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very pleased to see such a fine job! It wouldn't hurt to add a few effects, and I can tell you what program is needed for this " Sony Vegas Pro " This program will allow you to make a very good video I wish you good luck!

Those shopping for a shiny new solid state drive this holiday season (or shortly after) may want to expedite the process of pulling the trigger as NAND flash prices are only expected to rise in the coming weeks and months. A recent report from DRAMeXchange (via Taiwan-based media outlet CTimes) highlights the fact that NAND flash revenue on a global scale grew 19.6 percent sequentially during the third quarter of 2016. That’s only expected to climb during the current quarter as products that use flash memory – namely smartphones – will be in high demand during the holidays. The technological transition from 2D NAND to 3D NAND on the production side is another contributing factor to rising costs. This will work itself out over time as additional manufacturers upgrade their facilities to churn out newer and more advanced 3D NAND chips but in the interim, it will continue to limit the industry’s overall output. Even though prices will be inflated, it won’t be anything like what we saw with mechanical hard drives following the extensive flooding in Thailand in 2011. The shortage is, however, already having an impact on devices that use SSDs like computers. Just last month, for example, Acer delayed shipments of new laptops like the Swift 7 due to SSD shortages.

There has been a lot of hype surrounding secretive augmented reality startup Magic Leap over the last couple of years. The company, which was last valued at $4.5 billion, has raised $1.4 billion in funding on the back of amazing demos and claims about its technology. But it seems the firm may not have been totally honest about certain elements of its AR system. Last year, Magic Leap unveiled the “Just another day in the office” video, which shows the headset wearer playing a game where they fight AR aliens. The top corner of the video displays the logo of visual effects studio Weta Workshop. It was assumed that the company provided the game’s visual assets, but according to The Information, there was no such game - Weta created the entire video. While there’s nothing in the clip that states it was recorded on Magic Leap technology, its YouTube description does suggest this is the case. “This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,” it reads. The video was also used to recruit employees. Another issue relates to Magic Leap’s patented fiber scanning display, which appeared in the company's prototype product – a rectangular, shoulder-width box called “The Beast.” Many investors backed the firm with the expectation that the technology would appear in a smaller, more consumer-friendly product, but the company hasn’t been able to make it work and has shelved the project for now. “You ultimately in engineering have to make tradeoffs,” CEO Rony Abovitz told The Information. Magic Leap is now using a different technology in its AR product, which is described as being a PC-connected headset similar to Microsoft’s HoloLens but with blurrier and more jittery images. Abovitz did show off a prototype “PEQ” device that was the size of a standard pair of glasses, but declined to demonstrate it to The Information. He said it was only less capable than the tethered prototypes, but didn’t share any technical details.

Paleoclimatologist Kim Cobb samples coral, which preserves a record of water temperature in the ratio of oxygen isotopes in its skeleton. Kim Cobb and two team members, clad in black scuba gear, have been scouring the coral-studded seabed near the equatorial Pacific's Christmas Island here for nearly an hour. Then Cobb emerges with a victorious "Yes!" A few minutes later, Cobb, a paleoclimatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, dives back to the bottom and, from under a coral head, extracts the prize: two small containers encrusted with coralline algae. Inside are recorders of salinity and temperature that captured in excruciating detail the 2015–16 El Niño event, which brought a pulse of abnormally warm water to the tropical Pacific. The recorders showed that during the disturbance, which wreaked climatic havoc around the globe, the warming here set a record: 3°C above normal. The extreme warmth, Cobb says, reflected not just the natural El Niño cycle, but a new factor: global warming caused by human activity. As she will report next week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California, a detailed, long-term temperature record derived from corals on Christmas and other Pacific islands shows that over the last 7000 years, El Niños waxed and waned. Then, during the 20th century, with global warming taking hold, their intensity began to climb. The trend is likely to continue, boding ever more destructive El Niños, she says. "It's yet another impact of global warming that we'd like to avoid." Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, says Cobb's temperature archive offers the first historical picture of El Niño and its changes. "It's unique and gives a fascinating window into an otherwise totally obscure, but vitally important, part of climate history." El Niños arrive every 3 to 7 years when winds fail in the tropical Pacific, allowing warm water to pool in the eastern part of the ocean. The oceanic warmth disrupts fisheries and can bleach and kill corals—85% of Christmas Island's corals may have died in the latest El Niño, which ended in May. El Niños also trigger widespread floods and droughts that, during the extreme El Niño of 1997–98, caused $35 billion in damage and claimed an estimated 23,000 lives. Yet no one knew whether the gradual warming of the globe is intensifying these events, in part because records are short and spotty in the remote parts of the Pacific where El Niño hits hardest. To get the long view, Cobb and her collaborators gathered hundreds of lumps of old coral washed up on beaches on Christmas and Fanning islands (both part of the Republic of Kiribati) and the U.S. island of Palmyra. By applying uranium-thorium dating to the corals and measuring ratios of oxygen isotopes in their skeletons, her lab reconstructed ocean temperatures for much of the last 7000 years. During that time, Cobb says, "all kinds of stuff was going on in the climate, but it had no discernible effect on El Niño events." But the corals, supplemented by sensors like the one Cobb recovered off Christmas, show that over the past century El Niño intensity has increased by 25%. "There is no century even remotely resembling the 20th in the record for at least 5000 years," she says. Cobb's finding is consistent with a 2013 study of tree rings suggesting that El Niño–related weather havoc has intensified across much of the globe in recent decades, notes Wenju Cai, a climate modeler at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Melbourne, Australia. But the tree ring record is too short, he says, to show whether global warming is to blame. Cobb's 7000-year archive, in contrast, "clearly shows that 20th century El Niños are more extreme and intense than they were before the industrial era, and that points to global warming as a cause." Eric Guilyardi, a climate scientist at the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute in Paris, hopes Cobb's results will inspire others to develop similar temperature records elsewhere in the equatorial Pacific. "This will give us the spatial view needed to be sure El Niño is indeed changing." Now, Cobb plans to push her temperature record into the future. "We're now tracking 30 corals that have survived this latest El Niño," she says. They're waiting to record the next one—and even hotter seas to come.

Welcome to CSBD dude!

4K televisions have been a hot commodity during the past couple of holiday shopping seasons and 2016 is no exception. This year has delivered with some of the lowest prices we’ve seen to date on UHD sets which leaves just one glaring barrier to entry. I’m of course referring to 4K content… or rather, its scarcity. Google is taking steps to help fill in the void by offering up more than 125 movies in 4K resolution via Google Play Movies. Observant readers may have noticed that Google has quietly been seeding 4K-quality flicks to its online movie store in recent weeks but the search giant is just now getting around to officially announcing it. Ben Serridge, product manager for Google Play Movies & TV, said the flicks are initially being limited to buyers in the US and Canada (yes, buyers, as in, you can’t yet rent 4K movies). The movies are encoded using VP9, the open source video codec that Netflix is also relying on for its recently-announced offline viewing option. It’s worth mentioning that while customers can purchase movies using an Android device or on the web, they’ll only be able to watch them using a Chromecast Ultra, on a Sony Bravia Android TV or with an Xiaomi Mi Box 3 media streamer. Anyone that has a Chromecast Ultra can score their first 4K movie for free. Serridge specifically mentions Captain Phillips and the recent Ghostbusters remake. Speaking of, Google currently has a host of other offers that you may be interested in such as a three-month trail of HBO NOW, 75 percent off any one movie rental and 90 days of unlimited music on Google Play.

Intel has published the technical product specifications for its upcoming “Arches Canyon” NUCs powered by its own Celeron J3455 CPU, a 10W chip with integrated HD Graphics 500 that’s soldered to the motherboard. Intel will offer two variations of the NUC – one with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage and Windows 10 installed (model NUC6CAYS) and a barebones kit (NUC6CAYH) in which the buyer must supply their own RAM, storage and operating system. Those that opt for the barebones configuration should know that the system supports a maximum of only 8GB of 1600/1866 MHz memory. Elsewhere, you’ll find two USB 3.0 ports up front (one with fast charging) and two on the rear (sorry, no USB Type-C), a single 2.5-inch slot for a SATA SSD or HDD, an SDXC card reader, a full-size HDMI 2.0 port with CEC that supports up to 4K/60fps, a VGA connector that’s capable of 1,920 x 1,200 resolution at 60Hz, a front-mounted 3.5mm audio jack, a rear-mounted mini-TOSLink connector, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, dual-band 802.11 ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 as well as an infrared receiver up front. The specifications match up perfectly to what was listed on the consumer NUC roadmap that leaked online over the summer. No word yet on pricing nor do we know when exactly Intel plans to launch their Apollo Lake NUCs. With CES now less than a month away, I suspect we’ll hear more about Intel’s plans in early January (if not sooner).

A small coelurosaur, shown here in this artist’s representation, approaching a resin-coated branch. Amber is often prized not just for its golden beauty, but also for the tiny creatures it contains, many of them millions of years old. Now, a chunk of this fossilized tree sap found at a market in Myanmar has turned out to contain a very rare treasure indeed: a slender piece of feathered tail that belonged to a small bipedal dinosaur that lived about 99 million years ago. “Since Jurassic Park came out, paleontologists have joked about finding dinosaurs in amber, since it would contain so much extra information. And now we have a piece of one,” says Thomas Holtz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the study. Researchers aren’t using ancient blood from the belly of preserved mosquitos to recreate dinosaurs, as in the movies. But the finding does reveal a feathered dinosaur tail in 3D for the first time, and offers a unique glimpse into the early evolution of feathers. Amber is a uniquely useful fossilizer, notes Michael Engel, a paleontologist and entomologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was also not involved in the study. “It preserves things in lifelike fidelity.” Although it’s rare to find larger animals preserved in the sticky flow, researchers have found everything from frogs to lizards to ancient bird wings, likely entombed after death. The amber deposits of northern Myanmar harbor one of the most diverse arrays of animals from the Cretaceous period. Paleontologist Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences in Beijing was hunting through an amber market in Myanmar for lizard and insect specimens when a particular chunk caught his eye: Along with the usual scattering of insects, it contained a 3.6-centimeter-long section of a flexible, finely feathered tail. Right away, he knew he had something special. A feathered dinosaur's tail, frozen in amber. Xing contacted paleontologist Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, Canada, and the team used photographs taken through microscopes and computerized tomography scanning (computer-processed combinations of images taken by x-rays at different angles to reveal interior details of the fossil) to study the eight preserved vertebrae and their feathers. Unlike Archaeopteryx (a 150-million-year-old creature thought by many researchers to be among the very earliest birds) or modern birds, the vertebrae were not fused into a solid rod at the tip of the tail. Instead, the tail in amber is whiplike and flexible, bending in several places at once. That, the researchers report online today in Current Biology, suggests that its owner was not a bird but in fact a dinosaur, and likely a member of a group of small two-legged dinosaurs called coelurosaurs. (Jurassic Park fans, take note: Compsognathus—nicknamed “compys” in the movies—are a member of this group.) Plumage pigments preserved in the amber suggest the theropod was colored chestnut-brown along its dorsal side (the top of the tail), and lighter on its underside. The amber also allowed the researchers to study the structure of the animal’s plumage in 3D. Many well-known feathered dinosaur fossils—such as those of the “Jehol Biota,” a fossil deposit in northeastern China dating to about 130 million years ago—are “squashed flat, so that we have to deconstruct what the original shape of the feathers was,” Holtz says. “Here we can see them in the round, and this gives a better sense of some of the shapes.” The feather of the bird you see out your window today has a central shaft, or “rachis,” that branches out into a series of barbs that branch again into fine barbules. In the new specimen, the rachis is relatively thin and flexible compared with the thick, rigid central rachis of modern birds; however, the structure of barbules is complex, with fine tiers of branching as in modern feathers, distributed evenly across the length of the feathers. In all, the structure of the feathers suggests that the animal wasn’t capable of flight, although “it may have been a glider,” McKellar says. That combination of features—weak rachis and evenly spaced barbules—has not previously been directly observable in the flattened 2D fossils, Holtz says. He agrees that the bird likely couldn’t fly with this configuration—and notes that the discovery thus further reinforces the idea that feathers “evolved in a context other than flight,” such as for warmth or for mating.

Welcome to CSBD dude!

Welcome to CSBD dude!

Leap Motion has been working on its admittedly cool motion tracking technology for a few years now. But while the original hand tracker failed to rival the venerable computer mouse as the primary means of interacting with the two-dimensional computer interface, the company has been focusing its efforts in another area where the technology will be a more natural fit: virtual reality. They’ve already managed to work as an add on for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on Windows, and now the company wants to bring its tech to mobile phone-based virtual reality. The Leap Motion Mobile Platform uses two miniature cameras in a small strip that can be embedded into mobile head-mounted displays, to detect finger motion that’s integrated into lower-powered VR experiences. The company says it “reinvented” its Orion software to run at nearly 10 times the speed, and as a result performance is “smoother and more accurate” than ever before. The system is supposed to be showing up in commercial headsets next year, although no specific devices were revealed. Currently Leap Motion is showing off a reference design for Samsung Gear VR and the results are encouraging, according to first impressions by TechCrunch and The Verge. Leap Motion’s standard demo is a graphically non-intensive toybox where you can create and bat around blocks with your hands. The engine is relatively good at figuring out when you’re trying to grab an object, says The Verge, although it’s still not as reliable as hitting a hardware button. CEO Michael Buckwald promises there will be announcements from partners “soon”. Leap Motion will be hosting demos at major VR events this month, and given the timing of the announcements we can probably expect to hear more at CES in Las Vegas next month.

HardOCP's Kyle Bennett this past May published an editorial in which he painted a rather bleak picture of the happenings inside AMD’s walls. Specifically, Bennett – based on conversations with a number of current (at the time) and former employees – said Raja Koduri, leader of the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), wanted to spin off from the rest of AMD and once again become “ATI.” Key to realizing this goal was to become the GPU technology supplier of choice for arch rival Intel. Seems pretty far-fetched, no? Maybe not. Intel said a month earlier that it was cutting 12,000 jobs due to the continued downturn in the PC industry. Bennett reported that well over 1,000 graphics engineers and employees working directly with graphics engineers were let go in anticipation of Intel handing over graphics-related tasks to AMD. Fast-forward more than six months to late Monday evening where Bennett proclaims in the HardOCP forum that the licensing deal between AMD and Intel to put AMD’s GPU technology into Intel’s iGPU is signed and done. If true and taken literally, it would be an unprecedented move from both parties (I have no reason to doubt Bennett or his sources as he was already established and respected long before I ever came online). Forbes, on the other hand, floats the possibility that it could be little more than a patent cross-licensing play like the one Intel has in place with Nvidia to protect itself from patent infringement. That agreement, curiously enough, is set to expire on March 31, 2017 according to the publication. Those interested in digging deeper are encouraged to check out Bennett’s editorial, the 65 pages of subsequent discussion in HardOCP’s forum and Forbes’ write-up on the patent angle. Very interesting stuff.

One dark winter night in 992 C.E.—as the English King Æthelred the Unready was forced to pay tribute to Viking invaders and Almanzor, Muslim ruler of Andalusia, ravaged his Christian enemies in northern Spain—the northern sky was lit up by an ethereal glow. A chronicler in Saxony (modern-day Germany) wrote that “light like the Sun shone from the North.” The heavens were “blood-red,” said another from Ulster in northern Ireland. What they were seeing, according to a new study, was the aurora borealis (an example pictured), or northern lights, reaching much farther south than normal because of an extremely powerful solar flare (known as a superflare) on the sun bombarding Earth with high-energy particles. Several years ago, researchers had noticed that there were spikes in the levels of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings found all around the world at the same time. This can be caused by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere and converting nitrogen-14—a normal constituent of air—into carbon-14. But what sort of cosmic rays and where did they come from? Some studies suggested there were reports of unusual aurorae shortly before the biggest carbon-14 spikes in 774–775 C.E. and 993–994 C.E., suggesting the sun as the source of the rays. To find out, scientists scoured written records around the time of the later spike and found eight aurora sightings recorded in Saxony, northern Ireland, and the Korean peninsula, between October 992 and January 993, they report in a study accepted for publication in Solar Physics. From calculations of how far south the aurorae were visible, the team estimates that the solar storm of 992–993 was stronger than any recorded since detailed monitoring began in 1957, but probably not as strong as the famous Carrington event in 1859, which knocked out telegraph networks worldwide. Whereas in the 990s the storm produced little more than a nice light show, if it struck today it would likely devastate our technologically dependent society.

Back in June 2012, Google became one of the first big tech firms to announce that it would notify users it suspected of being targeted by state-sponsored attacks. Earlier this week, across the space of 24 hours, a huge number of prominent journalists and professors from around the world received these warnings. Some of those affected include Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, Politico's Julia Ioffe, GQ's special correspondent Keith Olbermann, Vox's Ezra Klein, Yahoo News' Garance Franke-Ruta, and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, Jon Lovett. Ars Technica reports that several security industry professionals also received the same warning. The red banners reads: "Warning: Google may have detected government-backed attackers trying to steal your password," and includes a link leading to an advice page on how to secure accounts. Reports state that some of the people who received the message were already using two-factor authentication. A Google spokesperson said the warnings were likely the result of hacking attempts made over the last month, rather than more recently. The company delays informing users that they have been targetted so attackers can’t learn security researchers’ detection methods. However, if a breach is successful, Google informs the victim straight away. While Google has sent out these warnings in the past, the sheer number of people who received them within a 24-hour period is suspicious, to say the least. Google hasn’t indicated who might have been behind the attacks but, assuming they took place around the time of the US election, they could relate to a spear phishing campaign tied to Russian government hackers that began just after Trump’s victory.

AOC has unveiled a new 25-inch gaming monitor that attempts to push refresh rates to their limits. The Agon AG251FZ is a TN LCD that supports FreeSync, with a variable refresh window from 48Hz up to a massive 240Hz. Whether or not you'll be able to discern a difference between 240Hz and 144Hz – the most common refresh rate for fast gaming monitors – remains to be seen. The good news is that with a resolution of just 1920 x 1080, you shouldn't have too much trouble pushing games well above 100 Hz with a powerful gaming system. The AG251FZ features a maximum brightness of 400 nits and a static contrast ratio of 1000:1. Unfortunately viewing angles aren't spectacular from this TN display at just 170/160° degrees, and color accuracy is limited due to 6-bit+FRC performance. Both issues shouldn't impact gamers significantly, as this monitor is designed specifically for fast refresh rates. This display packs a stand with tilt, swivel and pivot adjustments, plus there's a folding arm on the right side that's a perfect headphone holder. Port-wise we're looking at two HDMI ports, DisplayPort, DVI and VGA alongside a USB 3.0 hub and some audio jacks. The AOC Agon AG251FZ will be available in January 2016 for $449.

Many astronauts dream of traveling to a new world, but the road is paved with life-threatening hazards. When President John F. Kennedy declared in 1962 that the United States would go to the moon, not because it is easy, but “because [it is] hard,” he had no idea how hard. Nevertheless, the success of the Apollo 11 moon landing and subsequent manned missions inspired space explorers of all stripes to justify their journeys to other cosmic outposts in the same vein: because it’s the ultimate challenge. But with each new study, the passage to Mars and other planets seems fraught with more danger than ever thought possible. Just lifting off the surface of Earth and landing on another planet is bad enough. But how intense are the dangers of actually traveling in space? Here are five of the most dangerous threats astronauts will face when traveling to Mars and beyond. Cosmic radiation, energy-charged atom fragments from the sun, and supernovae outside our galaxy can give astronauts anxiety, depression, and impaired decision-making. Cosmic radiation En route to another world, astronauts will be bombarded with cosmic radiation: tiny, high-energy atom fragments that whiz through space and can damage cells and DNA. People on Earth are protected from cosmic rays thanks to Earth’s magnetic field, but an unprotected, Mars-bound astronaut would receive 0.3 sieverts of radiation on a one-way trip—that’s hardly close to the lethal dose of 8 sieverts or even the radiation sickness–causing dose of 1 sievert, but researchers think that amount (equivalent to 24 computerized tomography scans) is enough to cause irreversible damage to brain cells and other cells that aren’t readily replenished. “The central nervous system is the 800-pound gorilla in all of this,” says Charles Limoli, a radiation oncologist at the University of California, Irvine. In a recent rodent study in Scientific Reports, Limoli suggests that cosmic rays would cause long-term brain damage in astronauts on the way to another planet, resulting in dementia, memory deficits, anxiety, depression, and impaired decision-making. “This is not positive news for astronauts deployed on a 2- to 3-year round trip to Mars,” he says. But it might be a problem we can fix. Several research groups, including Limoli’s, are working on a drug that could protect cells and DNA from being broken apart. Still, others are trying to invent shields that would deflect the rays altogether. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is seen inside a Soyuz simulator at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia. Astronauts will have to get along in small spaces like this one for years on the way to another planet. Going stir crazy If you’ve ever been on a long family road trip, you’ve had a taste of what a trip to Mars might be like—except that when your dad plays too much ABBA, you can eventually exit the vehicle. In a years-long deep space voyage without pit stops, a spat could mean life and death for crewmembers. In a NASA-funded report published this year on long space flights, Jack Stuster, a cultural anthropologist at private research corporation Anacapa Sciences in Santa Barbara, California, writes that U.S. astronauts’ No. 1 concern on missions to the International Space Station (ISS) was getting along with crewmates. Their journals, positive overall, reflected that concern: “I think I do need to get out of here,” one astronaut wrote. “Living in close quarters with people over a long period of time, definitely even things that normally wouldn't bother you much at all can bother you after a while … that can drive anybody crazy.” And that was when Earth was right out the window. If astronauts start to feel this way when both Earth and their destination are but tiny pinpoints in space, things will feel even grimmer, Stuster says. Though these feelings can be limited by keeping busy, and by the intense psychological screenings that crewmembers undergo, the spectre of violence—and even mutiny—will always be a possibility. Aspergillus fumigatus is the most common cause of invasive fungal infection in humans. The airborne microorganism grows well on the International Space Station. Space fungus We’ve known since the 1960s that some microorganisms can survive the perils of space, including microgravity, extreme temperatures, and radiation. And given that our best efforts to wipe space vessels clean of microorganisms often fails, exposure to these potentially pathogenic organisms is unavoidable. Now, a new study supports that claim. In October, researchers found that the airborne fungus Aspergillus fumigatus, the most common cause of invasive fungal infection in humans, grows just as well on the ISS as it does on Earth. And if fumigatus lives just fine in space, the researchers write, so could many other, more lethal pathogens. The researchers say this calls for a better detection and cleaning policy to avoid sending a ship full of astronauts into the dangers of deep space, only to have them killed by an earthly pathogen. Microgravity makes meal time fun, but it can also cause muscle atrophy. Astronauts like NASA’s Karen Nyberg must exercise for 2 hours a day to prevent muscle loss up in orbit. Microgravity From YouTube videos of astronauts playing with floating blobs of water or doing effortless backflips, it seems like microgravity would be a blast. But up in space, the reality is much more serious. The absence of gravity causes bones and muscles to deteriorate, leading to a number of physiological problems. Astronauts on the ISS exercise for 2 hours a day to protect their muscles from wasting away, but losing bone density is unavoidable. Microgravity could also affect the body in other, unpredictable ways. Many astronauts, including Scott Kelly, have returned to Earth with blurred vision. The cause, according to research presented this week at the Radiology Society of North America’s annual meeting, is an increased volume of spinal fluid that pushes against the optic nerve and eyeballs, causing farsightedness. In another study, scientists discovered that the spinal muscles of ISS astronauts—essential for support and movement—shrank significantly during their time in space, decreasing by 19%. That could be the reason more than half of all ISS crew members report spinal pain and are four times more likely than Earth-bound citizens to have herniated disks, the researchers write in Spine. One solution? Space yoga—researchers say it might help increase spine mobility and strength. Exactly which poses they’ll do is yet to be determined. Technicians at mission control—like these at work at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center—work with astronauts to make sure missions run smoothly and without error. Human error Making mistakes is something humans are extraordinarily good at, and in space, mistakes tend to hold heavier consequences. Andy Weir, the author of the science-fiction novel The Martian, took full advantage of that, crafting his entire plot around how a stranded astronaut must expertly solve dozens of problems or face certain death. Real-life space explorers are not always as lucky. Take the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters, for example. Both shuttles broke apart because of mechanical problems, killing all seven astronauts on board each time. With Challenger, rubber O-rings were the culprit, causing the shuttle to break apart in the sky when they couldn’t seal properly in the cold. Columbia broke apart during re-entry when insulating foam separated from the shuttle and punctured its left wing. NASA management knew about mechanical issues in both cases, but considered them unimportant because they had never derailed a mission in the past. On long spaceflights where tensions might be running high or radiation could cause unusual anxiety, depression, or confusion, it’d be no surprise to see human-caused errors like a crash landing, leaky space suits, or even the loss of the water supply. Finding a way to limit the dangers of space and learning from past mistakes will ensure the safest flight to Mars and beyond. And with a little luck, our astronauts could end up as successful as Weir’s.

O modalitate foarte simpla de a va curata computerul folosind doar Notepad ul. Primul pas este sa deschideti notepad ul si sa copiati urmatoarele comenzi: @echo off color 4a del /s /f /q c:\windows\temp\*.* rd /s /q c:\windows\temp md c:\windows\temp del /s /f /q C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch del /s /f /q %temp%\*.* rd /s /q %temp% md %temp% deltree /y c:\windows\tempor~1 deltree /y c:\windows\temp deltree /y c:\windows\tmp deltree /y c:\windows\ff*.tmp deltree /y c:\windows\history deltree /y c:\windows\cookies deltree /y c:\windows\recent deltree /y c:\windows\spool\printers del c:\WIN386.SWP cls Al doilea pas este sa ii dam un nume fisierului si sa il salvam in format .bat Pe desktop-ul vostru va aparea acest fisier: Pastul 3 este sa deschidem fisierul denumit de noi, in cazul de fata "Cleaner". Dupa cum puteti vedea va curata: cookies, history, fisierele temporare nefolositoare care doar ocupa spatiu si nu le folositi.

The holidays are rapidly approaching and before you know it, we’ll be rolling the calendar over to 2017. As the year comes to a close, it’s important to take a moment and reflect on the events that shaped 2016 which is exactly what Google did on Thursday. Google Play’s “Best of 2016” recognizes the most po[CENSORED]r apps, games, streamed songs, movies, TV shows and books of the year. Some entries, like Pokémon Go’s place atop the games list, are a given while others may surprise you (I wouldn’t have guessed that Deadpool would finish as Google Play’s top movie, for example). That said, here are the top five lists for the most po[CENSORED]r content on Google Play at the global scale: Top trending apps of 2016 1. Face Changer 2 2. Lumyer - Photo & Selfie Editor 3. Castbox - Podcast Radio Music 4. Emoji Keyboard Pro 5. MSQRD Top trending games of 2016 1. Pokémon GO 2. Clash Royale 3. Traffic Rider 4. slither.io 5. Dream League Soccer Top streamed songs of 2016 1. Stressed Out, Twenty One Pilots 2. Sorry, Justin Bieber 3. One Dance (feat. WizKid & Kyla), Drake 4. Don't Let Me Down (feat. Daya), The Chainsmokers 5. Me, Myself & I, G-Eazy Top movies of 2016 1. Deadpool 2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens 3. Zootopia 4. Captain America: Civil War 5. Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice Top TV shows of 2016 1. Game of Thrones 2. The Walking Dead 3. The Big Bang Theory 4. Mr. Robot 5. The Flash Top books of 2016 1. Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe by Cullen Bunn 2. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, Jack Thorne 3. The Girl on the Train: A Novel by Paula Hawkins 4. The Art of War by Tzu Sun 5. Me Before You: A Novel by Jojo Moyes

Microsoft’s Surface Studio was one of the worst kept secrets in technology in the latter half of 2016 (and also the recent victim of an iFixit teardown). The optional Surface Dial accessory, however, took virtually everyone by surprise (in a good way). Many were also surprised (again, in a good way) by how easy it is to repair the all-in-one. Will the Surface Dial follow in the footsteps of its companion and prove to be equally as easy to dissect and repair? For that answer, we once again turn to iFixit. Jumping right in, the team found that the rubber foot on the bottom of the Surface Dial is held in place by magnets and thus, comes off without a fight. It is here that you’ll find two AAA batteries and a sync button (this explains why it’s so easy to get the cover off). Going deeper, however, requires a bit more work (and some tools). After struggling to get the mid-frame / battery compartment out, the team found a single access hole as part of the spinning mechanism that must be used to remove a few screws that separate the body from the silver cover. Only after the fact did they find a plugged hole under the battery compartment that would have made removal a bit easier. As such, they recommend drilling through the plug to remove the screws that separate the body. Back on track, they get the internals separated from the outer casing and have to pop the bearing apart to advance further. The team encounters springy posts that help even out the pressure when you press down on the Surface Dial, a pancake vibration motor for force feedback and a microswitch responsible for its click functionality. Also of note is the component responsible for the “spinny” function which iFixit says looks very similar to the sensor inside the Nest thermostat. Overall, iFixit awarded the Surface Dial a repairability score of four out of 10 (the higher the number, the easier it is to repair) which is one point less than the Surface Studio. iFixit praised the dial for its easy-to-remove bottom panel that makes swapping batteries and syncing a breeze. The team noted that while the accessory is durable, repairs are unlikely as most of the components that would probably fail can’t be replaced without damaging other parts. The vibrating motor responsible for haptic feedback, for example, is firmly held in place with strong glue. Without a repair guide and enough courage to drill your way into the main compartment, you won’t even get the chance to service anything. Given its sub-$100 price tag, your best bet is to either try and replace a faulty dial under warranty or simply buy a new one.

A half-scale model of ESA's 2020 Mars rover. It will descend using parachutes and thrusters. Europe’s ExoMars 2020 lander will go ahead as scheduled, despite the failure of the test-run Schiaparelli lander this past October, the European Space Agency (ESA) said today at the end of a council meeting at which government ministers from its 22 member states agreed on budgets for the next several years. ESA won a total of €10.3 billion for a wide range of projects extending into next decade but because the agency had requested €11 billion, some belt tightening will be required. And there was one notable casualty: the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM), which planned to study in detail and land on a near-Earth asteroid in 2022, did not win enough support from member governments to proceed. There will be huge relief that ministers supported going ahead with ExoMars 2020 as planned, because it has been on the books at ESA for more than a decade. The mission carries a rover that will be able to, for the first time, drill as deep as 2 meters below the surface in search of present or past life. The first part of the ExoMars program—the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)—successfully entered Mars orbit in October. It carried with it Schiaparelli, a demonstrator designed to test landing technology. But after a faultless atmospheric entry, a software error caused Schiaparelli to think it was on the surface when it was still kilometers from landing and it subsequently crashed. Because Schiaparelli was able to transmit data during the landing to the TGO, ESA engineers believe they can avoid a similar mishap in 2020. But it remained to be seen whether ESA members agreed with them. They did; today, ministers approved the €440 million funding needed to complete the ExoMars mission, but with caveats. Some €97 million of the total must come not from the ExoMars budget line, but from ESA’s central funding, which pays for other science missions. That could potentially lead to conflicts down the line. “Today I am very confident we will do it. We have some contingency,” ESA Director General Jan Wörner told a postcouncil press conference today. ESA’s central funding won a modest increase of 1% per year before inflation. Wörner pointed out that, with inflation as low as it is today, that does represent some growth in funding, but it doesn’t mean life will be easy. “We are in a little bit of a difficult situation: That increase will be eaten up by ExoMars. We didn’t get a free ticket from the member states,” he said. If inflation increases, then the trouble will mount, because it will eat into the budget for science missions which, with €508 million in 2017, form the biggest budget line in ESA’s central funding. Despite the strained circumstances, ESA Director of Science Alvaro Giménez Cañete told reporters that: “We can do what we’re committed to and can launch what we’re planning to launch up to 2021.” ESA science missions due for launch in that time span include the Cheops mission to study exoplanet transits, the BepiColombo probe to Mercury, the Solar Orbiter, and the Euclid dark energy mission. ESA member states also reasserted their commitment to the International Space Station (ISS) by approving nearly €1 billion in funding to remain part of the project beyond the current 2020 agreement to 2024. As part of the current deal, ESA is building a service module for NASA’s Orion capsule. The module will provide electricity, water, oxygen, and nitrogen for astronauts, as well as propulsion once Orion is in orbit. By agreeing to extend ISS operations, ESA commits itself to building a second-service module as part of a barter arrangement with NASA. Asteroid researchers will be dismayed to hear of the demise of AIM. The mission intended to send a small spacecraft to a 170-meter lump of rock nicknamed Didymoon, because it orbits around a slightly larger asteroid called Didymos. Didymoon is interesting because a NASA mission called Double Asteroid Redirection Test is intending to smash into it at 6 kilometers per second to see what effect that has on its motion. AIM would have observed the condition of the asteroid before and after the collision. Wörner said he will be traveling to Washington, D.C., next week to discuss with NASA what the AIM cancellation means for the joint mission. Looking further ahead, Wörner said the agency was looking into the possibility of building a “moon village.” This would not be a solely European effort but a multiparty collaboration with contributions from space agencies and industry. The concept doesn’t have a budget line but it has “started already,” says Wörner, adding: “ESA needs visionary programs for the future.”

According to the latest analysis from Steam Spy, more than a third of all games currently listed on Steam were released this year. And this is without considering there's still just under a month of game releases to go in 2016. Steam Spy's figures say that a whopping 4,207 games were released on Steam in 2016, considerably more than any other year in the platform's history. The amount of game releases this year will surpass 2015 by well over a thousand, and will crush the mere 565 games that launched on Steam in 2013, just three years ago. The data from Steam Spy includes Early Access titles, but does not include downloadable content, movies, and software that can be found on Steam. Early Access is a likely contributor to the explosion of Steam releases from 2013 onward, as Early Access debuted on the platform in March 2013. The service allows indie developers to release in-development versions of their games on Steam for feedback and sales, and has produced a number of po[CENSORED]r titles, most notably DayZ, Don't Starve, and Dirt: Rally. The huge number of Steam releases in 2016 has prompted Valve to modify their Store with features that make it easier to find po[CENSORED]r and interesting games. Most recently, Valve revamped the Steam Store homepage to heavily rely on recommendations and curators, rather than simple lists of new releases.

Intel aren't expected to formally announce their Kaby Lake desktop processors until early next year, but somehow Tom's Hardware have received and benchmarked a Core i7-7700K more than a month early. Their findings indicate that Kaby Lake won't be a significant upgrade over Skylake, at least on desktop platforms. The Core i7-7700K is clocked at 4.2 GHz with a boost clock of 4.5 GHz, which is a small 200-300 MHz clock speed gain on the Skylake Core i7-6700K. The processor also comes with improved Intel HD 630 graphics, and the same four cores and eight threads as its predecessor. The chip's TDP has been increased from 91W to 95W to account for the clock speed gains, noting that Kaby Lake is built on largely the same 14nm process. Tom's Hardware's testing revealed that the Core i7-7700K is only 3.6% faster than the Core i7-6700K across the benchmarks they performed. This is slightly lower than the 5-7% improvement in clock speeds, and due to the increased power draw that Tom's Hardware recorded, Intel's flagship Kaby Lake chip is actually less efficient than its Skylake predecessor. Tom's also spent some time overclocking the i7-7700K, and discovered that while the Kaby Lake sample they received did overclock slightly higher than their Skylake CPU (4.78 GHz versus 4.59 GHz), it produced a lot more heat in the process. The i7-7700K ran at 82°C above ambient while overclocked, which equated to a recorded temperature of a whopping 97°C. The i7-6700K, in contrast, ran at just 60°C above ambient (75°C). As it was unclear whether Tom's Hardware received an engineering sample or a retail Core i7-7700K, these performance characteristics may not carry over to units that will actually go on sale next year. You'll just have to wait until we get our hands on Kaby Lake in the coming months.

The comfortably warm atmosphere of a brown dwarf is an underappreciated potential home for alien life, scientists say. There’s an abundant new swath of cosmic real estate that life could call home – and the views would be spectacular. Floating out by themselves in the Milky Way galaxy are perhaps a billion cold brown dwarfs, objects many times as massive as Jupiter but not big enough to ignite as a star. According to a new study, layers of their upper atmospheres sit at temperatures and pressures resembling those on Earth, and could host microbes that surf on thermal updrafts. The idea expands the concept of a habitable zone to include a vast po[CENSORED]tion of worlds that had previously gone unconsidered. “You don’t necessarily need to have a terrestrial planet with a surface,” says Jack Yates, a planetary scientist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who led the study. Atmospheric life isn’t just for the birds. For decades, biologists have known about microbes that drift in the winds high above Earth’s surface. And in 1976, Carl Sagan envisioned the kind of ecosystem that could evolve in the upper layers of Jupiter, fueled by sunlight. You could have sky plankton: small organisms he called “sinkers.” Other organisms could be balloon-like “floaters,” which would rise and fall in the atmosphere by mani[CENSORED]ting their body pressure. In the years since, astronomers have also considered the prospects of microbes in the carbon dioxide atmosphere above Venus’s inhospitable surface. Yates and his colleagues applied the same thinking to a kind of world Sagan didn’t know about. Discovered in 2011, some cold brown dwarfs have surfaces roughly at room temperature or below; lower layers would be downright comfortable. In March 2013, astronomers discovered WISE 0855-0714, a brown dwarf only seven light years away that seems to have water clouds in its atmosphere. Yates and his colleagues set out to update Sagan’s calculations and to identify the sizes, densities, and life strategies of microbes that could manage to stay aloft in the habitable region of an enormous atmosphere of predominantly hydrogen gas. Sink too low and you are cooked or crushed. Rise too high and you might freeze. On such a world, small sinkers like the microbes in Earth’s atmosphere or even smaller would have a better chance than Sagan’s floaters, the researchers will report in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. But a lot depends on the weather: if upwelling winds are powerful on free-floating brown dwarfs, as seems to be true in the bands of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, heavier creatures can carve out a niche. In the absence of sunlight, they could feed on chemical nutrients. Observations of cold brown dwarf atmospheres reveal most of the ingredients Earth life depends on: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, though perhaps not phosphorous. The idea is speculative but worth considering, says Duncan Forgan, an astrobiologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, who did not participate in the study but says he is close to the team. “It really opens up the field in terms of the number of objects that we might then think, well, these are habitable regions.” So far, only a few dozen cold brown dwarfs have been discovered, though statistics suggest there should be about ten within thirty light-years of Earth. These should be ripe targets for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is sensitive in the infrared where brown dwarfs shine brightest. After it launches in 2018, JWST should reveal the weather and the composition of their atmospheres, says Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to start getting gorgeous spectra of these objects,” she says. “This is making me think about it.” Testing for life would require anticipating a strong spectral signature of microbe byproducts like methane or oxygen, and then differentiating it from other processes, Faherty says. Another issue would be explaining how life could arise in an environment that lacks the water-rock interfaces, like hydrothermal vents, where life is thought to have begun on Earth. Perhaps life could develop through chemical reactions on the surfaces of dust grains in the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, or perhaps it gained a foothold after arriving as a hitchhiker on an asteroid. “Having little microbes that float in and out of a brown dwarf atmosphere is great,” Forgan says. “But you’ve got to get them there first.”

Our favorite gadgets are driven almost completely by critical new breakthroughs in component technologies Sometimes, it’s what’s inside that counts more than what we can see on the outside. That’s certainly the case with people, and increasingly, I think, it’s going to be the case with tech devices. Many of the most impressive breakthroughs in our favorite gadgets are driven almost completely by critical new breakthroughs in component technologies: chips and other semiconductors, displays, sensors, and much more. Just this week, in fact, there were reports that Apple might offer a curved display on next year’s iPhone, and that HP Enterprise had debuted the first working prototype of a dramatically different type of computing device that they dub The Machine. In both cases, it’s critical component technologies that are enabling these potentially breakthrough end products. In the iPhone’s case, it would be because of bendable OLED displays being produced by companies such as LG Display and Samsung Electronics’ display division. For The Machine, HP’s own new memory and optical interconnect chips are the key enablers for computing performance that’s touted to be as much as 8,000 times faster than today’s offerings. Long-time tech industry observers know that the real trick to figuring out where product trends are going is to find out what the most important component technologies being developed are, then learn about them and their timeline for introduction. That isn’t always as easy as it sounds, however, because semiconductor and other component technologies can get very complicated, very quickly. Given the increasing maturity and stabilization of many po[CENSORED]r tech product categories, I believe we’re going to start seeing an increased emphasis on changes to the “insides” of po[CENSORED]r devices. Still, there’s no better way to find out the future of tech products and industry trends than to dive into the component market headfirst. Fortunately, many major tech component vendors are starting to make this easier for non-engineers, because they’ve recognized the importance of telling their stories and explaining the unique value of their products and key technologies. From companies like Sandisk describing the performance and lifetime benefits of solid state drives (SSDs) inside PCs, to chipmakers like Nvidia describing the work in artificial intelligence (AI) that GPUs can achieve, we’re starting to see a lot more public efforts to educate even dedicated consumers, as well as investors and other interested observers, to the benefits of critical component technologies. Given the increasing maturity and stabilization of many po[CENSORED]r tech product categories, I believe we’re going to start seeing an increased emphasis on changes to the “insides” of po[CENSORED]r devices. Sure, we’ll eventually see radical outward-facing form factor changes such as smartphones with screens you fold and unfold, but those will only happen once we know that the necessary bendable components can be mass produced. Of course, the ideas behind what I’m describing aren’t new. Starting in the early 1990s and running for many years, chip maker Intel ran an advertising campaign built around the phrase “Intel Inside” to build brand recognition and value for its CPUs, or central processing units–the hidden “brains” inside many of our po[CENSORED]r devices. The idea was to create what is now commonly called an ingredient brand—a critical component, but not a complete, standalone product. The message Intel was able to deliver (and that still resonates today) is that critical components—even though you typically never see them—can have a big influence on the end device’s quality, just as ingredients in a dish can have a large influence on how it ultimately tastes. Since then, many other semiconductor chip, component and technology licensing companies (think Dolby for audio or ARM for low-power processors, for example) have done their own variations on this theme to build improved perceptions both of their products and the products that use them. Chip companies like AMD, Qualcomm, and many others, are also working to build stronger and more widely recognized brands that are associated with important, but understandable technology benefits. Most consumers will never buy products directly from these and other major component companies. However, as tech product cycles lengthen and industry maturity leads to slower changes in basic device shapes and sizes, consumers will start to base more of their final product purchase decisions on the ingredients from which those products are made.