Hasta La Gadget!

Sales of iOS games have already eclipsed those of traditional portables like PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS, new research suggests, with Google Play sales looking likely to do the same within the next few months. Spending on titles for Sony and Nintendo’s hardware fell markedly from Q4 2012 to the first quarter of 2013, App Annie‘s portable gaming stats indicate, a marked contrast to the surge in sales on both iOS and Android, and one which is likely giving industry stalwarts sleepless nights.

According to the numbers, iOS is now the leading platform for consumer spending on mobile games, overtaking “gaming-optimized handhelds” like the 3DS. Google Play is accelerating fast, however, and while still lags behind iOS, is predicted to exceed traditional gaming spend by the end of the current quarter.

App Annie blames seasonality for most of the slump that Sony and Nintendo are seeing, but warns that ad-revenue isn’t included in its numbers. That could mean even more of a gulf is opening, considering many Android titles follow the so-called freemium model where a free download is offset by in-game marketing.

For traditional platforms, the DS and DSi saw the biggest proportional slump, with App Annie suggesting that gamers are shifting over to 3DS instead. However, that’s not to say the 3DS gaming spend is much more reassuring, almost halving between Q4 2012 and Q1 2013.

Games represent around 40-percent of downloads in both the iOS App Store and Google Play store, the research company says, and are the number one motivator to store growth. In total, spending on games across iOS and Android amounted to nearly 3x that of gaming-optimized handhelds in the three month period.

The disparity is only likely to become more pronounced now that Google has waded fully into mobile gaming. At I/O this week, the company unveiled Google Play Games Services, a cross-platform rival to Apple’s Game Center which leverages Google+ for social leaderboard sharing, among other things.

Google is yet to fully address arguably one of the biggest issues facing Android game studios, however, that of software piracy. Some developers have complained of a 95-percent piracy rate for their Android titles, with users reluctant to pay even $0.99 for a game.

VIA: TUAW

Here’s big gaming’s problem: iOS and Android are eating its lunch is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google will co-invest in a quantum supercomputer lab near its Mountain View campus, exploring the potential for incredibly-fast processing tipped to run 11,000x faster at some tasks compared to a standard Intel chip. The computer itself will be manufactured by D-Wave and based at NASA‘s Ames Research Center, where the Universities Space Research Association nonprofit will be responsible for its operation; Google and other companies will share access to the “D-Wave Two” hardware, which is rumored to cost around $10m.

It’s not the only time D-Wave has offered quantum technology, though that’s not to say Google’s shared machine will be one of many such installations. D-Wave sold the first quantum supercomputer to Lockheed Martin in 2010, following it up with a commercial version back in 2011.

D-Wave’s system differs considerably from the traditional path to producing a supercomputer. Usually, manufacturers piece together thousands of regular x86 chips and use complex software and hardware to get them all working together on the same problems; more recently, we’ve seen an increase in the role of more flexible GPU-based processing alongside normal CPUs.

In D-Wave’s quantum computing approach, however, a whole new chip architecture is introduced. The company calls them “Qubits” and each chip has up to 512 of them; they’re responsible for simultaneously encoding information at the quantum level as either 0, 1, or both 0 and 1 at the same time. The Qubits are hooked up using Couplers, which push a pair of Qubits to either matching or opposite states, and then programmable magnetic memory is used to guide the path of the processing.

D-Wave Qubit processing:

It’s that duality of state which helps quantum computing to be so fast, D-Wave claims. By examining all of the combinations simultaneously, the final computation comes far quicker than from a traditional processor, making it particularly suited to the sort of mass-crunching Google has a tendency to perform.

“In the D-Wave processor, the qubits can slowly be tuned (annealed) from their superposition state (where they are 0 and 1 at the same time) into to a classical state (where they are either 0 or 1). When this is done in the presence of the programmed memory elements on the processor, the 0 and 1 states that the qubits end up settling into gives the answer to a user-defined problem. All circuitry on the D-Wave processors is made from a material known as a superconductor, which is cooled to 20mK, (near absolute zero) in order for the quantum effects to manifest in the material” D-Wave

Specifically, Google apparently intends to harness quantum computing for advanced machine learning – or at least attempt to – and accurately model the real world. That could be used for more intuitive search, along with combining data from multiple services and making engaging inferences, such as Google is already attempting with Google Now. “We hope it helps researchers construct more efficient, effective models for everything from speech recognition, to web search, to protein folding” a spokesperson told Forbes.

For NASA, meanwhile, the Ames team will use the D-Wave hardware to explore robotics, space mission planning, and air-traffic control. Its potential for crunching data on possible habitable planets elsewhere in the universe will also be examined; the Ames team is also responsible for the Kepler project which is hunting space for exoplanets.

20-percent of the quantum computer’s usage time will also be opened up to research projects, with teams encouraged to submit proposals for what they might do with the unusual processing power. Those selected will get free access to the supercomputer.

VIA: WSJ

Google and NASA buy D-Wave quantum computer is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

According to scientists and researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, carbon dioxide levels on Earth have reached a level that hasn’t been seen in at least three million years. Scientists believe that large changes in the climate and sea levels are to blame for the rising amount of carbon dioxide.

Specifically, researcher say that carbon dioxide has reached an average daily level over 400 parts per million, which won’t mean anything to the average person, but the researchers says that this is the highest level that they’ve observed since before mankind even existed. The last time that levels were this high was during the time period called the Pliocene, when the climate then was much warmer, ice caps were smaller, and sea levels may have been as much as 80 feet higher. To put 400 parts per million in simple terms, it basically means that if you filled up one million quart jars with air, about 400 of them would be all carbon dioxide.

This is also a reminder that all of the hard work that people have done over the decades in order to control emissions has “failed miserably,” as one researcher puts it. Environmental agencies and even the government has been involved in trying to cut down on emissions, but it seems the problem is much larger than anyone expected.

Then again, researchers say that levels will dip just slightly over the summer, as the growing leaves on trees will remove around 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air worldwide. However, the level is expected to rise again in the fall and winter, and eventually, researchers say that carbon dioxide will reach 400 parts per million 24/7, no matter what season it is outside.

So what would happen if carbon dioxide levels kept rising? According to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the results could obviously be deadly. Not only can you not breath carbon dioxide, but the climate could eventually get to a point that isn’t a tolerable threshold” for humans to survive in. And while 500 parts per million doesn’t seem like a lot, research suggests that carbon dioxide is great at trapping heat near the surface of the Earth, even at extremely low levels.

SOURCE: The New York Times

IMAGE CREDIT: EMSL

Earth’s carbon dioxide levels reach near-record high is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Scientists and researchers have discovered that droplets of water found in lunar rocks brought back from the Moon are identical on a chemical level from that of samples of ancient Earth. The rocks used in the study came from samples brought back by Apollo 15 in 1971 and Apollo 17 in 1972, the latter being NASA‘s last mission to the moon.

The droplets in the rocks were found trapped in crystals on the inside, which protected the water droplets from volcanic eruptions, allowing them to be preserved through all these years and giving scientists the opportunity to look back at what the Moon’s ancient history as far back as 4.5 billion years ago.

According to past research, much of Earth’s water is believed to have been supplied by meteorites that crashed into our planet billions of years ago. The debris from the collision is said to have formed the moon, and since the intense heat from the explosion failed to vaporize all the water, it remained stagnant, which is what researchers are finding in the rock samples.

Scientists can tell where these water droplets originated from in the solar system based on ratio of the two chemicals deuterium and hydrogen. The water droplets in the rocks were found have small amounts of deuterium, which suggests that the water came from an area close to the sun, as opposed to further out in the solar system. The chemical structure essentially matched the levels of these aforementioned meteorites, which has scientists concluding that water found on the Moon very likely came from the Earth.

[via The Guardian]

[Source: Science Magazine]

Study suggests water on the Moon came from Earth is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Never before seen observations of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way have been made by the Herschel space observatory, revealing unexpectedly huge temperatures as the stellar body chews through gas and dust. Sagittarius A*, the black hole around 26,000 light years from our solar system, had previously been shrouded in too much space debris to clearly make out the processes going on around it; however, thanks to new work by the European Space Agency, new theories around radiation have been spawned to explain the 1,000-degree centigrade heat.

Before these latest observations, astronomers had assumed the interstellar clouds around Sagittarius A* would be much in line with regular clouds, with temperatures dawdling just about absolute zero (-273-degrees C). In actual fact, the black hole is surrounded by incredibly hot molecular gases, in the most central region at least, with only theories to explain why that might be the case.

Contributing to the heat – but unlikely to be responsible for all of it – is the cluster of massive stars around the black hole, the ESA says. Their output of ultraviolet radiation undoubtedly causes some of the unusual temperatures, but is not enough alone.

One theory, Doctor Javier Goicoechea of the Centro de Astrobiología, Spain, suggests, is that “emission from strong shocks in highly-magnetised gas” that also surround Sagittarius A* could be partially responsible. That could be the result of gas cloud collisions, or from the streams of hot gas that are being pulled toward the supermassive black hole.

Sagittarius A* masses around four million times that of our own Sun, and is the closest active black hole to Earth. “Herschel has resolved the far-infrared emission within just 1 light-year of the black hole,” Goicoechea explains of the new findings, “making it possible for the first time at these wavelengths to separate emission due to the central cavity from that of the surrounding dense molecular disc.”

Although black holes have been observed for many years, it’s only with recent advances in equipment that more accurate measurements could be taken. Sometimes those observations come unexpectedly; one black hole suddenly woke and consumed huge quantities of matter from a nearby planet while they had been taking measurements nearby, for instance. Earlier this year, meanwhile, scientists managed to measure a black hole’s spin for the first time.

Herschel space telescope watches our neighborhood black hole feasting is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.