The new commercial for Nintendo’s upcoming “Super Mario Galaxy 2″ shows the work of VFX studio “Superfad”. A fun commercial with great visuals, and a sequel to one of my favorite Wii games.
To view “Planets” please visit:
http://superfad.wiredrive.com/l/p/?presentation=5901b4db0c1f15961c74eb96ef596959
Full credits after the break.
The NVidia Fermi chipset was pitched early on as a computational accelerator, offering high-speed double-precision performance beyond anything available on the market. While this initially infurated NVidia Graphics fans, most of the Fermi benchmark results posted so far have been very graphics heavy. Earlier this week, NVidia announced that they’ve released a beta Folding@Home client to use the GTX480, and as shown in the tweet above the results are astounding.
With the introduction of Fermi and the GeForce GTX 400 GPUs, we recognized we had the opportunity to raise the bar even higher, and began working closely with the Folding@home team to jointly craft an efficient client tuned to the Fermi architecture. Now that client is available in Beta, and it’s the first Folding@home GPU client to achieve more than 1 microsecond per day performance.
via The NVIDIA Blog – Folding@Home Releases Beta Client for NVIDIA GTX 400 GPUs.
Over the past month, we have featured NASA satellite images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Now NASA has taken the collection of images and put them together to create a short movie.
Two NASA satellites are capturing images of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which began April 20, 2010 with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. This short video reveals a space-based view of the burning oil rig and, later, the ensuing oil spill through May 24. The timelapse uses imagery from the MODIS instrument, on board NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. The oil slick appears grayish-beige in the image and changes due to changing weather, currents, and use of oil dispersing chemicals.
Bankruptcy occurs when an individual or organization is unable to pay its creditors, and goes through legal channels to seek relief. While in the United Sates there are six different forms of bankruptcy, Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 are the ones used by most individuals.
In Chapter 13, the individual is allowed to retain ownership of their assets, such as their home and cars. However, they must pay a portion of their future income to creditors.
In Chapter 7, also known as straight bankruptcy, the individual is allowed to keep exempt property. This would be items such as clothes and household items. The non-exempt property is given to a bankruptcy trustee who sells it and uses the proceeds to pay off creditors.
BillShrink has posted an infographic that takes a look at personal bankruptcy in America.
Personal bankruptcy is an option when an individual has too much debt and cannot keep up with their financial obligations. The US Bankruptcy Code was amended in 2005 and added new requirements for those filing bankruptcy. As a result, many fewer Americans filed bankruptcy in 2006. However, the housing market bust, recession, credit crunch and other factors in personal finance are driving the rate of bankruptcy back up, despite the changes in the law.
As the space shuttle program winds down, Atlantis has made what is likely to be its final journey. Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy blog has posted a gorgeous picture from Thierry Legault showing the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle Atlantis transiting in front of the sun. In this image, Atlantis is docked with the ISS. An earlier picture we posted showed Atlantis approaching the ISS during the transit.
The picture has been cropped to show the relevant section, but you can click on it to see more detail. Better yet, you can see it at its full resolution by clicking on the link below. The original image is 5,430 x 3,620!
Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis during the STS-132 mission, taken from Niederbipp in Switzerland on May 22nd 2010 at 13h 14min 09s UT.
Transit duration: 0.49s.
ISS distance to observer: 390 km.
Speed in orbit: 7.4km/s (26500 km/h or 16500 mph).
Ogmento, creators of a few fun augmented reality toys and games, has just closed on an impressive $3.5M funding round to bring their operations to New York and Los Angeles. They already have several game projects to be released later this year, and this will allow them to expand their core features and technology on both sides of the US.
“We’ve been evaluating the fast evolving AR industry for over a year, and believe that Ogmento is uniquely positioned to lead the charge for the industry. It has an incredibly unique mix of mainstream video game industry executives, AR industry thought leaders, and world-class researchers and scientists” said Cole VanNice, a partner at Chart Venture Partners. “We’re delighted to be the first VC to provide funding to a company focused on Augmented Reality games, and I’m confident that together we can help Ogmento continue to build on its position as a market leader.”
Stuff like this proves that the future will be Augmented. Full release after the break.
Mint takes a look at the rebound in coffee consumption in the United Sates since the Great Recession in their latest infographic. Click on the link below to see the full graphic.
Americans scaled back their discretionary spending in 2009 — but there’s only so long you can last without that much-needeed caffeine boost. After a recession-fueled lull, Mint.com found, spending in coffee shops has rebounded steadily over the last few months. Coffee lovers have increased the frequency of their coffee-shop visits, even as outside temperatures have risen through the Spring season (hats off to you, inventor of iced coffee and frappuccino drinks!) You may be surprised to find, though, that one prominent coffee retailer isn’t recovering as well as the rest: in early 2010, Starbucks hasn’t been able to keep up with its competitors, both in terms of the number of transactions and spending per user, and spend per each transaction. For more refreshing details, take a look at our latest infographic.
The Northern Sumatra, Indonesia tsunami on April 6, 2010 was generated by a Mw 7.7 earthquake (2.360°N, 97.132°E ), at 22:15 UTC, 200 km (125 miles) WNW of Sibolga, Sumatra, Indonesia (according to the USGS). In a little under 2 hours, the tsunami was first recorded at DART® buoy 23401 and in a little over 3 hours, the tsunami was recorded at DART® buoy 56001. Forecast results shown below were created with the NOAA forecast method using MOST model with the tsunami source inferred from DART® data. The tsunami waves first arrived at Telukdalam (approximately 215 km southeast from the earthquake epicenter ), at 22:55 UTC, about 40 minutes after the earthquake.
credit: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research
This month’s issue of Wired Magazine features the technology of Pixar and the new Toy Story 3 movie. They have an interesting breakdown of the nearly 4 years of work that went into the production, some with some useful details like this:
/ Day / 907
Rendering—using computer algorithms to generate a final frame—is well under way. The average frame (a movie has 24 frames per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers running 24 hours a day.
You can read this brief article on their site, or check out the new Wired iPad App for the full thing.
via Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built Toy Story 3 | Magazine | Wired.com.
NGC 1313 is an irregular galaxy with an uneven shape and an off-center axis of rotation. NGC 1313 is approximately 50,000 light-years across and is about 15 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Reticulum.
The starburst galaxy NGC 1313, as imaged by the Gemini South 8-meter telescope in Chile using narrow-band filters in the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph. The image is comprised of three color layers: red (ionized hydrogen at 656.3 nanometers), green (ionized oxygen at 500.7 nanometers), and blue (ionized helium at 468.6 nanometers). The field-of-view is about 5.5 x 8.2 arcminutes; each filter was integrated for a total of 600 seconds, and the seeing was about 0.5 arcsecond. The image is rotated counter-clockwise 59 degrees from north up and east left and was produced by Travis Rector, University of Alaska, Anchorage.
via TAKING A NARROW VIEW OF A LOPSIDED GALAXY | Gemini Observatory.
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