Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.

The vertical laser, developed over six years and already working in WD’s labs, emits light straight down onto the disk rather than from the edge, delivering more thermal energy while occupying less vertical space — enabling areal densities up to 10 TB per platter, up from today’s 4 TB, and room for additional platters in the same enclosure. WD’s first commercial HAMR drives arrive in late 2026 at 40-44 TB on an 11-platter design, ramping into volume production in 2027. A 12-platter platform follows in 2028 at 60 TB, and WD expects to hit 100 TB by around 2030.

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After celebrating its fifth anniversary earlier this month, the tough-as-nails survival Viking game Valheim is coming to Switch 2 this year. Initially launched as a Steam Early Access game in 2021, Valheim lets you team up with up to nine other players online as you explore a procedurally generated open world inspired by Norse mythology.

Whether playing alone or with your Viking pals, survival depends on crafting the right gear, building shelters and prevailing in punishing combat encounters. The ultimate aim of the game is to kill various gods dotted around the game’s different biomes to be deemed worthy of entering Valhalla. But you can ignore the bosses if you’d rather focus on collecting recipes and cooking up banquets for your fellow bearded adventurers.

If I’m being brutally honest, the Switch 2 version of Valheim doesn’t appear to be much of a looker in the announcement trailer, but it’s technically still an early access game at the time of writing, and you do get support for mouse controls and HD Rumble 2 on Nintendo’s console.

After debuting on PC, Valheim later made the jump to Xbox and will also launch on PS5 later this year. There’s currently no release date for that or the newly announced Switch 2 port, but they could arrive at the same time to coincide with the game hitting 1.0.

Valheim was announced during today’s third-party-focused Nintendo Direct, in which a bunch of Bethesda games were also confirmed for Switch 2 in 2026. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/valheim-is-coming-to-switch-2-this-year-164159284.html?src=rss

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is heading to the Switch 2 on June 3. The news was dropped at this morning’s Nintendo Direct livestream. This is the second part of the FF7 remake-a-palooza. The first installment, Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade, was released for Nintendo’s console on January 22. Only a six month wait between chapters? Sony fans had to wait four years.

For the uninitiated, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth remakes the middle portion of the PS1 classic Final Fantasy 7. The graphics are, obviously, quite different, but so is the gameplay. This isn’t exactly the JRPG you remember, with a real time action system instead of turn-based mechanics.

This is a full port of the PS5 game, further proving that the Switch 2 is a capable little machine. It’s certainly pretty to look at, as proven by the trailer. As an aside, the port is also coming to Xbox Series X/S on the very same day.

Now that all of the major consoles will soon be home to both current FF7 remakes, we can join in solidarity as we wait for the third and final installment. Yeah, that’s right. A JRPG from 1997 requires three gigantic remakes. We don’t even know when the third one is coming out, but rumors suggest 2027.

Today’s Nintendo Direct also revealed that a bunch of Bethesda games are heading to the Switch 2, including Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition on February 24, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on May 12 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered sometime later in the year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/final-fantasy-7-rebirth-comes-to-switch-2-on-june-3-163009481.html?src=rss

Horizon is one of PlayStation’s biggest franchises at this point. Alongside Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, there are a bunch of spin-off games. Joining them is Horizon Hunters Gathering, a co-op action game that original Horizon developer Guerrilla is making for PlayStation 5 and PC. We’ve known since 2022 that the studio was working on a Horizon multiplayer game.

Here, you’ll be able to team up with a couple of friends to hunt killer machines, Monster Hunter style. Guerrilla says it’s designing the hunts to be challenging and replayable. “Combat is tactical, reactive, and deeply skill-based, building on the tactical precision of the Horizon games while embracing the dynamics of team play,” game director Arjan Bak wrote on the PlayStation Blog. The game also has a more stylized look compared with the more grounded visuals of the mainline games.

Horizon Hunters Gathering has multiple game modes. In Machine Incursion, you’ll battle waves of machines plus a tough boss. Guerrilla is pitching Cauldron Descent as a longer, multi-stage mode with a series of chambers to work through. These will contain things like battles with machines and “hidden doors that promise power and reward for teams prepared to open them.”

There’s a roster of characters to choose from that will expand over time. Each hunter has their own melee or ranged weapons and playstyles. The game has a roguelite perk system too, through which you’ll be able to shape your hunter’s build on each run, and you can select a class that alters their abilities. There’s a social hub where you can customize your characters, visit shops, upgrade your gear and assemble a team for a mission.

Guerrilla says Hunters Gathering is canonical to the Horizon universe. It has a narrative campaign with “new mysteries, characters and threats.” You’ll be able to play through the story with bots or with friends in co-op. The studio says it will add more adventures over time.

There’ll be support for cross-play and cross-progression between PS5 and PC. Guerrilla says it’ll have more to share about the game in the coming months, but you won’t necessarily need to wait a long time to try it out. The first closed playtest will take place later this month. You can sign up through the PlayStation Beta Program.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/guerrilla-reveals-horizon-hunters-gathering-a-co-op-action-spin-off-for-ps5-and-pc-162058264.html?src=rss

Back in 2022, astronomers were puzzled by a so-called “tidal disruption event” (TDE), dubbed AT2018hyz, that had faded when it was first noticed three years earlier, only to unexpectedly reanimate and burp out extremely bright radio waves. University of Oregon astrophysicist Yvette Cendes, a co-author of that 2022 paper, dubbed the black hole “Jetty McJetface” (a nod to the 2016 online British competition to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatface).

Astronomers have continued to monitor it ever since. Far from fading again, the TDE has grown 50 times brighter, and that brightness continues to increase. The black hole’s energy emission might not peak until 2027, according to a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

As we’ve previously discussed, it’s a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon—including light—is swallowed up and can’t escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object’s matter is actually ejected out in a powerful jet.

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Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the creative process. Amazon plans to launch a closed beta program in March, inviting industry partners to test its AI tools. The company expects to have results to share by May. […] Amazon is leaning on its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, for help and plans to work with multiple large language model providers to give creators a wider array of options for pre- and post-production filmmaking.

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The iPhone is going orbital, and this time it will be allowed to hang around for a while.

On Wednesday night, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and beyond.

“NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II,” Isaacman wrote on X. “We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world.”

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Electric vehicle enthusiasts are probably right to feel a little disheartened about the state of the United States’ transition to EVs. But they should take heart that our region is an outlier. The other side of the Atlantic still seems relatively positive about the whole idea, even as Europe’s car market recovers more slowly from the pandemic than the rest of the world. Last year, overall vehicle sales in Europe barely ticked up, rising 2.2 percent from 2024. EV sales, meanwhile, increased by 29 percent, bringing market share to an impressive 19.5 percent.

That’s according to data from automotive analyst JATO Dynamics, which finds that the big winner has been Volkswagen. Last year, its EVs outsold those from Tesla for the first time as sales of VW’s electric offering grew by 56 percent, while Tesla’s shrank by 27 percent.

To put that into concrete numbers, VW sold 274,278 EVs to Tesla’s 236,357. And that’s just the VW brand itself—the automaker also owns Skoda (in 4th place, with 171,703 sales), Audi (5th place, 153,845 sales), Cupra (15th place, 79,269 sales), and Porsche (21st place, 32,715 sales). Not a bad effort, considering just over a decade has passed since VW’s Dieselgate scandal.

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The digital publishing platform Substack has told some of its users that their data was stolen in a security breach. The affected account holders had their email addresses and phone numbers scraped in a hack that occurred in October 2025.

In an email posted on Bluesky, Substack CEO, Christ Best, said the company became aware of the breach on February 3, which involved an “unauthorized third party to access limited user data without permission.” While internal metadata was also shared in the hack, Best said that credit card numbers and other financial details were not. No passwords were obtained either.

As well as apologizing to Substack users, the company’s CEO also said in the email that the security vulnerabilities have now been addressed. “We are conducting a full investigation, and are taking steps to improve our systems and processes to prevent this type of issue from happening in the future,” he said. Best added that there is no evidence that any of the stolen data is being “misused,” but advised the affected account holders to be wary of suspicious emails or text messages they may receive. 

The newsletter platform has not disclosed how many accounts were hacked, but Bleeping Computer reported that a database allegedly containing 697, 313 stolen data records from Substack was leaked on the hacking forum BreachForums.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/substack-ceo-informs-users-of-a-data-breach-151113809.html?src=rss