SpaceX sends major science payload to the ISS

SpaceX has now made five successful rocket landings. As part of the ninth Commercial Resupply Services flight, the SpaceX team recovered a booster from a successful launch Monday — the second stage touched down, in accordance with the mission plan, at 12:53 AM EDT. CRS-9 is due at the ISS on Wednesday morning, with a several-ton payload of supplies and experiments in tow. Dragon is also bringing an international docking adapter which will make it easier for future manned missions to dock with the ISS. This includes future crewed Dragon flights, as well as the Boeing Starliner. While CRS missions aren’t manned (yet!), that doesn’t mean today’s mission didn’t bring any life to the party. This time, in addition to the crew supplies and science hardware, the CRS-9 flight will bring microbes from Chernobyl to the International Space Station.

Much of the science payload is equipment to be tested, including a machine for testing whether we can sequence DNA in microgravity. It’s not that we think it’s impossible — DNA sequencing just requires electrical current, but the way we currently do sequencing also relies on Earth’s familiar gravity, so we need another method if we’re going to do sequencing in space. There’s also an experiment called OsteoOmics that looks at which genes are transcribed in bone that’s been kept in mag-lev weightlessness on Earth versus bone cells kept in freefall weightlessness, which is what occurs aboard Station.

NASA also sent up a phase-change heat exchanger that they’re alpha testing. It could make heating and cooling in space easier by providing thermal inertia. The test build will compare water and wax to see which works better.  Wax’s thermal properties and overclocking potential has actually been explored for use in smartphones and other technology platforms, though we’ve yet to see shipping systems that used the technique.

The fungus comes from locations within and around the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl. Originally gathered by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as part of a different experiment, these eight species have been living in culture, so they aren’t themselves radioactive. But two of the species, Cladosporium sphaerospermum and C. cladosporioides, actually seem to have a taste for radiation. They grow toward it with a decisive preference.

Cladosporium cladosporioides, one of the fungi 

from Chernobyl that’s heading into space. Image: Medmyco via Wikimedia Commons

Clay Wang and colleagues hope the radiophilic microbes will provide some clue that will help humans survive in space. These special-snowflake fungi have many tactics that they employ to soak up and mitigate the dose of radiation they receive, including producing a lot of melanin, which can scavenge free radicals from the ambient fluid bath.

While the radiation environment aboard the ISS station is nothing like the radiocontamination surrounding the ruined nuclear plant, astronauts still experience elevated levels of radiation exposure while they’re in space. Wang hopes that the elevated dose will convince these fungi to start showing off their repertoire of radiation compensation tricks, explaining to Popular Science, “Microorganisms only make certain things when they need to. We want to see if they actually make new compounds in space.”

“From an overall perspective, this is just part of the rich stream of research going on on the space station, from human research, biology, physical sciences investigations and things for exploration technology,” said Julie Robinson, chief ISS program scientist, during a briefing Saturday. Falcon 9 is due back from the ISS in about a month, and we’ll keep you updated on its next endeavors.

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Microsoft will give you a new laptop if it can’t upgrade your system to Windows 10

 

 

There’s less than two weeks before Microsoft’s free upgrade offer for Windows 10 expires and the company is pulling out all the stops to encourage people to update. The company’s latest offer is that they’ll give you a free Inspiron 15 laptop from Dell if they can’t update your laptop to Windows 10 with same-day service.

As you might imagine, there are some caveats to the offer. First of all, your PC needs to be compatible with Windows 10 in the first place. If you don’t have a compatible system, you can earn $150 to the purchase of a new PC. PCs must be turned over to the company by noon on the day the service is to be performed, and apparently not all retail outlets are participating, so check with your local Windows Store beforehand.

“We’re not this stupid.” — Microsoft

Those of you thinking of walking in with an ancient Compaq Presario and claiming $150 to the purchase of a new Dell should be advised that there are additional caveats attached to this as well. Microsoft’s fine print reads:

To be eligible for trade-in, you must own the qualifying device, device must power on, battery must hold charge and not be required to be plugged in to operate, and be in fully functional, wor king condition without broken/missing components, cracked display/housing, liquid damage, modification(s) or have device warranty seal broken to be considered working. Cannot be password protected, and include original chargers/accessories. Must contain hard drive. Devices must be running Windows 8 or newer. (Emphasis added).

This last requirement is going to ensure that the majority of customers can’t qualify for upgrades on older systems. The only Windows 8 laptops that wouldn’t qualify for Windows 10 would be some old Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2 designs that didn’t implement the CMPXCHG16B instruction, which performed an atomic compare-and-exchange between 16-byte values; systems that lack this instruction would have failed a Windows 8.1 upgrade with a “You can’t install Windows 8.1 because your processor doesn’t support CompareExchange128” message. AMD’s share of the notebook market at this time was extremely small, however, which means very few systems of this era were built. Similarly, some older Intel Core 2 Duo motherboards didn’t support CMPXCHG16B, either (the CPUs of the era supported it, the motherboards didn’t). Again, these systems would predate Windows 8 itself by several years.

Finally, Microsoft will give you a $20 discount on Office 365, which doesn’t make Office 365 any less of a terrible deal compared to buying a copy of Office in the vast majority of circumstances. And apparently there’s an opportunity at some stores to win an Xbox One, though you have to inquire about the details at the store, in-person.

It’s not clear if Microsoft’s offer applies only to laptops, or if desktops are also eligible. The text of the offer refers only to “PCs,” but the fine print notes that the battery must hold a charge and the system can’t require a wall plug to operate. This would seem to imply that the offer is mobile-only. If you decide to take Microsoft up on the option, let us know how it goes in the comments below.

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HoloLens developers create Pokémon Go mockup for Microsoft’s augmented reality headset

When Pokémon Go launched last week, we theorized that Microsoft’s HoloLens could be a huge platform for the game. While HoloLens’ high price makes any kind of official port extremely unlikely, that hasn’t stopped HoloLens developers from creating mock-ups of how the game might play when paired with Microsoft’s headset.

First up, there’s CapitolaVR and a video created by David Robustelli. This build was created in Unity with the HoloLens SDK. It shows Pokémon being randomly generated in the environment before being captured by Pokéballs.

“For now the Pokémon are randomly generated within a mapped environment,” Robustelli told UploadVR. “We are now focusing on how to use different gestures for specific interactions. For example, like opening your inventory or activating your map and zooming in and tilting your map. The thing is there is a huge amount of possibilities that are unexplored and which could work for games like these. A more challenging thing is how to access the Google Maps API and enabling it within a running app. But I’m sure that in the upcoming years when more and more people are developing for this hardware also more things will be standard to use in tools and apps.”

The other prototype video was put together by Koder, a “developers-as-a-service” coding business. It includes shots of a potential UI — along with Pokémon that dance along to the included soundtrack — plus real-world Pokéballs. The idea of an incorporated AR toy that the user had to interact with is somewhat interesting, but the practical implementation would undoubtedly be problematic (imagine hundreds of people throwing Pokéballs around in the same relatively small area).

Both videos illustrate the potential ways that HoloLens or its eventual successor could be used to improve AR games in the future, and the smash success of Pokémon Go. At the same time, after watching both videos, I’m left wondering — what the heck is playing this game supposed to accomplish?
I mean, seriously. It’s really cool, for the first few minutes, to see little Pokémon superimposed over the real world and I like the concept of a real-world Pokéball, even if the practical implementation at scale would never work for an open-world social game. The actual gameplay mechanisms seem to be lacking, however. There’s no robust battle system beyond challenging other people to control gyms. The fighting mechanics at the heart of other Pokémon titles seem absent here and reviewers that focus on Pokémon Go’s actual gameplay rather than its novelty seem to agree that there’s not a lot of depth to this title.

Polygon’s review goes into some detail on this topic and I think it’s an understandable issue — and in some respects, even a desirable one. It’s easy to forget that the games we enjoy today evolved over time and with no small amount of trial and error. The ability to store larger amounts of data on floppy disks allowed developers to create text adventure games, while the ability to display graphics on the Apple II led to the creation of the first graphical adventure game, Mystery House. The FPS genre was kickstarted by games like Ultima Underworld, which ran on an engine significantly more powerful than the one powering the first FPS title most people have heard of — Wolfenstein 3D.

With VR and AR both still in their infancy, we’re at the very beginning of what will eventually be done with both mediums. In the long run, even popular games like Pokémon Go will look quaint — the same way that Wolfenstein 3D and Quake do today.

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Nvidia’s GTX 1060 GPU: Fast, cool, and potent competition for AMD’s RX 480

• By Joel Hruska on July 19, 2016 at 3:43 pm
• 36 Comments

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When AMD announced its RX 480 would launch in late June, it was virtually inevitable that Nvidia would follow suit with a midrange challenger of its own. Until now, the two companies have pursued different strategies with their 14nm refreshes — Nvidia chose to do a standard top-down refresh cycle, while AMD rolled out a midrange competitor first. The RX 480 proved to be potent competition for Nvidia’s previous-generation Maxwell products with competitive power consumption, more VRAM, and better overall performance.

Nvidia obviously wasn’t willing to risk losing sales in the larger mass market, even if its GTX 1080 and 1070 have locked down the high-end GPU space. As a result, we have the GTX 1060 — a 6GB Pascal GPU with 1,280 CUDA cores, 80 texture units, and 48 ROPS. Total memory bandwidth is 192GB/s, courtesy of a 192-bit memory bus.



Sample allocation on the GTX 1060 launch was extremely tight, which means our inbound Gigabyte sample hasn’t quite arrived yet. We’ve rounded up a number of GTX 1060 reviews from across the web, including TechSpot, TechPowerUp, THG, Hot Hardware, and Forbes. The major question on everyone’s mind: How does the GTX 1060 compare with the RX 480?

The short answer is: Pretty well — but it’s not the knockout blow that Nvidia wanted.
The GTX 1060 is generally faster than the RX 480, but the gap between the two cards shifts dramatically depending on the benchmark. Of the 23 distinct titles benchmarked by the various websites above, the GTX 1060 wins 14 of them, while the RX 480 takes nine. Pascal is extremely well-positioned against Polaris, with lower power consumption and superior overclocking. THG calculates its overall performance advantage over RX 480 at 13.5% while TechPowerUp reports a 7% difference in overall performance at 1080p.

The GTX 1060’s first problem is its cost. The GPU debuting today is the Founder’s Edition, priced at $299. Partner cards starting at $250 are already on the way, but the $300 version of the GPU is 25.5% more expensive than the RX 480 while offering 7 – 13.5% better performance. That gives the 8GB edition of the RX 480 a clear value advantage. The $250 version of the GTX 1060 will be far more competitive, but AMD has the 4GB RX 480 sitting at the $200 price point. Given that the performance difference between the 4GB and 8GB cards is minimal, a $200 4GB RX 480’s performance-per-dollar will compare extremely well against the GTX 1060.

Second, there’s the matter of which games the RX 480 wins. Four of its nine wins are in games that use new, low-latency APIs. Specifically, the RX 480 wins against the GTX 1060 in Hitman, Ashes of the Singularity, Doom, and even Gears of War: Ultimate Edition (according to Forbes the game is much improved). The GTX 1060 wins Rise of the Tomb Raider and the new DX12 version of the Total War: Warhammer title.

If we segregate the list into DX11 versus DX12, AMD wins 21.7% of the DirectX 11 comparisons and 67% of the DirectX 12 / Vulkan comparisons. That’s a non-trivial difference, and it could speak to the long-term strengths of GCN versus Pascal.

In the past I’ve cautioned readers against assuming that early DirectX 12 performance figures would be valid over the long term. We’re just shy of Windows 10’s one-year anniversary, and I have to say that the titles we’ve seen thus far have tended to favor AMD. There are a variety of explanations for this, including the argument that the reason Nvidia’s performance is flat in DX12 is because it did a far better job than AMD at maximizing performance under DirectX 11. Regardless of the reason, AMD is building a potent narrative about its own DirectX 12 performance — and Nvidia has yet to offer much in the way of an API counter-argument. The 1060 also gets a few dings for lacking SLI — the RX 480 supports Crossfire and comes in at a lower price target to boot.

Conclusions

The general opinion on the GTX 1060 is that it’s a very good GPU with lots of overclocking headroom and excellent power consumption characteristics. Reviewers are split on whether or not it qualifies as “better” than the RX 480. TechSpot declares AMD the overall winner thanks to superior performance-per-dollar and ongoing availability concerns about the GTX 1060, while TechPowerUp thinks the GTX 1060 will be the superior solution in the long term. Hot Hardware gave the overall nod to the GTX 1060 as well, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.

Critically, no one seems to think the Founder’s Edition of the card is a good buy; THG calls the $50 premium on the 1060 a “killer in any discussion of value.” If you care about maximum power efficiency and minimal noise, the GTX 1060 is a clear winner over the RX 480. If you’re more concerned with performance in DX12/Vulkan or care about maximizing your game performance per dollar, the situation is murkier and the  RX 480 is still quite compelling. Multiple reviewers recommend waiting for less expensive partner boards and evaluating the card on their characteristics before making a final decision.

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Neuroscientists just isolated the part of the brain that controls free will

Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we’ve cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision — how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act.

“How do we peek into people’s brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences and coauthor of the report. “What parts of the brain are involved in free choice?”

The team devised a novel way to track a participant’s focus without using cues or commands, avoiding a Schrodinger’s-like dilemma of altering the process of choice by calling attention to it. Participants took positions in MRI scanners, and then were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on both sides. They were asked just to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side. When to switch sides, and for how long to look, was entirely up to them. Over the duration of the experiment, the participants glanced back and forth, switching sides dozens of times.

In terms of connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. The basal ganglia has also been an important target for research on dopaminergic diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s, but the area has also been implicated in OCD, which has a lot to do with attention and volition.

Connectivity isn’t the only important factor here, though. Participants’ frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. Following commands or running through practiced actions, like the way you can sometimes drive home on autopilot, don’t need the same lead time. Timing is crucial.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that this is an entirely novel research tool. It should be examined and held up to criticism and comparison, because it stands to revolutionize how we study not just the brain but the mind. Now that scientists have a way to follow the execution of free will, they can use the technique to watch what’s happening in the brain as people navigate more complex decisions, such as weighing short-term rewards against long-term rewards — and perhaps even pinpoint the tipping point between them.

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