Month: May 2016

AUSTIN, Texas—After numerous rumours and a supposed "several billion dollars" spent on R&D, Nvidia's first consumer graphics cards based on its Pascal architecture are here: the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The GTX 1080 will retail for $599 (~£450), $50 more than the GTX 980 cost at launch, while the GTX 1070 will retail for $379 (~£270), again $50 more than the previous generation card. The 1080 launches on May 27, with the 1070 following on June 10.

While it's surprising Nvidia has raised the price of its flagships graphics cards—particularly given AMD's bold claims that its Polaris architecture will offer VR-ready performance at a "mainstream" price point—the company claims that both cards are significantly faster than its current flagships, the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti, which retail for $1000 (£800) and $650 (£550) respectively. In the case of the GTX 1080, Nvidia claims it's twice as fast as the Titan X and three times as energy efficient—it even says it's faster than dual-SLI 980 setup.

The performance boost comes from the combination of a new GPU microarchitecture (Pascal) with a leaner TSMC 16nm FinFET manufacturing process. The GTX 1080 also makes use of faster Micron GDDR5X memory, resulting in an impressive 10Gbps memory clock. Meanwhile, the GTX 1070 will use standard GDDR5 memory.

DigitalMania posted a photo of its giveaway cow before shipping it off to a winning couple. Pamela looks pretty chill about her fate. (credit: DigitalMania)

Typically, when video game players aim for a high score, they do it for bragging rights. Unless you're in a structured e-sports tournament, there's not much in the way of stakes for gobbling the most ghosts or fragging the most noobs.

A major exception arose in the nation of Tunisia on Monday, when the makers of a game called Bagra (which translates in Arabic to "Cow") rewarded its top player with the gaming world's first-ever real-life cow giveaway. Her name is Pamela, and as news site Tuniscope reported this week, that cow was loaded onto a truck and driven to the home of the iOS and Android game's top-performing cow herder.

The game asks players to tap the screen and position a variety of UFOs above a herd of grazing cattle. Players also get bonuses if they spend real-life money in the game, and reports didn't confirm how much cash the winners had to spend in the game to top the charts. We imagine the cost was less than paying for an entire cow outright. (Runners-up were reportedly given gizmos as prizes.)

(credit: CBS)

Earlier this week, mass panic ensued when a security firm reported the recovery of a whopping 272 million account credentials belonging to users of Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a variety of overseas services. "Big data breaches found at major email services" warned Reuters, the news service that broke the news. Within hours, other news services were running stories based on the report with headlines like "Tech experts: Change your email password now."

Since then, both Google and a Russia-based e-mail service unveiled analyses that call into question the validity of the security firm's entire report.

"More than 98% of the Google account credentials in this research turned out to be bogus," a Google representative wrote in an e-mail. "As we always do in this type of situation, we increased the level of login protection for users that may have been affected." According to the report, the compromised credential list included logins to almost 23 million Gmail accounts.

(credit: Flickr/Dennis Hlynsky)

Where would we be without our gut microbes? Most likely, we’d be in the bathroom, according to a new study.

Unraveling the interplay between our immune systems and gut microbes, researchers report that sensing and befriending helpful bacteria in our intestines may be critical for avoiding inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Those invisible allies can hack into the immune system’s chemical communications and shut down excessive inflammation, averting chronic and self-inflicted damage that can cause diarrhea, intestinal bleeding, and pain.

The finding, published in the journal Science, isn’t particularly surprising to scientists, who have long suspected that our microbiomes manipulate our immune responses and steer our health. But until now, the microbial tactics and the immune signals they alter have been a brown box.