Star May Have Come Within a Light Year of Earth
When you look up into the night sky, you can think about how remote much of the Universe is, but some of it was once closer than you may think. Researchers at the University of Rochester and institutions across the world, have recently determined that a star likely passed within a light year of the Sun about 70,000 year ago.
Called Scholz's star for its discoverer, the star is a dim red dwarf, about 8% the Sun's mass, and is part of a binary system that includes a brown dwarf, that weighs in at 6% of the Sun's mass. Currently it is about 20 light years away but it has some unusual characteristics. The main thing is that it has little tangential motion, which means it is moving almost directly away from the Solar System, unlike most stars at that distance. This indicates it either passed by us in the past, or will in the future. Radial velocity measurements showed that it is moving away, so it must have gone by us before. To determine when it did and what its influence may have been, the researchers modelled its orbit 10,000 times, and of those 98% showed it passed through the outer Oort cloud, at a distance of just 0.8 light years away.
While it may have passed through the outer Oort cloud, which is at the edge of the Solar System and holds trillions comets, it likely did not perturb it much. It may have been visible to humans 70,000 years ago, because even though it is too dim to see with the naked eye, it could have flared and become visible for minutes or hours at a time.
Source: University of Rochester
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Sony Announces Premium Sound Memory Card
In an effort to satisfy the ears of audiophiles around the world, Sony has announced a new microSD card that apparently offers premium sound when compared to similar storage solutions available to consumers. According to Sony, the latest microSD card from the company, model number SR-64HXA, creates little to no electrical noise when data is read from it, something that other memory storage devices cannot say. While the card is fortunately a standard Class 10 microSD card that features 64GB of storage, its price is skewed quite high due to the market of audiophiles that it targets. The storage solution is set to feature an MSRP of $160 and will initially launch in Japan on March 5, 2015. Consumers will have to decide if the claim of premium sound is worth it, since a regular Class 10 64GB microSD card can be purchased for roughly $30.
Source: CNET
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Overclocking is Coming Back for NVIDIA Mobile GPUs
Due to the latest NVIDIA drivers released just over a week ago, users of the GTX 900M series have been unable to overclock their mobile graphics cards. After many complaints to the company, NVIDIA has decided to reintroduce overclocking capabilities for the GTX 900M series. Although NVIDIA originally stated that overclocking a GeForce card found within a notebook simply carried too much risk, due to thermal limitations of laptops, the outcry of users seems to have brought back the feature. Overclocking capabilities will be included in the next version of NVIDIA drivers, which are slated to be released sometime next month. For users requiring overclocking to make certain games playable before the next driver release, NVIDIA is recommending that users downgrade to version 344.75 of the GeForce drivers.
Source: TechPowerUp
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Epic Games Creates Grant Program for Unreal Engine 4
Epic Games, the studio behind Unreal Tournament and the next-gen Unreal Engine 4, will be funding a a $5 million program to "support studios working in the latest version of the engine." The company will give grants that range in value from $5,000 to $50,000 to anyone working on games, animation, or other visualizations created using Unreal Engine 4. Epic will place no obligations on the money and will allow grant recipients to keep their intellectual property. Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney described the motivation behind the program stating, "While development can be fueled by creativity and determination alone, finishing and releasing a commercial project often requires money. A small budget can make all the difference in shipping a project with the content, marketing materials, and promotional expenses necessary for it to gain traction."
Source: Game Informer
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Lenovo to Release Tool For Removing Pre-Installed Software
Lenovo has announced that it will release a tool to automatically remove all Superfish software by Friday. The Superfish software comes pre-installed on some Lenovo machines and had the potential to expose "users to hacking attacks and unauthorized activity monitoring." Director of activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Rainey Reitman described the software stating, "The Superfish software undermines Internet security for the rather ridiculous purpose of serving advertisements. It’s a severe security issue, and frankly a betrayal by Lenovo of all of its affected customers." Lenovo Chief Technology Officer Peter Hortensius described the situation saying, "We messed up badly here. We made a mistake. Our guys missed it. We’re not trying to hide from the issue -- we’re owning it."
Source: Bloomberg
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Better Data Placement in Multicore Chips
When we have work to do, we like keeping what we need nearby, to speed up the process. The processing cores in our computers also like keeping their work nearby, but finding the best placement is anything but easy. However, researchers at MIT have developed a new optimization algorithm that is significantly faster than others, and could significantly speed up processors.
The problem has to do with the placement of data and keeping the related computations nearby. This is similar to the 'place and route' problem of minimizing the distance between logic circuits, which is NP-hard, meaning it is computationally impossible to find the optimal solution to. However, algorithms that approximate the optimal solution can be run over the course of several hours. The new MIT algorithm however completes in just 25 milliseconds and is better than 99% efficient, compared to those other algorithms. It works by roughly placing the data across the memory banks, to keep it all spread out and not clumped into the same area. It then places the computational threads near the data, and refines the placement of the data, based on the placement of the threads. While this process could be repeated, it only provides a 1% increase, which is not exactly worth it. When the researchers applied the algorithm to a simulated 64-core chip, it improved computational speeds by 64% and reduced power consumption by 36%.
If built into real chips, the dedicated circuitry would take up about 1% of the chip's area. The researchers believe chipmakers will consider this a fair loss, considering the performance improvements this algorithm could provide by constantly monitoring a processor.
Source: MIT
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