Academic success in school doesn’t necessarily translate into adult wellbeing. If you want your kids to grow up into happy adults, a new study suggests what you may want to help them aim for.
from Wired Top Stories
From AnandTech: ARM Announces 8-core 2nd Gen Mali-T600 GPUs
In our discrete GPU reviews for the desktop we’ve often noticed the tradeoff between graphics and compute performance in GPU architectures. Generally speaking, when a GPU is designed for compute it tends to sacrifice graphics performance or vice versa. You can pursue both at the same time, but within a given die size the goals of good graphics and compute performance are usually at odds with one another.
Mobile GPUs aren’t immune to making this tradeoff. As mobile devices become the computing platform of choice for many, the same difficult decisions about balancing GPU compute and graphics performance must be made.
ARM announced its strategy to dealing with the graphics/compute split earlier this year. In short, create two separate GPU lines: one in pursuit of great graphics performance, and one optimized for graphics and compute.
Today all of ARM’s shipping GPUs fall on the blue, graphics trend line in the image above. The Mali-400 is the well known example, but the forthcoming Mali-450 (8-core Mali-400 with slight improvements to IPC) is also a graphics focused part.
The next-generation ARM GPU architecture, codenamed Midgard but productized as the Mali-T600 series will have members optimized for graphics performance as well as high-end graphics/GPU compute performance.
The split looks like this:
The Mali-T600 series is ARM’s first unified shader architecture. The parts on the left fall under the graphics roadmap, while the parts on the right are optimized for graphics and GPU compute. To make things even more confusing, the top part in each is actually a second generation T600 GPU, announced today.
What does the second generation of T600 give you? Higher IPC and higher clock speeds in the same die area thanks to some reworking of the architecture and support for ASTC (an optional OpenGL ES texture compression spec we talked about earlier today).
Both the T628 and T678 are eight-core parts, the primary difference between the two (and between graphics/GPU compute optimized ARM GPUs in general) is the composition of each shader core. The T628 features two ALUs, a LSU and texture unit per shader, while the T658 doubles up the ALUs per core.
Long term you can expect high end smartphones to integrate cores from the graphics & compute optimized roadmap, while the mainstream and lower end smartphones wll pick from the graphics-only roadmap. All of this sounds good on paper, however there’s still the fact that we’re talking about the second generation of Mali-T600 GPUs before the first generation has even shipped. We will see the first gen Mali-T600 parts before the end of the year, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement in the way mobile GPUs and SoCs are launched…
from AnandTech
From Engadget: SLIPS liquid repeller is inspired by carnivorous plants, enemy to insects and graffiti artists alike
When a team of Harvard researchers wanted to create the ultimate liquid- and solid-repelling surface, they looked toward the Nepenthes pitcher plant, where curious insects check in and never check out, thanks to slippery walls that lead to their tiny, horrific fate. The tropical plant inspired the creation of SLIPS (Self-healing, Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surface), a synthetic material that utilizes nano/ microstructured substrates, capable of repelling just about anything you can throw at it. During a visit to the hallowed Crimson halls, the team was kindly enough to show off the material through a series of messy, messy demos, dropping water, motor oil, liquid asphalt and newly-mixed concrete on aluminum and glass. The team even went crazy with a can of black spray paint, comparing the results to a Teflon surface. The outcome was the same in all case — an amazingly repellent material.
The team has published a number of papers on the stuff, including ones that demonstrate its ice- and bacteria-repelling properties. Oh, and like its natural inspiration, SLIPS does a great jobs keeping bugs off its surface. You can check out our demos and one unhappy ant filmed by the SLIPS team. No insects were harmed in the making of our video, at least — and the lab assures us that ant had a good life before learning the hard way why it shouldn’t mess with Harvard scientists.
from Engadget
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: The First Shirt That Lowers Your Body Temperature
Ice Tee Courtesy Columbia Sportswear
The human body already has a highly efficient cooling system: As perspiration evaporates, it draws heat away from the body. Wicking fabrics facilitate this process by distributing sweat evenly over the fabric, so that it dries more quickly. Despite devising cheats, such as menthol-like chemical coatings added to fabrics, companies have never actually improved upon the body’s natural cooling process. Designers at Columbia Sportswear have now made a fabric that does.
The wicking polyester base of the Omni-Freeze ZERO T-shirt is embedded with thousands of 0.15-inch hydrophilic polymer rings (a men’s medium has more than 41,000 of them). As the base spreads sweat, the rings absorb moisture and expand into three-dimensional doughnuts. In order to swell, the rings require energy, which they gather as body heat. In tests, the shirt was up to 10 degrees cooler against the wearer’s skin than shirts made from any other material.
Columbia Sportswear Omni-Freeze Zero Freeze Degree T-shirt
Weight: 4.8 ounces
Material: stretch polyester
Sun Protection Factor: 50
Price: $60
In Related News: The Safest Way to Jog at Dusk
Designers at Brooks worked with a team at the Loughborough University Sports Technology Institute in the U.K. to ensure runners wearing the Nightlife Jacket III remain visible to drivers in any light. The darker the surroundings, the more heavily eyes rely on contrast to pick out objects, so the team added black stripes to the arms and shoulders to offset the fluorescent base and better outline runners. Brooks NightLife Jacket III $115
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Approved: The First Swallowable Electronic Devices
Smart Pills Proteus Biomedical
Digital pills that monitor you from withinNo matter how fast pharmaceutical companies can churn out drugs to prevent or cure illnesses, health insurance doesn’t cover the cost of hiring a person to follow you around and remind you to take your meds. So the FDA has approved a pill that can do it on its own by monitoring your insides and relaying the information back to a healthcare provider.
The pills, made by Proteus Digital Health, have sand-particle-sized silicon chips with small amounts of magnesium and copper on them. After they’re swallowed, they generate voltage as they make contact with digestive juices. That signals a patch on the person’s skin, which then relays a message to a mobile phone given to a healthcare provider. It’s only been approved for use with placebos right now, but the company is hoping to get it approved for use with other drugs (which would be where it would get the most use).
Even if there’s a slight whiff of dystopia about a pill that tracks your actions, it does help with a major problem. Patients aren’t the best at taking their pills, especially those suffering from chronic illnesses, so it’s one step of many toward a future where they don’t have to.
[Nature]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Discover Magazine: Malaria parasites evolve in vaccinated mice to cause more severe disease | Not Exactly Rocket Science
Curing disease is really a matter of outfoxing evolution. When we assault bacteria or viruses or cancer cells with drugs, they evolve ways of resisting those drugs. We attack, they counter-attack. Take malaria: the Plasmodium parasites that cause the disease have repeatedly evolved to resist our best anti-malarial drugs. The mosquitoes that carry the parasites have evolved to resist the insecticides we poison them with. And now, Victoria Barclay from Pennsylvania State University has found that some malaria vaccines could drive Plasmodium to become even deadlier than it is now.
Several malaria vaccines are in development, but none have been licensed yet. Barclay vaccinated mice with a protein that’s found in several of these vaccines, and then exposed them to Plasmodium. After a few generations, the parasite became more ‘virulent’ – that is, it caused more severe disease. And it did so via an evolutionary escape route that is rarely considered.
Vaccine creators aren’t naive to the possibility of resistance. They’re trying to train the immune system to recognise and destroy Plasmodium by presenting them with proteins on the parasite’s surface, and they know that the parasites could …
from Discover Magazine
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Video: Four-Ton Japanese Mega Bot Fires BBs At Smiling Humans
Kuratas via Plastic Pals
This boxy guy is called Kuratas, otherwise known as Vaudeville, and he stands 12 feet 5 inches tall. He weighs about 4.5 tons and is diesel-powered. Do not smile at him. He will shoot that grin right off your face.
Kuratas is a real-life mech from (where else?) Japan, and it’s an art project designed by Suidobashi Heavy Industry. Iron worker/artist Kogoro Kurata, at right in the photo above, built his namesake robot and debuted it at something called Wonder Fest 2012, which took place over the weekend.
It has a ride-in cockpit, a master-slave joystick and a touchscreen interface, and its arms can be controlled via Kinect, so it could be trained as a champion boxer. Its twin BB Gatling guns can fire up to 6,000 BBs per minute, according to Plastic Pals. And it fires when a small camera inside the robot detects when you smile. This is just for fun, however – Kurata says he would never want his creation to harm anyone. But it could be used for robot competitions, he said.
You could pretend-order one of your own, via a slick website Kurata and his colleagues at Suidobashi designed. The mecha come in various color schemes and customizable weapons. But the base model starts at $1,353,500, so better start saving.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now