NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is orbiting Mars to study the planet’s atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar winds. Also high on its list of mission-critical goals is not crashing into things. That one almost went out the window recently, as MAVEN was found to be on a collision course with the Martian moon Phobos. NASA , though. stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN — yes, it’s pretty clunky by NASA acronym standards. It arrives in orbit of Mars two years ago and set itself up in an elliptical orbit. It is equipped with instruments to analyze the state of Mars’ atmosphere, which will allows scientists to .
Today, Dell is offering up a substantial discount on the Inspiron 15 5000 laptop. If you’re in need of a powerful 15.6-inch device, this is the perfect time to buy. With a full HD display, a Skylake CPU, a dedicated graphics card, and a sizable hard drive, this laptop offers a complete computing experience wherever you go. (List price: $845.85 — Coupon code: AFFLT549) Inside, this model features a sixth generation dual-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, a discrete AMD Radeon R5 M335 graphics card (with 4GB of memory), 8GB of DDR3L RAM (1600MHz), a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive, a DVD burner, Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11b/g/n/ac WiFi support.
Hard drives and NAND flash memory can store a lot more data than they could just a few years ago, but they’ve still got nothing on . The genetic material in nearly every cell of your body has a vastly higher storage capacity than a hard drive, and it could potentially last for hundreds of thousands of years. The problem has been efficiently encoding data in DNA. Now a pair of researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center have developed a process for storing 214 petabytes of data per gram of DNA. The DNA in our cells contains the instructions for building all the proteins that keep us running.
The Legend of Zelda has captivated us for more than three decades now, and this franchise still has the capacity to surprise and delight. With Breath of the Wild, the latest installment, Nintendo has made a clean break from much of the traditions and baggage that comes with the name “Zelda” in favor of a launch title that feels exciting and modern. We saw the 3DS-exclusive A Link Between Worlds hit in 2013, but we haven’t had a full-fledged console release since November of 2011 — more than five years ago. The last console Zelda game was on the freaking Wii! Nintendo teased Breath of the Wild as early as 2013, but game-starved Wii U owners were met with delay after delay.
For the last few months we’ve heard tidbits and hints about Microsoft’s upcoming for Windows 10. The new mode, which is part of the Creators Update, is supposed to help some games run modestly faster — and as we suspected, it’s all about tuning system resources to dedicate more game-specific work to the CPU or GPU. At GDC this week, Microsoft said Game Mode will dedicate a certain number of CPU cores to game rendering rather than allowing other background tasks to be scheduled concurrently on those chips, to Ars Technica. An eight-core system, for example, might have six cores dedicated to gaming, with other tasks shunted to the “spare” cores.
Tepco, the utility company tasked with overseeing cleanup and waste processing for the former nuclear plant, hit another snag this week. Last month, we reported on new findings about Reactor #2 that showed it was far more radioactive inside than previously measured. At the time, we noted that Tepco was working on a new robot that could handle up to 73 sieverts of radiation, but the measured level of that tolerance. Now, Tepco has admitted that repeated robot failure is hampering its plan to search the bottom of the reactor, and find the estimated 600 tons of fuel and debris that may have poured out of the reactor and into the concrete lining below it.
Today at GDC, Nvidia announced its long-expected GTX 1080 Ti. The GPU, which has been rumored since at least the Nvidia Titan X’s unveil, is a potent upgrade compared to Nvidia’s previous top-end consumer card, the GTX 1080. The gap between the GTX 1080 Ti and the 1080 is one of the smallest we’ve seen Nvidia field. Like Titan X, the 1080 Ti is a GP102 design that relies on GDDR5X memory to hit its bandwidth targets. It’s a 12 billion transistor part, with 3584 cores, 224 texture units, and 88 ROPS (3584:224:88). That’s eight fewer ROPS than the Titan X.
While most of the attention around autonomous vehicles has centered on “everyday drivers,” there is one effort that goes off in an entirely different direction. An offshoot of Formula E, Roborace aims to launch a parallel series of races conducted entirely without human drivers. The effort has taken longer than planned, but is getting closer to reality. At MWC in Barcelona this week, Roborace showed off the complete design of its first race car. Until now, it has been using awkward-looking “devbots” that have a seat for a driver to test its software and hardware designs. This is not your father’s EV
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