Patriot EP Pro 32 GB SDXC/SDHC Card Review
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Transparent Photoelectric Cells Made for Windows
Despite the interest in renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, the state of modern technology limits them to producing less power than other, less-clean energy sources. However solar panels and wind turbine are significantly easier to install in odd, public areas than larger power plants. Many researchers are working on developing solar power paint and windows to take advantage of this fact, because while those solutions may not be as efficient as full-size power plants, they can be installed and used without interfering with people or the environment.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have recently developed a solar panel along these lines as it is 70% transparent. The key for this polymer solar cell is that it reacts only weakly with visible light and strongly with infrared light. Infrared light carries less energy than visible, but this sacrifice for transparency will greatly help the design in the end, thanks to the variety of potential uses.
Another major bonus for this design is that it is polymer based and made in solution. This allows it to be mass produced cheaply, which is important for this technology to enter commercial products. Though the 4% efficiency is not particularly great, these other factors give this design great potential, and that efficiency can only increase as the UCLA researchers and others continue their work.
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EA CEO Questions NPD Accuracy, Says PC is Fastest Growing Platform
Depending on the company you listen to, PC gaming is either the biggest platform there is or the smallest compared to the consoles. The NPD only measures retail sales and does not look at digital, so there is no real way to determine the size of PC gaming. Sure, we can look at the amount of logged in users on Steam or Origin, but neither one is very forthcoming with just how many people use either service, and there are other PC gamers who do not use those clients. EA CEO John Riccitiello does not put much weight into NPD numbers and says the industry is far too reliant on the group. Riccitiello says how everyone thought the PC gaming market was declining because the NPD said retail numbers were down every year. The only problem with that is what I stated before, with how the NPD only looks at retail numbers. Riccitiello believes PC gaming is the fastest growing platform because of digital downloads and free-to-play games and the like. EA has had a 40% increase in digital downloads, yet its stock prices still dropped because investors looked just at the NPD numbers. There is a bigger picture than just retail, and Riccitiello hopes others can see that.
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Wireless Processor Interconnects Are Coming
Wireless phones, wireless power, wireless networks; so much technology is going wireless, and a team of researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Washington State University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology have received an $800,000 grant from the NSF to make multicore processors wireless too. Intra-chip communications are becoming more and more important as the number of cores within a processor increases, and the limited space for wires is providing some challenges. By going to a wireless design though, not only is the issue of wires resolved but fewer resources are needed to coordinate communication.
The entire project is being overseen by Washington State University and is also responsible, with Rochester, for designing the architecture. The Georgia Tech researchers instead will have their focus on creating the on-chip antennae. The researchers are looking to mimic modern cell phone networks, with their ability to handle multiple users on the same antenna, but at a smaller scale. This is not going to be easy to accomplish though because the millimeter wavelength transmissions cannot be allowed to interfere with each other.
At this stage, there is no way to predict when this technology may be realized, but it will be a great leap forward when it is. Not only will intra-chip communication problems be solved but power requirements will drop as well, due to fewer resources being needed to send and direct data between the processors.
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September Brings Final Fantasy XIII Announcement - Versus XIII Canceled?
Square Enix has big plans for Final Fantasy XIII, as evidenced by just how many titles it announced along with it so many years ago. Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 have been released, and now it looks like something more will be planned. Square Enix will reveal details on the Final Fantasy XIII Project on September 1st during the 25th anniversary celebration of the Final Fantasy series. The 25th anniversary celebration will start on August 31st and end on September 2nd in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, Japan. There is no telling just what Square Enix has planned for the announcement, but it could be Final Fantasy XIII-3 or some other entry in the FFXIII world. It is also possible we will know the fate of Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is rumored to have been canceled. The game was announced back in 2006, but very little mention of it has been made since the release of Final Fantasy XIII. Apparently Square Enix will not officially cancel it for fear of lower stock prices, but I still think an update on its fate would be fitting.
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Media Violence Effects on Bullying Studied
The debate about whether violent video games, movies, and television make children violent has been going on for about as long as I can remember caring. One side staunchly believes these violent media teaches children to be violent while the other has no doubt this premise is false. Well new research out of Iowa State University has concluded the effects violent media have on children is somewhere in the middle, at least when it comes to bullying.
Bullying has been increasing in our schools and researchers are trying to determine how to identify bullies before they attack someone. The Iowa State researchers examined six risk factors of what leads to someone being a bully using a relative weight analysis and found that media violence is indeed a factor, but no different from the others. The other factors were bias toward hostility, low parental involvement, gender, physical victimization and prior physical fights.
Before you start worrying about how many of those factors you or someone you know expresses, no one factor makes you more likely to be a bully. It actually is not until there are three or more of these factors together that the researchers can predict if you will be a bully or not. Of course if you have three of these factors, there is an 80% chance you will be a bully, and a 94% chance if you have all six. Fortunately two of the factors are easy to address as involved parents should also monitor and control the media violence a child is exposed to.
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The War Z Announced - Zombie Survival MMO with Doses of DayZ
Zombie games are certainly all the rage these days, with a wealth of titles being based solely on the living undead or including some specific game modes. One of the most popular games of late is a mod for ArmA II called DayZ, which is a pretty brutal take on surviving a zombie horde. This piece of news does not concern DayZ though, at least not entirely, but rather a new game from Hammerpoint Interactive. The War Z is a zombie survival MMO that puts players in the middle of a zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic world. It sounds pretty similar to DayZ, but The War Z's executive producer says DayZ is based around a hardcore military game while The War Z is a standalone title.
The War Z features game worlds between 200 and 400 kilometers in size, Normal and Hardcore modes, a mix of first-person and third-person perspectives, role playing elements with skills to improve, and a combination of PvE and PvP. The difference between Normal and Hardcore mode is the latter has permadeath, so you need to be extra careful with your customizable character. There will be safe settlements where players can gather to post notes, purchase, sell, and store items, and try to find some help to outlast the zombies. Bounties can be posted as well, so perhaps you will be able to avenge someone if another player takes them out. Weapons and items can be found in the game world, which you need to explore to find the better ones. The game servers will hold up to 250 players, but there is no telling just how many zombies there will be for you to encounter.
The only thing missing from The War Z's announcement is just what kind of shooter it will be. We do not know if it will have real-life ballistics or what the combat mechanics are like, but hopefully that will be revealed shortly. The War Z is scheduled to release this fall for $30 and will have no subscription fees or in-game transactions.
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Oldest Spiral Galaxy Discovered
A quick look through the image archives for the Hubble Space Telescope reveals a variety of different structures to galaxies. Primarily you will find massive elliptical galaxies and more elegant spiral and barred-spiral galaxies, but there are also a number of unusual galaxies whose structures have been disrupted by recent collisions. All of these galaxies are relatively young galaxies, as it takes time for those structures to develop, but researchers have just found a spiral galaxy from when the Universe was only three billion years old.
Named BX442, the spiral galaxy was found by astronomers in part from the University of California, Los Angeles with Hubble while examining 300 galaxies at about the same distance. Upon finding this galaxy the researchers turned to the W.M. Keck Observatory to collect spectroscopic information which proves it is indeed a single galaxy, and not two. It is large enough to have been multiple galaxies though as only 30 other galaxies in this survey weigh as much.
The researchers now have to figure out how this galaxy got its spiral. Current cosmological theory would say this structure should either not exist or be very unlikely to form that far in the past. The current suggestion by the astronomers are that it formed from the collision of a great many smaller galaxies, and this idea is aided by the presence of a dwarf galaxy also visible in the image. BX442 will definitely be studied more as it provides a link between the primitive galaxies and the younger ones we are more familiar with.
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Borderlands 2 Campaign Lasts 58 Hours
In an age where single player campaigns in first-person shooters can be measured in nanoseconds, it is always refreshing to see a title buck the trend. Gearbox Software's Borderlands 2 is more than your average FPS, as it includes some RPG elements and more loot than you can ever possibly use at any given time. The best news comes in the form of how long a single playthrough of the campaign can last. Gearbox's vice president of marketing Steve Gibson said some of the "guide guys" reported a single playthrough of 58 hours for one character. Suffice to say we will all be spending a long time on Pandora yet again, and even longer when you factor in the Badass System. Gearbox has also tweaked the co-op aspect of Borderlands 2, so now questlines can be re-adjusted some to better match with your friends, and removed the rarely used PvP Arenas. Borderlands 2 is all PvE over those 58 hours, which not many other games (FPS or otherwise) can claim.
Borderlands 2 arrives on September 18 for the PC, PS3, and 360.
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Microsoft Announces Quarterly Loss
Microsoft announced that it has posted its first quarterly loss as a publicly traded company. The loss is a result of an accounting adjustment related to its 2007 purchase of online ad service aQuantive for $6.3 billion. The company lost $492 million compared to earnings of $5.9 billion during the same period last year. Revenue for the quarter stood at $18.06 billion and shares closed at $31.32, an increase of 2.1%. Investors are clearly focused on the future and new editions of the Windows OS and Office productivity software.
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Dark Blood Now in Open Beta
Dark Blood is a "free-to-play hardcore action RPG arcade brawler" from Outspark. The publisher has announced that the game is now in open beta for gamers in North America and Europe. In the newest iteration of the game the developer has added support for joysticks and game pads, adding to the arcade feel of this RPG. The next update will come on July 26 in the form of a level cap raise, a store filled with premium items, and new in-game events.
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Self-Assembling Complex Shapes
Modern lithography technology used to create microchips do so by removing material and preventing wires from forming in certain areas. While this top-down approach works well, it is limited in where it can go because ever-better etching techniques are needed to continue shrinking the size of the wires. A bottom-up approach however that self-assembles the wires would be a much better solution as it is not as limited in the size it operates at. However self-assembly is hard to achieve, especially when dealing with molecules. Researchers at MIT though have found a way to overcome one of the challenges.
Molecules like to assembly along hexagonal lines. While this works great for many systems, the designs for modern micro-circuitry are based on rectangles. What the MIT researchers discovered was a way to pattern tiny posts that can guide the formation of polymer-nanowires. These posts allow for more than just the creation of rectangles though but also cylinders, double cylinder, spheres, and ellipsoids. This is accomplished by coating the posts with a material that repel a polymer component in the wires. This puts a strain on the polymer causing it to twist and bend away, thereby defeating its preference for a hexagonal shape.
It may be some time before this can be implemented as an actual manufacturing process, but when it is the impacts will be far reaching. Not only could microchips extend to a smaller scale but so could RAM and magnetic memory. The patterning process could be used to identify the specific areas that are bits on a hard disk platter.
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Activision Blizzard May Buy Back Majority Stake from Vivendi
Last month it was reported that Vivendi was considering selling its stake in Activision Blizzard in order to reverse its dropping stock price. There have been some potential buyers mentioned, like Microsoft and Disney, but nothing has come of that yet. However, it now looks like Activision Blizzard may buy back its majority stake from Vivendi. Activision Blizzard has a market worth of over $8 billion since Vivendi acquired the company in 2008. Few companies that Vivendi has approached have the $8 billion or so in spare cash to consider the purchase, so now it may let Activision reacquire the 61% majority stake. Activision Blizzard has around $3 billion in cash for the deal and it can get the rest in loans from investors if need be, but I imagine this would be a last resort for Vivendi. The company needs to recover its stock prices and also get out of a negative credit watch, so I cannot imagine it would settle for a lower price for Activision Blizzard. Vivendi will reveal its earnings for the first half on August 30th, which then it will determine what to do with Activision Blizzard and other assets.
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Successfully Synthesizing Spider Silk
Steel is a strong metal, so it was surprising when Kevlar, a polymer, was actually stronger, but even it has superiors and one of them has been challenging researchers for a long time. Spider silk is an incredibly strong material that has been incredibly difficult to synthesize due to its complex chemistry and intricate fabrication within a spider. A recent video article on the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) goes step by step as a team of researchers successfully create black widow silk.
Black widow silk is comparable in strength to Kevlar, but is both lighter and less dense. Previous research teams have found ways to produce it with bacteria but have had issues with replicating the post-spin step. After the silk is made by the spider, it stretches it to align the molecules, which increases the silks tensile strength. Instead of relying on humans to stretch the silk, the researchers employed an actuator to precisely stretch the silk to the proper length.
Now that an in-lab production method has been developed, the researchers want to improve it for mass production. Once mass production is achieved we may see spider silk used in bullet-proof vests, to replace Kevlar and similar materials, in aircraft bodies, bridge cables, and medical sutures, to name a few possible uses.
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Flying Wild Hog Releases a Stunning Hard Reset Artbook, for Free
Last week, developer Flying Wild Hog released a free update to sci-fi first-person shooter Hard Reset, providing a lot of additional content. Today, via a Facebook post, some new free content has been released, this time in the form of an artbook. Titled "The Art of Hard Reset: A Visual Journey", the 46-page PDF file contains stunning concept art, renders, and more. It's a 137MB download, but if you're a fan of the game and/or game art in general, it is well worth your time. It's great to see Flying Wild Hog continuing to provide free content to the community – we need more developers to show that type of dedication. You can grab the PDF at the Facebook link above, or download it directly from here (again, it's 137MB, so be patient as it loads).
Hard Reset Extended Edition is currently part of the Steam Summer Sale, discounted 75% until July 23, netting you an awesome shooter for a mere $3.75.
UPDATE (2:10P ET): Due to presumably high interest in the artbook, Flying Wild Hog's Dropbox account has come under heavy traffic and has been temporarily disabled. Hopefully it's resolved soon for those who didn't get a chance to grab it. I'll try and provide another update if more information becomes available.
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