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A Big Explosion On the Moon

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Traveling at 56,000 miles per hour a 40 kilogram rock slammed into the moon creating an explosion equivalent to 5 tons of TNT. The event happened on March 17th and was so bright it was actually visible from Earth with the naked eye. This is by far the largest explosion that NASA has detected since they started monitoring impacts on the moon in 2005.

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Earth’s Moon (Credit: NASA)

The moon is no stranger to impacts as you can clearly tell just by looking at the image above. What makes this recent impact so cool is the fact that it was relatively large. Most of the impacts on the moon’s surface are tiny by comparison, many of them merely a few centimeters wide. Anything is possible and someday we may even see a larger rock smash into our moon.

Thanks to Wired for the update.

Chris Hadfield Leaves the ISS With A Cover Song

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Commander Chris Hadfield has made an awesome video, actually he’s made quite a few awesome videos, but in this last one he says goodbye to the International Space Station as he gets ready to land back on Earth by creating an performing an amazing cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”. The video offers something to this song that no other video can and it fits his situation perfectly, it simply captures the moment and the view of Earth is stunning.

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The International Space Station (Credit: NASA)

 

Next Gen Xbox Tech: IllumiRoom

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IllumiRoom is an augmented reality device that projects images around your television. The projector is meant to sit on a coffee table and fill the room with visual content form your video games. Microsoft shows off a demonstration of IllumiRoom in action and it’s pretty amazing. I can see a ton of potential in something like this and it’s definitely one of those features that makes a statement, something we haven’t really seen to much of in regards to console tech lately.

IllumiRoom

The project works together with Kinect in order to analyze the area around the television so that it can auto-adjust it self to better work with your surroundings. Besides making the images appear outside the limits of your television, it even has the ability to change how things near your TV actually look. The video above shows exactly how all of this comes together. This could easily become the biggest feature of the next-gen Xbox, which is due to be announced on May 21st.

Sony Shows Off Features of DualShock 4

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Sony has put together a video that gives us a better idea of what the new DualShock 4 is all about. The controller still maintains that classic Playstation look with a few noticeable changes.

The light bar at the top of the controller is one of the more obvious alterations but there are a few more subtle features like a built-in speaker, which is something that turns out to be a pretty cool feature of the Wii U gamepad. The additional speaker on the controller provides an extra dimension in sound and the benefits of that can only really be appreciated when you actually immersed in gameplay.

I think the controller will be a success, but that’s only one factor in a great gaming console. There’s still a lot to be proven.

Unreal Engine 4 Shows Off Infiltrator Demo

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The latest version of the Unreal Engine is showing off some of it’s capabilities in a new “Infiltrator” Demo that is being rendered in real-time.  The demo was unveiled at GDC 2013 earlier and it looks absolutely stunning.

Unreal Engine 4 will be running on the next-gen PlayStation 4 and most likely the next Xbox. Unreal Engine 4 seems to actually have a “wow factor” to it and it helps to remind us that although at times it feels like games can’t get any better looking, they can and will continue to evolve.  The final verdict on the this next-gen technology will only come into play once we see this stuff on our own TV screens. Until then, we have to keeps watching demos of what’s to come. You can see the official announcement at Unreal.