Scientists have spotted a few thousand , or planets orbiting stars other than our sun. Exomoons are another story. There have been some potential exomoons, but nothing definitive. Now, a team from Columbia University thinks it might have the of a moon outside our solar system, and Hubble is going to give it a look. While we haven’t been able to identify any exomoons in the past, we have every reason to think they exist. After all, most planets in our solar system have at least one moon. In the case of gas giants, there can be dozens of moons.
Everyone’s favorite organization, the NCTA (now known as The Internet and Television Association), has released a report claiming an overwhelming number of people now have access to multiple internet service providers and plenty of competition in that market. This may come as a shock to anyone living in an area (like I do) where there’s exactly one internet provider. Not only do I have to use Comcast, the apartment complex I live in signed a deal with them, which means I’m stuck using a service I don’t want, period. Hurrah. So competitive. The NCTA, however, , mostly because it relies on outdated and irrelevant metrics for measuring broadband performance.
For the past few years, Microsoft has been pushing the idea of Office and Windows as a service that’s continually updated rather than as discrete products you purchase off the shelf. At various points throughout 2017, the company has been synchronizing and simplifying its update schedule. Now it’s unveiled the final result: From the launch of Windows 10’s Creators Update, all Office, Windows Server, and Windows 10 updates will be handled the same way, with the same nomenclature. Currently, Microsoft splits updates into three buckets: Current Branch, Current Branch for Business, and Long Term Servicing Branch. Going forward, Microsoft will combine CB and CBB into the Semi-Annual Channel, or SAC.
Three-dimensional printing has been the “next big thing” for at least seven or eight years running. But it has yet to advance beyond the niche industrial and enthusiast markets. One of the main issues is the lack of durable materials. Virtually all 3D printing still uses cheap plastics, which isn’t suitable for long-term use. Meanwhile, 3D printing with metal is expensive and slow. A company called Desktop Metal thinks it can finally take 3D metal printing mainstream with its new system, which is supposed to be . There was a great deal of mainstream interest in 3D printing a few years back, but that has cooled somewhat.
It’s been a little less than five months since AMD launched its first 7 products, and the company is finally ready to introduce its Ryzen 3 family of CPUs. While Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 may have captured more headlines, Ryzen 3’s lower price points are targeted at the mass market of gamers that want a decent CPU with solid performance, but who don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on it. Let’s take a look at what AMD is launching, and how it compares with Intel’s offerings in-market. As we expected, AMD is launching two Ryzen 3 CPUs today — the Ryzen 3 1300X and the Ryzen 3 1200.
AMD released the latest version of its Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition (whew) last night, with a significant performance and feature boost for Team Red GPU owners. It’s part of a significant transformation in how AMD handles its drivers that kicked off in earnest back in November 2015, with the launch of Radeon Software . From 2012 to 2015, with periodic updates and more driver betas provided as opposed to more frequent (monthly) updates. The company’s more recent policy has been to release much faster updates, with 17 drivers published so far this year, mostly as optional updates to improve performance in specific titles.
If you’re looking for a thin, lightweight laptop with all-day battery life, check out the latest iteration of Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It only weighs about 2.5 pounds, measures six-tenths of an inch thick, and delivers up to 15.5 hours of battery life on a single charge. Better yet, today’s coupon will help you save you hundreds off the list price. (List price: $1469 — Coupon code: THINKPADSALE) So, what exactly are we looking at here? This configuration sports a sixth generation dual-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-7200U CPU, integrated Intel HD Graphics 620, 8GB of LPDDR3 RAM (1866MHz), a 128GB solid-state drive, Bluetooth 4.1, and 802.11b/g/n/ac WiFi support.
The discovery of has made for an interesting few years in the realm of genetic research. It meant we can make permanent edits to a genome with the aid of the CIRSPR/Cas9 system, but there has been a great deal of concern over how to use this powerful technology. Researchers in the US have limited CRISPR experiments on the human genome, but for the first time, a US team has . In doing so, the scientists at Oregon Health and Science University also showed CRISPR has the potential to eliminate genetic diseases. What makes CRISPR so exciting is its ability to make changes to DNA inside living cells.
One of the topics we’ve been covering in the past month is the behavior of the Core i9-7900X when overclocked, as well as the performance characteristics of the X299 chipset. In both cases, Intel has been criticized. First, for a CPU that traps a great deal of heat below the heatspreader, thanks to the use of thermal paste instead of solder, and second, for that apparently allow motherboard manufacturers to use poor VRM cooling. It’s not clear who’s actually responsible for the latter issue. It could be that Intel didn’t provide the necessary platform documents within a reasonable manufacturing window, or it could be that motherboard manufacturers made their own assumptions about product specs and wound up with VRMs that run too hot for their own on-board cooling solutions.
