Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Astronomers mapped out the stars (shown here in blue) and gas (green) of the strange galaxy known as AGC 114905. (credit: Javier Román and Pavel Mancera Piña)

Three years ago, Filippo Fraternali and his colleagues spotted a half dozen mysteriously diffuse galaxies, which looked like sprawling cities of stars and gas. But unlike almost every other galaxy ever seen—including our own Milky Way—they didn’t seem to be enshrouded in huge masses of dark matter, which would normally hold those stellar metropolises together with their gravity. The scientists picked one to zoom in on, a modest-sized galaxy about 250,000 light-years away, and they pointed the 27 radio telescope antennas of the Very Large Array in New Mexico at it.

After gathering 40 hours’ worth of data, they mapped out the stars and gas and confirmed what the earlier snapshots had hinted at: “The dark matter content that we infer in this galaxy is much, much smaller than what you would expect,” says Fraternali, an astronomer at Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. If the team or their competitors find other such galaxies, it could pose a challenge for scientists’ view of dark matter, the dominant perspective in the field for at least 20 years. Fraternali and his team published their findings in December in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Enlarge /  LG DualUp Monitor (28MQ780). (credit: LG)

Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show previews a massive amount of products planned for release during the year. 2022's show revealed the latest in PC monitors targeting better image quality, faster refresh rates, and features that help facilitate increasingly virtual workplaces.

There was a lot to see, so we've broken down seven of the most interesting monitors announced at CES 2022 below. We've included no concepts, no gag releases, and no gimmicks (OK, maybe a few gimmicks). Regardless, none of these products should end up as vaporware.

Here's a look at some of the most unique monitors expected to come out over the next 12 months.

An alien (Alan Tudyk) disguised as a small-town doctor must figure out how to rescue his new human friends from an invading army of his fellow aliens in the trailer for the second season of Resident Alien, SYFY's critically acclaimed dramedy based on the Dark Horse comics created by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse. This gem of series easily made our list of the best TV shows of 2021.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As I've written previously, Tudyk's alien (with an unpronounceable name) takes on the identity (and form) of small-town doctor Harry Vanderspiegle, and promptly gets roped into investigating a local murder. Harry's mission is to wipe out the human race for the good of the planet, but he finds himself wavering in his resolve the more time he spends in the small town of Patience, Colorado.

Enlarge / AMD's RX 6500 XT. (credit: AMD)

AMD will begin selling its latest budget GPU, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, on January 19th. Its retail price is $199. But the ongoing GPU shortage, caused in part by cryptocurrency miners and scalpers who are snapping up every card they can get, has made it mostly impossible to get any graphics card at its list price over the past year. 

Whether the 6500 XT will be any different depends partly on supply, but AMD has also apparently designed the card to make it deliberately less appealing to miners while retaining its usefulness as an entry-level graphics card. Speaking to journalists in a press roundtable earlier this week, AMD Radeon VP Laura Smith talked about how the 6500 XT had been “optimized” for games (a transcript from a now-apparently-deleted PCWorld article is preserved here).

"We have really optimized this one to be gaming-first at that target market," Smith said. "And you can see that with the way that we configured the part. Even with the four gigs of frame buffer. That’s a really nice frame buffer size for the majority of AAA games, but it’s not particularly attractive if you’re doing blockchain-type activities or mining activities.”