Where on Earth is this freaky lava pool? Why do people hate love locks? Is it true that fire ants love the suburbs? And what do the soon-to-be-lost sounds of the industrial age sound like? All your answers are here, in this week’s landscape reads!
It’s been almost five years since Gizmodo first reported on the Thirty Meter Telescope
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I just came across this cool old time-lapse video made by scientists from the US Geological Survey: The collapse of the crater floor of the Puʻu ʻŌʻō, one of the cones of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii.
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Graphics cards aren’t normally our go-to choices for audio processing, but we may have to make exceptions for AMD’s just-unveiled Radeon R9 and R7 lines. The R9 290X (shown above), R9 290 and R7 260X (after the break) will support TrueAudio, a new programmable pipeline that enables advanced audio effects without burdening a PC’s main processor or a dedicated sound card. Not that the range will be lacking in visual prowess, of course. While the company isn’t revealing full specifications, it claims that the R9 290X flagship will have five teraflops of total computing power versus the four teraflops of the previous generation. The boards will ship sometime in the “near future,” with prices ranging from $89 for an entry R7 250 to $299 for the mid-tier R9 280X. AMD isn’t divulging the R9 290X’s price, but pre-orders for the card will start on October 3rd.
The firm has also revealed a new programming interface, Mantle, that makes the most of the Graphics Core Next architecture found in many of its recent processors and video chipsets. Developers who build the low-level code into their games should get better performance from GCN-based devices without having to re-optimize for each platform — a title meant for Radeon-equipped PCs should still behave well on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, for instance. Mantle will debut on Windows through a December update to Battlefield 4, and should spread to other platforms in the months ahead.
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, AMD
Via: AnandTech
Source: AMD
The Hawaiian Board of Land and Natural Resources announced on Thursday that it had granted a land permit for Thirty Meter Telescope, which is a next generation observatory being built close to the summit of Mauna Kea. With the grant of this Conservation District Use Permit, the Thirty Meter Telescope is now one step closer to being constructed. The permit comes with certain conditions so as to ensure protection of sensitive environments in Hawaii. Construction plans need a final approval from Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. Construction ground is expected to be prepared by the end of this year, whereas start date for construction is pegged for April next year.
If the work starts on schedule and there are no setbacks along the way, this next generation observatory will begin scientific operations in 2021. The Thirty Meter Telescope is a project on which a number of universities and institutions have collaborated upon. It is said to have nine times the coverage area and three times the sharpness of any such telescope, and will be able to track extrasolar planets and stars throughout the Milky way and those in neighboring galaxies.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: U.S. To Form Working Group With China On Cybersecurity, Bathroom Usage Monitor (BUM) Should Be Compulsory In Offices, 
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The Thirty Meter Telescope has been under development for more than a decade, but the sheer amount of land needed on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea for its namesake main mirror has proved problematic: locals have formally challenged the multi-university effort over concerns that it might damage both the environment and natives’ heritage. Regardless of which stance you take on the issue, the project is going forward now that the state’s Board of Land and Natural Resources has granted an official land permit. The move clears an optical and near-infrared telescope with nine times the coverage area of its peers, and three times the sharpness. That’s enough to observe light from 13 billion years ago as well as put a heavy focus on tracking extrasolar planets, including planets in the making. Any impact on science or Mauna Kea will have to wait when construction doesn’t even start until April 2014, although we’re hoping that environmental care requirements attached to the permit will let us appreciate both the early universe and modern-day Earth in equal measure.
Filed under: Science
Source: Thirty Meter Telescope
Back in 2007, Lindy Scallan went to Hawaii for a vacation and took her camera along. After putting the camera in its underwater housing, she went scuba diving but unfortunately lost her camera. Thinking it was gone forever, the camera was incredibly found thousands of mile away in Taiwan six years later. The pictures she took from that 2007 vacation are still on the camera. More »
Louisiana residents probably won’t be too pleased to hear the following news, which, for them, won’t really be a change of pace at all. According to a team at the very not-real-sounding Vermont Complex Systems Center and based on what is surely a totally objective and not-at-all arbitrary analysis of tweets, Louisiana is understandably (Katrina, blacking out the Super Bowl, being notoriously obese) the saddest state while Hawaii (sunshine, pineapple, knowing they bestowed Manti Te’o unto the world) is the happiest. More »
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