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Enlarge / Roses are red, violets are blue, turbines use magnets to generate power which can be used to make light, and without light you are likely to be eaten by a grue. (credit: Northern Power Systems)

BARRE, Vermont—It started with Mars. In 1993, NASA gave a Small Business Innovation Research grant to Vermont-based Northern Power Systems (NPS) to build a very southern wind turbine—as in, a turbine that could reliably work at the South Pole.

NASA was interested in a wind turbine that could potentially provide power for human exploration of Mars, and the National Science Foundation was interested in some electricity at its South Pole station that didn’t require flying in fuel. NPS set about tackling both challenges in one fell swoop, designing a low-maintenance turbine using components that could survive the deathly Antarctic (or Martian) cold. A few years later, a 3 kilowatt turbine was spinning away at the South Pole.

Video: Ars visits Northern Power Systems to get our wind turbine learn on. Shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

AMD announced its new Crimson drivers, replacing the Catalyst name and software, with great fanfare earlier this month. The first Crimson drivers are now out, and they appear to have a serious problem. There are widespread reports of cards overheating and perhaps even failing permanently.

It appears that the new driver is setting the video card fans to 20 percent and then leaving them there. Normally, the fan speed should increase as the GPU temperature goes up, but that is not happening with Crimson. Even during games and intensive workloads, the fans are sticking at 20 percent, allowing GPU temperatures to climb to more than 90° C. These high temperatures are causing poor performance due to thermal throttling, graphical glitches and crashes, and some users are reporting permanent hardware damage. Although the GPU itself throttles when it overheats, there's speculation that other components on the cards, such as the VRMs, can still be damaged.

AMD has acknowledged the fan speed issue and says that a hot fix will be published today. This is unlikely to be any great comfort to those whose cards have bitten the dust, and it makes for an inauspicious debut for AMD's new driver. This is, however, not a problem unique to AMD; in 2010, Nvidia published a driver update that had a similar fan controller issue that led to cards overheating and in some cases breaking entirely. Another Nvidia release in 2013 also yielded complaints of overheating and video card destruction.

The Nexus 5X.

It's Cyber Monday, which means there are a ton of deals out there if you're willing to hunt around. If you know someone who needs to upgrade his or her smartphone, one of our favorites, the Nexus 5X, is on sale at the Google Store for $80 off. That makes it a nice, even $299.

Thanks to stock Android, a fantastic camera, a great price, and quick updates directly from Google, the new Nexus devices are the best Android phones you can buy. They're also the most secure, due to Google's monthly security update program. The device is compatible with Google's Project Fi Internet service, which may or may not be cheaper than your usual cell service, depending on your usage pattern. $80 off makes the already great price irresistible.

The Google Store is also shipping any two Chromecasts for $50, which works out to a $20 savings. You can mix and match the audio and video Chromecasts in whatever combination you want.

(credit: BBC)

A British toddler recently had his right eye sliced in half by a neighbor’s drone, which resulted in the removal of his eyeball. He will eventually be fitted with a prosthetic.

According to BBC Watchdog, Oscar Webb was just 16 months old at the time of the accident. He was out playing in front of his home in Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire when a neighbor’s drone hit him in the face. Pilot Simon Evans, a next-door neighbor of the Webb family, flew the drone in front of his house, where it clipped a tree and "spun out of control" for a moment before colliding with the young boy. (The BBC described Evans as an "experienced" drone operator.)

"It was up for about 60 seconds," Evans said. "As I brought it back down to land, it just clipped the tree and span round. The next thing I know I've just heard my friend shriek and say, 'Oh God no' and I turned around and just saw blood and his baby on the floor crying."

Enlarge / A shot of the PS4's main processor, courtesy of a teardown from Wired. (credit: Wired)

In terms of raw power, console hardware doesn't really change over time; the PS4 you buy today will essentially have the same pixel-pushing components as one you buy in 2020. But through software updates, the current generation of game consoles is managing to give developers access to more of that raw hardware power as time goes on.

Sony's PlayStation 4 is the latest beneficiary of this trend. The system's eight-core CPU used to devote two entire cores to managing the underlying operating system, leaving just six available for developers to use for games. So it was a bit surprising when the release notes for a recent version of FMOD Studio's middleware platform noted that the API had "added FMOD_THREAD_CORE6 to allow access to the newly unlocked 7th core."

Digital Foundry confirmed with its development sources that Sony has indeed unlocked a seventh CPU core for direct access by developers. Those same sources suggest that the core may still be partly used for system-related tasks at points, so it's not exactly a one-sixth improvement in available CPU time. Still, every little bit helps when trying to process complex scenes or bits of game logic.

The Metal Gear Solid series has always carried a strong undertone about the threat of nuclear proliferation. Metal Gear Solid V is taking that message to a new level by integrating an in-game metagame that will unlock a new story cutscene once all players have disarmed their in-game nuclear arsenals.

Nuclear weapons are a powerful force in MGSV's Forward Operating Base side-game, which lets players build up a personal army and arsenal that can be used to invade and plunder fellow players online. The nuclear bombs act as deterrents to invasion from other players, unless the invading force also has a nuclear weapon or has achieved Hero status through tireless do-gooding.

The nature of that in-game arms race led to tens of thousands of in-game nukes being deployed across the game's servers as of November 1, according to Konami's official count. But players also have reason to try to reverse that trend. As Konami recently officially announced, a "secret nuclear disarmament event" will be triggered for all players only when "All nuclear weapons on the regional server corresponding to your console or platform must have been dismantled. In other words, the amount of nukes on your platform's server must be equal to 0."

This illustration shows Earth surrounded by filaments of dark matter called "hairs." (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

There are few fields like theoretical astrophysics, where public perception so radically departs from reality. Society generally considers its practitioners—scientists like Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne—to be among the most brilliant people in the world. They are the great sages to whom we turn with the universe’s deepest questions. Yet in reality, astrophysicists are mired in ignorance.

When a theoretical astrophysicist looks up at the nighttime sky, he or she will see the stars shining overhead. But what concerns the physicist is not what he or she sees but rather what is unseen. Based upon different kinds of observations, such as how galaxies rotate and how they are flying apart from one another, scientists know that 95 percent of the of the universe is made of up stuff we cannot see. Of the universe's mass, physicists say 27 percent is dark matter, and 68 percent is dark energy. And researchers have no idea what this stuff is or where to find it.

Yet a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has now provided a clue about where dark matter—and lots of it—might be found. In a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal, Gary Prézeau has proposed that Earth and other planets and stars in the Milky Way galaxy are surrounded by theoretical filaments of dark matter called "hairs.” By finding the roots of these hairs, he reports, physicists could uncover a trove of dark matter.