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With Wagner Moura 's recent win in the Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama category at the Golden Globes for his performance in The Secret Agent , he became the second Brazilian performer to win the award in as many years, following Fernanda Torres ' victory the year before. The back-to-back wins mark an unprecedented and hugely important moment for Brazilian cinema, but they have also highlighted an incredible coincidence: both actors once starred together in Basic Sanitation: The Movie , one of Brazil's most underrated comedies that deserves renewed attention. Since it remains the only project the two actors have shared, one question naturally follows: could Brazil's next Golden Globe winner already be hiding among its cast?

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Samsung quietly prepares DRAM-free PCIe 4.0 SSD with flagship-level read performance

Host Memory Buffer replaces dedicated DRAM inside Samsung's upcoming budget SSD

Leaked specifications reveal 7,150 MB/s speeds from Samsung's mystery SSD

Samsung appears to be preparing a budget PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD which removes the onboard DRAM cache found in traditional drive designs.

The unannounced model surfaced briefly on Samsung's website recently, before the listing was taken down without any official confirmation from the company.

Listed specifications describe a 1TB drive with sequential read speeds reaching 7,150 MB/s and write speeds reaching 6,450 MB/s.

How Samsung plans to compensate for missing DRAM

Traditional SSDs rely on dedicated DRAM to store the flash translation layer, letting the controller locate data across NAND flash quickly and efficiently.

However, as the global “RAMpocalypse” continues to worsen, even the largest vendors are looking for ways to reduce their dependence on DRAM.

Without that DRAM, drives can suffer higher latency and weaker performance during sustained workloads or heavy multitasking sessions.

To offset this gap, Samsung is using NVMe's Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature, which reserves a small portion of system memory over PCI Express instead.

That borrowed memory holds mapping metadata rather than user files, connecting logical addresses to their physical NAND locations directly.

HMB generally cannot match the responsiveness of dedicated DRAM, though it improves performance compared to drives with no caching mechanism at all.

The drive carries a 400 TBW endurance rating, a modest figure for a 1TB SSD by current industry standards.

That number hints at Quad-Level Cell (QLC) NAND flash, which stores four bits per memory cell and lowers both cost and durability.

Samsung has not disclosed publicly which specific NAND flash technology sits inside this particular unannounced drive model.

Rising component costs are reshaping SSD design choices

Samsung's move comes as NAND flash and DRAM pricing continue climbing sharply across the broader global storage industry this year.

Removing the DRAM package cuts component costs directly, simplifies PCB design, and helps maintain competitive pricing within the mainstream SSD segment overall.

QLC NAND increases storage density and lowers manufacturing costs, though it trails Triple-Level Cell NAND in sustained write performance and long-term endurance ratings.

It also remains considerably less durable than older Multi-Level Cell (MLC) and Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND technologies still found in some enterprise storage products.

Despite those trade-offs, the listed sequential speeds of 7,150 MB/s and 6,450 MB/s place the drive alongside many mainstream PCIe 4.0 SSDs with dedicated DRAM caches.

Samsung has not announced pricing, availability, the official product name, or the specific NAND technology used in the drive.

Until those details emerge, the leaked specifications point toward a lower-cost PCIe 4.0 SSD designed to balance competitive performance with reduced manufacturing costs as memory prices continue rising.

Via The Guru of 3D

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In order for stars to form, you need the right ingredients to make it happen: gravity, mass, time, and of course the right type of matter in the form of baryons. Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe had plenty of them, but they were all very simple: protons, deuterons, helium-3 and helium-4 nuclei, and a tiny bit of lithium-7. These nuclei, made out of protons and neutrons, were all that the Universe gave us to work with prior to the formation of stars. But, in clumps of material small and large, from individual star clusters to enormous galaxy cluster scales and everything in between, these baryons went to work and, across the Universe over the past 13.8 billion years, created sextillions of stars within the observable Universe.

In a very real way, the story of how we ourselves came to be is the story of how baryons evolved, matured, and wound up deducing our own cosmic history . Yet so many mysteries about that process still remain, from the baryon life cycles within galaxies to identifying the right conditions to trigger star-formation in the vastly different environments where they formed throughout cosmic history. Yet, it’s by examining so many different environments where stars do and don’t form, in galaxies of all different masses and metallicities, and in the modern, nearby Universe as well as far back in ancient cosmic history, that we can begin to piece the full story together.

Here to guide us through this topic, and starring in this episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast, I’m so pleased to welcome newly-minted Dr. Ava Polzin to the show . Ava got her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is about to begin a postdoc at the University of Toronto, and has a whirlwind tour of information in store for us all on this episode of the podcast. Plus, at the end, there are a few bonuses she was eager to highlight, and you can find the links to two fabulous papers she’s written for the good of the world below:

Astronomy as a Field: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04041

Picture an Astronomer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24465

Make sure you tune in; this is one episode you won’t want to miss!

This article Starts With A Bang podcast #131 – The baryon life cycle is featured on Big Think .

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day is just a few short weeks away, and the fourth standalone MCU story following everybody's favorite webhead is already expected to be Hollywood's third billion-dollar film of 2026 after The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Toy Story 5 . In domestic previews alone, Brand New Day is expected to gross over $200 million, representing but a fraction of the huge earnings that Tom Holland 's upcoming sequel will rake in. The early projections show that Marvel Studios ' partnership with Sony Pictures to share rights to the Spider-Man IP has continued to bear fruit, and it just seems to keep getting better.

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It's easy to feel like the videogame industry is an endless tornado of shattered dreams and hellfire, and that's because it is . But it also brings in a lot of money, and our beloved PC gaming space in particular is growing faster than both mobile and console markets. Thursday, a report from Alinea Analytics said Steam is just exiting its biggest six months ever.

"In the first half of 2026, we estimate that games on Steam generated $11.1B in gross revenue, the platform’s highest-ever half-year," wrote Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis. "That’s up 14.5% on H1 2025, and up 8% even on the holiday-heavy H2 2025, which is the more remarkable comparison given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys."

The full blog highlights some of the biggest reasons for all this growth: new games are more expensive, friendslop megahits like Meccha Chameleon rake in mountains of cash before you can blink, and third parties like Ubisoft are back on Steam after they tried and failed to escape Gabe's dread labyrinth to play ball with Steam's lessers.

The full list of causes and takeaways is in the blog, but this all follows a very long upward trend: as the report states, Steam's yearly revenue has gone from $5.5 billion in 2017 to roughly $20 billion in 2025. A growing percentage of all those sales is from old games, too: so far, "just 21%" of Steam's 2026 revenue has come from games that released this year, down from 29% in 2024.

That said, plenty of new games have been big moneymakers so far: the top five in terms of gross revenue for new games are Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2 (Meccha Chameleon snuck into sixth place). It might be especially galling to see a first-party Xbox game at the top of that list given, you know, everything . It's hard to imagine this growth will continue—or even amount to much—if the industry's biggest companies continue to destroy the teams they depend on .

2026 games : All the upcoming games

Best PC games : Our all-time favorites

Free PC games : Freebie fest

Best FPS games : Finest gunplay

Best RPGs : Grand adventures

Best co-op games : Better together