By far the fastest video card in the land: Asus ARES Dual Radeon HD 5870 4GB Review – “Back in April, we first gave you a glimpse of the extreme Asus ARES dual-Radeon HD 5870 GPU powered graphics card, complete with some preliminary benchmarks. At the time, the specifications weren’t quite finalized and there was little word about availability in the U.S., but the card’s impressive configuration immediately piqued our interest. The ARES was, after all, a “true dual-Radeon HD 5870″ CrossFire setup on a single PCB. The Radeon HD 5970 was / is the fastest single graphics card on the market, and the Asus ARES would clearly offer more performance due to its increased number of stream processor cores and potentially higher clocks…”

A Beginner’s Guide to Overclocking Your Intel Processor – “A Beginner’s Guide to Overclocking Your Intel ProcessorIf you want to squeeze every last ounce of processing power out of your new computer or aging system, overclocking is a great—if slightly nerve-racking—option. Here are some simple guidelines for safely overclocking your CPU…”

My crock of gold: Chef discovers largest ever hoard of Roman coins in a field – “The 63-year-old unearthed 21 of the coins on a farm near Frome in Somerset before realising the find was so significant expert help was needed. He called in archaeologists who set about the delicate task of excavating the site…”

Russian sub ‘could stop oil leak’ – “Russian-owned submersibles would be able to cap the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the captain of one of the vessels has said. The skipper was speaking as two of the subs – which can dive to 6,000m – started a campaign of exploration at the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia…”

Using word association games to predict break-ups? – “For psychologists conducting relationship studies, it can sometimes be tricky getting a straight answer. If you ask a participant how happy he is in a relationship, sometimes he may be in denial, just not want to open up to you (ostensibly a complete stranger holding a clipboard), or may simply not truly know himself. So, to circumvent this particular problem in the search for broader truths about romantic relationships, in a new study published in the journal Psychological Science a group of researchers from the University of Rochester decided to take a less direct approach: instead of asking participants directly, they asked them to play word association games…”

Bluetooth 4.0 Devices will be Out This Year – “The low power Bluetooth 4.0 wireless networking specification will no longer be a dream. Bluetooth SIG, the organization for setting the standard, tested, certified and licensed Bluetooth 4.0 for production and use in devices. The Bluetooth 4.0 comes as an update to the previous Bluetooth 3.0 wireless specification. A low power transmission of a small burst of data over short distances makes it distinguishable….”

Game Development Toolset Stencyl Making The Big Leap Towards Flash – “It’s one thing to say “hey, world, I could make a kick ass video game” and quite another to actually go and make the thing. The biggest obstacle remains the technical barrier to entry, as games require extensive coding knowledge, the ability to draw things better than stick figures (most of the time, anyway) and other bases of knowledge that can’t be learned overnight. The web-based Stencyl is one of many companies who attempts to make that easier for the amateur developer, and the company recently told us about a slew of improvements coming to Stencyl, including support for Flash…”

HOW TO: Transfer Your iTunes Library Onto Your New OS

What color eyes would your children have?

The Internet in 2020

“The Little Toaster That Changed My Life” – “”

Advance in Quest for HIV Vaccine – “In the latest development, U.S. government scientists say they have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91% of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered. They are now deploying the technique used to find those antibodies to identify antibodies to influenza viruses…”

Introducing NEW YouTube Mobile:

So You Want To Be A Time Traveler? – “While time dilation and quantum tunneling might help, relativity will always get in the way of your time traveling dreams…”

Untidy beds may keep us healthy – “Failing to make your bed in the morning may actually help keep you healthy, scientists believe. Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies…”

Flights diverted, delayed as UFO detected hovering – “An unidentified flying object (UFO) disrupted air traffic over Zhejiang’s provincial capital Hangzhou late on Wednesday, the municipal government said on Thursday. Xiaoshan Airport was closed after the UFO was detected at around 9 pm, and some flights were rerouted to airports in the cities of Ningbo and Wuxi , said an airport spokesman, who declined to be named…”

31 Instant Health Boosters – ” Try one of these tips each day — you’ll feel better and get fitter and smarter in just one month…”

A Step Closer to Perfect 3-D Data Storage – “In the introduction to a paper in press in the Journal of Biotechnology, Virgile Adam of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, along with a long list of collaborators from other institutions, describe the ultimate in holographic (three-dimensional) data storage: a chemically pure crystal composed solely of proteins that can be read and reversibly switched between at least two different states using nothing but light…”

Drugs, Inc. – “While the Colombian drug cartels make millions, the farmers who sell them the cocaine paste struggle to survive…”

The China Study: Fact or Fallacy? – “When I first started analyzing the original China Study data, I had no intention of writing up an actual critique of Campbell’s much-lauded book. I’m a data junkie. Numbers, along with strawberries and Audrey Hepburn films, make me a very happy girl. I mainly wanted to see for myself how closely Campbell’s claims aligned with the data he drew from—if only to satisfy my own curiosity. But after spending a solid month and a half reading, graphing, sticky-noting, and passing out at 3 AM from studious exhaustion upon my copy of the raw China Study data, I’ve decided it’s time to voice all my criticisms. And there are many…”

How The Truth About Motorcycle Helmets Got A Journalist Fired – “How The Truth About Motorcycle Helmets Got A Journalist FiredDexter Ford was a three-decades-long veteran of Motorcyclist, a motorcycle enthusiast magazine, until he was fired in September. Now, recently-revealed email exchanges indicate he was canned after a motorcycle helmet story he wrote for The New York Times angered advertisers…”

The coolness of tiny things – “NANO-THIS. Nano-that. Nano-the-other. The idea that making things so small you measure their dimensions in nanometres (as billionths of a metre are dubbed by the scientific-measurement system) will unlock advantages denied to larger objects has been around for well over a decade. Long enough, in other words, for sceptics to wonder when something useful will actually come of it. It looks possible, though, that something useful is indeed about to happen. The evidence suggests that adding a sprinkle of nanoparticles to water can improve its thermal conductivity, and thus its ability to remove heat from something that it is in contact with, by as much as 60%. In a world where the cost of coolth is a significant economic drain (industrial cooling consumes 7% of the electricity generated within the European Union) that offers a worthwhile gain. It would, for instance, allow the huge computer-filled warehouses that drive the Internet to fit in more servers per square metre of floor space…”

Tiger population ‘falls to lowest level since records began’ – “Tiger numbers are at lowest level since records began, with conservationists warning that the world has 12 years to save the species…”

Porn CEO: Don’t Fight Piracy With DRM – “That doesn’t mean Private isn’t alarmed by piracy; in fact, the company is determined to pursue legal action against sites redistributing its work. But punishing paying customers isn’t the right approach to deal with the issue, according to Bunimovitz. “The way to fight piracy is not to limit who you sell content to, it’s by fighting pirates,” he said…”

Conroy backs down on net filters – “Academics, ISP experts, political opponents, the US government and a broad cross-section of community groups have long argued that the plan to block a secret blacklist of “refused classification” web pages for all Australians was fraught with issues, for example, that blocked RC content could include innocuous material…”

Companies brace for end of cheap made-in-China era – “Factory workers demanding better wages and working conditions are hastening the eventual end of an era of cheap costs that helped make southern coastal China the world’s factory floor. A series of strikes over the past two months have been a rude wakeup call for the many foreign companies that depend on China’s low costs to compete overseas, from makers of Christmas trees to manufacturers of gadgets like the iPad…”

U.S. Tomahawk Missiles Deployed Near China Send Message – ” If China’s satellites and spies were working properly, there would have been a flood of unsettling intelligence flowing into the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese navy last week. A new class of U.S. superweapon had suddenly surfaced nearby. It was an Ohio-class submarine, which for decades carried only nuclear missiles targeted against the Soviet Union, and then Russia. But this one was different: for nearly three years, the U.S. Navy has been dispatching modified “boomers” to who knows where (they do travel underwater, after all). Four of the 18 ballistic-missile subs no longer carry nuclear-tipped Trident missiles. Instead, they hold up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles each, capable of hitting anything within 1,000 miles with non-nuclear warheads…”

Doing Spy Stuff with Mathematica – “The idea of steganography is to hide messages within other information so that no one notices your communications. The word itself comes from a Latin-Greek combination meaning “covered writing”, from earlier physical methods that apparently included tattooing a message on a messenger’s head before letting him grow his hair back to hide it. In the case of digital steganography, it is all done in the math…”

Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp – “Some birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and orientate themselves with the ease of a compass needle. This ability is a massive boon for migrating birds, keeping frequent flyers on the straight and narrow. But this incredible sense is closely tied to a more mundane one – vision. Thanks to special molecules in their retinas, birds like the European robins can literally see magnetic fields. The fields appear as patterns of light and shade, or even colour, superimposed onto what they normally see…”

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