Luxa2 EnerG Slim 10,000mAh Power Bank Review
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Nickelodeon to Launch Its Own Subscription Service Next Month
According to Viacom, the parent company of Nickelodeon, the children’s entertainment giant will soon follow HBO and offer its own video-on-demand subscription service sometime next month. Amazon and Netflix have long offered content aimed directly at children, and with the popular growth of services that both companies offer to consumers, it is no wonder why Nickelodeon is planning to debut its own offering. More details about the subscription service are expected to be revealed to advertisers sometime next month in an upfront meeting, but Philippe Dauman, the Viacom Chief Executive, has already stated that the service will be very attractive to parents and children alike. Dauman also noted that the new Nickelodeon service will be aimed at consumers who use mobile devices throughout their day, a move that should help the company achieve success in its mission to offer its own subscription service.
Source: Variety
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Working to Improve Cold Spray Additive Manufacturing
Though 3D printing is what most people think of when considering additive manufacturing, it is not the only method out there (juts perhaps the most popular). Another method is called Cold Spray and it has some distinct advantages over 3D printing, but it also has some major disadvantages. Researchers at Trinity College Dublin though have been awarded €500,000 by ESA (European Space Agency) to improve the method and hopefully overcome the issues.
Typically 3D printing involves building a structure layer-by-layer by extruding a material from a nozzle, and often that material is a plastic of some sort. Cold Spray however works with powders of various materials and accelerates them to supersonic speeds. These materials can be metals, composites, or polymers and can be used to build coatings and some simple geometrical components currently, and all without needing heat. It can do that about a thousand times faster than other additive manufacturing technologies, but it is also more expensive and less efficient than those methods. Bringing down costs is one of the Trinity researchers' goals.
Potentially the technology could be used for space missions, hence ESA's support, but there are also terrestrial uses, such as applying special coatings to domestic vehicles. It is hard to guess the wealth of uses that may be found for Cold Spray, if the researchers do succeed with all of their goals.
Source: Trinity College Dublin
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Latest Build of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Runs Best on PC
At a recent preview event for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that was held by developer CD Projekt RED, gaming publications and online reporters had the ability to test the highly anticipated game on three platforms, including PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. According to details by GameStar, a German video game magazine, the PC version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt simply looked the best when compared to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions. The PC version was capable of running on "high" settings and offered sharper textures than the console versions it was compared against. GameStar also stated that while Wild Hunt was able to run at 1080p and 30 frames per second on the PlayStation 4, it suffered from textures that were less sharp and detailed than the PC version. However, the PlayStation 4 fared well when compared to the Xbox One, which was only capable of running the latest build of at 900p. GameStar rated the PC as the best platform to experience the latest Witcher title on, with the PlayStation 4 beating out the Xbox One.
While CD Projekt RED is attempting to make changes to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that allows the Xbox One to run the game at 1080p, the company cannot confirm that this change will take place before the game’s launch on May 19.
Source: WCCFtech
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FCC Defines Broadband As 25Mbps
The United States Federal Communications Commission has revised its definition of broadband, bumping it from 4Mbps down 1Mbps up to 25Mbps down 3Mbps up. The FCC stated that the old numbers were "dated and inadequate for evaluating whether advanced broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a timely way." Along with the new definition, the 2015 Broadband Progress Report found that 55 million Americans don't have access to advanced broadband. The report was summarized by the FCC stating, "While significant progress in broadband deployment has been made...these advances are not occurring broadly enough or quickly enough."
Source: PC Magazine
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Several New LEGO Games Announced
Multiple upcoming LEGO games have been announced by Warner Bros. Interactive and TT Games. Two games will tie into upcoming moves Jurassic World and Avengers: Age of Ultron. LEGO Jurassic World was first teased during the credits of LEGO Batman 3 and will take gamers through the stories of the first three Jurassic Park movies in addition to the upcoming movie. It has an expected release of June and will be available on all major consoles. LEGO Marvel's Avengers also has a June release date and will be based on the two Avengers movies. LEGO Ninjago: Shadow of Ronin and LEGO Batman: Beyond Gotham will be heading to the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita on March 24 and this summer, respectively. TT Games Managing Director Tom Stone talked about the games stating, "This year will be the biggest yet for Lego video games with these incredible titles and several firsts for the series. TT Games are crafting humorous Lego adventures, based on new stories and characters across some of the most well-known and iconic worlds."
Source: Polygon
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Another Means to Quantum Computing Gets a Boost
For decades now we have relied on electronics, and while they have served us well, the time is approaching that we replace them with something else. One of these potential replacements is spintronics, which relies on the spin of electrons to store information, but it may be getting some new competition soon. Researchers at Berkeley Lab have made an important discovery that could give valleytronics the boost it needs to challenge spintronics and bring us closer to a quantum future.
Valleytronics is similar to spintronics in that it uses a quantum value to encode information, but the value has a different source. It comes from electrons moving through a 2D semiconductor as a wave with two energy valleys. These valleys can be described by their momentum and quantum valley number. What the Berkeley researchers have discovered is a way to generate a pseudo-magnetic field for controlling the valley excitons, using the optical Stark effect. Manipulating these excitons is hard to do with real magnetic fields, even when using superconducting magnets. The optical Stark effect creates the powerful pseudo-magnetic field with laser pulses.
Both spintronics and valleytronics offer significant improvements in data processing speeds over modern electronics, so it will be interesting to see which may be adopted in the future. Either one though will likely open the way to quantum computers.
Source: Berkeley Lab
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AMD Slashes Price of R9 290X After GeForce GTX 970 Memory Issues
It was reported yesterday that NVIDIA publically acknowledged a problem that involves how the 4GB of VRAM featured on the GeForce GTX 970 is divided, which causes performance drops when 3.5GB of VRAM is utilized. AMD has decided to take advantage of this news by not only releasing a media document that states “4GB means 4GB,” but also by slashing the price of the Radeon R9 290X. AMD has told its add-in board partners to lower the price of the R9 290X to as low as $299, making the graphics card highly competitive against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. AMD is also emphasizing to consumers that along with the 4GB of onboard VRAM that the R9 290X boasts, the card offers a 512-bit wide memory interface.
Source: TechPowerUp
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Microsoft Launches Office for Android
Microsoft has officially launched its Office suite for Android tablets, which allows tablet owners to utilize Word, PowerPoint, and Excel on their mobile devices. The news comes just weeks after Microsoft announced the expansion of the Office for Android tablet preview program and months after Microsoft brought office to additional mobile devices. The latest version of the Office suite for Android tablets supports retrieval of documents from OneDrive and Dropbox accounts, a variety of customizable templates, and synchronization with OneDrive. Office for Android is compatible with 7-inch tablets and larger that run Android KitKat 4.4, but unfortunately requires a monthly subscription of at least $7 per month after the one-month free trial expires.
Source: CNET
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Manipulating Light with Sound
Light is central to many technologies we rely on today, but it is likely to become even more important in the future. Before that can happen though, we must find new ways to manipulate light into doing what we want it to do. Researchers at the University of Illinois have recently succeeded in demonstrating Brillouin Scattering Induced Transparency (BSIT), which is a major step toward that level of control.
Normally you would expect light travelling through a fiber to continue on through it, but it can be made to leave the fiber by placing a microresonator next to it. What BSIT does is allow you to remove that opacity, and the researchers were able to trigger it by firing a laser at the microresonator. This second laser causes mechanical vibrations, which can be tuned to do more than just allow light to pass or not. The resonator can also cause light's group velocity to increase or decrease. This 'slow' light is useful for optical buffer applications, such as storing quantum information.
Another part of this discovery that is particularly important is that BSIT is non-reciprocal, meaning that this system was only allowing through from one direction, while it would still block light coming from the other. Current non-reciprocal devices are more complicated and are unsuited for use in optical chips, but this could actually be built into chips using current foundry processes.
Source: University of Illinois
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HyperX Predator DDR4 Memory Overclocked to World Record
HyperX, the high-performance product division of Kingston Technology, has announced that its Predator DDR4 memory has been overclocked to 4351MHz, thereby setting a world record. The frequency of 4351MHz is the highest frequency achieved among all DDR4 memory across the globe, showing that HyperX memory is truly performance driven. The overclock was set by "Toppc" of MSI, who utilized a single 4GB HyperX Predator 3333MHz DDR4 module on the impressive MSI X99S XPOWER AC motherboard.
Along with boasting the highest frequency among all DDR4 memory, HyperX Predator DDR4 memory successfully achieved 10 out of the top 20 memory clock records across the world, according to HWBOT. HyperX DDR4 memory also has the top scores in two other benchmarks recognized by HWBOT, MaxxMEM, and MaxxMEM Read Bandwidth, respectively.
Source: Press Release
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