Everything posted by vIs^♚
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Mechanical keyboards have exploded in po[CENSORED]rity recently by offering a blend of typing precision along with a solid, clicking sensation under your fingers and the satisfying sound produced by each key press. For those in shared environments who want the travel and tactile feel of a mechanical keyboard without all the noise, however, Cherry Americas is set to introduce two silent key switches. Previously available exclusively on Corsair's Strafe RGB keyboard, the MX Silent switches are now openly available in Black and Red stem varieties with standard and LED-backlit configurations for each. The switches feature an actuation force of 45cN and less than 5ms bounce along with the company’s patent-pending noise reduction feature. They are said to offer a light linear feel and no pressure point on the red variety — if you bottom out often, you will find reds softer to your liking, since with the non-clicky but still audible brown switches you have to use stronger force (55g) to overcome the pressure point. For those unfamiliar, keyboards using Cherry MX keyswitches make up the majority of the mechanical keyboard market. The company will be showing off its products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegasnext month, so perhaps we’ll learn more about new keyboards coming to the market using the company’s new Silent MX switches.
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A couple of weeks ago, AMD launched a massive driver update that brought a whole suite of new features, including the ability to capture gameplay and improve the power efficiency of your graphics card. Today, AMD has released an updated driver that addresses a handful of issues introduced in the previous release. The Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 16.12.2 driver (that's a serious mouthful, AMD) fixes a bunch of glaring bugs, including problems with borderless fullscreen mode on FreeSync displays, bugs during the ReLive installation process, problems launching Radeon Settings, and an issue where Chrome would not hardware accelerate VP9 content. Users should find fewer bugs with AMD's ReLive gameplay capture software in this driver release. AMD has fixed issues with unwanted slow motion audio recording, mouse cursor stutter in recorded videos, and Instant Replay failing to re-enable itself after being disabled for content protection. As always, you can grab a manual installer for the latest Radeon Software drivers from our driver download section here, or you can let Radeon Settings perform an automatic update for you. If you've experienced issues with ReLive in particular, it'd be a good idea to update to these new drivers.
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One Lunar XPrize team wants to study the effect of space weather on the Apollo 17 rover. Update: The story below will apear in the December issue of Science, but after the magazine went to press, the Japan-based team Hakuto announced that it had also booked a ride to the moon—along with a rival, Team Indus. The lander of the India-based team can carry 20 kilograms and so, in addition to its own rover, Team Indus will also carry Hakuto’s 4-kilogram rover. It remains to be seen which rover will get out of the lander first and set off on the 500-meter trek required to win the prize. A few years back, Oded Aharonson, a planetary scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, met three space-mad engineers who were building a cut-price mission to the moon. Backed by a mix of companies, foundations, and universities, the trio was competing for the $20 million jackpot of the Google Lunar XPrize, which challenged privately funded teams to be the first to land on the moon, travel 500 meters, and send back pictures and video. Other than that, the engineers' ambitions didn't extend beyond a triumphant party in the central square of Tel Aviv, Israel. But to Aharonson, this was too good an opportunity to miss. "You have to do something more. There must be some intellectual legacy to this mission," he told them. After several such conversations, he says, "they bought it." The party plans are still on. But SpaceIL now has a mission scientist—Aharonson—and its lander will carry a lightweight sensor to map the moon's magnetic field. Science was never the primary driver for the Lunar XPrize, which reaches a major milestone at the end of this month. Only those teams with a contract to launch their spacecraft before the end of 2017 will be allowed to stay in the competition. Of the 16 industry teams still in the running, the XPrize authorities have confirmed launches for just four, including SpaceIL. A fifth team, Part-Time Scientists, a Germany-based team founded by researchers who initially entered the prize alongside their day jobs, is still awaiting confirmation of its launch booking. Moonward bound? Five teams say they have booked launches to compete for the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize, but they have different approaches to roving on the moon and doing science. Engineering will determine the ultimate winner of the prize, which is modeled on the Ansari XPrize, awarded in 2004 to give a leg up to cheap human spaceflight. The race to get to the moon, move around, and report back home is meant to foster cheap lunar access so that industry and government agencies can prospect for minerals or build resorts for space tourists. Along the way, though, science will benefit, says Andrew Barton, the prize's director of technical operations in Culver City, California. Movement over the surface and communication with Earth are basic technologies for many future science missions. Also, he notes, the competition offers two bonus prizes that are at least partly scientific. The water discovery bonus ($4 million) requires teams to unambiguously detect water on the surface and publish a peer-reviewed paper to prove it. "Water has been observed from orbit but no one has yet made a physical measurement on the surface," Barton says. For the Apollo Heritage Bonus Prize ($4 million), teams must broadcast video and pictures from one of the Apollo landing sites, and Barton says data on how exposure on the moon has weathered the Apollo artifacts could have scientific value. None of the potential finalists has declared an intention to look for water. That may be because they're most likely to find it in permanently shady craters at the poles, a difficult place for solar-powered rovers to reach. Nor is it easy to get a look at Apollo relics. Landing on the moon is imprecise, so the nearest Apollo site could lie far beyond the range of the teams' modest rovers. Closer landings risk damage to sites of historical importance, from the blast of a retrorocket or a collision. Part-Time Scientists, however, is planning to try. The team believes its rovers—developed with the help of the Audi car company—have the necessary range. Karsten Becker, the team's chief technology officer for electronics, says they want to get up close to Apollo 17's lunar rover, which is made of materials including aluminum, fiberglass, nylon, and duct tape. "What's happened to that after 45 years in the space environment? Is it like new or in shreds from micrometeoroids?" he asks. Team Indus from India may go for a smaller, $1 million bonus by visiting the site of an unmanned landing—China's Chang'e 3 lander and Yutu rover, which operated from 2013 to 2014. Although the bonus prizes haven't generated a stampede to do science, most of the finalists have taken on one or several experiments. SpaceIL's magnetometer aims to help answer the question of where the moon's magnetic field comes from. Is it the relic of an ancient field, created by a churning iron core like Earth's, that was locked into its surface rocks when the core solidified? Or does it come from iron-rich asteroids that generate magnetic fields from the energy of their impact? As the Israeli craft orbits the moon and moves across the surface, the magnetometer will look for correlations between magnetic field changes and impact sites. "This mission may not settle the question once and for all, but we'll make progress," Aharonson says. Another finalist, Team Indus, is holding an open competition for young people aged 25 and under to devise experiments that could point a way to sustainable settlements on the moon. The team was overwhelmed by 3000 entries from all over the world, including plant and microbial growth experiments, proposals to build lunar structures and radiation shields, and even an attempt to brew beer on the moon. The team recently narrowed the field to a short list of 25, and those groups are now building prototypes that must be the size of a soda can and weigh less than 250 grams. In March 2017, up to eight experiments will be chosen to fly. Moon Express is carrying a couple payloads: laser retroreflectors from a U.S.-Italian university group to precisely measure the Earth-moon distance for gravitational studies, and a 7-centimeter optical telescope for the International Lunar Observatory Association, a nonprofit aiming to show the power of observing in airless, ever-clear skies. The telescope will have open access for "citizen scientists." Synergy Moon, an international team with offices in San Francisco, California, aims to blend the arts and sciences—perhaps with a holographic projector that will display artworks on the moon. The team claims it will study weathering of the lunar surface and the nature of the thin atmosphere above it using tiny autonomous robots they call lunar spiders and butterflies. These may be more artwork than instrument, according to a team blog post: "They will also be programmed for swarm behavior, to create random geometric and color patterns." In general, it's best not to expect major payoffs for science, says Mike Ravine, a project manager at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, which builds instruments for NASA Mars missions. In 2000, Ravine attempted to get a private moonshot off the ground with BlastOff! Corporation. The effort failed, but it taught him the challenge of trying to do science on a cut-rate mission. If the XPrize teams succeed, he says, "it would be great to wring some scientific value out of it. But it's a pretty high bar."
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Some Pennsylvanians aren’t aware that they carry a mutation that raises their risk of heart attack and stroke. In the largest study of its kind, a research team has meshed extensive genome data on more than 50,000 people with their electronic health records and identified potential new disease-causing genes. The data further suggest that about one in 250 people may harbor a gene variant that puts them at risk for heart attacks and strokes, yet aren’t receiving adequate treatment. Several projects in Europe and the United States have amassed DNA from huge numbers of people and coupled the data with clinical information to search for links between genetic mutations and diseases and traits. But these studies have so far looked for common genetic markers, not the very rare variants that can have a much larger influence on disease risk. And not all of these studies are sharing the DNA results with participants. To find rare disease variants and integrate patients’ DNA results into health care, Geisinger Health Care System in Danville, Pennsylvania, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, New York, sequenced the exome—the 1% of the human genome that codes for proteins—of 50,726 Geisinger patients. The volunteers—mostly rural Pennsylvanians, 98% of whom had European ancestry and a median age of 61 years—had agreed to share their electronic medical records for a long-term health study. Like previous studies, the researchers found that most individuals had a few mutations that likely disable one copy of a gene—there was a median of 21 rare predicted “loss of function” variants per person. Some are potentially of medical interest because the analysis of the patient medical records suggest that they influence some blood marker or other trait associated with a disease. And 3.5% of participants, slightly more than the 2% expected based on smaller studies, had mutations in 76 genes that are clearly linked to disease, such as the BRCA1 breast cancer risk gene and others for heart disease, the team reports today in Science. These individuals are being informed of those results so they can adjust their health care if needed. “They’re things that are potentially life threatening,” says Michael Murray, director of clinical genomics for Geisinger. The researchers then dug deeper into the clinical impact of three genes already known to contribute to abnormally high cholesterol levels, which can make a person prone to heart attacks and strokes at an early age. As expected, the 229 people with these variants for the disorder familial hypercholesterolemia had high “bad” cholesterol and were more likely than the average person to have had coronary artery disease. But only 58% were on statins, the standard drug for this disease, and fewer than half of these patients were getting an appropriate dose, the team reports in a second paper in Science. The results suggest that it may make sense to screen the entire po[CENSORED]tion for these cholesterol-raising variants, says cardiovascular disease geneticist Daniel Roden of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “There’s a huge amount of interest in identifying these people.” One limitation of the study is that it didn’t nail down any new disease genes that could lead to drug targets. That’s because the gene-disabling variants were rare—often found in only one or two individuals—and it takes more to make a statistically significant connection with a disease risk. “Even with 50,000, the numbers are very, very small,” Roden says. Firming up the role, if any, of these variants will take approaches such as a precision medicine study championed by President Barack Obama that aims to enroll at least 1 million volunteers, and the Department of Veterans Affairs’s Million Veteran Program. These projects will also help fill out the role of rare disease variants in minorities—people missing from the current study.
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Samsung at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show announced two new additions to its Notebook 9 series of lightweight laptops. This time around, the South Korean electronics giant isn’t waiting until January to let the cat out of the bag. On Monday, Samsung took the wraps off refreshed versions of its 13.3-inch and 15-inch Notebook 9 laptops packing faster hardware and a slightly different look. Like the models they’re replacing, the latest Notebook 9 systems are incredibly lightweight. The smaller machine checks in at just 1.8 pounds which, according to Samsung, makes it the lightest notebook on the market. The 15-incher, however, may be even more impressive as it tips the scales at only 2.17 pounds. Apple’s slim MacBook with a 12-inch display, for comparison, checks in at 2.03 pounds. As for hardware, the new Notebook 9 can be configured with up to a seventh-generation Intel Core i7 processor with integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM and 256GB of solid state storage. Bluetooth 4.1 and 802.11 ac 2x2 Wi-Fi come standard, as do the dual 1.5-watt speakers, 720p webcam, fingerprint sensor and backlit keyboard. Both systems include two USB 3.0 ports, one USB Type-C port, a microSD card slot and headphone / microphone jack. They’ll ship running Windows 10 Home in just one color which Samsung calls Light Tan. Battery life is rated at up to seven hours on a single charge, we’re told. Aside from the shared graphics, the only thing that really stands out as being ho-hum is the 1,920 x 1,080 resolution display. Given the size of the panels, however, this likely won’t be a deal-breaker for most prospective buyers. Samsung hasn’t yet revealed how much the newcomers will cost or when they’ll go on sale. These details and more will likely emerge at CES 2017 a few weeks from now.
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v2 effect + blur
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980 Ti owners will get the first spot in line for GTX 1080 Ti pre-orders Nvidia has yet to announce the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti publicly, but, thanks to a job listing on LinkedIn, the GPU maker has confirmed that the highly anticipated card is on its way. Additionally, the listing reveals that a “Club GeForce Elite” program could soon be arriving. First spotted by PC World, the LinkedIn ad for a Nvidia “Senior Marketing Manager – GeForce, Gamer Loyalty & Advocacy” doesn’t give away any new technical specifications about the GTX 1080 Ti, but it does confirm that the company is getting ready to launch the card. One interesting section of the ad, titled “Targeted Spot Prizes To Drive Sentiment, Reward Behavior, And Grow Advocates,” mentions a “Step Up” offer that will see 980 Ti users get the first spot in line for 1080 Ti pre-orders. The lengthy ad also focuses on rewarding Nvidia customers’ loyalty. In addition to listing benefits for GeForce Experience users, such as a free indie game once a year, free skins, hardware discounts, and beta access for certain first-party content, there’s also mention of a “Club GeForce Elite” subscription program. Those who subscribe to the $10 per month service will get a rotating bundle of four free games from the GeForce Experience app store each quarter and a free GeForce 'PC in the cloud' subscription, along with exclusive skins, in-game items, and GeForce Gear. It could be a while before Club GeForce Elite arrives, especially as there is currently no GFE app store. PC in the Cloud, meanwhile, could hint at Nvidia’s Shield-exclusive GeForce Now streaming service coming to PCs Back in September, it was reported that the GTX 1080 Ti could be launched at CES in January. It will be the second consumer GPU to feature Nvidia’s Pascal GP102 silicon, which was first used in the Titan X. The 1080 Ti will reportedly pack 3,328 CUDA cores, 208 TMUs, a 1.7Ghz boost clock, 12GB of GDDR5X memory, and 10.7 TFLOPs of FP32 performance.
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Seahorses are bizarre little ocean anomalies, from their tube-shaped snouts to their prehensile tails. Perhaps their most unusual trait: It’s the males that give birth. Now, for the first time, a research team has begun to investigate the genetic basis for these evolutionary oddities, by sequencing and analyzing the genome of a male tiger tail seahorse (Hippocampus comes) and comparing it with the DNA of other bony fish species. The seahorse species, the team reports today in Nature, evolved at a faster rate than its ancestors, leading to key genetic changes. For example, the tiger tail lacks most of the genes that influence enamel development; instead of teeth, its jaws have fused into a tubular snout and tiny mouth, suitable for slurping up food from the sea floor. And although most fish depend on their sense of smell for survival, H. comes has relatively few smell-related genes. The tiger tail and related seahorses also lack the genes for pelvic fins—which might explain their elongated tails and bony body armor. But H. comes does have an abundance of one gene: Dubbed Pastrisacin, the gene is associated with male pregnancy, and the seahorse genome contains six copies of it.
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Hi How to fight against viruses People recently faced with the problem of protecting your computer think that if they have a "cool" the antivirus, it must deal with, but it is losing perspective. Antivirus software works well only with the latest antivirus databases, but it is not a guarantee of security - anti-virus software developers simply could not know about the presence of the virus that you are going to run. Therefore, returning to the "how to remove the virus free" topic list all the ways to remove viruses. 1. Install anti-virus - such as Avast. Free anti-virus software do not possess super abilities, but some viruses being treated. 2. If the antivirus program did not find the virus, but you left the file on which you have a suspicion that it is infected, the file can be sent for analysis to the anti-virus developers. For example: Once the file is sent to the address - http://www.kaspersky.ru/scanforvirus and after a while came the antivirus database that helped remove the virus. Other developers have similar services. 3. Removing virus manually. If you remember the launch - such as exactly remember that launched the file with a virus at 12.00 - you can find all the files on the hard disk that were created at this time and remove the virus manually But look as if not to remove system files and, although the system is installed much earlier and the chance that there are important files with the same date of creation as well as the virus is small. In any case, if you do so boiled down, it removes viruses. I removed the two. 4. Anti-virus utility - free applets that have been created to remove a virus. 5. Programs to recover your computer after infection. If after removing the virus remained a problem, it is possible that the registry changes have been made to remove viruses. You can use the anti-virus utility AVZ, which restores your browser options, windows.
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Update: Here's our full announcement regarding AMD's new Ryzen CPUs AMD is hosting its “New Horizon” event later this afternoon in which the public (it’s being streamed live over the Internet) will get an advanced preview of the company’s new “Zen” CPU and ahead of a planned early 2017 launch. The event will be hosted by Geoff Keighley, a well-known Canadian video game journalist and television presenter. Former professional Dota 2 player and current CEO of eSports organization Evil Geniuses, Peter “ppd” Dager, will also be on hand to put the new silicon through its paces. Given the personnel, it's safe to assume that the broadcast will largely focus on gaming. There will be plenty of other opportunities for AMD to showcase more technical aspects of the Zen architecture - like a CES, for example. AMD says we can expect special guest appearances and giveaways although the prospect of AMD once again competing with Intel in the desktop CPU market will likely be reason enough for most to tune in. The livestream kicks off at 4 pm EST (1 pm PST). Be sure to check back around that time as you can watch the whole thing unfold right here on CsblackDevil.
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HDR televisions have been around for a little while now, but the technology is yet to hit PC monitors in a big way. That's all set to change at CES 2017, where LG has confirmed that they will be launching a 32-inch 4K monitor that supports the HDR10 standard. The 32UD99 is aimed mostly at creative professionals and prosumers, with support for 95% of the DCI-P3 color space through a 10-bit panel capable of producing 1.07 billion colors. Some of LG's top-end monitors cover more than 98% of DCI-P3, so this won't be a flagship creative monitor for LG, but the inclusion of HDR10 capability is new and unique. As LG will be fully revealing the 32UD99 at CES, the company hasn't unveiled its full set of specifications just yet. LG has stated that the monitor will connect to PCs via USB Type-C, and it will support charging laptops over a single cable while receiving picture data. The 32UD99 is also supposedly "well-equipped" for modern game consoles that support HDR, so presumably there will be a HDMI 2.0a port on this monitor as well. We'll have to wait until CES to get details of when this monitor will launch, and at what price. With features like HDR10, this monitor will almost certainly cost more than your average 32-inch 4K display. With that said, we expect that LG won't be the only monitor manufacturer to show off HDR-capable PC monitors at CES this year, so there might be some competition in this space.
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The Lut Desert's fantastical landscape harbors creatures that eke out a living from hidden water and the occasional windfall. During the 1920s and 1930s, Viennese physician and adventurer Alfons Gabriel fell under the spell of Iran's Lut Desert. Gabriel had crisscrossed arid parts of the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan by camel, observing and mapping areas into which few dared venture—lands with names such as Dasht-i-Naumid (the Desert without Hope) and Dasht-i-Margo (the Desert of Death). But a "confused mass of impassable tangled dunes" stymied his efforts to probe the interior of the Lut Desert, a tract of sand and fantastical rock formations in southeastern Iran that was said to be the hottest place on Earth. In March 1937, Gabriel finally conquered the central Lut—and barely made it out alive. He described his experiences a year later in a spellbinding talk to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Late one afternoon, Gabriel recounted, "the landscape darkened under red clouds … and a noise like the roaring of the sea began." The dust storm raged into the night. "For several anxious hours we lay, motionless and helpless, outstretched on the ground." Later, the voyagers were disoriented by mirages that were most vivid when the air was coolest, just before sunrise. Near the end of the 3-week journey, even their parched camels had had enough: "Their legs trembled; they panted, knelt down, and sometimes crept along on their knees." The allure of the Lut persists. Last month, a convoy of five SUVs carried 10 researchers and their guides, along with cameras, instruments, and hundreds of liters of water and fuel, into the heart of the desert. These modern explorers from Iran, the United States, and Europe were drawn not so much by the exotic landscape as by the puzzle of its unusual ecosystem. Many researchers had assumed that the Lut Desert is too hostile to sustain life, says Hossein Akhani, a plant biologist at the University of Tehran. The interior of the desert, an area nearly as big as West Virginia, is mostly devoid of plant life. But adventurers and the occasional scientist who traveled into the Lut had spotted diverse animal life, including insects, reptiles, and desert foxes. How that food web holds together without plants has been a mystery. A morbid, and possibly unique, phenomenon may be the answer. Dead birds are a frequent sighting in the desert. A few years ago, scientists in Iran began wondering whether migratory birds stray into the Lut and, overcome by the intense heat, fall from the sky like manna, forming the base of a food web. The expedition, organized by Akhani and Bahman Izadi, head of an environmental nonprofit in Shiraz, Iran, and a Lut explorer, set out to test the idea. Colleagues warned that in the fall, right after the heat of summer, the team might not find enough living things to tell. Creatures that burrowed or migrated to escape the heat would not have had time to venture back into the desert. Instead, the team confirmed the existence of a vibrant ecosystem and saw compelling signs that migratory birds do help nourish it. They also found that the bone-dry landscape conceals what they are calling a "hidden sea": a surprisingly shallow layer of salty groundwater that may also help sustain life. The Lut Desert also offers a less uplifting lesson—at least for people living on the knife edge of sustainability in arid regions. Climate change models predict that as temperatures rise, tracts of the Middle East that are naturally uninhabitable—not survivable without air conditioning—will expand. Those areas may come to resemble the transition zone between settlements on the Lut's edges and its supremely hostile core. After Gabriel's pioneering venture, the scientific literature on the Lut Desert remained sparse. One point was settled, though: Gabriel had noted that a contemporary, the German geographer Gustav Stratil-Sauer, "was of the opinion that the hottest region of the earth was not, as hitherto supposed, to be found in Sind, or Abyssinia, or in the Death Valley of California, but in the southern Lut." In 2005, an infrared radiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite measured a ground temperature of 70.7°C (159.3°F) at one spot in the Lut—the hottest satellite reading of ground temperature ever. And in April 2014, Morteza Djamali, a paleoecologist at the Mediterranean Institute of Marine and Terrestrial Biodiversity and Ecology in Marseilles, France, and his colleagues ventured into the central Lut to install a temperature logger at the same spot. In an experience worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, a swarm of locusts descended, picking nearby bird carcasses clean, cannibalizing each other, and biting the researchers. "I can imagine that a lonely traveler could be killed by these small creatures" in a few days, Djamali says. The hardship paid off, Djamali says. In July, the thermometer, planted 30 centimeters above the surface in the shade of a wooden cylinder, registered 61°C—some 5°C higher than the official shade record set in Death Valley in 1913. Bands of heat-absorbing black sand, primarily magnetite, together with topography that limits air movement help explain the blazing temperatures, Djamali says. That same year Akhani paid his first visit to the Lut, a quick scouting trip. A specialist in salt-loving plants, which grow in salty seeps in a few spots in the desert, he also had noticed the birds' carcasses and wondered what role they might play in the ecosystem. Cobbling together backing from the Iranian National Science Foundation, the Saeedi Institute for Advanced Studies at Kashan University in Iran, and other sources, he assembled a team of specialists from Iran and abroad that will spend the next 5 years prizing scientific secrets from the desert. Empty quarter Few scientists had probed the heart of the Lut Desert. The team set off last month on its maiden expedition, departing from Shahdad, an oasis on the Lut's western edge, and heading due north before arcing south in a path that bisected the desert. In some areas, yardangs, wind-sculpted rock formations several meters tall, sprouted from the desert like mushrooms. Heftier formations called kaluts reminded Akhani of "the ruins of an old city." Relics of what Djamali calls a "complex geoclimatic history," some are made of sandstone, whereas others were eroded from the beds of saline and playa lakes that dotted the landscape some 10 million years ago. The topography, whimsical or majestic, is a major reason the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization inscribed the Lut Desert on its World Heritage List last July. (Iran hopes it will beckon intrepid ecotourists.) Along their 700-kilometer journey, the researchers sampled soil and biota at 37 sites before emerging from the desert east of Bam, a city that suffered catastrophic damage from a 2003 earthquake. One day, the team struck out on foot into a canyon called Zabone Mar, which means "snake's tongue." By satellite, the canyon, about 15 meters wide with walls reaching 30 meters high, looks like a bifurcated tongue. "I noticed a weird noise," recalls expedition member Amir AghaKouchak, a hydrologist at the University of California (UC), Irvine. A continuous, soft crackling emanated from the walls. He speculates that the sound was the rock expanding as temperatures soared from nightly lows near 0°C up to fall daily maximums of about 40°C. "I just stopped and listened to this beautiful music." Or perhaps it was a siren call: The canyon is a death trap. Within its walls, the researchers found the remains of dozens of migratory birds. The birds may have sought shelter in the canyon's shade, but without water they would have quickly perished, AghaKouchak says. Mahmoud Ghasempouri, an ornithologist at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, collected carcasses of several migratory species. Why the birds make a fatal detour into the desert is a puzzle, he says. Even outside the canyon dead migratory birds were plentiful, and they often bore signs of having been scavenged by foxes. "I think that's their main food source," AghaKouchak says. The remains of birds that blundered into the desert (top) apparently help support an ecosystem of animals including Rüppell's foxes (bottom left) and geckos (bottom right), along with numerous insects. Insects, too, are critical to the Lut's food web. Many nibble on plants on the desert's periphery and are in turn eaten by spiders, reptiles, and foxes in the Lut's interior, supplementing the nutrients in the ill-fated birds, says expedition member Hossein Rajaei, curator of Lepidoptera—moths and butterflies—at the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History in Germany. Yet some live in the heart of the desert. When Rajaei set up light traps at night, he was surprised to count large numbers of moth species. "What do they do there? What do they eat there?" he asks. How the fly larvae he found in a pool of hypersaline water survive is another enigma, he says. And so is the question of how the Lut's denizens stay hydrated. The answer may lie just below the surface. Before the expedition began, AghaKouchak had scrutinized satellite sensor data from the Lut. To his surprise, microwaves emanating from the ground suggested that in some parts of the oven-hot desert, the soil is moist. Perplexed, AghaKouchak consulted a colleague, who proposed that the Lut's soil is so dry that microwaves were radiating from deeper layers of soil or even rocks, falsely indicating shallow moisture. Last month, in the heart of the desert, the team's convoy entered "a flat landscape, as far as you can see," the hydrologist says. A short distance onto the plain, one of the trucks broke through several centimeters of hard, crusty soil and sank, up to its axles—in mud. After another SUV pulled out the stricken vehicle, "you could actually see water" where the tires had been. "It was hard to believe," AghaKouchak says, "but the area is really, really wet." He thinks the moisture comes from distant mountains that ring the table-flat playa. Occasional rainfalls in the spring and early fall drain into the flat basin, he says. According to the team's guides, other areas of the Lut have similar features. Back at UC Irvine, AghaKouchak will attempt to correlate the local knowledge with satellite moisture data to map the extent of the hidden sea. No one lives in the heart of the Lut, and after a 6-year-long drought in Iran, settlements on the desert's fringes are in retreat. That may foreshadow the fate of other parts of the Middle East as global warming pushes summer temperatures still higher, says Elfatih Eltahir, an environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Last year, in Nature Climate Change, Eltahir and a colleague defined a naturally uninhabitable climate as one in which the heat index—temperature adjusted for humidity—exceeds 35°C for more than six straight hours. "What we are talking about are really extreme conditions," Eltahir says. "If a human being is exposed to that, very likely that person would die." In summer, areas of the Persian Gulf already exceed that threshold and would be unbearable without air-conditioning. Barring "significant mitigation," the uninhabitable areas near the Persian Gulf are likely to expand, including arid but still habitable regions of Iran. "Lut would be a good lab to study what an extreme environment would look like," AghaKouchak says. To probe such questions more deeply, Akhani's team plans to return in the spring. Among other things, they will bring more sophisticated instruments for measuring soil moisture and set up camera traps to study the ecology of the desert fox and other creatures in more detail. They also hope to decipher at a molecular level how the life forms adapt to broiling heat, Akhani says. In 2018, they may even attempt a summer expedition. "If we go then, we probably need to bring a physician," says AghaKouchak, who hastens to add, "I can't wait to go back."
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Welcome to CSBD dude!
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Users complained about poor MacBook battery life, so Apple removed battery life estimates Apple's latest MacBook Pros, particularly the 15-inch model, don't have the greatest battery life. Since their launch last month, buyers and reviewers have complained that battery life has regressed compared to previous-gen models, and that Apple's estimate of 10 hours of usage is a bit optimistic. Apple's solution? They've removed the 'time remaining' battery life estimate in the newest version of macOS Sierra. The reason for this is that, in the eyes of Apple, it's too hard to create an accurate battery life estimate for laptops that use Intel's latest processors. Modern CPUs aggressively change their clock speeds and power states to match the performance requirements of tasks, which can lead to fluctuating and inaccurate battery life estimates. Even though battery life estimates can fluctuate, they are still a useful feature in some circumstances, and this change doesn't actually address the issues with MacBook Pro battery life. Those that download macOS Sierra 10.12.2 will probably end up complaining not just about the battery life of their MacBook Pro, but also about the removal of 'time remaining' estimates. Perhaps Apple should have spent the last month optimizing the battery life of their MacBook Pros, rather than coming up with a software change that only hides their poor performance.
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Formally known as Zen, Ryzen's full launch is happening Q1 2017 It's official: AMD's next-generation CPU is called Ryzen. Formally known as Zen, AMD's exciting new processors are set to launch in Q1 2017, complete with some features and capabilities freshly announced at the company's Tech Summit 2016 last week in California. We were in attendance. Let's discuss the big details first. AMD's desktop Ryzen platform also known as 'Summit Ridge', will include a CPU with 8 cores and 16 threads with a base clock of at least 3.4 GHz. This was the first time AMD revealed the clock speed Ryzen will achieve, and the company stated that while engineering samples are currently running at the 3.4 GHz frequency, production units will be clocked higher than that. Summit Ridge will also include frequency boost technology, with exact boost frequencies still to be determined. Summit Ridge is set to include 16 MB of L3 cache and 4 MB of L2 cache at the high end. Supporting the new Summit Ridge CPUs will be the AM4 platform, of course, with DDR4 memory, PCIe gen 3, USB 3.1 gen 2, and NVMe storage. During the summit AMD showed us a Summit Ridge engineering sample running at 3.4 GHz (without boost) in a head-to-head battle with a stock Intel Core i7-6900K. The i7-6900K is a $1,100 Broadwell-E enthusiast CPU from Intel with 8 cores and 16 threads, clocked from 3.2 to 3.7 GHz, so it's a great processor to compare to AMD's similar Summit Ridge hardware. AMD showed Summit Ridge narrowly outperforming the i7-6900K in a Handbrake video rendering task, completing the render a second or so faster. We weren't told the exact Handbrake configuration used, but Summit Ridge matching the performance of Broadwell-E is very promising, especially considering AMD is set to introduce frequency boost and a higher base clock speed closer to release. It's also looking good for high-end Summit Ridge in terms of power consumption. In the Blender CPU rendering test that AMD first used to demo Ryzen a few months ago, Summit Ridge consumed around 3-5 watts less total system power than the Core i7-6900K. AMD didn't reveal exactly what was in each system, so the difference in system power could be explained by other components, however the company did suggest it was an apples-to-apples comparison. Summit Ridge was also shown consuming less total system power at idle, sitting at around 93 watts compared to 107 watts for the Intel system. At peak both systems jumped to around 190 watts, for interest's sake. AMD CEO Lisa Su reiterated that the company is on track to deliver a 40% improvement in IPC over their last-gen products at the same level of power consumption. "No games, no gimmicks, it's all about delivering the real product." And if the demos are a true reflection of Ryzen and Summit Ridge, AMD will be delivering a modern CPU that can truly compete with Intel's best. AMD also touched on a number of Ryzen's features, particularly surrounding a group of technologies they're calling SenseMI. The name "SenseMI" is essentially a brand for AMD's network of sensors and monitoring hardware built in to Ryzen, which itself isn't anything we haven't seen before in competing products (and last-gen AMD hardware). SenseMI technology is used in five key areas of Ryzen that will help deliver optimal performance and power efficiency. Pure Power: a closed-loop control system that optimizes clock speeds and frequencies to deliver the best performance at the least power consumption. AMD states that Pure Power is used to enable "lower power for same performance" Precision Boost: works in tandem with Pure Power, but instead offers higher performance at the same power consumption level through clock speed boosts in 25 MHz increments. Extended Frequency Range (XFR): Perhaps the most interesting SenseMI feature, XFR allows the CPU to increase its clock speed beyond rated boost clock frequencies depending on the temperature levels. This sounds similar to Nvidia's GPU Boost 3.0 technology, which often boosts Pascal GPUs well above their rated frequencies. AMD says XFR will reward enthusiast coolers by allowing Ryzen clock speeds to scale with cooling solutions. Neural Net Prediction: The use of the term "neural net" is a bit loose here, however this technology will pre-load instructions by anticipating the actions a user will perform ahead of time. Smart Prefetch: This technology learns data access patterns to prefetch necessary data into the CPU cache so it can be immediately accessed where necessary. AMD will have more to share about Ryzen Summit Ridge closer to its Q1 2017 launch. Ryzen CPUs for servers, codenamed 'Naples', are scheduled for launch in Q2 2017, while the second half of 2017 will see Ryzen-based 'Raven Ridge' APUs for low-power devices.
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A vent on Axial Seamount spews hot water and bits of microbial matter after a 2011 eruption. Most volcanic eruptions on Earth happen in a hidden, dark place: deep underwater. Scientists rarely detect these outbursts on the sea floor, but last year, they caught a seamount eruption in the act. Now, researchers have characterized it in unprecedented detail—showing how a rash of earthquakes preceded the eruption and how bulging of the volcano’s surface was used to successfully forecast the eruption. Scientists say the results will help them understand how other volcanoes around the world behave. The eruption began on 24 April 2015 at Axial Seamount, which lies 480 kilometers off the Oregon coast. Researchers already had a good picture of the volcano’s magma chamber, and they’ve now learned how it erupts, thanks to a cabled array of seismometers and pressure gauges deployed by the U.S. Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and other projects. Scientists hope the results, published today in two Science papers, will shed light on volcanic processes, and also help quiet the OOI’s detractors, who have criticized the project’s $1.8 billion lifetime cost. Immediately after the OOI sensors came online in late 2014, they started recording hundreds of daily tremors, says William Wilcock, a marine geophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle who led the first study. By March 2015, they had increased to upward of 2000 per day. The frequency of earthquakes also tracked the tides, with more than six times as many events occurring at low tide—a pattern that can be a sign of an imminent eruption, Wilcock says. If the volcano is close to erupting, pressure from the magma critically stresses the faults, so that a drop in water pressure at low tides can trigger small earthquakes. “You unclamp the faults,” he says. After the eruption, seismometers also recorded booms that the researchers attribute to steam exploding out of fresh rock, which helped them map lava flows. The eruption didn’t come out of the blue, however. Scientists had some pressure recorders, which measure seafloor deformation, in place for eruptions in 1998 and 2011. Based on how fast magma seemed to be accumulating again in recent years, lifting the roof of the volcanic caldera, researchers were expecting another outburst soon. “The magma chamber inflates to a certain level, and then it can no longer withstand the pressure anymore and the magma breaks out,” says Scott Nooner, a geophysicist at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. In September 2014, after seeing that the caldera had started growing at a faster rate, Nooner and William Chadwick, a geologist at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon, predicted another eruption in 2015. In the second study, they show that their forecast was successful. The researchers also documented how the caldera deflated by 2.5 meters after the lava erupted. At the moment, such forecasts are only possible for well-behaved volcanoes like Axial, Nooner says. “We think it’s a simpler volcanic system than a lot of volcanoes on land.” But Nooner thinks it’s a good start toward ultimately understanding more complicated volcanoes, like those along subduction zones that pose threats to people. Researchers have only monitored one other submarine volcano with seafloor seismometers, and this is the first one where they tracked seafloor deformation through several eruption cycles, he says. Other researchers are equally excited. “That is really a great advance,” says Vera Schlindwein, a seismologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, who was not involved in the work. Such comprehensive measurements are rare for submarine eruptions, and although every volcano is different, Schlindwein says the results will help other researchers interpret sparser data from other locations. “With such full coverage, it helps to place these others in a better framework.” Wilcock and others hope that the results will help demonstrate the value of the OOI, a network of 830 moored, mobile, and seafloor-based instruments at seven sites around the globe. A 2015 U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report suggested shrinking the costly project to fund other oceanographic research during a time of contracting budgets. The rollout has also been marred by delays and problems with data management and distribution. “On anything big and new, there’s always going to be people criticizing it,” Wilcock says. But he says the new results show how the program is already starting to pay off. Nooner adds that the OOI’s ability to alert researchers to an eruption right when it happens lets them respond rapidly and make more measurements—for instance, of changes in water temperature and chemistry that can only be detected immediately after an eruption. The 2015 eruption provided proof of concept for real-time monitoring, he says, and next time Axial erupts, researchers hope to mount such a response. Given how the caldera is inflating now, Nooner thinks they won’t have to wait long. Based on his latest measurements, he predicts the seamount will blow again in just three short years.
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Few things excite hardware enthusiasts and overclockers more than the prospect of unlocking hidden potential in a piece of hardware. Fortunately for this bunch, such appears to be possible with select versions of AMD’s Radeon RX 460 video card. Overclocking.guide is reporting that a simple firmware update for the Radeon RX 460 can unlock additional stream processors and TMUs that AMD disabled at the factory. The RX 480 ships with 896 SPUs and 56 TMUs but fully unlocked, those figures bump up to 1,024 shaders and 64 TMUs (a gain of 128 shaders and eight TMUs for those keeping count). Multiple sites are having success with test cards on their end although as of writing, Overclocking.guide only has modded BIOS for the Sapphire Nitro 4G and the ASUS STRIX O4G cards. They’re working to test additional cards but for now, that’s all that’s available. We’re hearing that the mod can result in performance gains of up to 12.5 percent in certain games. Those interested in trying out the mod are first encouraged to back up their existing BIOS (TechPowerUp’s GPU-Z is a good option). From there, you’ll need to run the “flash unlocked bios.bat” file as part of the Asus or Sapphire modded BIOS download from Overclocking.guide, wait for it to complete then reboot your system as instructed. A word of warning: tinkering with the BIOS can easily result in a bricked card and it’s doubtful that the manufacturer will replace it. Proceed at your own caution and don’t blame us (or anyone else) if something goes wrong. That said, there’s a reason AMD disabled portions of the card although that reason could be one of many that may or may not have a negative impact on the card now or in the long-term. TechPowerUp only noticed an increase in peak power consumption of about four watts with an unlocked card meaning (at least in their case), increased heat shouldn’t be a major concern.
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New compute accelerators and software packages propel AMD into the deep learning market AMD is using its compute prowess to tackle the next big thing in the server market: machine learning and artificial intelligence. At its Tech Summit 2016 in California last week, the company announced a new machine intelligence initiative known as Radeon Instinct, which gives server designers and developers a compelling set of infrastructure to tackle machine learning. Radeon Instinct encompasses both hardware and software aspects to deliver a full machine intelligence platform. AMD hopes that industries such as financial services, life sciences, and the cloud – which are all quickly moving to machine learning solutions and infrastructure – will choose Radeon Instinct for their compute requirements. On the hardware front, AMD has developed a set of GPU accelerators for server farms geared specifically for machine intelligence workloads. The three Radeon Instinct Accelerators set to be available in the first half of 2017 use three generations of AMD GPU architectures, including Vega, which is set to be available in consumer oriented cards in a similar time frame. MI6 is the most basic of the three, and uses a Polaris GPU with 5.7 TFLOPs of compute performance along with 16GB of memory. MI8 steps up to a Fiji GPU with 8.2 TFLOPs of performance, and includes 4GB of HBM in a small form factor card similar to the Radeon R9 Nano. MI25 is the most interesting of the three accelerators as it uses Vega with AMD's next-generation compute units (AMD calls this NCU, although it's unclear whether the N actually stands for next-gen). AMD is keeping tight-lipped about the specifications of this accelerator, although judging by how they have named the card, MI25 will pack a huge 25 TFLOPs of FP16 compute in a sub-300W power envelope. AMD lists these three accelerators as "passively cooled", although in reality they'll be slotted into servers with powerful (though external to the card) active cooling. One of the most intriguing things announced by AMD was the combination of Radeon Instinct Accelerators with the upcoming Zen 'Naples' platform. With Naples, server designers will be able to pair many accelerators (in some cases up to 16) with a single CPU. Previous solutions required multi-socket CPU implementations and even PCIe expanders to achieve this functionality, but with Naples, GPU-heavy servers will be possible at a lower cost and footprint than before. AMD showed off a number of server systems that will be possible thanks to Radeon Instinct. The most compelling was the Falconwitch with Radeon Instinct, a single unit with 16 MI25 accelerators inside, providing 400 teraflops of GPU compute. Using multiple units of this kind, Inventec will release a solution that produces 3 petaflops in a single rack. The Radeon Instinct platform will utilize several of AMD's compute software initiatives, including ROCm (Radeon Open Compute), which is their already-announced open-source compute platform. What was freshly announced at the Tech Summit 2016 is ROCm optimizations for po[CENSORED]r deep learning frameworks, including Caffe, Torch 7, and Tensorflow. AMD has extended their deep learning software platform with MIOpen, a new open-source deep learning library from AMD crafted specifically to improve machine intelligence performance on Radeon Instinct accelerators. MIOpen provides highly optimized support for common deep learning routines, and is a key pillar of Radeon Instinct. Using MIOpen, AMD achieved a near-3x improvement in deep learning convolution performance compared to a GEMM-based implementation. With just a few weeks of engineering, AMD also managed to narrowly beat the Titan XP in DeepBench using MIOpen and their MI8 accelerator. The MIOpen library will be available in Q1 2017, while Radeon Instinct Accelerators will launch in the first half of 2017. Server platforms from partners should be available shortly thereafter, giving those in the machine intelligence market a compelling server hardware and software platform for the rapidly-expanding deep learning market.
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This isn’t a photo of the Milky Way; it’s a deep, dark cave in New Zealand. And those blue things aren’t stars; they’re maggots. A chemical reaction in their Malpighian tubules—structures analogous to kidneys—makes their posteriors glow, much to the delight of more than 200,000 tourists who visit them every year. These larvae of fungus gnats eat by creating a hammock of mucus and silk secreted from glands in their mouth, and then dropping down fishing lines with glistening droplets that capture insect prey summoned by their glow. To find out what makes these threads so sticky, researchers went spelunking and brought threads preserved in liquid nitrogen back to the lab. They discovered glowworm threads have little in common with sticky spider threads. Spider silk is an incredibly complex mixture of silk and glycoproteins; the droplets on glowworm silken threads are 99% water, with just one unexpected ingredient: urea, the main component of urine, the team reports today in PLOS ONE. One question that remains is how the mucus threads, secreted at the head end of the larva, somehow become covered with small amounts of urea, which is produced at the other end. The researchers speculate that urea, which is used commercially as a glue in plywood and other laminates, might be the source of the stick in the silken threads. They’re keen to head back into the caves to find out.
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The Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has tapped Major General James Gilman (retired), a longtime manager of military hospitals, to lead its troubled research hospital. A cardiologist, Gilman “has the kind of experience that we believe will serve us extremely well,” said NIH Director Francis Collins today at a meeting of his NIH Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD). As the center’s first CEO, Gilman will oversee management including patient safety and regulatory compliance at the hospital on NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, starting early in 2017. He will work with former Clinical Center Director John Gallin, who is moving to the position of chief scientific officer (CSO) at the center. With more than 200 beds, the NIH Clinical Center is the world's largest hospital devoted to research. It specializes in studies of treatments for rare diseases and life-threatening disorders. But the discovery last year of fungal contamination in two vials of a drug produced in a facility at the center led to an investigation that found broader problems. Major General James Gilman is the new chief executive officer of the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center. Last spring, a working group of ACD delivered a scathing report that found patient safety had become “subservient to research demands.” The report recommended many reforms, including a new leadership structure like that at most hospitals with a CEO, chief operating officer, and chief medical officer. In May, NIH announced that Gallin’s leadership team would be replaced. The shakeup sparked an uproar among Clinical Center and other clinical research leaders at NIH, however. They defended the center’s patient safety record and said the working group’s report had “demonized” its leadership and “demoralized” employees. NIH seemed to step back slightly in August when it announced that Gallin would remain at the center as CSO and would also fill a new position overseeing all clinical research across NIH. The position is one of several steps NIH has taken to strengthen fragmented oversight of staff from the various institutes that conduct studies at the clinical center. Before retiring in 2013, Gilman oversaw several Army hospitals, most recently the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He was executive director of Johns Hopkins Military & Veterans Health Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, until June. Gilman said at the meeting that he had “actively sought this job” because caring for patients who have agreed to be research subjects at NIH is “about as close as I could ever get in my professional career again” to caring for service members and their families. He is “gradually adapting to try to understand NIH culture and NIH-speak,” he added. NIH has been holding focus groups with staff on how to improve operations and shore up morale.
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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!