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A team of scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland developed a new kind of dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC). Its vastly improved efficiency promises cheap, transparent, and ubiquitous energy-generating panels. Widespread adoption could help the world build a future free from fossil fuels and greenhouse gases. Also known as Grätzel cells, modern DSCs were co-invented by Brian O’Regan and Michael Grätzel in 1988 as an alternative low-cost solar cell....

“Low Disk Space. You are running out of disk space on Local Disk (E:). Click here to see if you can free space on this drive.” And yet clicking the option to free up space on the drive doesn’t actually free anything up, guaranteeing future error messages. A couple of our Windows PCs at the office experienced the issue. After troubleshooting for a bit, we looked into the solution to remove the drive since Windows Updates so far have not solved it on its own....

The Pro 6 Plus’ camera is paired with an f/2.0 24mm (equivalent) lens, four-axis optical image stabilization, laser-assisted autofocus plus PDAF, and a 10-LED circular dual-tone flash. On the front is a 5-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 lens. Meizu has made a good attempt at producing a flagship quality smartphone camera - this camera is certainly far better than anything I’ve used from Meizu in the past - but ultimately it doesn’t meet the same quality standards as other flagship smartphones in 2016....

“Hardwear” is a nine-piece collection consisting of shirts, hats, cargo pants, sweaters, sweatpants and jackets. There’s a heavy retro vibe to the line, as evident by the blue sky green hill tee sporting the iconic Windows XP wallpaper on the reverse and the MS Paint-inspired tee. “Every piece is intentional, and there is meaning behind each item in Hardwear,” said Amanda O’Neal, director of multicultural and social communications at Microsoft....

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently held an interview with Financial Times (reprinted by Ars Technica), wherein he laid out the potential for the metaverse and its similarities with games. He went so far as to say the two are essentially the same thing. “You and I will be sitting on a conference room table soon with either our avatars or our holograms or even 2D surfaces with surround audio,” Nadella said, reflecting on 20 years of the Xbox and the varied game franchises Microsoft produces, like Forza and Flight Simulator....

Netflix recently partnered with Microsoft to power its new ad-supported subscription tier, which appears to be off to a slow start. According to recent data from analytics firm Antenna, just nine percent of Netflix sign-ups in the US in November were for the Basic with Ads plan, making it the least popular of all plans offered. Furthermore, Antenna noted that only 0.1 percent of Netflix’s existing US subscribers switched to the ad-supported plan last month....

Activision Blizzard released its fourth-quarter earnings and 2021 financial results earlier this week. According to the numbers, the company had record-breaking growth. Net revenues in Q4 were $2.16 billion, a seven-percent increase over the third quarter but a 10-percent year-over-year decline. While the dip for the quarter is unfortunate, the beleaguered company did well overall. Activision ended its 2021 fiscal year earning $8.8 billion—a nearly $800 million windfall over FY2020, which was also a record breaker....

According to CIRP’s latest survey, only 24 percent of recent iPhones purchased in the US came directly from Apple. The majority of iPhone sales – a full 67 percent – occurred through wireless carriers, which makes sense when you consider how aggressive carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are when it comes to marketing attractive promotions. Best Buy accounted for five percent of new iPhone sales, with stores like Walmart and Target bundled into the “other” group making up the remaining four percent of the pie....

Inside the GS40 are two small blower fans attached to small heatsinks and heatpipes, designed to cool the 45W CPU and 75W GPU respectively. Although there are two fans and heatskins, both halves of the cooling solution are actually joined via a single heatpipe. The CPU side only gets one vent, with air pushed directly out the back, while GPU side sees air vented from the back and right-hand side....

Today we’ll be taking a look at the X-Slim X340, a very slim notebook from MSI that’s been labeled by many as the budget alternative to the MacBook Air. Currently selling for $600, MSI hopes to lure potential buyers with its svelte design and extended battery life. The MSI X340 weighs in at only 3.2 pounds with the included 8-cell battery and is powered by Intel’s Core 2 Solo SU3500 CULV processor operating at 1....

“Developing these early designs will help us lay the groundwork for powering our long-term human presence on other worlds,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA said the phase one awards will provide them with critical information that can lead to the joint development of a full flight-certified power system. A concept could be ready to launch for testing on the Moon by the end of the decade, we’re told....

Naughty Dog provided a better glimpse into what we could expect from its next-gen remake of The Last of Us. Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann said the remake is a faithful reproduction of TLOU, utilizing the same performances from the original cast. Of course, the graphics are enhanced — as if the game could look any more stunning than the PS4 Pro remaster — judge for yourself in the trailer below....

“We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us,” the Netflix Geeked Twitter account teased on Tuesday along with a pretty visual from BioShock Remastered. Netflix said Vertigo Entertainment will serve as a producer on the project, but stopped short of sharing any additional details. The first entry in the BioShock series arrived in 2007, putting players in control of protagonist Jack after the plane he was on crashed in the Atlantic in 1960....

Nvidia’s new flagship was also very fast when testing Crysis Warhead, averaging 38fps at 2560x1600. This was enough to match the performance of the GTX 295, making it around 31% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 and 19% faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. Once again, the only single card configuration to beat the GTX 480 was the Radeon HD 5970.

Needless to be said, GeForce GTX 470 owners won’t be rushing to buy a new GTX 560 Ti in hopes of gaining a little performance. However, let’s not forget the GTX 470 debuted less than a year ago for $350, so users that are more than a generation behind will receive a nice overall boost when picking a new mainstream graphics card. The GTX 560 Ti’s price and performance makes sense when compared to the next step up, the GeForce GTX 570....

Here we see when testing with Metro: Redux that the GTX 950 is 46% faster than the GTX 750 Ti and 32% faster than the R7 370. Meanwhile the GTX 950 was also 11% faster than the GTX 760 but 20% slower than the GTX 960. Sleeping Dogs is another three year old video game but unlike Hitman it’s still rather demanding when played on low-end to mid-range hardware. With 38fps the GTX 950 was 58% faster than the GTX 750 Ti, 19% slower than the GTX 960 and more importantly, 12% faster than the R7 370....

Hitman Absolution is starting to show its age as the GeForce GTX 980 Ti pumped out 56fps at 2160p, which was virtually the same performance seen by the Titan X. This meant that the GTX 980 Ti was 30% faster than the GTX 980 and 27% faster than the R9 290X. The in-built Dragon Age Inquisition benchmark saw the GeForce GTX 980 Ti deliver just 28fps at 2160p, which meant that while it was just 7% slower than the Titan X, it was 27% faster than the GTX 980....

Nvidia was originally going to launch two versions of the RTX 4080, a 16GB model and a cut-down 12GB card. But the backlash over releasing something with 4GB less VRAM, 25% fewer CUDA cores, and a narrower memory bus than the RTX 4080 16GB while pricing it at $900 saw Nvidia “unlaunch” the less powerful version and reimburse partners for the expense. But the RTX 4080 16GB, now called just the RTX 4080, is still launching on November 16....

Nonetheless, with the right flash memory the SandForce 2282 is good for sequential read and write transfers of up to 500MB/s (@ 128KB blocks), so four of them working together were never going to be slow. The RevoDrive 350 provided the best results we’ve seen in our file copy test, being an average of 120% faster than the Samsung SSD 840 Pro 512GB. Furthermore, we were relieved to find that the RevoDrive 350 is much faster than the RevoDrive 3 X2 in both our file copy and application tests and it’s set at a fairer price too, though that doesn’t mean it’s cheap at $1....