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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.

(credit: flickr user: Hideyuki KAMON)

Research on inequality usually looks at fairly static social structures like schools, transport, healthcare, or jobs. But sometimes glaring inequality can be quite fleeting, as researchers Katherine DeCelles and Michael Norton argue in a recent PNAS article. Their example? Coming face to face with just how awful airplane economy class is in comparison to first class.

DeCelles and Norton wanted to study whether exposure to this kind of inequality could prompt people to behave badly. They looked at records of “air rage” incidents, where “abusive or unruly” passengers threaten staff or fellow travelers. “Popular explanations for air rage include crowded planes, frustrating delays, and shrinking seats,” they write—but they suspected these explanations are missing something.

They suggest that when people fly in economy class, their position in the social hierarchy becomes glaringly obvious. This is especially so if they have to walk through the first class section of the plane to get to their assigned space in a cramped hell.

Charter's new footprint. (The numbers are slightly lower than actual as they're based on year-old data.) (credit: Charter)

The Federal Communications Commission just announced that it approved Charter's acquisitions of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks, allowing Charter to nearly quadruple in size.

Charter will face conditions designed to boost broadband competition and prevent harms to online video providers that compete against the cable companies' TV services. Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposed conditions were approved over opposition from Republican commissioners.

Charter just needs to tie up a few loose ends before completing the deal. The Department of Justice has proposed a settlement that will allow the merger to proceed, and approval from California state regulators could come in a vote on May 12. When announced last year, Charter expected the acquisitions to cost a combined $67.1 billion.

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Over the crackle of an old record, you can hear a woman singing in Urdu. Though listening to her is as easy as clicking a few buttons on the British Library website, her voice comes to you across vast distances in space and time. Sometime in the early 20th century, engineers recorded the voice of a woman called Malkajan for the German company Odeon, which pressed shellac discs for Indian record collectors in the 1910s and 30s. Now her work is part of a series of recordings called The Odeon Collection, digitized by Mumbai record collector Suresh Chandvankar with help from a grant from the British Library. There are over 1400 recordings in the collection, and all are free to the listening public. If you love music and history, it's easy to get lost in the riches of this easily accessible digital archive.

Chandvankar explains the collection:

Odeon label shellac discs were issued in India in two phases: during 1912-16; and during 1932-38. During the first phase, Odeon's first Indian recordings were made in late 1906 on a grand tour that took the engineers from Calcutta to Benares, then on to Lucknow, Cawnpore, Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, Bombay and finally back to Calcutta. In all, they recorded some 700 titles, which were duly shipped back to Berlin for processing and manufacture in what was then the established worldwide pattern. Disc records manufactured and pressed in Germany were shipped back to India by 1908... Because of the diversity of language and cultural taste, Odeon's engineers recorded a great deal of regional music for local consumption.

In the second phase, the Odeon disc manufacturing company operated during 1932-38. Its operations were mainly from Mumbai and Madras and the company produced over 2,000 titles in north and south Indian music. At this time, radio and film songs had just entered the entertainment era. Disc manufacturing and distribution activity continued until the outbreak of World War II. Because of the embargo imposed on German goods, the company had to wind up their business in India, leaving behind hundreds of titles. The musical genre recorded on these discs include drama songs, speeches, folk music, classical music, drama sets, skits and plays, vocal and instrumental music.

What he's describing is a treasure trove of Indian musical culture, from a period when folk songs and traditional music were giving way to the pop music that pervades so many Bollywood movies. Odeon records allowed Indians to enjoy everything from classical music to contemporary comedy from all over the country. And now, over a century after many of these recordings were made, we have a chance to hear what the Indian music industry was like in its infancy.