NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft brought back samples from the asteroid Bennu and, in a livestream earlier today, NASA scientists showed us what it found hanging out in the great vastness of the cosmos. Simply put, the agency brought back a fairly large sample collection of various-sized rocks, dust particles and intermediate-sized particles. 

The big news here is that samples from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid contain not only carbon, which is to be expected, but also water. These are the building blocks of life on Earth and, likely, everywhere else, so this is a big deal.

NASA

“The OSIRIS-REx sample is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever delivered to Earth and will help scientists investigate the origins of life on our own planet for generations to come,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. 

While space rocks and dust may seem boring to those expecting a bevy of friendly aliens, there's still plenty of time to make more fantastic discoveries. These samples have only been on the planet since September 25 and initial studies just began. NASA says they'll continue to study the particles and will create a registry of some kind so scientists from other organizations can borrow portions for a looksie. Some samples are also heading to museums. 

The space agency says that the "secrets held within the rocks and dust from the asteroid will be studied for decades to come, offering insights into how our solar system was formed, how the precursor materials to life may have been seeded on Earth, and what precautions need to be taken to avoid asteroid collisions with our home planet."

Additionally, scientists were pleasantly surprised by the presence of "bonus asteroid material" covering the outside of the collector head, canister lid and base. Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, says that the agency is ready with additional specialized tools to "study this precious gift from the cosmos."

OSIRIS-REx actually grabbed the sample from Bennu all the way back in 2020. After that, the space vessel spent 18 months analyzing the asteroid from above before making its way back to orbit our favorite life-sustaining blue marble.

Bennu is an ancient relic of our solar system, as NASA says it was formed anywhere from 700 million to 2 billion years ago after breaking off a much larger asteroid that was originally formed over 4.5 billion years ago. Due to its older-than-Methuselah status, these Bennu fragments could actually give us a window into how life started on Earth, thanks to the carbon and water already discovered and any future findings.

This isn't the end for the curious spacecraft OSIRIS-REx. It's still out there, doing its best Jim Kirk impression. Next up? The craft's heading to an asteroid named Apophis under a new mission name, OSIRIS-APEX.

Sony’s well-reviewed WH-CH720N headphones are on sale for just $98, which is $52 off the MSRP. It’s part of Amazon’s October Prime Day event, so make sure to snatch one up soon before the deal ends or before the stock runs out. These headphones are typically $150, and considered a bargain at that price, so this discount is sure to entice many consumers.

The WH-CH720N is already a budget-friendly purchase when compared to Sony’s spate of high-end headsets, but it still brings some modern features to the table. During our review, we called out the proprietary V1 chip that allows for high-grade active noise cancellation (ANC) and helps boost the sound quality a bit. We also appreciated the robust battery life, allowing for 35 hours of use per charge, which is a mighty fine metric for budget or mid-range headphones.

The controls are easily accessible, with a power/pairing button on the left side and a noise canceling button on the right side that cycles between ANC and transparency modes. There’s also the typical three-button array for volume and for switching tracks. The center button, however, can be used to instantly call up your preferred voice assistant, like Siri or Google Assistant.

As for connections, there’s the standard USB-C port for charging and there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack if you want access to sweet, wired audio. The design is comfort-forward, with ample cushioning in the ear pads and a lightly-wound headband hinge that won’t squeeze your noggin.

What are the downsides here? The exterior uses a whole lot of plastic, which takes the aesthetic appeal down a notch. This model also lacks Sony’s Speak-to-Chat feature that automatically pauses audio when you’re talking. The 720N headphones don’t even pause when you take them off, so make sure you manually push the stop button on your track to preserve battery life.

As previously stated, this is a limited-time Amazon Prime Day deal that will likely bid adieu by the end of the day. These headphones are available in both black and white.

Your October Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Learn about Prime Day trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Fall Prime Day deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

1010music’s colorful and portable Nanobox line just gave birth to a brand-new sampler, the Tangerine. This may be an ultra-portable device, but it boasts powerful sampling features, alongside a pleasingly bright orange colorway. The Tangerine can trigger one shots, play time-synced loops and record live loops, among other tasks.

The maximum sample size is 4GB, so when we say “trigger one shots” we really mean you can trigger multi-sample pieces that act as a backbone to a beat or melodic composition, in addition to simple snare hits and the like. This being a modern device, you can also slice up clips and resample playback. There’s also “musically intelligent” looping that should keep everything in time without any obvious air-filled gaps.

As for the hardware itself, you get a touchscreen interface for making adjustments and a 32GB microSD card slot for storage, though there’s a small amount (64MB) of internal storage. The Tangerine connects to other instruments via MIDI for capturing additional samples, which is always nice.

Each file boasts a 4GB storage cap, which the company says is enough for up to four hours of continuous streaming. There’s a 500 multi-sample bank limit and a total wav capacity of 1,500. You can save multi-sample banks to nearly 80 presets for later use, complete with 16 velocity layers and eight stereo sample pads. There are plenty of adjustment options to change up the sound of these presets via granular synthesis, pitch, gain, filters, quantization and more. MIDI-mapped parameter controls also transfer over, so you can fiddle with those for even more sonic diversity. This is a real-deal sampler that approaches groovebox territory. Not bad for a ridiculously tiny device that 1010music calls “nearly indestructible.”

There’s one caveat, and it’s the same one that accompanies other Nanobox devices, like the impressively powerful Lemondrop and Fireball synthesizers. Despite weighing just 0.25 pounds and shipping with a pocket-friendly form factor, the Tangerine sampler is not battery-powered and must be plugged in via USB-C to function. For true portability, you’d need an external power bank.

1010music’s Tangerine sampler is available now and costs $400. In addition to the device, you also get a USB-C cable, the aforementioned microSD card and a type B TRS MIDI to MIDI 5-pin DIN adapter.

When Gmail launched for Wear OS last week, folks wondered how long it would be before the companion Google Calendar app would arrive. Well, it’s here. Google Calendar has officially shipped for Wear OS, giving smartwatch-wearers all kinds of access to their day-to-day schedules, as originally spotted by 9to5Google.

You’ll see it on the launcher as Calendar once installed. It’s basically a beefed-up version of the Schedule view found on phones. When you open up the app, you'll find a daily calendar complete with precise location details for events, notes, notifications and more. You can adjust whether or not you’ll be attending any saved event, in addition to deleting the event entirely.

If you’re tired of staring at a teensy smartwatch screen, you can also use the Calendar app to open up any date or event on your smartphone. Certain events, like holidays and birthdays, can appear as background images in the main feed of the app. There’s even some Google Tasks integration here, so you can mark events as complete.

Like many smartwatch apps, Google Calendar is for consumption and not creation. You cannot use the app to make new events or tasks. There are, however, two new Wear OS tiles that let you quickly glance at upcoming events and tasks without opening up the full app.

Google Calendar for Wear OS is now available to download on the Play Store. Just search for Calendar in the wearable version of the Play Store or remotely install it via the app listing.

As Wear OS 3 and Wear OS 4 continue to gain new features, the company’s older smartwatch operating systems are losing tools. Google recently announced that its proprietary voice assistant would no longer work on watches running anything before Wear OS 3.

Popular audio gadget maker Bastle just released an iOS app called Outsidify that lets you capture and transform audio directly from your iPhone’s speakers and microphone. Despite the slightly cringey app name, it looks pretty darned fun, allowing users to explore the ambient noise around them to create some truly unique soundscapes.

Once you capture some audio via the app, use Bastl’s latest creation to make harmonious or discordant feedback, manipulate responses, apply resonant filters and more. You can even use your mouth, speaking directly into the phone’s microphone, to create your own resonant filter.

Additionally, you can capture impulse responses from just about anything, with Bastl using a coffee cup or a construction site pipe as examples. These IRs can then be used to run other audio sources through to create custom reverbs and the like, via a DAW or a standalone piece of hardware. The only caveat here is the phone has to fit inside of the object or the space it's capturing, so your dreams of having an impulse response from the inside of a toilet paper roll are, sadly, quashed.

The integrated media player allows for full looping and lets you adjust the start and end points. There’s also a speed slider, from ¼ speed to 4x, and a cropping function. As for the recorder, it saves wav files to pass on to other devices, again with adjustable start and end points. You can also speed match recordings, so the recorded speed automatically matches the tempo set in the player while preserving the pitch. Of course, there’s also a countdown timer so you can get in position before the app starts recording.

The audio gets transformed via a feedback pad with adjustment options for amount and tone. There’s even an adjustable delay that changes how long it takes the microphone to reach the feedback pad.

Outsidify is an iOS exclusive that costs $6 when purchased from the official App Store. This app is unique for Bastle, as the company typically manufactures analog gadgets like the battery-powered Kastle portable synthesizer. We’ve also praised Bastle’s Microgranny Monolith granular sampler and the Bestie portable mixer.

Atari just announced preorders for a physical cartridge for the company’s once-ubiquitous 2600 console. You read that right. A gaming console that counts 1982 as its most successful year is releasing another new cartridge in the year 2023. The game-in-question is called Save Mary and was actually developed during the console’s golden years, before being shelved when the 2600 went the way of the dodo.

Save Mary was in development for two whole years, which is a lifetime in the generation of gaming that preceded the NES. The normal timeframe to produce a game back then was six to nine months, with some notorious titles taking just five or six weeks. Save Mary was originally developed by veteran Atari staffer Tod Frye, the guy behind the 2600 version of Pac-Man and the Swordquest series.

Preordering one of these cartridges for $60 nets you a silver collector’s edition box and a full-color manual, in addition to the game itself. There are only 500 of these carts available, making them an attractive collector’s item for Atari diehards.

Atari

As for the game, Save Mary tasks you with, well, saving a lady named Mary. She’s stuck in a steep canyon that’s rapidly filling with water. You use a crane to build platforms to help her escape the dire predicament. Power-ups appear on the cliffside to help you out, an idea that Atari says was likely inspired by Pac-Man. Atari’s founder Nolan Bushnell lauded the title in a 1989 interview, saying that it was the “first game in which you rely on construction rather than destruction to save the princess.”

Save Mary joins several other recently-manufactured Atari 2600 cartridges, many of which are brand-new titles like Mr. Run and Jump or unreleased “lost” games like Aquaventure. Each cartridge in the Atari XP line is “manufactured to exact standards” from yesteryear with some modern flourishes like beveled edges to prevent pin damage and gold-plated connectors. You don’t have to track down a dusty old 2600 to play these games, as Atari currently sells an upgraded version of the console, called the 2600+.

The rumor that X, formerly known as Twitter, is going to integrate more paid services continues to persist, with Bloomberg reporting that the company’s testing a trio of subscription tiers to help solve its financial woes. Details are scant, but it looks like these paid subscription options will impact the number of ads you see when using the platform.

A developer and leaker with the X handle @aaronp613 dived into the source code of the app’s most recent iOS update and discovered some information on these proposed subscription tiers, though the information has been trickling out for the past week. It looks like it’ll break down into Basic, Standard and Plus, as indicated by the Bloomberg report. Basic users will continue to see the regular amount of ads, labeled or not, while standard users will see half of the ads, which is equivalent to a current perk exclusive to the folks who plunk down $8 each month for a blue check. Plus users will see no ads whatsoever, providing them unfettered access to whatever conspiracy theory is snaking around the Internet on any given day. 

We don't have any idea how much these tiers would cost. Meta's reportedly making a similar move in Europe, as it could charge users up to $17 each month for an ad-free experience on Instagram and Facebook. 

Other than the ad stuff, which hasn’t been confirmed by the company, nobody knows what additional perks these subscription tiers would provide paying users. It also remains to be seen if this indicates a push toward mandatory subscriptions to use the service. However, with the paid basic plan reportedly displaying the current level of ads, it’s hard to see what a free account would experience. Twice the ads? Three times the ads? Elon Musk coming to your home to blame the company’s financial decline on the Anti-Defamation League? It’s anybody’s guess, though the rumor that X was going full on pay-to-play comes from an off-hand comment made by Musk during a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So it doesn’t look like this is part of any move to force people to pay for the service but it does look like Twitter/X is continuing to throw monetization ideas at the wall to see what sticks as part of its overarching plan to become the “everything app.” It’s hard to imagine that a reduction in the frequency in ads would be enough to entice many users to send a monthly stipend to one of the world’s richest men, so let’s wait and see what other perks the team cooks up for the three proposed subscription tiers.

As for the company’s financials, Bloomberg reports that CEO Linda Yaccarino recently told bank lenders that advertisers have been returning to the platform, albeit with reduced budgets. On the other hand, Reuters just reported that X’s US ad revenue has plummeted each and every month since Musk’s acquisition, with the latest figures showing a 60% year-over-year decline as of August.

Google has finally released a version of Gmail for Wear OS to accompany the launch of the Pixel Watch 2, as originally spotted by 9to5Google. The company teased this feature back in May at I/O, but we were left wondering when it would actually launch. Well, here it is, giving you prime wrist access to your emails.

This has been a long-awaited option for Wear OS users, as Google hasn’t offered a direct way to access Gmail with its smartwatches, outside of notifications, until now. Being as how Gmail is one of the company’s tentpole offerings, it’s a mystery as to why it took this long. Still, better late than never.

The app seems robust, with options to refresh your inbox, scroll through emails and even switch between multiple accounts on the fly. You can also adjust the overall settings so new email notifications pop up on the watch’s face as you go about your day. The app works with 2021’s Wear OS 3 and the just-released Wear OS 4, so those with slightly older smartwatches can also read an endless barrage of campaign donation emails. Gmail for Wear OS is available now via the Google Play Store.

Back at I/O, Google also announced that the company’s Calendar app was coming to Wear OS, but that has yet to materialize. Calendar for Wear OS is expected to allow users to check schedules, RSVP to invites, update tasks and to-do lists and more. Additionally, Google’s smart home ecosystem will soon get improved Wear OS integration, letting you answer your Nest doorbell from your wrist.

However, as Wear OS 3 and Wear OS 4 continue to gain new features, the company’s older smartwatch operating systems are losing features. Google recently announced that its proprietary voice assistant would no longer work on watches running anything before Wear OS 3.

Developer CD Projekt Red just announced it is in the early stages of developing a live-action TV show or movie based on the once-hated and now-beloved Cyberpunk 2077 game. Details are scant, as we don’t even know if it’ll be a film or ongoing series, but the game developer has teamed up with production company Anonymous Content to bring Night City to glorious live-action life.

You probably don’t know Anonymous Content by name, but the company’s behind a slew of high-profile and critically-acclaimed TV shows, like True Detective and Mr. Robot. It’s also helped produce recent films like The Revenant and Spotlight, but also classics like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. This is a serious production company, so we could be in for something special.

While CD Projekt Red hasn’t announced whether this will be a show or movie, there are some hints indicating it’ll be a TV series. The developer went out of its way to note that it’s working closely with certain members of the Anonymous Content team, all of which are heavily involved in the TV side of things. For instance, the dev called out the company’s Head of Television Garret Kemble and noted Chief Creative Officer David Levine’s decade-long tenure at HBO. Levine was heavily involved with getting Game of Thrones and Westworld on the network, in addition to other hit shows.

This situation here looks slightly different from Netflix’s The Witcher show, as that’s adapted from the source books and not the video game series. Cyberpunk 2077 is a wholly original IP, giving CD Projekt Red a good amount of creative control over how the story plays out. To that end, the developer hasn’t indicated this would be a one-to-one adaptation of the game, rather stating its “set in the world” of Cyberpunk 2077.

This looks to be in the extreme early stages of development, so it could be years before we see the lawless Badlands or the slums of Dogtown in live action. This series or movie will join the Netflix cartoon Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

When you think about it, it’s pretty nuts that the Cyberpunk IP is flourishing in this way. The game launched as a buggy mess, forcing Sony to actually pull it from its online store and both CD Projekt Red and Microsoft to issue refunds to unhappy customers. Since that disastrous launch, the developer has slowly and steadily improved just about every aspect of the game, transforming whole gameplay mechanics in the process. The end result? Cyberpunk 2077 is now considered to be a truly special video game, with 25 million sales to prove it. Even the recently-released Phantom Liberty DLC has already racked up 3 million downloads. There’s also a pseudo-sequel on the way.

Blizzard’s hit dungeon-romping sequel Diablo IV is officially coming to Steam on October 17. This is a boon for PC gamers, as it was previously only available on Blizzard’s proprietary sales platform Battle.net, and Steam is a more widely-used service. The news should be of particular interest for Steam Deck owners. It was already possible to jump through the hoops required to get the game running on the portable console, but this will radically streamline the process.

Valve hasn’t rated the game for Steam Deck compatibility, but that’ll likely happen closer to launch. Additionally, you’ll still need a Battle.net account to get started, so have those login credentials ready. Just like the Battle.net release, standalone PCs require at least an Intel Core i5 or AMD FX-8350 CPU and 8 GB of RAM, though 16 GB is preferred, to get this running.

The Steam release joins a new DLC called Season of Blood, also launching on October 17. The content drop brings a new questline, updated vampire powers, five new endgame bosses and much more, like the addition of actress Gemma Chan as a vampire hunter.

There’s also a big-time patch coming out on the same day. Patch 1.2.0 brings all kinds of quality of life improvements, like faster XP gain, better navigation around Nightmare Dungeons, streamlined character rewards, more durable NPC companions, reduced backtracking and an increase in world boss spawns for loot gathering purposes. That’s just scratching the surface. For a full list of improvements, check out the patch notes.

We were impressed by many aspects of Diablo IV at launch, praising the world design for having the “most detailed and creative assets Blizzard has ever produced.” We also said that it’s basically the Diablo game we’ve been “dreaming of ever since” the original title launched back in the hazy Clinton-infused days of 1997.

Blizzard has been protective of its IP with regard to allowing them to flourish on other sales platforms than Battle.net. However, Diablo IV isn’t the first high-profile game to migrate to Steam. Back in August, the hit multiplayer shooter Overwatch 2 launched on Valve’s storefront. At that time, Blizzard said that several titles would be making their way to Steam, but it didn’t say which ones. Obviously, Diablo IV is one, but we’re still waiting on more releases.