Tag: bbc

Microsoft’s HoloLens headset will reach developers within a year

When Microsoft said that its HoloLens headset would arrive ” in the Windows 10 time frame , ” what did it mean, exactly? Thanks to a BBC interview with Satya Nadella, we now have a better sense of when this augmented reality eyewear will show up. The company chief expects developers and enterprise users to get the first version of HoloLens “within the next year” — you won’t be getting one as a holiday gift, folks. It’s not certain just when a personal version will launch, but Nadella describes the overall technology as a “5-year journey” that will eventually branch out to other fields. While that doesn’t necessarily leave you high and dry until 2020, it does suggest that you’ll have to be patient if you want to play some holographic Minecraft . Filed under: Displays , Wearables , Microsoft Comments Via: Piptell , The Verge Source: BBC

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Microsoft’s HoloLens headset will reach developers within a year

US wants the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2025

President Obama has signed an executive order demanding that the US build the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2025. The National Strategic Computing Initiative has been implemented to get the country building an Exascale machine and not fall behind rival nations in the technological arms race. This supercomputer will be developed by arms of the federal government and then be harnessed to speed up research into a wide variety of topics. One example is that the hardware will be used to help NASA better understand turbulence for aircraft design, while another is to crunch the numbers for medical researchers. The US may have more of the Top 500 supercomputers than any other nation, but its prestige in this area is slipping to nations like China and Japan. China’s Tianhe-2 has been the world’s fastest machine for two and a half years in a row, and the list’s authors feel that the US approaching is plunging to a “historical low.” With the weight of the federal government behind it, the NSCI is hoping to steal a march on its rivals and break new ground in the high performance computing sphere. With all of the various challenges that the planet is facing — challenges that we’re told Exascale computing will be able to fix — it can’t come soon enough. Filed under: Desktops Comments Via: BBC News Source: White House , (2) (.PDF)

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US wants the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2025

Nanowires help produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight

You ideally want to produce clean hydrogen fuel using clean sources, and Dutch researchers have taken a big step toward making that a practical reality. They’ve built a solar cell that uses a grid of gallium phosphide nanowires to make hydrogen gas from water. The approach gets a useful yield of about 2.9 percent in lab tests. That may not sound like much, but it’s about 10 times more effective than previous techniques and uses 10, 000 times less exotic material. It’s still going to take more refinements before this kind of technology is practical. Even hooking up silicon cells to a battery nets a 15 percent yield, for example. If scientists improve their methods, though, you could be driving hydrogen cars whose fuel is eco-friendly at every step, not just when it’s in your vehicle. [Image credit: AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi] Filed under: Transportation , Science Comments Source: TUE , Nature

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Nanowires help produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight

Lockheed Martin buys helicopter maker Sikorsky

Don’t look now, but Lockheed Martin just became an even larger aerospace powerhouse. The aircraft maker has acquired helicopter maker Sikorsky (best known for the UH-60 Blackhawk) for $9 billion. The two have already been partners on programs like the MH-60, but this gives Lockheed its very own rotary-wing team. If a customer wants something that flies, the company will have it covered. The buyout is poised to close by late 2015 or early 2016, provided everything goes smoothly. The union might come at a stiff price, however. Lockheed says it’s conducting a “strategic review” of both its information systems group and a chunk of its missile division — tough times in the market have led Lockheed to believe that these segments would be better-off either spun out or sold to someone else. That puts the future of more than 17, 000 workers in doubt, and that’s not including whatever jobs might be cut when the Sikorsky deal wraps up. [Image credit: AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee] Filed under: Transportation Comments Source: Lockheed Martin

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Lockheed Martin buys helicopter maker Sikorsky

Spotify’s Discover Weekly uses your habits to recommend new music

Spotify just added a load of new features with a recent update and now it’s looking to help you find new music. To do just that, a new tool called Discover Weekly builds a two-hour playlist of suggestions based on your listening habits and those of folks with similar preferences. What’s more, the collection of tunes — basically a mixtape — is refreshed every Monday so that you’re greeted with new material on the regular. In fact, my collection was updated early this morning. Spotify says the more you use it, the better it’ll get, adapting as your musical taste evolves. Soon, Discover Weekly with appear at the top of your saved playlists for easy access. And yes, you can save individual songs you like or share the whole lot with your pals. I’ve had access to the tool for a few days, and based on the first set of tracks Spotify selected, I’m cautiously optimistic. Meek Mill, Run the Jewels, Of Monsters and Men and Miguel are getting the bulk of my attention these days, so the tool built my first playlist of songs from Caribou, Modest Mouse, Action Bronson, Flying Lotus and more. Understandably, this group of initial picks is a bit of a mixed bag — similar to my tastes — but I’m looking forward to seeing how the feature changes during weeks when I lean more towards one genre. In this morning’s update, for example, I received mostly hip-hop picks as my listening last week centered around that genre during workouts. While Apple Music touts its human-curated playlists, Spotify is relying on its software here, and it seems to work just fine. You’ll be able to try it for yourself soon enough, as the curated playlist should appear across all of Spotify’s apps shortly. Filed under: Portable Audio/Video , Internet , Software Comments

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Spotify’s Discover Weekly uses your habits to recommend new music

Mario and Sonic look absolutely stunning in Unreal Engine 4

Unreal Engine 4 has shown us what the next generation of video games can look like: large, realistic and mind-bogglingly gorgeous. Frankly, its tech demos are breathtaking — technical marvels that show off photo-realistic apartments and stunningly beautiful landscapes ; but what happens when you cram cartoonish mascots like Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog into these technical marvels? Mind-blowingly awesome YouTube videos, that’s what. It was bound to happen eventually. Back in March, Unreal made its incredibly popular game engine free to anybody who wants to use it, leaving amateur game developers with immediate access to professional game creation tools. Search around YouTube, and you’ll find more than a few folks using it to put our favorite game characters into hauntingly realistic worlds. Check it out: See that vast landscape? That’s the setting for Unreal Engine 4’s Kite demo, which shows off the engine’s ability to handle large worlds and procedural asset placement. YouTube user CryZenx decided it was the perfect place to drop in Sonic The Hedgehog. The resulting demo isn’t much of a game (though it does show off just how fast a blue hedgehog can run), but it binds the potential of Unreal Engine 4 to a familiar face — letting us imagine what the coming generation of games could really look like. CryZenX made a Mario demo, too — but the plumber looks a little out of place in the Unreal’s endless prairie. YouTuber Aryoksini put Mario in a more familiar environment, a series of castles and caverns more suited to his adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom. The canned environments (taken directly from the Unreal marketplace) look a little too polished for the off-beat world Nintendo’s mascot normally inhabits, but it’s still a stunning look at where console gaming could be in a few short years. Want to see more? Hit up the YouTube search bar with “Unreal Engine 4” and your favorite video-game mascot. Let us know if you find anything good. Filed under: Gaming Comments Source: YouTube (1) , (2)

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Mario and Sonic look absolutely stunning in Unreal Engine 4

SanDisk’s wireless flash drive gives your phone more storage

For all the advances we’ve made in mobile computing, transferring files between your phone and your desktop is still kind of a pain in the ass. We’ve tried using dongles, adapters and even double-sided USB thumb drives , but none of them really solved the problem. Today, Sandisk announced a new solution: a wireless, battery-powered USB flash drive. SanDisk’s Connect Wireless Stick was actually designed to address two problems — the chore of moving files between devices and the internal storage limitations of modern smartphones. Want to cart some movies and high resolution pictures around with you, but only have 16GB of storage on your phone? Put them on the Connect Wireless Stick: it can hold up to 128GB and can stream data to your phone for 4.5 hours on a single charge. The stick can also automatically back up photos and videos from your phone’s the camera roll. Not bad. As a file transfer system, Sandisk’s new stick still sounds a little cumbersome — but as a small, wireless storage expansion system for iOS and Android devices, it’s pretty unique. Interested? It hits stores today for $30-100 in 16, 32, 64 and 128GB sizes. Filed under: Misc , Mobile Comments Source: BusinessWire

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SanDisk’s wireless flash drive gives your phone more storage

UW-Madison researchers invent a metal-free fuel cell

The development of fuel cell technology has been hamstrung by the need for expensive and difficult-to-manufacture catalysts like platinum , rhodium or palladium. But a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison believe they’ve found an ingenious alternative that employs a molecular, rather than solid, catalyst . A fuel cell generates electricity from chemicals by reacting hydrogen and oxygen at its anode and cathode , respectively. Specifically, a catalyst at the anode oxidizes the hydrogen fuel to create free electrons and charged ions. The ions pass through the electrolyte while the electrons pass through a separate wire (to drive an electronic device) and the two recombine in the cathode with oxygen to create water or CO2. The team, led by Professor Shannon Stahl and lab scientist James Gerken, noticed that the aerobic oxidation reactions they had studied in their previous work closely mimicked the oxygen reaction in fuel cells. To see if this aerobic reaction could work as a fuel cell, they built one using a catalyst composed of nitroxyl and nitrogen oxide molecules to react with its electrode and oxygen. “While this catalyst combination has been used previously in aerobic oxidations, we didn’t know if it would be a good fuel cell catalyst, ” Stahl said in a statement. “It turns out that it is the most effective molecular catalyst system ever reported.” The results are more than impressive. “This work shows for the first time that molecular catalysts can approach the efficiency of platinum, ” Gerken continued. “And the advantage of molecules is that you can continue to modify their structure to climb further up the mountain to achieve even better efficiency.” [Image Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto] Filed under: Science Comments Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison

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UW-Madison researchers invent a metal-free fuel cell

Surely someone cares about the official ‘Angry Birds’ sequel

Angry Birds revolutionized the mobile gaming market after its launch in 2009, and developer Rovio has since released numerous off-shoots , follow-up games and bits of retail merchandise , plus it’s working on an animated film due in theaters next April, starring Peter Dinklage and Maya Rudolph. Now, six years and 3 billion series downloads later, Angry Birds 2 is officially on its way. The sequel is due to hit app stores worldwide on July 30th and, yes, it seems the game will still feature exploding crates, a bunch of pigs and some deeply upset birds. Rovio doesn’t specify which app stores Angry Birds 2 is coming to, but it’s safe to expect a fairly comprehensive, simultaneous launch across iOS, Android, Amazon and Windows app stores. While Angry Birds remains a ubiquitous name in mainstream mobile-gaming conversations, it now operates in a crowded marketplace filled with fresh experiences such as Monument Valley , Device 6, Minecraft, Crossy Road, Goat Simulator, Five Nights at Freddy’s and thousands more. Surely Rovio wants excitement for Angry Birds to remain high ahead of its theatrical debut in April, so expect more announcements from the company after the launch of this month’s full-fledged sequel. Filed under: Gaming , HD Comments Source: Rovio

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Surely someone cares about the official ‘Angry Birds’ sequel