Exoplanet’s visible light spectrum measured for the first time

For some 20 years, astronomers have been discovering exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, in various indirect fashions. These discoveries are just as scientific and valid as a visual observance, if not more so. But once in a while there’s a milestone that’s worth noting for the thrill as much as for the science. The first time we actually saw an exoplanet, i.e. directly imaged, in 2008 was one such example. Now we have the first official detection of an exoplanet’s visible light spectrum, courtesy of the HARPS planet-hunting machine and the ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The exoplanet in question orbits the star 51 Pegasi, and is roughly 50 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. What also makes this discovery noteworthy is that this exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, is the first one we ever discovered back in 1995 that orbits a normal star like the Sun. For amateur astronomers, 51 Pegasi itself has an apparent magnitude of 5.49 — meaning you can *just* about see it without binoculars or a telescope if you’re under dark skies. Fortunately, we have much more sophisticated instrumentation available to us than the naked eye:

It’s still possible we all live inside a hologram

Mathematicians are already familiar with the holographic principle, which the famous physicist Leonard Susskind first proposed. It asserts that a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to it — such as an observer-dependent gravitational horizon — and therefore needs one less dimension than it appears to need. By extension, since our universe seems three-dimensional to us, it could actually be a two-dimensional structure that’s overlaid onto an incredibly large cosmic horizon.Is our universe actually just a hologram? This idea has been floated around before, and isn’t just some trippy, somewhat horrifying thought one gets at 3am, perhaps along with (or as a result of) insomnia. Instead, it could very well be an actual physical property of the universe. And it may have been under our noses all this time.

Sony Has Certain Parity Policies As Well, Microsoft’s Indie Requirements Are Not Unreasonable

Microsoft’s indie parity clause has been a subject of much debate ever since Microsoft announced the ID@Xbox policy at Gamescom 2013. Several developers in the past have outright mentioned their grievances with the parity clause whereas some have taken a neutral stance on it. In the past, Xbox One executives have mentioned that the parity clause can be tweaked if developers speak to them and bring along exclusive content for the Xbox platform.

Black Ops 3 Nuketown T-Shirt Discovered On Call of Duty Merch Store

With the game’s official global reveal mere hours away, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 merchandise has begun to surface on Call of Duty’s official store.

While that fact itself may not interest you, what caught our eye, as well as the eye of tipster @DavidCarcedo, was this “Black Ops III” t-shirt designed around the series’ most popular multiplayer map, Nuketown.

Skip the Apple Watch, but keep its features

Let’s step through the features one at a time. First and foremost, this is a timepiece. It’s an expensive and elaborate one, but it’s still just a watch. If you’re looking for a quick way to tell time and set alarms, you’re better off investing ten or 20 bucks in a plain old digital watch. And even if you’re looking for an expensive and showy timepiece, you’re probably better off investing in something without firmware.Today’s the day. The Apple Watch is now officially on sale, and the crowd is, in fact, going wild. There’s a lot to like about Apple’s new product line, but there’s even more to dislike. It’s reportedly underpowered as it stands, so what hope do we have of it aging gracefully? At this stage, even most smartwatch enthusiasts should probably wait a generation or two for Apple to work out the kinks. But thankfully, we can still get most of the Apple Watch’s functionality without dropping between $350 and $17k.

Cancer tech: reprogramming rogue cells in pancreatic cancers

Most cases of pancreatic adenocarcinoma are caused by mutation in the so-called Kras gene that is active in the acinar cells. These are the cells that secrete the major digestive enzymes. An errant setting of a single bit (technically 2 bits for four base pair options) at the right spot in the Kras gene reconfigures the entire flow chart of the acinar cell to differentiate itself into a highly unstable ‘ductal’ type cell — those which line the secretory output ducts of the pancreas and feed into the gut.All forms of pancreatic cancer are difficult to treat. Surgery is the only potential solution for the rare neuroendocrine variety, the type that Steve Jobs succumbed to, and we all know how ineffective that method still is. Adenocarcinoma, the more common variety that killed the likes of Patrick Swayze and Luciano Pavarotti, is no better a sentence, as anyone who does their own supermarket shopping knows from seeing the tabloids.

The 20 best free PC games

Free PC games used to be the realm of quirky flash games or weird indie projects, but the free-to-play phenomenon has really taken off in the last couple of years. Now, the $60 AAA games that once ruled the roost are getting some real competition from games that offer hundreds of hours of gameplay for free.

There are innumerable free-to-play games available for the PC, and with that comes both good and bad. The large selection means that there is something to fit just about any taste, but the signal-to-noise ratio is truly atrocious. Instead of trudging through dozens of clones and half-hearted cash grabs, let me separate the wheat from the chaff for you. Today, I’m highlighting twenty of the very best free games on the PC to help you find something you’ll really love. There’s a lot to cover, so follow along, and something here is bound to strike your fancy.

Server woes: Final Itanium processor will be 32nm, AMD’s ARM servers delayed a full year

Intel and AMD are both facing delays and product changes on the server front. While we alluded to some of these changes in our AMD earnings coverage from last year, it’s worth exploring them in a bit more detail. Intel has finally let slip some details on Kittson, the follow-up processor to Poulson and the last Itanium processor on any roadmap. Meanwhile, AMD’s roadmap for its Cortex-A57 based “Seattle” SoC has slipped a full year, with volume ramping in 2015.

How to download and install Windows 10 Technical Preview

Be preparedAs promised, Microsoft has been issuing new Windows 10 Technical Preview builds on a regular basis, ahead of the official release later this year. Want to try it out? There are 64-bit and 32-bit versions available for US  and UK English, Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese, among other languages. Follow these instructions to download and install the Windows 10 Technical Preview.

Wacom announces new 2.5K tablet

CES, the world’s biggest gadget show, has been and gone for another year, and among the new smartphones, even-higher-def TVs and super-lightweight laptops, there was a bit of news for artists and animators with an update to Wacom’s touch-screen tablet line, the Cintiq 27QHD and Companion 2.

With its 27-inch screen, the Cintiq 27QHD is the biggest pen display Wacom has made, and boasts a higher 2.5K resolution at 2,560x1,440. However it actually has the same footprint as its predecessor, the Cintiq 24HD, and is much lighter, at just 9kg.

In terms of specification, the 27QHD is improved across the board, capable of displaying 97% AdobeRGB with 1.07 billion colours and conforming to the REC 709 HDTV standard. It also features five USB 3.0 ports, plus DisplayPort and HDMI outputs.

Printing ‘soft robotics’ and wearable tech with liquid metal

The production method is called mechanically sintered gallium-indium nanoparticles. While that’s a mouthful of marbles, it’s actually pretty straightforward. You make the ink by taking liquid metal and dispersing it in a non-metallic solvent using ultrasound. The result is ink that could work in an inkjet-style printer. What happens is the process creates liquid metal nanoparticles, which are small enough to pass through an inkjet printer nozzle. The resulting technique would let you print devices made of liquid metal alloys, the same way you could manufacture ne-off plastic objects using a commercially available 3D printer.Researchers at Purdue University have outlined a way to mass-produce circuits made of liquid-metal alloys using inkjet-printing technology, paving the way for “soft robots” and other kinds of flexible electronics, at least once commercial manufacturing echniques are developed. These devices could involve anything from stretchable garments to pliable robotic designs, for purposes as widespread as therapeutic clothing and new kinds of consumer devices.

Delivering medicine directly to the brain via remotely heated nanoparticles

Researchers at the Université de Montréal, Canada were able to bypass the BBB by delivering iron-oxide magnetic nano particles to a precise region of a mouse brain, and then heating them up with a remote RF field. To prove all this, they injected a blue dye into the blood, and then looked to see if it showed up on the business side of the BBB. To give some measure of confidence that the heating was not damaging the brain, they analyzed sliced-and-diced samples of brain for the presence of a protein known as CD68. This molecule, while certainly not the only telltale indicator of inflammation, is manufactured and/or released after many kinds of injury.There’s a lot of great medicines out there that don’t work for the brain. That’s primarily because they aren’t membrane-soluble and therefore can’t penetrate the blood brain barrier (BBB) that surrounds its vasculature. For things like cancer or infection, the only way in is to tap into the spine for a one-shot charge, or put in a more permanent indwelling tube that in-and-of itself can lead to further infection. Furthermore, any drug delivered by these extraordinary means can only penetrate as deep as the cerebro-spinal fluid can percolate. Fortunately, there may now be better ways to do it.

This laser imaging chip could turn your phone into a 3D scanner

3D imaging systems already exist, but they’re usually bulky and expensive. Google’s Project Tango developer devices can do a little of this, but they rely on multiple cameras and are built entirely around depth and position sensing. The NCI chip could be just another thing built into your phone. The key to making this work is that each pixel on the NCI is an independent interferometer. That’s an optical instrument that uses the interference of light rays to judge distance. Therefore, the NCI pixels have both intensity (like a regular camera) and distance information.Your smartphone can probably do an okay job of figuring out how far away something is when taking a photo, but the image itself is still just a flat plain of pixels. A team at Caltech has created a new imaging chip that could be incorporated into smartphones to capture a full 3D view of an object, which could then be used to generate a file suitable for 3D printing. It’s called a nanophotonic coherent imager (NCI), and it’s so small it could fit inside current smartphones without much of a problem.

This Guy Continues To Paint Pop-Culture Characters Into Old Thrift-Store Paintings

David Irvine is an artist in Toronto who breathes new life into old thrift-store paintings by adding new, often silly elements and characters. Since we last wrote about his altered thrift-store paintings (or, as he calls it, ‘Re-Directed Art’), Irvine has come up with a host of new bizarre paintings that we’d love to share with you.

Irvine, who runs an art store called ‘Gnarled Branch,’ seems to have a fascination with pop culture characters, which makes them seem all the more fun and outlandish in the idyllic, rural paintings his that they often invade. Depending on the painting, he will either match the original artist’s style or oppose it intentionally, but he will always leave the original signature clear.

If you like his work, check out the prints he sells on Etsy, and if you find yourself in Toronto, swing by the Flying Pony Gallery, where his art will be on display for the entire month of April!

Open-source Windows? The unthinkable is already happening, says Microsoft

However unlikely a future in which Microsoft makes Windows open source may sound, Microsoft has already taken considerable strides in that direction.
But instead of allowing developers to make changes to Windows and other products, it’s Microsoft’s fingers at the keyboard.
According to Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, a future that includes an open-source Windows could happen. “It’s definitely possible,” Russinovich reportedly told an audience at the ChefCon conference in Santa Clara this week. “It’s a new Microsoft.”
“Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software—open versus not-open versus services—has happened,” Russinovich added.

4K vs. UHD: What’s the difference?

4K vs. UHDNow that 4K is becoming a bit more mainstream, with HDTVs and computer monitors both approaching somewhat normal levels in pricing, let’s look at two terms that have become increasingly conflated with one another: 4K and UHD, or Ultra HD. TV makers, broadcasters, and tech blogs are using them interchangeably, but they didn’t start as the same thing, and technically still aren’t. From a viewer standpoint, there isn’t a huge difference, and the short answer is that 4K is sticking, and UHD isn’t. But there’s a little more to the story.

Scandinavian diversity + The release date

Greetings,

We are stabilizing the 1.17 ETS2 update with the goal of releasing another open beta soon. In fact we hoped to surprise you and get it out still this week, but late on Friday it became clear that we are not ready yet.

The graphics rendering pipeline is undergoing quite some overhaul to speed things up ahead of release of Scandinavia. We see that it improved framerate stability on low-end computer configurations, the jury is still out whether it helps the same way on high-end computers. We are battling some last-minute bugs creeping in now, and the programmers insist on spending a couple of extra days to have a build stable enough for public consumption. We expect 1.17 public Steam beta will see the light of day next week, fingers crossed that the coders fix all the problems by then.

Comcast speeds past Google Fiber with symmetrical 2Gbps service

That puts it ahead of Google’s own 1Gbps symmetrical fiber service — or AT&T’s in Kansas City, if you let them spy on you for the privilege of paying them for their own product. Google plans to roll out its own service to 34 new cities in 2015, although we’re still waiting for someone to launch gigabit fiber in big ones like San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Boston.Comcast may be evil incarnate in some ways, but it’s also rolling out some seriously fast hardware. Today the company announced that 2Gbps fiber service will be available to 1.5 million Atlanta customers beginning this month. Called Gigabit Pro, Comcast claims it’s the fastest available in the country for home users, and will deliver 2Gbps both down and up.

Why is it called Windows 10 not Windows 9?

When Microsoft announced its newest operating system, the surprise was not that it was coming, but that Windows would be skipping 9 and headed straight to 10. When asked about Windows 10’s name, Microsoft didn’t give a clear answer. So why, exactly, is Windows 10 getting the nod instead of 9?

Intel quietly launches 14nm Braswell, Bay Trail’s successor

Intel has quietly launched its first 14nm Braswell cores this week. These new 14nm chips are the successor to Intel’s 22nm Bay Trail-D (meaning the Celeron / Pentium flavor of Bay Trail) and will target ultra-mobile systems and low-end desktop PCs. Just as Broadwell is a die-shrink of Haswell, Braswell is Bay Trail’s die shrink — which means the 14nm “Airmont” CPU core inside the SoC isn’t expected to offer dramatically new features or other capabilities compared with its predecessor. Increased efficiency, lower TDPs, and better thermals are the order of the day. Intel’s Cherry Trail, which will debut later this year, will offer the same silicon in a tablet power envelope.