Corsair Carbide 330R Review
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Thermaltake Adds Laptop Cooler
The Massive TM is the latest laptop cooler from Thermaltake and it supports laptops up to 17 inches in size. Two 120mm fans provide the airflow that is regulated by a temperature sensor in four areas of the cooler. A panel features a temperature display and also has controls for the cooling fans. The cooler stand is height adjustable and has two USB ports to make up for the one that is lost by powering the device.
Source: Press Release
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Valve Completes Its Trifecta of Announcements with the Steam Controller
Today's the day for Valve's third and final announcement for the week, which has already seen the likes of SteamOS and Steam Machines. So what does the company have in store for today? The Steam Controller. It's a gamepad designed to work with the entire Steam library while you're comfortably sitting on your couch. It looks like nothing else you've seen before, however, as the Steam Controller has two trackpads in place of the traditional face buttons. Each trackpad is high-resolution for the utmost precision and can also be pressed in like a button. Haptic feedback has been worked in as well, yet Valve decided on a new generation system in order to deliver a better range of force and vibration.
In the middle of the controller is a touchscreen to give gamers any number of possible actions outside of the buttons. The touchscreen has to be clicked in order to register an action, so feel free to swipe along to find the exact action before committing to it. Developers can program it to function as a radial dial, a scrolling menu, a map, or any number of other features Valve hasn't thought of. Touching the screen brings up an overlay on your TV or monitor so you can see what you're doing without taking your eyes off the game.
As for the buttons, Valve has packed each Steam Controller with sixteen in total. About half of them can be accessed without removing your thumbs from the trackpads. Every one of them has been placed symmetrically too, so there's no awkward reaching or reprogramming if you're a lefty or a righty. Valve has engineered the controller to be registered as a keyboard and mouse in games that don't support controllers, with various bindings able to be created and shared by the Steam Community. An example for Portal 2 can be seen below.
Like SteamOS and Steam Machines, the Steam Controller can be tweaked and modified by its users. Valve is planning to open the doors to see just what everyone can come up with for the controllers, so maybe that touch screen will have many more uses down the road. The lucky 300 people selected for the Steam Machines beta will also receive a Steam Controller, however it'll have four buttons instead of a touchscreen and will connect via a USB cable instead of wirelessly. If you don't plan to get one of the Steam Machines when they're available next year but like the controller, you can buy one separately. Oh, and Valve has no intention of abandoning keyboard and mouse support in favor of the Steam Controllers, the company's just providing another input option.
Source: Valve
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Curiosity Finds Water in Martian Soil
The goal of many Mars missions has been to determine if there is or ever has been water on the red planet. Thanks to the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite on NASA's Curiosity rover, we now know that the Martian soil is roughly 2% water.
To make this discovery, the rover scooped up the dust, dirt, and fine soil at the Rocknest site it is currently in. Part of the fifth scoop was placed in SAM, which heats samples to 835 ºC to reveal its components. It found water as well as a compound that is likely chlorate or perchlorate, which previously was only found near the north pole; the Rocknest site is equatorial. This suggests the chlorine and oxygen compound is more widespread than previously believed. Due to the dust storms on Mars though, the entire planet is covered in a layer of surface soil that is similar everywhere. This is quite useful as a sample in one place is going to tell you about the entire planet.
Curiosity also looked at the isotopes of hydrogen and carbon in the sample, and found the isotope ratios to be similar to that found in the Martian atmosphere. This implies that as the dust moves around the planet, it is reacting with the atmosphere.
Source: NASA
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Pulsar with Identity Crisis Discovered
One of the stranger objects in the Universe just got a bit stranger as researchers have found a pulsar that switches between emitting X-rays and radio waves. It has been predicted that pulsars switch like this over the course of millions of years, as they age, but not back and forth over weeks. This discovery was made by an international team of scientists using multiple space telescopes, including NASA's Swift and Chandra satellites, and ESA's XMM-Newton.
Pulsars are a special class of neutron stars, which are formed when large enough stars go supernova. The force of the implosion crushes atoms to the point that electrons and protons collide, leaving a giant mass of neutrons behind. If a neutron star is spinning fast enough, its magnetic fields will restrict where light is emitted to its poles, and if the poles cross over Earth, we will see the light pulsing on and off. When the pulsar has another star nearby to feed from, gas will collect around it and on its surface. As the gas falls in, it will produce X-rays, but also when enough of it collects on the pulsars surface, it will trigger a thermonuclear explosion to produce a burst of X-rays. It was one of these bursts that first caught the researchers' attention. Upon further examination, the X-rays stopped, and radio waves were being detected, which indicates the gas was no longer falling onto the pulsar. Two days later though, the X-rays unexpectedly started up again.
The researchers hypothesize that what is happening is the magnetic field of the pulsar pushes away the gas being pulled in from the companion star, which enables its naturally emitted radio waves to escape. Eventually there too much mass to be swept away though, so the gas starts producing X-rays again, and blocks the radio waves.
Source: NASA
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OCZ Adds Two Power Supplies
OCZ has announced that two power supplies it first introduced at Computex are now available for purchase. The two new PSUs join the Fatal1ty Series and have capacities of 550W and 750W. The new units are capable of hitting efficiency of 85% and have been given the 80-PLUS Bronze certification. A single +12V rail powers all of your components and a 135mm red LED fan keeps everything running cool. A fully modular design allows users to only plug in the cables that are necessary, helping to reduce clutter in their case. VP of Power Management Bob Roark said, "The new Fatal1ty 550 and 750W PSUs feature a brand new core and are not only quieter and more energy efficient but also provide customers with enhanced flexibility with a complete modular cable design."
Source: Press Release
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Bringing Back the CD for Water Treatment
Due to digital downloads and portable media players, CDs have been getting less and less attention of late. There is a good chance that some of us have a collection of discs that we rarely touch, if ever, because our media players are always at hand, so what can we do with the discs? Thanks to researchers in Taiwan, as reported by the Optical Society, we can use them to clean water.
While that small plastic disc may not seem like anything special now, it had to be engineered to survive the rapid spinning of an optical drive. That engineering is key to the researchers' water cleaning system. Zinc oxide is a cheap semiconductor that can break down organic molecules when exposed to UV light. By growing zinc oxide nanorods on the surface of a CD, the researchers had a device to clean water. Spinning the CD accelerates the process as it causes water drops to spread into thin film that light can easily penetrate, and increases the surface area exposed to the nanorods.
When tested, the researchers determined this system could clean 150 mL of waste water a minute. Considering the small size and low power requirement of this system, it could see use in small scale situations. Naturally the researchers are exploring ways to increase the system's efficiency so it can work even faster.
Source: The Optical Society
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First Nanotube Computer Built
Silicon is approaching its limits in our electronics, so researchers are looking for alternative semiconductors that can go smaller, faster, and cooler. One possibility is carbon nanotubes, long chains of carbon molecules just nanometers in width, but they have some challenges to overcome. Researchers at the Stanford School of Engineering have overcome those challenges and created the first carbon nanotube computer.
There are different kinds of carbon nanotubes, including semiconducting and metallic. For use in computers, we want the semiconducting kind, but we are not yet able to grow exclusively the semiconducting kind. As manually sorting through and removing the metallic nanotubes would take too long, the researchers developed a shortcut method. After switching off the semiconducting nanotubes, the researchers pumped enough electricity into the circuit to cause the metallic nanotubes to burn away in puffs of carbon dioxide. This solves the problem of metallic nanotubes, but leaves the problem of misaligned nanotubes, which could cause a short circuit. To work around those, the researchers developed an algorithm that can map out circuits that will work regardless of where any askew nanotubes are.
Armed with those two techniques, the researchers were able to build a computer of 178 transistors, using the university's limited fabrication facilities. This computer is able to perform some basic tasks, such as counting and number sorting, and can run the MIPS instruction set, developed in the 1980s. It may not seem like much now, but this is a great step toward a future of carbon nanotube technologies.
Source: Stanford School of Engineering
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