Tweaked Semiconductor to Release Hydrogen from Water
Hydrogen is the simplest of all elements with a single proton and single electron (and occasionally a neutron or two). Right now there is a great deal of interest in using this gas for fuel because the processes involved often result in only water, and not more harmful emissions. Because of how light hydrogen is though, it does not exist in our atmosphere because it will simply float off into space. One common way to get hydrogen is from coal and natural gas, which means to get the clean-burning hydrogen one must first use less clean materials. A potential source of hydrogen is water, H20, but separating the hydrogen and oxygen takes so much energy this method is not used much. Researchers at the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville have discovered a potentially cheaper means to release hydrogen from water. The team was exploring what can be done with an inexpensive semiconductor, comprised of antimony and gallium nitride, after simple tweaks were made to it. Their findings were a material capable of photoelectrochemical water splitting. What that means is if you put the tweaked material into water and let the Sun shine on it, the water will split into hydrogen and oxygen. This new technique may prove itself to be economical and a carbon-free hydrogen source for the future.
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Developer Behind L.A. Noire Goes into Administration
Back in May of this year, a game many had been looking forward to, L.A. Noire, was released. The game was developed by Sydney, Australia-based Team Bondi and published by Rockstar, and the game was met with critical acclaim. L.A. Noire was the first game from Team Bondi, which had spent the better part of six years working on it. However, after the game was released some reports came out from the studio that talked of unsatisfactory working conditions, former employees who were left out of the credit list on the game, and even Rockstar saying it was not likely it would publish the next game from Team Bondi. The studio was also rumored to be selling its non-L.A. Noire intellectual property to filmmaker George Miller's KMM studio, but now, the news takes a turn for the worse. It appears that Team Bondi has been placed into external administration, meaning the fate of the studio is up in the air. Some employees are already working with KMM on Happy Feet Two, so it is likely the rest of Team Bondi will join them.
It is kind of sad to see a studio, which released such a great game, have so much trouble soon after a major release. One has to wonder if these events weren't already unfolding long before L.A. Noire ever came out, and now that the studio has nothing major in store, everything compounded at once. L.A. Noire was also announced to be released on the PC later this year, but Rockstar is having a different studio handle that so it is unlikely a delay will result.
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Replacing Lenses with Holograms
Everyone can get sick and probably will, regardless of where they live, though the quality of treatment you get is dependent on your location. Researchers around the world put time and effort into developing cheaper ways to collect biomedical information specifically to benefit poorer nations. The Optical Society’s open-access journal Biomedical Optics Express has just published a paper on a new microscope that is smaller, light, and cheaper than the typical microscopes a medical professional would use. The key to creating the microscope was replacing the expensive and heavy lenses with hologram apparatuses. A hologram is created when light travelling through or bouncing off of a surface is interfered with is compared against a reference beam. The resulting microscope can fit in one’s hand, weighs “as much as a medium-sized banana,” and, most importantly, costs between $50 and $100 to produce. However, unlike typical microscopes, this will not produce an image for the human eye, but data to be converted into an image. A laptop or cellphone can be used for this, or an off-site server can be sent the information for processing.
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Star Trek Online Going Free to Play Later This Year
Much like Champions Online did last January, Cryptic Studios will be making Star Trek Online free to play before the end of 2011. The announcement was made by the CEO of Cryptic's parent company Perfect World Entertainment, Kelvin Lau. The latter company has several F2P MMO titles under its belt, so the decision to add Star Trek Online to that list does make sense, from a competitive standpoint. Lau adds that making the game F2P will broaden its market potential in the Chinese and US territories. However, it has not been made known if Star Trek Online will use Steam's free to play system in the same vein as Champions Online.
With any luck, this should rope in new players to Star Trek Online, just like the surge of new blood experienced by other MMO games that recently went free to play.
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Minecraft Won't be Coming to Steam
Minecraft, the immensely popular open world game, is one of a few popular games that hasn't managed to find its way on to the Steam platform from Valve. The creator of the game, Notch, has decided to clear up the reasons why it isn't on Steam and why it won't be anytime soon. While Notch loves Steam and has dropped a ton of money on games, just like me, he has a few issues with it. Offline mode and DLC handling, for example. The current setup of Steam would prevent offering maps and other items for sale on the Minecraft website, and then having them made available in game. Notch is trying to work with Valve on this, but would be fine with Valve choosing not to change the platform in this specific case.
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PlayStation 3D Display Launches in November, Resistance 3 Included as Pre-Order Bonus
At E3 this year, Sony announced a new 3D monitor that would carry the PlayStation brand. It is a 24" screen capable of displaying 1080p stereoscopic 3D content, with the ability to display two 1080p 3D images at the same time for a two person game. During E3, Sony said that the 3D display would set you back $499.99, but did not elaborate on when we could get one. Well, Sony has now come clean with that bit of information and we can expect to see the PlayStation 3D display launch this November. The display includes a single pair of 3D glasses, an HDMI cable, and a copy of MotorStorm: Apocalypse. It doesn't come with Resistance 3, like Sony said during E3, but if you pre-order the display then you will receive Resistance 3. You have to pre-order by September 30th, however, in order to receive Resistance 3 with it, otherwise you will just get the included MotorStorm game. Resistance 3 will launch next week, while MotorStorm: Apocalypse launched in May of this year.
The Sony PlayStation 3D display will come out in November for $499.99. Additional 3D glasses will run you $69.99.
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Mass Effect 3's Female Shepard to be a Redhead
Earlier this summer, BioWare decided it would hold a contest to let the fans choose what the female Commander Shepard's default look will be for Mass Effect 3. Well, the general consensus was that the hairstyle of "Shepard 5" would be the winner, however, there was some outcry by fans that the female Shepard should be a redhead. So, using the winning hairstyle, BioWare opened up another fan vote to determine the default hair color. After an impressive turnout, the redhead won the vote, so now fans should at least have a default female Shepard to be proud of. However, I know plenty of you decided to create your own face for Shepard, so the default look probably won't be used by too many. Still, it is nice to see that BioWare let the fans decide how the female Commander should look.
Mass Effect 3 launches on March 6th, 2012, for the PC, PS3, and 360.
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OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Storage Solution Launched
OCZ today announced a new member of its RevoDrive family of solid state drives with the release of the RevoDrive Hybrid PCI Express drive. The RevoDrive Hybrid combines solid state drive and hard disk drive technology on a single PCIe card to offer a high-performance, high-capacity storage solution at an affordable price. The drive combines a 100GB SSD with a 1TB hard drive which is managed by OCZ's Dataplex software to offer the best of both SSD performance and HDD capacity. The RevoDrive Hybrid maintains the most frequently used data on the faster SSD while the less-frequently accessed data remains on the higher capacity hard drive. This helps eliminate the SATA bottleneck with bandwidth up to 910MB/s and up to 120,000 IOPS.
"The RevoDrive Hybrid leverages the best attributes of both solid state drives and traditional hard drive technology to deliver dynamic data-tiering on a single easy to deploy PCIe storage drive," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. "Leveraging Dataplex software to efficiently manage frequently accessed data delivers superior performance and capacity, making the RevoDrive Hybrid the ideal solution for high performance computing and media content creation."
OCZ did not announce an availability date, but did mention the RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB will carry a MSRP of $499.99US and is being backed by a three-year warranty.
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