innovation – Page 5 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Doctors will soon be able to study 3D-rendered organs in VR before operations

Add / Remove Doctors currently rely on flat images from CT and MRI scans for pre-op information about patient’s organs. Now, however, health tech startup EchoPixel is planning to use the information garnered from current medical imaging technology to produce 3D virtual reality organs, which doctors can explore and inspect before beginning surgery. EchoPixel uses the images which are already being gathered during medical imaging processes to create 3D-rendered body parts. These floating masses can then be examined via a VR platform called zSpace. Doctors can rotate and dissect the images of organs, including the brain and the heart, using a stylus. They can even examine a colon via a simulated fly-through. EchoPixel hope their technology will help doctors gain an enhanced understanding of the intricacies of each organ, and enable them to go into surgery well-rehearsed. It can also be used by medical students as a supplementary learning tool. Could this combined technology be used in other industries too — such as mechanics or construction? Website: www.echopixeltech.com Contact: www.echopixeltech.com/contact-us

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Doctors will soon be able to study 3D-rendered organs in VR before operations

Skylake for desktops: New socketed processors from Core i7 to Pentium

It’s been over two years since Intel’s entire lineup of socketed desktop processors got a true refresh. We got a smattering of high-end Broadwell chips this year and a small speed bump to the Haswell lineup last year , but it’s been a while since system builders and desktop buyers had much to be excited about. We’ve already looked at a couple of these CPUs, particularly the high-end unlocked i7-6700K. But today Intel is announcing (alongside many mobile CPUs) a more comprehensive desktop refresh that also encompasses mainstream dual- and quad-core CPUs, a few low-power options for smaller systems, and wallet-friendly chips from the Pentium line if you’re trying to build a modern system on a budget. Intel tells us that all of these should be available for purchase before the end of the year. Before we get into it, you should familiarize yourself with the features of the new 100-series chipsets , since we won’t be covering that ground again in this article. You should also know that ultra-low-end Skylake Celeron chips are coming, but won’t be released until early 2016. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Skylake for desktops: New socketed processors from Core i7 to Pentium

AMD’s R9 Nano crams a full Fury X into a tiny 6-inch form factor

12 more images in gallery Earlier this year, AMD unveiled three new graphics cards: the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, and R9 Nano. While the top-of-the-line water-cooled R9 Fury X and air-cooled R9 Fury have both since been released to positive reviews, the mini-ITX sized R9 Nano has remained something of a mystery. Fortunately, the Nano appears to have been worth the wait. While the Nano costs the same as a Fury X—$649, or about £530 (UK pricing is unconfirmed)—the diminutive card also sports same full-fat Fiji chip, which is crammed into its teeny 6-inch form factor. With the R9 Nano you get a full 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of 4096-bit memory high-bandwidth memory operating at 1000MHz. AMD claims performance is around 8.2 TFLOPS, which is only five percent below that of the Fury X. Even better, the Nano needs just a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, with a typical power consumption of 175W, which is miles below the 275W of the Fury X. Of course, such dramatic power savings have to come from somewhere, and for the Nano that means a reduction in clock speed. The Nano’s GPU is rated for “up to 1000MHz,” with AMD saying that under typical usage in most games it runs between 850MHz and 900MHz. That’s around a 14 percent decrease over the 1050MHz of the Fury X, but it’s still impressive given the Nano’s size. AMD puts performance somewhere between the Fury and Fury X, with the full shader count helping to mitigate the drop in clock speed versus the Fury. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD’s R9 Nano crams a full Fury X into a tiny 6-inch form factor

Phone and laptop encryption guide: Protect your stuff and yourself

The worst thing about having a phone or laptop stolen isn’t necessarily the loss of the physical object itself, though there’s no question that that part sucks. It’s the amount of damage control you have to do afterward. Calling your phone company to get SIMs deactivated, changing all of your account passwords, and maybe even canceling credit cards are all good ideas, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Using strong PINs or passwords and various Find My Phone features is a good place to start if you’d like to limit the amount of cleanup you need to do, but in this day and age it’s a good idea to encrypt your device’s local storage if at all possible. Full-disk or full-device encryption (that is, encrypting everything on your drive, rather than a specific folder or user profile) isn’t yet a default feature across the board, but most of the major desktop and mobile OSes support it in some fashion. In case you’ve never considered it before, here’s what you need to know. Why encrypt? Even if you normally protect your user account with a decent password, that doesn’t truly protect your data if someone decides to swipe your device. For many computers, the drive can simply be removed and plugged into another system, or the computer can be booted from an external drive and the data can be copied to that drive. Android phones and tablets can be booted into recovery mode and many of the files on the user partition can be accessed with freely available debug tools. And even if you totally wipe your drive, disk recovery software may still be able to read old files. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Phone and laptop encryption guide: Protect your stuff and yourself

Gamers: It’s safe to upgrade to Windows 10

While the IT managers of the world stress about Windows 10’s buggy mail client , default browser , and dodgy domains, for the gamer, Microsoft’s latest and greatest OS is an exciting proposition. Windows 10, if you didn’t know, comes with DirectX 12 , which promises significant performance increases (particularly for AMD graphics card users), thanks to its new low-level API features. The trouble is, right now, there aren’t actually any games out there that use DX12. While Nvidia and AMD have both launched new drivers to bring DX12 support to a range of their current GPUs, there’s not a single DX12 game to play. 3DMark has a neat draw call benchmark that gives us some idea of how much faster DX12 will be, but it’s entirely synthetic. One of the first games to actually use DX12 will be StarDock’s upcoming RTS Ashes of the Singularity , with an early beta build showing a significant uplift in performance. We were hoping to check out a special benchmark build of the game this week, but sadly it’s been pushed back. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gamers: It’s safe to upgrade to Windows 10

This magic exoskeleton for industrial workers is the future—we know, we wore one

RICHMOND, Calif.—Wearing Ekso Bionics ’ forthcoming exoskeleton for construction and industrial workers is probably the closest that I will ever come to having a real physical superpower. Through the magic of gravity and amazing industrial and mechanical design, a 40-pound industrial tool that I was holding became totally weightless. After just a few minutes, I quickly figured out that if I let the tool go it would fly off into space, as if gravity had no effect on it at all. The Ekso Works suit is slated to hit the market in 2016 in the “tens of thousands of dollars” range. (One financial analyst, Jeffrey Cohen, believes it will cost about $12,000.) Read 36 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple Will Pay $450 Million for Conspiring to Fix Ebook Pricing

Apple violated federal antitrust law in a conspiracy with five book publishers to fix ebook prices, according to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ended a long-running legal battle with a big blow to Apple, calling its ebooks price-fixing scheme “the supreme evil of antitrust.” Read more…

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Apple Will Pay $450 Million for Conspiring to Fix Ebook Pricing

EA at E3: Star Wars Battlefront, Mirror’s Edge reboot, and new IP Unravel

23 more images in gallery LOS ANGELES—At its pre-E3 presentation, EA revealed an orgy of games, though there only appeared to be one truly original IP: an adorable puzzle-platformer called Unravel . Throughout the 90-minute presentation, a few games stood out. Need For Speed , powered by Frostbite 3, looks truly sensational. In the words of an EA exec, “Frostbite will make you question whether it’s real, or in-game,” and we have to admit, there was one sequence that really did look like live-action actors, despite the fact that it was apparently “pre-alpha footage.” Need For Speed is arriving on November 3. EA also announced a new expansion for the free-to-play MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic , dubbed Knights of the Fallen Empire . It’s due on October 27 and will be free to subscribers. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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EA at E3: Star Wars Battlefront, Mirror’s Edge reboot, and new IP Unravel

Hands-on with YouTube Gaming—Google built itself a Twitch Killer

NEW YORK—YouTube Gaming is coming! YouTube’s Twitch Killer was announced on Friday , so we stopped by the YouTube Space in Manhattan to try out a pre-release version of the service. (And we took a ton of screenshots, see below.) YouTube says the service will launch “this summer”—it’s kind of “this summer” right now— and sure enough, the version we tried out seemed 99% finished. We spent most of our time with the desktop website, and we weren’t even on a developer sandbox—it was just the live gaming.youtube.com site with a properly-flagged account. Let’s get started! The Interface Ron Amadeo An open live stream, complete with chat. It’s Twitch! Note the “-1:43” tooltip: you can rewind the stream! 3 more images in gallery In its blog post, YouTube neglected to show the most important screenshot: the live streaming video page, so that was the first place we explored. The live video page is an all-dark interface with a large video player and a tabbed interface to the right. The tabs house chat, the typical YouTube related videos list (which should be great for discovery), and a description tab. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hands-on with YouTube Gaming—Google built itself a Twitch Killer

Everybody copies everyone: iOS 9 features inspired by Android

Apple announced iOS 9 on Monday, and while watching the keynote, I had just a little bit of déjà vu. Most of iOS 9’s new features seem to be squarely aimed at Apple’s biggest rival in mobile: Android. Specifically, they were about catching up to Android. Search improvements, proactive assistance, split screen, and transit directions? It’s been done, but the differences are the fun part, so we chased down the new iOS 9 screenshots and compared them to their Android counterparts. It’s not just about who copied whom; it’s also a chance to look at the different designs of the two operating systems. And hey, Apple isn’t the only one taking ideas from a competitor. Android M’s selectable app permissions are an exact copy of the iOS model. Siri and Search are chasing Google Now but hitting Google where it hurts The iOS 9 Search and Google Now screens. 8 more images in gallery iOS 9 adds a lot of “proactive assistant” and search features that were first seen on Android. The main search screen now looks a lot like Google Now, with cards showing various bits of information. Search differs from Google Now in that it shows suggested people and apps at the top, but the News and Nearby places are all Google Now. iOS search shows categories for Nearby places, while Google Now shows individual places with ratings and pictures. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments