Growing Opportunities with Collapsed Nanotubes
If you take a piece of paper and roll it into a cylinder you will notice that the greater the diameter of the cylinder, the more easily you can distort the shape. Though several thousand times smaller, carbon nanotubes have a similar relation between diameter and distortion. Researchers at Rice University decided to investigate collapsed nanotubes to find how they can be made, and what they are capable of doing.
Carbon nanotubes are essentially rolled up sheets of graphene, which are atom-thick sheets of carbon. Nanotubes are grown using a catalyst, which allows carbon atoms to collect and bond into the hexagonal pattern they like. Researchers have considered unzipping nanotubes to make nanoribbons of graphene, but this does not always result in clean edges to the ribbons. By collapsing nanotubes like this though, the edges will always be perfect. The key to collapsing the nanotubes was to make them really wide. Systems tend to the state of lowest energy, and at a certain point the collapsed state requires less energy than remaining a cylinder.
Once collapsed, there are two main parts of the nanotube; the flat top and bottom, and the bulged sides. The flat parts act like graphene, because really, that is what they are, while the edges act like buckyballs, a 3D carbon structure. This differentiation allows for different properties between the sections. For example, edge chemistry could be used to make the edges non-conductive, making it difficult for the top and bottom sections to electrically communicate. This could open up a new realm of physics and electronic properties. Using double-walled nanotubes (essentially one nanotube inside of another) could make things even more interesting as there will be four layers of graphene and two sets of buckyball-like edges.
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Namco Bandai Reveals Dark Souls PC System Requirements
Namco Bandai has maintained a no-frills approach to its PC version of Dark Souls, what with developer From Software's revelation that not much was done to optimize the PC port. The good part is that Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition comes with new content that PC gamers can slash their way into, and its recently announced system requirements look reasonable enough to run on even modest machines. In fact, those with scant hard disk space might be pleasantly surprised to find that Dark Souls only needs 4GB to install. The lean digital footprint could imply that the graphics might not be much of an improvement over your kid brother's aging console system, but hey, the PC version also requires a microphone headset for enhanced multiplayer play. Check out the system requirements below to see if your rig makes the cut.
- OS: Windows XP , Windows Vista, Windows 7, or newer
- Processor: 2.6 GHz Dual-Core
- Memory: 1 GB (XP), 2GB (Vista/7)
- Hard Disk Space: 4 GB
- Video Card: 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 4850 or higher, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or higher
- DirectX®: 9.0c
- Additional: Multiplayer requires microphone headset support
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Healing Nanotubes to Achieve One Meter Length
Modern construction techniques allow a skyscraper to be built using cranes at the top of the partially finished building. As floors are completed the cranes rise up to continue working. This is somewhat similar to how carbon nanotubes are grown. The cranes are like the catalyst, and it is at the catalyst that new material is added, making the nanotube grow longer. Just as in construction, mistakes can happen when growing nanotubes, but the speed at which nanotubes grow makes it much more difficult to correct or repair a mistake, before it can be an issue. Researchers at Rice University, Hong Kong Polytechnic, and Tsinghua University have modeled the growth of nanotubes and found a way to potentially repair these issues at the catalyst.
Single-walled carbon nanotubes, like those the researchers were working with, look like chicken wire wrapped up into a cylinder, with the carbon atoms bond in hexagons. At least that is the goal. Sometimes the atoms bind in pentagons or heptagons (seven-sided polygon) and these imperfections can comprise the nanotube. Fortunately they always occur together, so the extra atom in the heptagon can be moved over to the lacking pentagon, if there is a mechanism to enable the move. According to the researchers' model, iron works as such a mechanism and it is already a catalyst for nanotube growth.
Using an iron catalyst is not the ultimate solution though because its effects are not far reaching. From four atoms away, the iron does not enable the nanotube to repair, so if a defect escapes that far, it will not be so easily repaired. Fortunately the researchers found it should be possible to slow the growth of nanotubes, which will give the iron more time to act as a catalyst. Potentially slowing down like this could allow a meter-long nanotube to be grown.
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Trailer for Next 3DMark Released
Just about everyone that has benchmarked a gaming computer knows about FutureMark. This company specializes in benchmarks that are visually spectacular and can push even the latest hardware. Its current graphics benchmark, 3DMark 11 was released in December of 2010 and soon we will see the release of its successor.
The next 3DMark is being designed to work on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, which is why it will release after the OS launches, and will test DirectX 9, 10, and 11 hardware. Normally features found in a newer DX cannot be run be older hardware, but Futuremark is taking advantage of Feature Levels which are in the DirectX 11 API.
First introduced in DX 10, though in a limited way, Feature Levels are collections of features and capabilities hardware can be expected to run. Instead of having to request information from a GPU about if it can handle multiple specific features, software can ask the hardware what feature level it is at, and then run with only the features that level supports.
The tech demo for the next 3DMark features a trader walking through Scarport with its buildings clinging to canyon walls above canals of lava. Tessellation, advanced volumetric lighting with real-time light scattering, fluid dynamics simulation, post processing, ambient occlusion, lens effects and more complete the scene.
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50 Gigapixel Camera Built
While just about every professional digital-photographer will tell you resolution is not everything, a 50 gigapixel will still probably interest them. Of course the technology will first have to become something viable for taking to a shoot. The researchers at Duke University and the University of Arizona are confident though that we will see gigapixel cameras hitting the market within five years.
Traditionally one would improve the resolution of a camera by using better optics that require more components. This works quite well, but only to a point. The additional elements push the complexity of the system to such a level that the design is too expensive to make. Instead of adding more optics, the researchers added more cameras.
A shared objective lens brings the light into the system, which is then split up and routed to an array of microcameras. These microcamers are each aimed at different, overlapping sections of the image, and each section is then combined by the camera's processor.
The camera the researchers built is roughly 2.5 square feet and 20 inches deep, so obviously not the choice of someone trying to capture a wedding. Interestingly, the majority of this bulk is dedicated to the electronics required to process the imagery and cool the system, instead of the optics and microcameras. As technology improves though, less will be needed to process the imagery from the microcameras, which will also allow the cooling systems to be removed. It may take five years, but when you consider the camera can capture more detail than the human eye, it is probably worth the wait.
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Hardware Roundup: Thursday Edition
We have several video card reviews in our roundup today with cards from GIGABYTE, MSI and Galaxy covered, including a pair of HD 7870 offerings and a GeForce GT 640 card as well. Microsoft made news this week with its Surface tablet announcement and we picked up an article on what little we know so far about the new devices. We also have reviews on the GoFlex Satellite 500GB portable hard drive and the ADATA SP900 solid state drive for you to read.
Mobile
Galaxy S III Review: Samsung's Worthy New Flagship @ TechSpot
Notebooks/Tablets
Microsoft Surface: The Good, the Ugly and the Unknown @ TechSpot
Storage/Hard Drives
Seagate GoFlex Satellite @ LanOC Reviews
Unboxing the ADATA SP900 Solid State Drive @ ThinkComputers
Trade Shows/Conventions
AMD Heaven GamExperience @ Madshrimps
Video
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7870 OC Video Card @ [H]ardOCP
Galaxy GeForce GT 640 GC 1GB DDR3 Review - GK107 is no GK104 @ PC Perspective
MSI Radeon HD 7870 Hawk 2GB Video Card @ Benchmark Reviews
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EA Executive Thinks All Games in Next Five to Ten Years will be Free-to-Play
Free-to-play games seem to be everywhere these days, with subscription MMOs turning nearly daily and new titles being announced every week. There are more than enough free games to keep you occupied for quite some time, and if you have some money to spare, can improve your game with many enhancements. EA is certainly no stranger to F2P games with its Play4Free selection, but if you listen to one executive, it seems F2P games will be the standard for all companies. EA's COO Peter Moore believes every game in the next five to ten years will be free-to-play, with add-ons requiring a fee and $60 games dropping off substantially. Moore does not think $60 games (that is, big-budget games) will completely disappear, but the market will shift to F2P titles. Billions of people can access these free titles, but that microtransactions will rule the day. Moore likens it to walking into a store; you can browse all you want, try on a new shirt, but must pay for something if he wants it. A different analogy, to be sure, but one that works just the same.
Gaming has gone from the grasp of the few to the many, where a touchscreen is all you need to call yourself a gamer, according to Moore. I do not think he is far off at all, and the future may turn to F2P in the end no matter what hardcore gamers desire.
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Custom Themes Coming to Gmail
Gmail users will soon be able to customize the theme of their email using more than the default themes available from Google. Users will be able to choose their favorite photo from a number of sources to use as the background of the page. Photos can come from Google+, a hard drive, or an image URL. After choosing a photo, you are presented with a choice of light or dark for the rest of the interface. This new feature is expected to rolled out "over the next couple of days." I still haven't forgiven Google for changing the text color of the Terminal theme from green to white.
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Introducing Windows Phone 8
Microsoft has had a pretty busy week and it is just to the halfway point. On Monday the company announced the new Surface tablet and today we have Windows Phone 8. The hardware limitations/restrictions of Windows Phone 7 have been thrown aside, as WP8 allows for multi-core (up to 64) processors, resolutions up to 1280x768, external storage on SD cards, maps provided by Nokai, and a wallet function courtesy of NFC support. All of these are great improvements for Microsoft to include, especially the SD card storage since that was a sticking point for many using WP7. The processor and screen upgrades will allow for better apps and faster games, as WP8 uses C/C++ instead of CLR. Windows Phone 8 runs on a kernel shared with Windows 8 and Windows RT, which means Microsoft will have one OS running across PCs, tablets, and phones. Apps and games will be able to be ported easily across all platforms, so this will open up a heap of possibilities for developers.
Microsoft will ship Windows Phone 8 devices around the same time as Windows 8 launches this Fall. Sadly current Windows Phone 7 devices will not receive an upgrade to WP8, but will get an upgrade to 7.8 that includes some software improvements.
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Gigabyte Hidden Gems Competition
Gigabyte has announced a new contest to celebrate its 25th birthday, the Hidden Gems Competition. Gigabyte is looking for pictures and videos of old computers built using Gigabyte components and have said, "The older the better!" To enter the contest, simply like the Gigabyte page on Facebook and post your submission to the contest page. The grand prize is a G1.Sniper M3 motherboard and will go the entry with the most votes. A Z77X-UD3H motherboard will be given to a user chosen by the Gigabyte Facebook team. The "Most Deserving of an Upgrade" prize is a B75M-D3H motherboard and will be given the submission that has been deemed the oldest system still in operation. The contest opens today and runs until July 30.
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DarwinTunes Evolves Music
What makes a song popular? Is it the creativity of the composer to develop something new that people enjoy or does the popularity of specific musical elements dictate what full songs and pieces rise to the top? Researchers at Imperial College London decided to look into this through the eyes of evolution.
The basic concept to evolution is fairly simple. Variations within a population can cause a specific entity to be more successful, less successful, or have their success unchanged, and only the successful variations are able to be passed to future generations. Applying evolution to music would mean it is only the music with the most successful elements that are the most popular. To test this, the researchers created DarwinTunes, a computer program which has people rate eight second long loops of music. The most highly rated loops were then 'mated' to produce new loops that combine the elements of their parents. These multiple generations of music were then posted for rating purposes again, but this time to see if later generations were preferred to the older generations. In validation of the researchers' theory, the newer generations were rated more highly than their predecessors.
DarwinTunes has already completed more than 3500 generations of music and is still going. If you would like to help it produce new generations or just download some of what it has already produced, check out DarwinTunes.org.
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Final The Secret World Beta Weekend Open to Everyone
The Secret World has been having beta weekends for some time now, but the only way to get in so to pre-order the game or be fortunate enough to receive a key. This weekend is the final beta event, but unlike past ones, this is open to everyone. All you need to do is head to The Secret World's website, register for the beta before this Friday the 22nd, and then start playing at 9am PDT on Friday. All the content from the previous weekends will be included in this one, so new players will be able to experience the different societies, towns, dungeons, and even PvP and server-wide battles. It is recommended to have the game downloaded and patched before the 22nd so as to not miss any of the action. The beta will end on June 24th at 11:59pm PDT, with the full version of The Secret World launching on July 3rd.
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Dishonored on PC has 'Different Interface' - PC Standards a 'Religion'
PC gamers are no doubt used to getting a port of certain titles, even if the launch is after the console versions. Bad ports leave a sour taste in the mouth and do little to appease the PC gaming collective. There are indie games and some exclusives, but the majority of PC games are ports from the console version. The team working on Dishonored at Arkane Studios knows this and is setting out to appeal to both console and PC gamers. For starters, the PC version of Dishonored "has its own different interface," thanks to the mixture of PC and console gamers working on the title. Co-designers Raphaël Colantonio and Harvey Smith both have PC backgrounds, so they are instrumental in making sure the PC version of Dishonored is worth the hard drive space. PC gaming is like a "religion" to Colantonio and Smith, and both them and the team want to live up to the standards of computer gaming. We still need to see this different PC interface, but I have every faith Arkane will deliver on Dishonored.
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New Nanowire Template for Improved Solar Panels
The photoelectric effect is a special interaction between electrons and photons. When a photon with the correct frequency strikes an electron, the photon and its energy can be absorbed by the electron, causing it to jump to a higher energy level around the atom. If there is enough energy, the electron will escape the atom completely. By forcing these escaped electrons through a circuit before they can return to an atom, we can convert solar energy to electrical energy. This is how solar panels work and while the system seems very efficient, there are some issues with it.
The Shockley-Queisser, or SQ limit is the maximum efficiency achievable by a semiconductor-based solar panel, and is roughly 35%. There is no way to get out more than 35% of the energy in a certain frequency range using solar panels. For silicon this is a real issue because the frequency range it responds to is limited, but other semiconductors can have their range extended, allowing more light to be absorbed and more energy to be produced. One of these other semiconductors is indium gallium nitride and researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have found a way around one problem with it. The amount of indium in the material controls the frequency range of the semiconductor, but while adding more indium can increase the range, it also makes the material more stressed and likely to break.
The researchers decided to try making an indium gallium nitride solar panel on an array of nanowires, instead of the usual flat substrate. This allowed the material to relax and support a mixture that is roughly one third indium, which is more than the previous record. This successfully increased the range of frequencies the material will react to, but the design itself will need some improvements. At just 0.3% efficiency, this is far from the current 15% achieved by many other designs. Still, this shows it is possible to increase the amount of indium in the mixture, which will increase power output.
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Upcoming Saints Row: The Third Expansion Cancelled to Make Way for Sequel
Saints Row: The Third's next expansion will be taking a backseat in favor of a full-blown sequel which will be coming out next year. Enter the Dominatrix was initially conceived as a standalone extension to the wacky open-world game, but THQ decided to include the expansion's content into the upcoming sequel instead. Initially titled "The Next Great Sequel in the Saints Row Franchise," the Matrix-inspired expansion was going to be sold for 29.99, although no word from THQ whether bullet-time was going to be added as a feature. "We believe the potential for this sequel is far greater as a full-priced, full-length, high quality, connected experience," remarked THQ president Jason Rubin. Unfortunately this move is also predicted to cost a $20 million reduction in THQ's 2013 fiscal outlook, which could further put the publisher in dire straits.
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