Corvus.corax

First time accepted submitter MalachiK writes "A senior academic and former UK government drugs adviser reckons that pretty soon it'll be possible to enjoy the fun of being drunk without having to suffer the negative effects of alcohol. In a proposal reminiscent of Star Trek's synthehol, Professor David Nut has identified a number of molecules that he claims offer experiences that are subjectively indistinguishable from alcohol intoxication. Apparently a major advantage of using these more selectively psychoactive drugs is that the effects can be quickly reversed. It's not all good news though as Professor Nut seems to think that the drinks industry is using its financial and political clout to stop this sort of research being undertaken."

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During an interview with The Atlantic Wire last month, the Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd joked about the exhausting pace of life in the Oklahoma City rock band. "I'm just like, man, please," he said amidst discussion of the group's newest studio album, brand new Ender's Game-inspired LP, forthcoming joint EP with Tame Impala, and ongoing world tour. "I don't really like to work at that kind of pace."

Which is frankly too bad, because that pace shows no signs of letting up. Gearing up for the Black Friday edition of Record Store Day, the Lips will be releasing (count 'em) three items, Rolling Stone reports: the previously mentioned EP with Tame Impala, a vinyl edition of the Peace Sword EP, and a full-length cover of the Stone Roses' entire self-titled debut. (The group's been planning that one for a while; you might recall their similarly minded reimagining of Dark Side of the Moon from 2009.) That makes for a hyperactive 2013 for the group. Please—be careful, Flaming Lips! Exhaustion from overwork is nothing to scoff at.

Of course, there is a dutifully psychedelic packaging component to this output, as frontman Wayne Coyne told the magazine: 

"It's all made out of chocolate, it's a life-size human skull, a life-sized human brain, and the brain is actually sliding out of the skull made with this brain fluid flavored hard-candy," Coyne tells Rolling Stone. "And there's a little magic coin inside that brain that you're supposed to dig out."

Which is—well, fun. But this is a band that has released a special edition of a collaborative LP pressed with actual samples of its contributing artists' blood, a band that has released a box set of four CDs meant to be played simultaneously, a band that has released an EP on a USB drive contained within an edible gummy skull. So let it go, Wayne. You've already staked your conquest upon the psychedelic possibilities of audio formatting. Try to move on. There isn't much territory left to explore—edible or otherwise. 

Except for one idea Drozd proposed in the aforementioned interview with the Wire: "Maybe the next thing is, you pay $50,000 and [Coyne] comes to your house and plays it for you on your record player in person." Start saving up for that one now.

Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you're connected to. What could possibly go wrong?"

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An anonymous reader writes news of an attempt to erase a bit of history. From the article: "The Conservative Party have attempted to delete all their speeches and press releases online from the past 10 years, including one in which David Cameron promises to use the Internet to make politicians 'more accountable'. The Tory party have deleted the backlog of speeches from the main website and the Internet Archive — which aims to make a permanent record of websites and their content — between 2000 and May 2010"

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Dr Herbert West writes about a reported $3 billion offer from Facebook that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel turned down. "Snapchat, a rapidly growing messaging service, recently spurned an all-cash acquisition offer from Facebook for close to $3 billion or more, according to people briefed on the matter. The offer, and rebuff, came as Snapchat is being wooed by other investors and potential acquirers. Chinese e-commerce giant Tencent Holdings had offered to lead an investment that would value two-year-old Snapchat at $4 billion. Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO, will not likely consider an acquisition or an investment at least until early next year, the people briefed on the matter said. They said Spiegel is hoping Snapchat’s numbers – of users and messages – will grow enough by then to justify an even larger valuation, the people said."

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Reihan reports:

University of Minnesota economist David Levinson envisions a future in which per capita vehicle travels falls significantly, bringing traffic congestion down with it. The chief driver of this death of traffic is not the emergence of a new transportation technology, though technology certainly plays a role in Levinson’s scenario. Rather, it is the shrinking of the American workweek coupled with new business models which draw primarily on existing technologies. Though written in an understated style, it is quite entertaining. I recommend reading it in its entirety. A few aspects of his vision struck me as particularly notable:

1. Just as it was once standard for U.S. workers to work a six-day week, Levinson imagines that the workweek will continue to shrink. Every-other Friday off (the 5/4 schedule) becomes standard by 2015; by 2020, the standard schedule becomes a 9 hour day with four days a week in the office and 4 additional hours of checking in from home; by 2025, workers are taking every-other Monday off (the 4/3 schedule); and by 2030, the “flipped” office, like the “flipped” classroom, becomes the norm — i.e., workers do the bulk of their work at home, and they come to the office for “interactive collaboration days.”

2. But it’s not just the workweek that will change. The pattern of how we work over the life course will also change. Levinson envisions a world in which almost half the population doesn’t enter the paid workforce until age 30, as firms lose interest in financing training. Instead, most people go through an extended apprenticeship period that can last as long as a decade, combining unpaid internships and attending school online. And most people exit the workforce by age 60, as technological advances reduce the value of older workers.

3. The changing workweek causes the value of office buildings to plummet. As office buildings are converted to apartments, the least desirable of which become home to the 20-somethings toiling away at their unpaid internships (subsidized, presumably, by parents, or sustained by part-time work), residential constructions in the suburbs grinds to a halt, and suburban property values drift down, thus making suburban neighborhoods more attractive to low-income households. Large garages are transformed into stores, workshops, and accessory dwellings as families choose to maintain fewer automobiles. Car-sharing, meanwhile, grows more entrenched as a larger share of the population comes to reside in urban cores. (This has the effect of reducing per capita vehicle trips because while car-sharing eliminates many of the fixed costs associated with vehicle ownership, it increases the marginal cost per trip.)

4. Shopping, once a big contributor to vehicle trips, is transformed as people (and their autonomous agents) order online and have goods delivered; decentralized manufacturing and 3-D printing on-demand, in turn, shrink supply chains

There is more at the link…

Joe Sacco has made a career of tackling difficult subjects through imagery. He's a journalist and cartoonist who has reported on the Middle East and Bosnia — in both written and comic form. In his latest book, The Great War, Sacco turns to history, producing a 24-foot-long depiction of the horrifying first day of the Battle of the Somme.

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I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far [...]

The post Master of many trades appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Charlie Stile at The Record on how Chris Christie won over Democrats. "Christie discreetly and methodically courted Democrats with every lever of power at his disposal. By the end, many of those Democrats would supply the manpower, money or simply the photo ops for his campaign," Stile explains. Christie's leadership during Superstorm Sandy helped him keep the governorship, but it was his Democratic support that really propelled him to victory. For example, "Christie won the unofficial support — and admiration — of George Norcross, the South Jersey insurance executive and the state’s most powerful Democrat, by carrying out an overhaul of the state’s higher education system that poured more money into that region." At base, "Christie revived the transactional, political dynamic that vanished during the rocky tenure of [Democrat Jon] Corzine, his predecessor." By working out deals with certain Democratic mayors, Christie won the support of some of the more liberal towns in New Jersey. Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker's Washington correspondent, tweets, "@PoliticalStile has the best piece I've read on how Christie won."

Jonathan Chait at Daily Intelligencer on why Christie won't go to the White House. Republicans "now see the enticing chance, in the form of Christie’s all-but-declared presidential candidacy, to right their course without veering left," Chait explains. But don't "measure the drapes" in the White House just yet. For one, Christie will fall to the left of other Republican primary candidates: He's "openly endorsed gun control, called for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and conceded the legitimacy of climate science" as well as participated in Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. And he's already been vetted once: "Mitt Romney wanted to make Christie his vice-presidential nominee, but took a close look at what the vetters came up with and ... promptly changed his mind." Huffington Post political reporter Sabrina Siddiqui tweets, "[Christie] faces uphill battle, especially in primary. Chait has good points here." 

Nate Cohn at The New Republic on what Terry McAuliffe's win means for Democrats in 2014. A narrow victory in Virginia's gubernatorial race "doesn’t bode well for Democrats in 2014," Cohn argues. "[Ken] Cuccinelli was relatively competitive in race where everything went wrong. He was decidedly outspent. His party never unified around his candidacy and a libertarian candidate was there to take advantage. The government shutdown probably didn’t help. And, of course, Cuccinneli was a pretty flawed candidate in his own right." Most importantly, "McAuliffe did as bad as President Obama in coal country and western Virginia, the exact sort of places where Democrats need to rebound to retake the House." Matt O'Brien, an economics writer at The Atlantic, is skeptical: "I'm not sure the inability of a horribly flawed candidate to win big augurs poorly for Democrats in '14."

Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker on the real threat of climate change. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "reads like a laundry list of the apocalypse — flood, drought, disease, starvation," Kolbert explains. "Climate change, the group noted, will reduce yields of major crops by up to two per cent each decade for the remainder of this century." Things look worse for animals: "Under the most likely scenarios, many species 'will not be able to move fast enough during the 21st century to track suitable climates,' and there is a chance that some ecosystems, including the Arctic tundra and the Amazon rainforest, will undergo 'abrupt and irreversible change.'" So what's to be done? "Any genuine 'preparedness' strategy must include averting those eventualities for which preparation is impossible," Kolbert argues. "This is not something that the President can do by executive order, but it’s something he ought to be pursuing with every other tool." MSNBC reporter Ned Resnikoff darkly jokes, "Regardless of what happens [in the elections], we're still on track for global, civilization-wide catastrophe."

David Dayen at Salon says Wall Street slumlords are back. Investors are "flocking to the latest product peddled by large banking interests, even though they look almost exactly like the mortgage-backed securities that were a primary driver of the financial crisis. These new securities, backed by rental payments, also have real-world implications for millions of renters, who could end up turning in their monthly checks to Wall Street-based absentee slumlords," Dayen argues. While these securities have secured a AAA rating from ratings agencies, "you’ll remember that mortgage-backed securities were bestowed triple-A ratings during the housing bubble, and that this spurred massive purchases, fueling demand for more and more home loans to create more securities." Dayen concludes, "if Americans weren’t seduced by the mythical dream of homeownership and turned to renting, that could certainly be positive. But it’s hard to trust that the same financial titans who blew up the economy won’t distort and pervert the rental market ..." David Gaffen, who covers U.S. markets for Reuters, tweets, "How [Wall Street] could wreck the economy again." 

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is being moved to a prison four time zones and 2,000 miles from her family in Moscow

Steve Loveridge's much-delayed project stars Kanye West and Julian Assange

It's been a tumultuous few weeks for the Confederate flag, which has alternately been held aloft at White House protests and emblazoned on merchandise being sold during Kanye West's Yeezus tour. That tour has since gone on temporary pause, but West's fascination with the 150-year-old emblem of racist Confederate statehood has not: he was spotted by Us Weekly wearing it on the sleeve of his army-green jacket over the weekend, then donning the same uniform to a Barneys location on Monday.

As a shopping destination, Barney's would have seemed altogether innocuous one month ago, but could not be more racially charged now. It's where two black customers separately shared stories of racial profiling several weeks ago. Those incidents almost directly echoed lines from Yeezus's anti-racism manifesto "New Slaves" ("It's broke nigga racism / That's that, 'Don't touch anything in the store' / And it's rich nigga racism / That's that, 'Come in, please buy more'"), so it's little surprise the rapper shared thoughts on the Barneys debacle at a show in Las Vegas. But brandishing the flag as a fashion statement probably won't get the point across as lucidly as West's lyrics already have.

"I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag. It's my flag," West boasted to 97.1 AMP Radio, explaining his reappropriation of the artifact. "I just think people look cool in it," he added, calling it "super-hood and super-white-boy-approved at the same time." Which, bafflingly, emphasizes the flag as a fashion accessory rather than a political statement. It's unclear what's so "super-hood" about it, but it's clearly "super-white-boy-approved"—so much so that it's the young, "white-boy" segment of West's fanbase that may well start following his lead without grasping the history behind it.

‘Negativity’ is an apt word to describe the impact of the events that inspired Deer Tick’s fifth full-length, it’s not an overwhelmingly dark record.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dan Goodwin writes at Ars Technica about a rootkit that seems straight out of a science-fiction thriller. According to security consultant Dragos Ruiu one day his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused and he also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. Next a computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting and further investigation showed that multiple variants of Windows and Linux were also affected. But the story gets stranger still. Ruiu began observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped. With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on. It's too early to say with confidence that what Ruiu has been observing is a USB-transmitted rootkit that can burrow into a computer's lowest levels and use it as a jumping off point to infect a variety of operating systems with malware that can't be detected. It's even harder to know for sure that infected systems are using high-frequency sounds to communicate with isolated machines. But after almost two weeks of online discussion, no one has been able to rule out these troubling scenarios, either. 'It looks like the state of the art in intrusion stuff is a lot more advanced than we assumed it was,' says Ruiu. 'The take-away from this is a lot of our forensic procedures are weak when faced with challenges like this. A lot of companies have to take a lot more care when they use forensic data if they're faced with sophisticated attackers.'"

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This one is from the comments:

Daylight Saving Time is the greatest continuing fraud ever perpetuated on American people. And this weekend, the effects of this cruel monster will rear its ugly head again. On Sunday morning, Americans across the country will have to set their clocks back one hour, and next week, the sun will begin its ambling lurch to eventually settling at 4:30 in the afternoon. 

Technically-speaking, this sleep cycle-wrecking practice of setting our clocks back is because we will be going back to Standard Time after our flirty summer with DST. And the unsettling shift back to these hours, and the hour "we gain" is the back-end of the time-bargain we have to pay for setting our clocks forward in March to "maximize daylight" — a phrase probably better suited to organisms that rely on photosynthesis — during the spring and summer hours.

Why we try and "maximize daylight" like we're plants is actually an archaic practice first thought up in the late 1700s and often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. As some elementary school teacher may have explained to you, this was a practice to accommodate agricultural workers and farmers (wrong, and we'll get to this in a minute) or lower the nation's electricity usage.  

A lot of that is prime b.s. There is actually no benefit or rhyme or reason we have to endure this weekend's time shift and no reason we should even be playing with the idea of losing and gaining hours. Here's why:

The Energy Savings Are Minimal 

A large push for DST has always been the idea that this time warp saved money and helped conserve energy. In the 1970s the energy crisis helped further this notion along. This is all a myth — the energy saving are tiny. First off, did you notice any change in your energy bills between 2006-2008? I know that recalling electricity bills is asking a lot, but the reason I ask is that we actually extended DST by a month in 2007. The thought was that a month of DST would bring more savings. 

That was wrong. The great energy-sucking state of California actually studied the impact of that extension and found it wanting. "Formally, weather- and lighting-corrected savings from DST were estimated at 0.18%," reported the California Energy Commission. 

There was also another study on the state of Indiana, a state that went full DST in 2006. A team from Yale studied what happened post-DST, and found that the average Indianan was hit in the wallet by DST. National Geographic reported:

In their 2008 National Bureau of Economic Research study, the team found that lighting demand dropped, but the warmer hour of extra daylight tacked onto each evening led to more air-conditioning use, which canceled out the gains from reduced lighting and then some: Hoosiers paid higher electric bills than before DST, the study showed. 

DST Is Bad For Your Health

SAD, a.k.a. seasonal affective disorder, is when people get bummed out when the seasons shift. Sunlight plays a role into that, and you'd think that DST would be something everyone would be looking forward to. Wrong. In order to get more daylight during the day, DST short-changes the early-morning sun hours. Those hours are important for those affected by SAD. And it's also very important for your sleep patterns. 

"Daylight savings time is anti-physiologic, and it’s a little deleterious, at least for several days,"  Dr. Nicholas Rummo, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Northern Westchester Hospital told Health.com, and added, "light earlier in the day is more helpful for them." 

Research has also shown that DST, and shifts and the rupturing of sleep patterns is also linked to myocardial infarctions (a.k.a. heart-attacks), car accidents, and medical equipment malfunctions. 

Time Shifts Are Bad For Your Productivity 

American exceptionalism is a phrase we've heard a lot recently, and it's usually prefixed by words like "dwindling" or "losing faith in...". If we want to continue this path, then we might as well have DST and shifting time patterns every few months. The weird shift in time messes with our sleep patterns and our bodies, and our work. 

"We're encountering data of an increase in extra auto and workplace accidents on Monday or perhaps even carrying through the first week of the Spring time shift," Dr. James Wyatt, at Rush University Medical Center told ABC News in 2012. National Geographic spoke with Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist, and he explained why: 

Light doesn't do the same things to the body in the morning and the evening. More light in the morning would advance the body clock, and that would be good. But more light in the evening would even further delay the body clock.

DST Is Not Financially Responsible

Think about what you could do with $147 million. That's how much the Air Transport Association estimated the 2007, one-month shift cost the airline industry because time schedules with the world (a lot of which does not believe in DST) were messed up. 

DST Is Not Helping Any Farmers

Oh right, we almost forgot about farmers. I remember my second grade teacher told skinny, frail, 7-year-old me, "We do this [time shift] for the farmers." I didn't know any farmers, but I remember feeling noble and helpful. I did not know I was being lied to. 

"That's the complete inverse of what's true," Tufts University professor Michael Downing, told National Geographic. "The farmers were the only organized lobby against daylight saving in the history of the country." The reason, Downing explains, is that DST left them with less sunlight to get crops to market.

DST affects dairy farmers the most, since cows' bodies and the milk they're tasked with producing are affected by the time changes.

You Don't Even Like DST

"God, I love getting up an hour earlier," said no one ever. "Me too. I can't wait to have my schedule messed up in the fall," no one replied.

 A 2011 Rasmussen poll (for what it's worth, Rasmussen can be a bit skewed when it comes to conservative politicians but seems to have no known bias against time zones) found that 47 percent (ha, Romney, ha) of Americans said DST was not worth the hassle. 

So how do we fix all of this? Over at Quartz, there's an idea to just have two timezones. But let's be clear here. The real evil here is change. No one really minds if 4:00 is 4:00. They (and their possible heart attacks) mind if for some reason or another that 4:00 is now 5:00 and will be 3:00 in a few months. And it's time to stop this insanity. 

However, director does not reveal when he plans to start shooting the sequel

Preview of show to be held in New York on November 7

In 1980s Arkansas, everyone was abuzz with Satan-paranoia. In the middle of the chaos, a teenage Scott Hutchins came across Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. What he found wasn't demonic at all — instead, it was an eye-opening, complex narrative about sad failures, washed-up movie stars and wrecked marriages.

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Could humans – so fractious and violent – forge a moral lingua franca, a unified system for weighing values? Let the metacognitive revolution begin… more»

Whether you want to take some crazy macro photography or you just need to do a little laboratory work, Instructables user Yoshinok shows off how to turn your smartphone into a microscope for just $10.

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Because residents of Irwindale are experiencing things like burning throats, eyes, and some pesky headaches from exposure to fumes emanating from the Sriracha hot sauce factory, the company is facing a shutdown from the city. And now the hot sauce's CEO and founder is warning of us dark times ahead which may include a shortage and price hike. "If the city shuts us down, the price of Sriracha will jump up a lot," CEO and Huy Fong Foods founder David Tran told The Los Angeles Times. Huy Fong foods makes the legendary sauce. 

The nation now faces a Sophie's choice: is the health of 30-or-so Irwindaliens more important than the exquisite burn of the rooster sauce? Would we rather have spiced eggs and salty-spicy soups or some clear-eyed Angelenos? Is our dependency on this wondrous sauce stronger than our fidelity to our brothers and sisters who live in L.A.? 

The answer isn't clear right now. The plant processes raw material for about one quarter of the year and is struggling to meet demand, The Los Angeles Times reports. Considering the demand — there were 20 million bottles sold last year — a shutdown could result in a real Sriracha shortage. If that happens, hoarding and selling bottles wouldn't be a bad idea.

The savior in this whole predicament could be a $600,000 contraption which burns the fumes/air. "Burning the pepper air just didn't seem safer. Maybe we didn't move fast enough, but it's a big business expense and we want to make sure it's the right investment," Huy Fong Foods's director of operations, Adam Holliday said. To that we say, Kickstarter, Adam. If the public will chip in $5.7 million for a silly Veronica Mars movie, we can cover $600,000 for your fancy air-burning system. Let's be done with this. 

The Automatic Link is a little white box that plugs into a port in your car you probably never knew existed. It can collect data about your driving habits and tell you how to improve your fuel efficiency, remember where you parked your car, and will call for help in the event of a crash. You don't have to do a thing.

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The NSA's hard-won surveillance of the United Nations, celebrated in a now-infamous memo, has come to a silent and ignominious end, as the Obama administration continues to clean up the fallout of the Edward Snowden leaks.

Der Spiegel reported on surveillance of the New York-based organization in August. According to one memo the German newspaper saw, the NSA was giddy when it finally gained access to the private video streams used within the building. "The traffic gives us the internal video teleconferencing the UN (yay!)," the memo read.

Now, that's coming to an end. (Predicted NSA response: boo!) Reuters reports that the surveillance has come to an end.

President Barack Obama recently ordered the National Security Agency to curtail eavesdropping on the United Nations headquarters in New York as part of a review of U.S. electronic surveillance, according to a U.S. official familiar with the decision. ...

"The United States is not conducting electronic surveillance targeting the United Nations headquarters in New York," said a senior Obama administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The official did not address past surveillance of the world body," Reuters continues. It's a denial in the same spirit as that offered to German chancellor Angela Merkel by White House spokesman Jay Carney. The U.S. "is not monitoring and will not monitor" Merkel's calls, he assured the world last week.

The United Nations didn't receive any assurance about future activity, nor does the Reuters report address spying on any of the scores of diplomats that live and work in New York City. The initial Der Spiegel report suggested that some 80 embassies and consulates were being surveilled.

Photo: Obama checks out the U.N. for himself. (AP)

littlesparkvt writes "A team of astrophysicists at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und- Raumfahrt; DLR), together with German and European colleagues, has discovered the most extensive exoplanetary system to date. Seven planets circle the star KOI-351 – more than in other known planetary systems. They are arranged in a similar fashion to the eight planets in the Solar System, with small rocky planets close to the parent star and gas giant planets at greater distances. Although the planetary system around KOI-351 is packed together more tightly, it provides an interesting comparison to our cosmic home."

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Mars Express video shows near-complete topographical map of planet's surface — and sets it to music.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2013.14041

German musician confirms that reports of his death are incorrect

RenderSeven writes "Science has so far been at a loss to explain why tapping a beer bottle with another causes it to explosively foam over. Thanks to a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, a research team at the University of Madrid studying fluid mechanics has found the answer with some fascinating slow-motion video. Their soon-to-be-published paper found that tapping the bottle (or shooting it with a laser) causes a series of compression and expansion waves, that generate unstable buoyant plumes, quickly turning most of the liquid into foam. PhysicsBuzz notes that the process is very rapid and nearly unstoppable once started."

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MojoKid writes "AMD has launched their new top-end Radeon R9 290X graphics card today. The new flagship wasn't ready in time for AMD's recent October 8th launch of midrange product, but their top of the line model, based on the GPU codenamed Hawaii, is ready now. The R9 290 series GPU (Hawaii) is comprised of up to 44 compute units with a total of 2,816 IEEE-2008 compliant shaders. The GPU has four geometry processors (2x the Radeon HD 7970) and can output 64 pixels per clock. The Radeon R9 290X features 2816 Stream Processors and an engine clock of up to 1GHz. The card's 4GB of GDDR5 memory is accessed by the GPU via a wide 512-bit interface and the R290X requires a pair of supplemental PCIe power connectors—one 6-pin and one 8-pin. Save for some minimum frame rate and frame latency issues, the new Radeon R9 290X's performance is impressive overall. AMD still has some obvious driver tuning and optimization to do, but frame rates across the board were very good. And though it wasn't a clean sweep for the Radeon R9 290X versus NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 780 or GeForce GTX Titan cards, AMD's new GPU traded victories depending on the game or application being used, which is to say the cards performed similarly."

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