Month: January 2016

AMD, a company famous for its subtlety and restraint when dealing with competitors, is once again accusing Intel of unfair business practices, this time around dodgy benchmarks. Rather than provide useful metrics to consumers, AMD says Intel's use of the SYSmark benchmarking tool unfairly favours Intel products by putting too much emphasis on raw CPU performance. It even went as far to compare said practice to the recent VW emissions scandal, in which diesel engines could detect when they were having their emissions tested, changing their performance accordingly to improve results.

"Information provided by even the most established organisations can be misleading," explains AMD's John Hampton in a video titled "Truth or Myth?: Is SYSmark a Reliable Benchmark?" on YouTube. The video, in which a po-faced Hampton and technical sidekick Tony Salinas explain the Intel problem in true 60 Minutes style, shows SYSmark on a pair of PCs, one powered by an Intel Core i5 processor and the other by an AMD FX chip. The Core i5 system scored 987, while a "comparable AMD platform" running an FX processor scored 659. "That's a delta of 50 percent. Quite astonishing and not realistic in what real life performance is like," says Salinas.

To try and prove that AMD's chips are comparable to Intel's in real-world usage scenarios, the pair then boot up PCMark8, which has "activity going on on the CPU, GPU, and video sub-components of the system." The performance delta drops down to around seven percent. To hammer the point home they then load up a custom script, which looks at the time taken to complete a set of tasks within Microsoft Office. The Intel system completed it in 62 seconds, while the AMD system completed it in 64, thus providing the "better representation of real performance" the company is so keen to share.

(credit: Patrick Rowe, NSF)

The natural movement of carbon through the Earth and its inhabitants is essential to life as we know it. Carbon is needed in our atmosphere for photosynthesis, it’s present in plants and our bodies, and it’s expelled back into the atmosphere by our respiration.

The world’s ocean represents a significant sink in the global carbon cycle, containing the majority of the world’s CO2 in a dissolved form. Dissolved CO2 is required for many chemical and biochemical processes critical for marine organisms. For example, the sunlit level of the ocean is filled with phytoplankton, an organism that uses sunlight and dissolved carbon dioxide to create sugars via photosynthesis.

Iron is a trace nutrient that is critical for photosynthesis. The Southern Ocean has low concentrations of dissolved iron compared to other oceans, leading to lower levels of carbon sequestration—approximately 10 percent of the global sequestration. However, scientists think that sources of iron can lead to elevated localized levels, which could dramatically increase carbon sequestration. The impact of these local changes on the overall carbon sequestration of the Southern Ocean is not well understood.

Acciona

The Acciona 100% EcoPowered racing across the desert.

6 more images in gallery

Motorsport is never easy, but races don't come any tougher than the annual Dakar rally. Originally, the race used to run from Paris to Dakar, Senegal but security concerns about crossing North Africa in 2008 saw the race moved to South America the following year, where it has found a new home ever since. Cars, trucks, bikes, and quads all compete in the two-week long, 5,700-mile (9200km) race, through stunning but remote and arduous terrain. And this year an electric vehicle called the Acciona 100% EcoPowered put in an extremely credible performance.

The car in question is a technology demonstrator project from Acciona, a renewable energy multinational. It's a purpose-built machine (i.e., not based on an existing road car), powered by eight lithium-ion battery packs (that may well have come from Tesla road cars) to give it a total 150kWh. Those cells feed a 335hp/250kW electric motor, and Acciona say the car uses between 20 and 45kWh per 100km. Recharging takes an hour using a fast charging system, something the team was able to do at various checkpoints along the route with the help of a support truck.

Between the need to recharge for an hour at a checkpoint during the stages and the EV's limited top speed of 93mph (150km/h) the Acciona 100% EcoPowered was never going to trouble the factory-backed Peugeot and Mini teams for the win. But Ariel Jaton and his codriver Gaston Scazzuso put in a decent showing and were in 71st place by the end of the 10th day.

One of the earlier leading candidates to explain the odd behavior of this star. The new data suggest this explanation is unlikely.

For over a century, a star's bizarre behavior has been hiding in plain sight. Now, after unusual fluctuations in its light were spotted in the Kepler data, a researcher has gone back and looked at old photographic plates and found that its behavior has been unusual since some of the earliest images. The new findings make any mundane explanations for the star's erratic behavior even less likely.

"The star KIC8462852 (TYC 3162-665-1) is apparently a perfectly normal star." That's how a new paper from Louisiana State's Bradley Schaefer begins. It's an F-type star, which means it's a bit larger than the Sun, but is otherwise boring and stable. If you were to image it (as has happened many times over recent decades), it would look unremarkable.

It took the Kepler telescope to figure out that the star was anything but boring. Kepler was designed to stare at one patch of the sky and watch for signs of planets passing in front of their host stars. By chance, that patch of sky included KIC8462852. Its bizarre behavior—sudden dips in brightness of as much as 20 percent, lasting for seemingly random periods of time—wouldn't have been identified by the software that analyzes Kepler data.