The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Review: Aiming For the Top

Having launched last week and being reviewed today is AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X, the company’s new flagship single-GPU video card. Featuring a fully enabled Fiji GPU, the R9 Fury X is AMD’s new Fiji GPU at its finest, and a safe bet to be the grandest video card AMD releases built on TSMC’s 28nm process. Fiji is clocked high, cooled with overkill, and priced to go right up against the only GM200 GeForce card from NVIDIA that anyone cares about: the GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

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The Oculus Touch – Finally, I can touch corn in Farmville

We’ve been inching closer and closer to realistic VR, and while we’re not quite there yet, new innovations are cropping up left and right. The Oculus Rift has been on the radar for quite some time, but we know for certain that it’s going to be coming out in the first quarter of 2016. There have been a few other attempts at realistic experiences, but they’re oftentimes a bit too …

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With Tiny Smartphone Spectrometers, Everybody Can Be A Chemist

Smartphone camera spectrometer

Jie Bao

This is about the size of a quarter.

Spectrometers are one of the most important tools in science. By measuring the various properties of light coming from or bouncing off an object, the device can help scientists figure out what paint is made of, or detect the composition of faraway stars. In the past, the machines have been too large to really be used anywhere but the lab. But now researchers from MIT have used quantum dots to make spectrometers that can fit in a smartphone, according to a study published yesterday in Nature. Having all that computational power in the palms of their hands could help scientists diagnose of diseases (especially skin conditions), test urine samples, or identify food contaminants.

A spectrometer works by taking in electromagnetic waves from an external source, putting it through a grating used to separate out the different wavelengths (the earliest spectrometers used prisms for this), and detecting various properties of the resulting bands of light, such as their intensity and polarity.

Quantum dots–nanocrystals made of different combinations of metals–provide a variation on the same concept. Each quantum dot can absorb a slightly different wavelength of light depending on the dot’s makeup. So when a thin film of quantum dots is placed over a photodetector like a smartphone camera, a finely tuned algorithm can decode the light that’s let through to determine the properties of the original light source. The study authors tested their initial version with 195 dots that could be used for several different readings, with a resolution only slightly lower than the bulky lab spectrometers.

Quantum dot spectrometer

Mary O’Reilly

An illustration showing the process of making a quantum dot spectrometer chip, by printing drops of quantum dot inks onto a detector array.

The quantum dot arrays are essentially printed on a film, so they would only cost a few dollars to produce, the study authors note. And though the researchers want to make their films slightly more accurate and higher-resolution, it’s not crazy to think that they might hit the market fairly soon. "Of course we still have a lot of room for improvement. But performance-wise, even at this preliminary stage, our spectrometer works very close to what’s currently being sold in the market," Jie Bao, the study’s lead author, told Popular Mechanics. "I think that’s one of the most attractive results of our research: [This spectrometer] is already so close to a real product."

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BP Will Pay $18.7 Billion To Settle Deepwater Horizon Case

Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010

Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010

The Department of Justice and oil company BP announced today that they had reached an $18.7 billion settlement over issues related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Back in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 people and sending millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Today’s settlement covers claims from four states (Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi) and the federal government and relates primarily to the environmental damage done by the spill. According to The New York Times the settlement includes:

  • $5.5 billion in fines under the Clean Water Act

  • $4.9 billion to the states for economic damages (for example; damages to the fishing and tourism industries in the wake of the disaster)

  • $1 billion to local governments

  • $7.1 billion to account for damage to natural resources.

BP already paid $4.5 billion in fines after a criminal case related to the disaster in 2012, and nearly $14 billion in cleanup efforts, and estimates that it will pay as much as $7.8 billion in compensation to individuals and businesses.

"If approved by the court, this settlement would be the largest settlement with a single entity in American history," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement. "It would help repair the damage done to the Gulf economy, fisheries, wetlands and wildlife; and it would bring lasting benefits to the Gulf region for generations to come."

"If approved by the court" is the key phrase there. The settlement must still be approved by a judge before it goes through.

While the money is sure to help the cleanup process, it could still be years before the full environmental costs are known. Studies have shown that fish exposed to the oil had heart defects while dolphin deaths spiked and oil entered the food chain via tiny plankton.

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