of his house, and survived to tell it. However, the dusty files of the Ottoman Empire tell a different story. One that does not end with a great Moraton, but with a death. The interrupted nap of Ann Hodges. The probability that a rock rock falls is very small, but it is never zero. On November 30, 1954, Ann Hodges was sleeping on the sofa of his house in Alabama when an object of the size of a softball ball crossed the roof, bounced on a radio and hit it on the hip. The result: a considerable bruise and a legal dispute between Hodges and her homemade. Tired of media care and curious tourists, the woman ended up donating the meteorite to Alabama Natural History Museum In 1956, where it can still be visited. Two subsequent cases. From the interrupted nap of Ann Hodges there have been two doubtful cases. In 1992, a Uganda child said he was reached in the head by a small rock fragment. The Meteoritus rain existedbut the child suffered any damage. In 2016, a man died in India for the alleged impact of a meteorite. NASA It ended up determining that had not been a meteorite, but an explosion on land. A death in Ottoman archives. In 2020, a team of researchers diving in the state archives of Türkiye found something unexpected. Three manuscripts written in Turkish Ottoman described with chilling details An event occurred on August 22, 1888. The documents, which were official reports aimed at Sultan Abdul Hamid II, report that a “bright light accompanied by smoke” was followed, for about ten minutes, of meteorites that fell “like the rain” on a village of Sulaymaniyah, a region that today is part of Iraq. The consequences were tragic: “A man died and another was seriously injured and was paralyzed.” The texts also mention extensive damage to crops. No one knows where those rocks are. The documents mention that samples of the rocks were sent to the capital, but the researchers have not found them. Even so, it is the first report in the story, backed by three manuscripts, which states that the impact of a meteorite killed a man. The incident has gone unnoticed by more than a century by the idiomatic barrier and the little interest in reviewing historical archives of this type, but seems authentic. “Because these documents come from official government sources, we have no suspicion about their truthfulness,” the study concludes. Unlikely, but not impossible. Every day, about 44 tons of meteoritic material bombard the earthbut the vast majority disintegrates in the atmosphere. That a large enough fragment survives and, in addition, impacts a populated area and, to top it off, hit a person, it is statistically unlikely, but not impossible. Even so, it is not the meteorites that should worry, but our own garbage. Every day three large pieces of space garbage, such as dead satellites or rocket stages re -entering in the atmosphere. The majority burns or falls into the ocean, but luck is not eternal. With the new megaconstellations, the resentments will multiply. “Sooner or later we will have bad luck and someone will be injured by the fall of space garbage,” warns the astrophysic Jonathan McDowell. Images | Public domain In Xataka | A huge meteorite boiled the oceans 3,000 million years ago. It was a “fertilizer bomb” for the earth

In 2011, a collector bought in Morocco a meteorite. It has turned out to be a direct test of thermal water on Mars

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A black stone that had fallen from the sky was discovered in the Sahara desert by a Saharawi group. Selling to the highest bidder, we have known for a long time that it comes from the Mars cortex, but they have had to spend more than 10 years for scientists to desert one of their best kept secrets. A meteorite called “Black Beauty”. Officially called Northwest Africa 7034, the 320 grams rock was found in 2011 in the Sahara desert, in Western Sahara, and later sold to an American collector in Morocco. Its composition is unique among known Martian meteorites. It contains very old and very young minerals glued to each other, but coincides with what was observed by NASA’s rovers on the surface of Mars, so it was part of the Martian cortex when it detached from the red planet. A time capsule. A Recent study It focuses on a zircon grain found in the meteorite. This zircon has no less than 4,450 million years, which places it in the earliest stages of Martian history. The majority of known meteorites that come from Mars are from later geological periods, so NWA 7034 provides invaluable information on what the surface environment of the red planet was long before becoming what it is today. The meteorite that contains the most water. What makes Black Beauty exceptional is that it houses 10 times more water than other Martian meteorites. It was known that by the interaction of the rock with the water present in the crust of the planet at the time of its formation, but the recent analysis of the zircon with modern microscopy techniques has revealed much more information. The fragment contains iron, aluminum and sodium, unusual elements for a zircon of purely magmatic origin. But it is above all the presence of tiny inclusions of magnetite (iron oxide) that suggests that it crystallized under hydrothermal conditions. That is, in the presence of water at high temperature, and in an oxidizing environment. Ancient hot springs. The magnetite is trapped in zones of the zirch that are not altered by radiation, which indicates that they were formed at the same time as the zirch, and not as a result of subsequent secondary processes, the researchers explain. What the study comes to say is that 4,450 million years ago, during what is known as the pre-ondic period of Mars, there were already hydrothermal conditions in the Martian cortex. The Black Beauty meteorite is a direct proof that Mars had water in its formation stages. Favorable conditions for life. The finding reinforces the hypothesis that Mars had from very early the necessary conditions to house life, or at least some environments suitable for microbial life. That there was life on Mars or that it arrived on earth through a meteorite is still two hypotheses for which we have no evidence. However, that a meteorite of 2011 has given us so much information and reasons to continue investigating demonstrates how important the Martian samples can be that NASA and China want to bring in the coming years. Images | New Mexico University, NASA

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