A new study on solar energy from Deutsche Bank bears very good news . Thanks to technology and innovation, solar energy will be just as cheap as energy from fossil fuels by 2016. That’s basically tomorrow, and it’s awesome. Read more…
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Study: Solar Energy Will Be as Cheap as Fossil Fuel Energy by 2016
An anonymous reader writes Officials say molten lava from a Hawaii volcano has been flowing steadily in an area where residents have been warned they might have to evacuate their homes. Dozens of residents in the flow path have been told to complete all necessary preparations by Tuesday for a possible evacuation. From the article: “Janet Babb, a geologist and spokeswoman for the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, said methane explosions also have been going off. She said decomposing vegetation produces methane gas that can travel subsurface beyond the lava front in different directions, accumulating in pockets that can ignite. She said it was a bit unnerving to hear all the blasts on Saturday.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lava Flow In Hawaii Gains Speed, Triggers Methane Explosions
MojoKid writes When Apple debuted its A8 SoC, it proved to be a modest tweak of the original A7. Despite packing double the transistors and an improved GPU, the heart of the A8 SoC is the same dual-core Apple “Cyclone” processor tweaked to run at higher clock speeds and with stronger total GPU performance. Given this, many expected that the Apple A8X would be cut from similar cloth — a higher clock speed, perhaps, and a larger GPU, but not much more than that. It appears those projections were wrong. The Apple A8X chip is a triple-core variant of the A8, with a higher clock speed (1.5GHz vs. 1.4GHz), a larger L2 cache (2MB, up from 1MB) and 2GB of external DDR3. It also uses an internal metal heatspreader, which the Apple A8 eschews. All of this points to slightly higher power consumption for the core, but also to dramatically increased performance. The new A8X is a significant power house in multiple types of workloads; in fact, its the top-performing mobile device on Geekbench by a wide margin. Gaming benchmarks are equally impressive. The iPad Air 2 nudges out Nvidia’s Shield in GFXBench’s Manhattan offscreen test, at 32.4fps to 31 fps. Onscreen favors the NV solution thanks to its lower-resolution screen, but the Nvidia device does take 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited by a wide margin, clocking in at 30, 970 compared to 21, 659. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple A8X IPad Air 2 Processor Packs Triple-Core CPU, Hefty Graphics Punch
The idea of branding a place is a fairly new one, and the notion of place-based typefaces is even newer, with national and local governments from Qatar to Chattanooga commissioning their own fonts. The latest country to set its on typeface is Sweden—but it’s also questioning whether a national font is a bit too nationalistic for their progressive Scandinavian sensibilities. Read more…
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Why Sweden Commissioned Its Own Typeface
There’s a good reason why so many of us still prefer mechanical keyboards and real control boards despite the availability of touchscreen interfaces: In many cases, they give us more control over our digital worlds. Fans of tactile interfaces will love this project by Florian Born —who created a system that meshes your iPad with arrangeable physical controls. Read more…
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These Knobs and Sliders Turn an iPad Into a Custom Tactile Interface
This is the Pieter Schelte, which is now the largest ship sailing the seas, surpassing even the Maersk Triple-E*. Built by Daewoo in Korea, this catamaran is so huge that it can lift entire oil platforms off their base, pick up the base itself, and then transport it all to port—which is exactly what it’s designed to do. Read more…
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This is now Earth’s largest ship—so big it can lift oil rigs off the sea
The current drought in the U.S. certainly feels like it’s one for the history books. But it’s likely not the worst North America has seen in the last millennium. A new study from NASA shows that a drought in 1934 was by far the worst to strike the continent in 1000 years. Read more…
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The worst drought of the last 1,000 years was in 1934
For nearly two years, the Air Force’s X-37B autonomous space plane has been circling around the Earth doing who knows what. Now it’s finally coming back to Earth , carrying all its secrets with it. Read more…
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The Air Force’s Mysterious Spy Plane Is Landing After 2 Years in Space
You are looking at the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer onboard the ISS. The news is that, “after accumulating years of data, there are significantly more positrons than expected at the highest energies detected.” Scientists believe their origin may be the destruction of dark matter, which is amazing. Read more…
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Unbelievable view of the International Space Station
At last, it’s done. The biggest spaceship size chart ever created is now complete and fully operational. 4, 268 x 5, 690 pixels of technological terror that includes everything from the smaller Star War ships to EVE. According to its author, Dirk Loechel, this is the last update. It’s epic. Read more…
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The biggest comparison of sci-fi spaceships ever is complete at last