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For the last few years, Apple has been an AMD-only shop. Graphics may not be a core area that Apple focuses on — OpenGL support in the latest version of macOS remains stuck in 4.1 territory). But it does include discrete graphics cards in several of its MacBook Pro and iMac products, as well as in all of the Mac Pro SKUs. Now, there’s talk that Apple might switch back to Nvidia. Bloomberg multiple job listings at Nvidia (some of which have since been edited) that talk about “help[ing] produce the next revolutionary Apple products” and claimed the role would require “working in partnership with Apple” and writing code that will “define and shape the future” of the Mac’s graphics software.
A study just broke out of Tokyo that says some eyebrow-raising things about water bears and their DNA. First among the revelations is the finding that water bears might not be all that much not-tardigrade at all. Remember that story about the tardigrade genome being about ? The Tokyo University team suspected that might have been because of contamination. So, for their own experiments, they took some extra precautions when getting ready to make their little vials of extract of tardigrade. And by precautions, I mean dosing the water bears with antibiotics and soaking them in bleach. It’s like how a surgeon scrubs before surgery; any microbe that can hang on through that chemical and physical onslaught probably belongs there, so it’s easier to mind their potential for contamination because we know to look for it.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR who sold the company to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, has been confirmed as the major financial backer behind a pro-Donald Trump group called Nimble America. Nimble America, in its own words, is a “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit dedicated to shitposting in real life.” The DailyBeast and confirmed with Luckey that he was the near-billionaire NimbleRichMan associated with Nimble America. The story came after a controversy on the pro-Trump reddit board r/The_Donald, often itself a haven for the that has been repeatedly tweeted and boosted by the Trump campaign itself. In a , Nimble America declared that NimbleRichMan would match all donations made to the group, after he had been vetted by both mods within r/The_Donald and by Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right author affiliated with Breitbart.com.
Several weeks ago, SpaceX suffered another blow to its efforts to make private spaceflight a viable business when a Falcon 9 rocket during a pre-flight test. The explosion resulted in the loss of the rocket and the payload, a satellite that was to be used for Facebook’s internet.org project. The firm began an investigation immediately, and has now provided an update on the cause. The explosion was reportedly a result of a breached helium containment system. This might sound familiar, because it was also a problem with the helium storage tanks that caused the 2015 in-flight explosion that destroyed a resupply payload bound for the International Space Station.
When No Man’s Sky , it was already clear that the game would primarily appeal to a niche audience. The title’s lead designer and head of developer Hello Games, Sean Murray, has been blasted for promising the game would include features that didn’t actually ship. Not long after launch, Murray and Hello Games went radio-silent as players began requesting refunds. Now, nearly a month later, the game has transformed into a ghost of its former self. Some articles have implied that Hello Games has ceased communication altogether, which isn’t quite true. While Murray hasn’t tweeted since August, HG has continued patching the game and releasing patch notes for each update, including a 1.09 update that dropped today and contains a fairly significant list of patch notes.
Energy Star ratings are supposed tell consumers how much power their devices use under normal operation. But they only work if the tests and ratings reflect real-world use. A new study of Ultra HD televisions has revealed some of these devices use far more electricity than they claim if operated even slightly outside the preprogrammed test conditions that the manufacturers use for testing — and that the end result can be substantially higher electrical bills over the lifetime of the device. A new by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) criticizes the behavior of many high-end UHD televisions for the way they implement power-saving features.
Scientists put forth an interpretation of our planet’s that they think does a better job accounting for the silicon and carbon content of our planet as a whole. Over four billion years ago, just shortly after our planet’s surface first cooled enough to solidify, the Mercury-sized planet Theia smashed obliquely into Earth, mingling mantles and sloshing molten rock out into space to form the moon. Theories vary on the relative force of the impact — I like the sloshing theory, but there’s also a paper saying the impact would’ve had to actually vaporize part of the planet’s mantle. But the mixing would explain why we find carbonates and silicates where we do, and also the very similar chemical composition of the Earth and its Moon.
If you’re in the market for an affordable big-screen laptop, take a look at the 17.3-inch Inspiron 17 5000 series from Dell. With a Skylake CPU and a full HD display, this laptop is a steal when you use today’s coupon code. (List price: $902.99 — Coupon code: INSP$599) On the inside, this model sports a sixth generation dual-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U processor, a discrete AMD Radeon R5 M335 graphics card (with 4GB of memory), 8GB of DDR3L RAM (1600MHz), a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive, Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi support. As for the 17.3-inch display, it benefits from LED backlighting, an anti-glare coating, and a full HD resolution of 1920×1080.
