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Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo was destroyed at launch this morning -- details on the event still to come.



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Microsoft is reportedly already working on a next-generation die shrink of the Xbox One, but can we expect any meaningful improvements?



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NASA has announced that it has finished construction of the first Orion spacecraft. Orion, which is scheduled to take its first test flight aboard a Delta IV rocket on December 4, will be the first spacecraft to have the capability to take humans into deep space beyond the Moon, to land on asteroids, Mars, and who knows what else.



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Tablets are getting bigger and better all the time, as the bar raises for what can be considered a budget device. With an 8-inch 1080p display and Android 4.4, and selling for just $150 right now, Dell's Venue 8 tab is an example of just how much you can get today without spending big.



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Remember the big PS4 2.0 firmware release that shipped earlier this month? Well, it turns out there is a bug in this update that can prevent the PS4 from waking properly from rest mode. Affected users are being required to hard boot their systems, and that could potentially cause major problems. There's no official word on when we'll see a bug fix, but thankfully there is a workaround for the time being.



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Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist Party, has announced that he will be a contender in the 2016 presidential race. Having set forth many bold ideas in his recent prolific writings, he now embarks on a new mission to bring transhumanist philosophy to politics. We interview him to find out about his views on religion, politics, society, and more.



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DARPA, the US military's R&D division, has been awarded a Guinness World Record for creating the world's fastest solid-state chip, clocked at one terahertz -- or 1,000 gigahertz, if that's easier to digest. Computers and radio systems that operate up in the terahertz range have some very interesting and powerful properties, from the creation of hand-held tricorders and security scanners, through to wireless networks that are hundreds of times faster than 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi.



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Feast your eyes on Sprout, a new all-in-one PC from HP that replaces the keyboard and mouse with a 20-point, 20-inch projected touchpad. HP says the Sprout is the first product in a new "Blended Reality" lineup that's meant to re-envision the interface between real and virtual, analog and digital. Along with the projector, there's also a high-res camera and 3D scanner, allowing you to easily "upload" objects into the Sprout just by placing them on the mat.



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A new simulation of how particles spread throughout an airplane cabin could tell you who's going to get sick.



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Consoles were once exclusively home to big-budget full-price games, and now the entire market is being turned on its head. The Xbox One is now home to a number of free-to-play titles, and today I want to give those games their due. Let's jump in, and explore what the free-to-play model has to offer the average Xbox One owner.



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Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group is finally ready to show off a new, fully working prototype of the Project Ara modular smartphone. The prototype appears to be a polished version of Spiral 1, which made a brief public appearance in June at Google I/O. Perhaps most excitingly, though, the Project Ara engineers say that they're almost ready to show off Spiral 2, which will make the prototype from the video look like a potato.



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Today we've got a lot of great deals for you, including a Core i3 touchscreen laptop for $450, a 39-inch Smart HDTV for $369, 68% off Windows 8.1 Professional and more. Read on to check out all the top deals we've found today.



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Intel's new Broadwell has gone under the microscope at chipworks, and the firm has certified that Intel's new core hits its metrics. Broadwell is a full 14nm shrink.



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Microsoft has unveiled the Microsoft Band, a fitness band with a small screen and some smartwatch-like properties. To get the most out of the Band, you'll also need Microsoft Health, a quantified self/mobile health app that produces pretty graphs and tracks your various fitness-related activities (or lack thereof). Microsoft Band is available to buy today (in the US) for $200, and the Health app is available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.



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On July 2, 1937, American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart was attempting to circumnavigate the globe in a modified twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E when she -- and her navigator, Fred Noonan -- mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the Pacific, near Howland Island. Now, at long last, it seems that dogged investigation and advanced technology may have finally solved the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart.



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MRAM researcher Everspin has signed a new agreement to build 40nm MRAM with GlobalFoundries, but will the chips ever hit densities that compete with NAND flash?



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A new in-engine gameplay video seems to confirm that Assassin's Creed Unity is really, really pretty. Oh, and bad news if you have a Radeon: The game has certain graphics features that will only be available on Nvidia graphics cards.



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TVs are getting smarter and faster, and this 2014 Samsung HDTV is loaded with a powerful processor and cool capabilities. Including a $200 eGift card you can now shave an effective $702 off the regular price, which means this stylish 55-inch HDTV will run you a net of just $698.



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Have you ever wondered what the Earth looks like from the Moon? Or what the Earth and Moon looks like through the rigs of Saturn, or billions of miles away from the edge of the Solar System? Well, now you can find out!



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A new report from DisplayMate claims that sapphire glass is simply too reflective to match up well against the latest from Corning and Apple. Will we ever see high-end products shipping sapphire glass?



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There is a bold new project from the Google X research lab to monitor your state of health from the inside. The core technology will be an army of magnetic nanoparticles that are injected into to your circulatory system.



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Last night, an Antares rocket exploded 14 seconds after launch. The Antares, developed by US company Orbital Sciences, was meant to carry around 5,000 pounds (2,260 kilos) of supplies to the International Space Station. No one was harmed by the explosion, though the launch site will have sustained significant damage. We don't yet know the cause of the explosion, but I'm sure that Orbital Sciences' decision to use ancient (but refurbished) Russian NK-33 rocket engines will come under a lot of scrutiny. The six astronauts aboard the ISS will be fine; NASA says they have months of supplies on board -- and anyway, Russia successfully launched its own Progress resupply craft last night, just a couple of hours after the Antares went kaboom.



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The FTC has filed a lawsuit against AT&T, alleging that the company's treatment of its 'Unlimited' customers is discriminatory and illegal.



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Microsoft has just announced that trackpad gestures are getting a makeover in Windows 10. Sure, you've been able to tap and swipe with Windows before, but some of the more advanced gestures we've seen in Mac OS X are now making their way into Microsoft's extremely popular operating system.



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Touchscreens have become a normal part of everyday life, from the phones in our pockets to the automated checkout line at the grocery store. Touchscreens are now abundant, but one research team is working on removing the physical aspect of the screen altogether.



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Nikon's newly released D750 DSLR is a powerful camera brimming with features, targeted at both enthusiasts and professionals. Right now you can already get it bundled with a 24-120mm lens for just $2650, a savings of over $1050 off the debut price, making it a pretty compelling value.



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You have to admit it makes sense: The country that spends the most time per capita whining about the weather -- the United Kingdom -- is investing in the world's fastest weather forecasting supercomputer. When it's complete, the Met Office's new supercomputer will clock in at 16 petaflops -- one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, and more than twice as powerful as the next-fastest weather forecasting computer.



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Contrarian studies say there's little difference. Drivers who flout the law may be lousy drivers regardless.



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At long last, Cree is capitalizing on the phase-out of incandescent bulbs by releasing a new low-price ($8) LED bulb that, near as dammit, has the same silhouette as the standard A19 incandescent bulb that you bought at Walmart last week. This new Cree bulb doesn't just look different, however -- this is a brand-new third-generation design. Curiously, the new bulbs come with a 3-year warranty instead of the 10-year warranty that Cree previously offered on its LED lights.



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Instead of mechanical fingers or clamps, Grabit uses electrostatic attraction to pick up and move objects.



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The Alienware 13 laptop -- announced this morning -- will go down in history as the first ever laptop allowed into the vaulted, blustery, and mythical halls of True PC Gaming. While the laptop itself is just an upgraded version of the Alienware 14, it has a new peripheral that will blow your mind: the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, an external enclosure that allows you to attach a full-length desktop graphics card to your laptop.



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The new Kindle Fire TV Stick is a wireless casting device for your videos and Amazon services -- and it packs considerably more hardware under the hood than competing solutions.



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The compact Dell Inspiron 20 touch PC fits as well in your kitchen or living room as in your office. It's on sale right now for just $511, a sizable 30% off the usual price and the lowest we've seen yet. Plus get a 3G/4G mobile internet USB stick with free data for just $30 from FreedomPop.



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Sorry, penguin lovers -- if you thought that 2015, in the heinous wake of Windows 8, would finally be the year of desktop Linux, you were sadly mistaken. Windows 10 will actually come with a package manager. Yes, in Windows 10 you can open up a command line shell and install VLC or Firefox or thousands of other packages by typing in a single command.



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The first reviews of the Lenovo Core M-powered Yoga 3 Pro have hit the market, but they're anything but encouraging. It's not clear that the problem is actually with Intel's chip, but the end result is disappointing.



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AMD is claiming that Mantle can offer a unique and potent improvement to Civilization: Beyond Earth. We take that concept for a test drive.



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Apple Pay launched in the US last week, and its apparent success is already breeding contempt: With no public explanation, both CVS and Rite Aid -- huge US drugstore/pharmacy chains -- have stopped accepting Apple Pay. A leaked memo from Rite Aid says a consortium of US retailers is working on a mobile wallet solution, and thus Apple Pay was disabled so that their own solution -- called CurrentC -- will stand more of a chance when it's launched in 2015.



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A joint group of researchers from the Netherlands and the US have smashed the world speed record for a fiber network, pushing 255 terabits per second down a single strand of glass fiber. This is equivalent to around 32 terabytes per second -- enough to transfer a 1GB movie in two milliseconds, or alternatively, the entire contents of your 1TB hard drive in under two seconds.



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All available data suggests the Xbox One is getting badly beaten by the PS4 in total sales -- has Sony established an unbeatable advantage?



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Ford extends the reach of pedestrian braking to mainstream cars. Honda/Acura will steer the car around some pedestrians.



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Ubisoft has announced the minimum requirements for the PC version of Assassin's Creed Unity -- and, well, they're a little bit puzzling to say the least. At a bare minimum, the new Assassin's Creed game will require an Nvidia GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970. The recommended specs take that up to a Core i7-3770 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a top-of-the-line GTX 780 or Radeon R9 290X. The minimum PC specs are about twice the processing power present in the Xbox One. What on earth is going on?



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Somewhere around the $500 sweet spot you can usually find a premium spec, like Core i5, or a touchscreen, or upgraded RAM/storage, but they tend to come at the expense of the others. Right now thanks to a $100 coupon, you can nab a Dell Inspiron 15 with all of the above for just $550, an excellent value.



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A new CPU design concept, codenamed VISC, has broken from the shadows in the past 24 hours -- and it might just be the breakthrough we've been looking for.



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Responsible epilepsy surgery now demands precision control of surgical instruments to get up close to the cells that cause it. Faced with the impossibility of bringing a machine into the OR that transforms gas cylinders into missiles, researchers at Vanderbilt are now proposing to do the only other thing left -- bring the surgery into the MRI.



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It turns out that comet 67P, the comet that is currently being stalked by the ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, stinks. If you just so happened to be in whiff range of the comet, you would be treated to a fantastic "perfume" (the ESA's words, not mine) that smells like a combination of rotten eggs and horse urine, with a soupçon of stale alcohol and suffocating formaldehyde thrown in for good measure. In the words of the ESA, 'If you could smell the comet, you would probably wish that you hadn’t.'



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Earlier today, the latest version of Ubuntu was released to the public. Version 14.10 -- dubbed "Utopic Unicorn" -- doesn't bring much to the table in terms of new features, but it does mark an important anniversary. Ten years ago this week, the very first version of Ubuntu was released, and began the march to a more user-friendly Linux desktop. So, is this release something worth celebrating?



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Microsoft has announced that the Nokia Lumia brand is dead; there will be no more Nokia-branded Windows Phones. Instead, we'll now get Microsoft Lumia devices. It will be interesting to see how the Lumia range does, now that it has been fully excised from Nokia. Microsoft's (MSFT) latest Q1 2015 earnings, released yesterday, highlight that sales of Lumia devices were only slightly up over the last year -- and I doubt that the transition to Microsoft branding will help matters.



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Stanford researchers suggest that the way to move beyond the legal, physiological, and physical constraints on the energy that can beam to an implant may be to move away from radio waves, and switch to ultrasound instead. Not content just to wax philosophical about these issues, they have now demonstrated proof of principle for ultrasound power transmission into the brain -- or at least into a three-centimeter-thick slab of chicken meat.



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Mobile all-in-ones running Windows are getting more common, but there are still plenty of reasons to consider an Android powered device - and high on that list is certainly price. On sale for just $300 after a 50% coupon is applied, this is the best price we've seen on Lenovo's 19.5-inch Android powered all-in-one.



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Ah, email. Essentially unchanged since its inception some 40 years ago, email -- with a few extensions along the way to support other character sets and multimedia attachments -- has had remarkable staying power. That hasn't stopped Google trying to replace it or fix it, though -- and the new Gmail Inbox is a pretty good effort, too.



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