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Stories about: Physics


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Trials Evolution Success Linked to Fidelity to Core Game Mechanics

Trials Evolution is one of the most complex and interesting releases on the Xbox Live service for 2012 and its development team says part of its success was linked to their refusal to break any element of the core Trials HD experience. Tero Virtala, the managing director working on Trials at RedLynx, told Gamasutra ...

30 April 2012
20:51 GMT

Tequila Works Offer Teaser and Details on Deadlight

Video game developer Tequila Works have offered a number of new details on their upcoming zombie and survival game Deadlight, which also got a teaser showing potential players what they can expect from the title. The main character of the game is Randall Wayne, apparently the only man who has managed to survive a ra...

27 January 2012
13:01 GMT

Gish 1.6.1 Review

Gish it's a not so popular game released back in the 2004 by Chronic Logic studio and developed by Alex Austin, Edmund McMillen and Josiah Pisciotta. It can be considered that Gish is the hipster of the indie game universe, being probably one of the first games of its type to be developed with melancholy initiat...

29 December 2011
04:35 GMT

Newton's Books Scanned, Posted Online

Officials at the Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, announce that they recently made most of the books written by Sir Isaac Newton available online. These works, some of the most important scientific documents ever, are now available to the general public here. Newton was the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics...

13 December 2011
08:17 GMT

Dead or Alive 5 Will Revolutionize Fighting Game Genre

Dead or Alive 5 will revolutionize the fighting game genre, according to the boss at developer Team Ninja, because it will use all the available computing power of current generation home consoles.Speaking to VG247, Yosuke Hayashi, who is the leader of development on Dead or Alive 5 at Team Ninja, has stated, “...

15 November 2011
15:01 GMT

Crop Circles Explained by Simple Physics

Scientists at the University of Oregon say that crop circles are very likely not caused by supernatural forces or UFOs, but rather by the laws of physics. These circles are enormous drawings on the ground, usually laid in crop fields, and that are visible in their entirety only from the air. The director of the UO Ma...

1 August 2011
08:20 GMT

Executive Producer Leaves Madden NFL After 14 Years

Phil Frazier, who worked as an executive producer on the Madden NFL series from EA Sports, has announced that he was living the series after more than 14 years in charge of the game, with the division announcing that Roy Harvey, who was the executive producer working on the college powered NCAA Football, taking over ...

20 June 2011
16:41 GMT

E3 2011 Hands On: FIFA 12

FIFA 12 could easily be seen as one of those revolutionary editions of the venerable football simulation series from EA Sports, with players looking back and talking about the moment when physics and realism really managed to make the franchise shine. I played FIFA 12 at the E3 2011 event of Electronic Arts and came ...

8 June 2011
23:42 GMT

Game Makers Don't Care About Hardware-Accelerated Physics

There has been much talk surrounding physics effects in games, and while it is generally accepted that such a feature adds to quality and enjoyment, it looks like it is not as vital as some might think.As some end-users might know, Advanced Micro Devices is no longer bereft of a Physics engine (NVIDIA used to have a...

25 March 2011
04:15 GMT

AMD Enables Game GPU Physics via Maya

AMD has been saying for a while that it was working on a software plug-in meant to enable GPU Physics in games, and it seems that this goal has finally been achieved if the recent press release is to be believed.For a long time, NVIDIA has held a sort of monopoly over simulating realistic physics effects in games, a...

3 March 2011
09:38 GMT

Third Person Shooter Vanquish Will Use Havok Tech

Platinum Games, as the developer, and Havok have announced that the upcoming third person shooter Vanquish will be using the Hacok Physics and Animation middleware to deliver its mix of fast paced action and stylish visuals.The Havok technology is set to be used throughout Vanquish and will be used to deliver “...

7 October 2010
03:23 GMT

YouTube Debuts Summer School

It’s the middle of the summer and most students are enjoying their well earned vacations. But that doesn’t mean that if, for whatever reason, you actually want to learn something you have to wait until the semester starts. Like in many cases, the answer is on YouTube. The site’s YouTube EDU channel ...

15 July 2010
10:10 GMT

AMD Expands Support for Open Physics

AMD's activity related to the implementation of physics in games seems to be a battle fought on two fronts. On the one hand, the company is saying NVIDIA uses bribery to promote its PhysX. On the other hand, it has decided to provide added support to open source physics platforms, in collaboration with Pixelux E...

12 March 2010
03:23 GMT

Chimps Understand Basic Liquid Physics

Researchers have been surprised to learn in a new study of another trait of intelligence chimpanzees display, one that was never encountered before. They have noticed that the primates are perfectly capable of recognizing precisely how big a pint of liquid is. The animals can also tell the volume of any other measure...

23 February 2010
16:01 GMT

VU Expert to Study Black Hole Evolution

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just awarded Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an assistant professor of Physics and astronomy at the Vanderbilt University, an important grant for studying the evolution and development of black holes. The VU professor is the recipient of the largest Faculty Early Career Developme...

18 December 2009
04:43 GMT

Inversion Will Turn the World Upside Down in 2010

Games have been messing around with the fixed rules of the universe ever since the first platform title was brought to life. And the favorite constant-turned-variable is without a doubt the law of gravity. On purpose, games have never truly defied the “all things that go up must eventually come down” sayi...

21 October 2009
04:29 GMT

Statistical Tool to Benefit Nanotechnology Data Interpretation

The future of nanoengineering, and of any science involving the use of nanomaterials for that matter, is entirely dependent on tools that allow for precise measurements of the events unfolding at the nanoscale, while at the same time correcting errors that may appear in the process. Experts at the Georgia Institute o...

2 July 2009
14:01 GMT

Experts Create Radio Waves Traveling Faster than the Speed of Light

In a surprising turn of events, experts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the same involved in the creation of the first atomic bomb, have announced the creation of radio transmitters that incorporate a radio wave source that moves faster than the speed of light (superluminally). Behind the amazing achiev...

30 June 2009
06:06 GMT

The Real Benefits of Particle Physics

Hollywood movies have always had the talent of inspiring panic where there was usually nothing to fear, and the latest productions are no different, what with the threat of the Vatican being destroyed by antimatter generated at the Large Hadron Collider and all that. Needless to say, the script is pure fantasy, but p...

29 May 2009
05:52 GMT

Austria Will Remain in CERN, Officials Announce

According to the latest developments in Austria, the country will remain a part of the massive European physics research initiative CERN, the main operator of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Earlier this month, the nation announced that it would withdraw from the cooperation, in order to invest the money it had caug...

19 May 2009
05:59 GMT

Austria Plans on Quitting CERN

Austrian science minister Johannes Hahn has recently announced that the nation would withdraw from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), seeking to reinvest the money it has caught up in the scientific project into other endeavors. The announcement comes at a very bad time, just six months before the...

9 May 2009
05:25 GMT

Gravity Could Vary with Each Season

The idea that apples might fall from trees differently in the summer and in the winter may seem preposterous, but Indiana University in Bloomington (IUB) Physicist Alan Kostelecky and graduate student Jay Tasson think that the idea may not be so far-fetched. They argue that violations in Newton's law may have ea...

16 April 2009
19:01 GMT

Innovative Particle Smashers to Use Protons

The study of subatomic particles is, as everyone knows, mostly conducted in particle accelerators, those huge devices that accelerate protons and electrons to nearly the speed of light, and then smash them together. The ensuing collision breaks the objects into their basic components, and physicists then spend an eno...

13 April 2009
15:01 GMT

LBNL Experts Learn New Conservation Law

A new conservation law is always a very important thing, and experts working for the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) take high pride in their work.By carefully analyzing the collective spin state of very mobile electrons inside...

3 April 2009
06:41 GMT

The Quest for the Unified 'Theory of Everything'

Ever since Isaac Newton first published his general universal law of gravitation, in 1687, the race to find the explanation of this mysterious force has been on. Countless generations of physicists have tried to answer a simple question, namely how is gravity transmitted with so much accuracy and almost instantly ove...

16 March 2009
10:16 GMT

Fermilab Brings the Higgs Boson Closer to Reality

Finding the elusive Higgs boson, the particle that makes energy acquire mass, has been the goal of physicists for several decades, and projects such as Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have appeared to accomplish exactly that. Now, due to the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy (DOE)'s Fe...

12 March 2009
10:32 GMT

This May Change Your Mind About Going Back in Time

For us, wanting to go back in time is as natural as thinking and breathing. Around the world, countless people, myself included, believe that a simple trip to a certain point in our past would most likely change the course of our lives, maybe for the better, because I imagine no one would like to go back and make thi...

14 February 2009
11:01 GMT

Music Lessons Increase Academic Performance

Since the dawn of civilization, music has been an integrated part of a child's education, as everyone has realized the potential that sounds have in shaping the mind of a young pupil. In most countries in the world today, music lessons are still offered in schools as part of the basic curricula, along with sport...

11 February 2009
12:01 GMT

The Dangers of the Grandfather Paradox

Over the years, theoretical physicists have identified a number of potential deterrents for time travel, including general obstacles, as well as various paradoxes of such a travel. The predestination issue is one of the most complex and with most implications, as it advocates that people going back or forth through s...

7 February 2009
03:28 GMT

How to Build 'Living Dead' Quantum Objects

Following important advancements in the field of quantum physics and energy, scientists are currently working on a way to create Schrodinger's cat, a macroscopic object that is both dead and alive at the same time. It takes advantage of oddities recorded in quantum mechanics for electrons and molecules, which re...

29 January 2009
02:33 GMT

Time Travel and the Predestination Paradox

The predestination paradox is just one of the many paradoxes that are theoretically possible in time travel, and it is highly controversial because it grips people's control of their own lives from their hands and places it with a higher power. Basically, what the principle says is that people who would pot...

24 January 2009
05:17 GMT

Indiana Boy Gets Tongue Stuck to Street Pole

According to Nwi website, a ten year-old boy from Hammond, Indiana, got his tongue stuck to a light pole on Wednesday. The local paper reports that, most likely, the kid was triple-dared by peers in a game. However, he won't forget this accident very soon, as freezing body parts to metal objects can be very pain...

17 January 2009
05:43 GMT

Exotic State of Matter to Be Created with Ultracold Gas Atoms

A new class of quantum materials is hinted at theoretically by researchers at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and the University of Maryland. They propose a new method of turning ultracold gas atoms into a supersolid, which is a state of matter that behaves very int...

14 January 2009
05:18 GMT

Einstein's Space-Time Continuum Theory Challenged

Einstein's relativity theory is one of the things people learn in basic physics, and most of the applications that shape today's science are applied on it. But what if the theory doesn't always hold true? That's not to say that it's wrong, but just that it didn't foresee everything. Phys...

6 January 2009
11:31 GMT

High School Physics Lessons Updated

There is a problem that does not only address Physics, but most of the courses taught in educational institutions, more pregnantly in high school. It involves the fact that the knowledge found in average school textbooks is old news. Physics, for example, spans over the discoveries of 2 millennia, covering the buoyan...

2 December 2008
06:40 GMT

Physics for Presidents

Surely, the field of physics is far from being the first thing that presidents concern themselves with when it comes to the skills they require for the job. However, having a more solid knowledge of the way things happen around the world and in nature in general, as well as in space, might make the difference at some...

3 November 2008
11:08 GMT

The Physics of Acoustics in the Boston Symphony Hall

The acoustical magic of the Boston Symphony Hall is due to the fact that the architectural company that built it resorted, for the first time in history, to the services of a physicist. It was built based on the design of Leipzig's Gewandhaus, which was devastated later on, during World War II. Constructed ...

15 October 2008
10:31 GMT

Intel and Havok Announce Physics Challenge for Amateur Developers

Physics is bound to become a major part of upcoming graphics cards, as well as future game releases, which is why major players in the industry are seriously considering the development and adoption of physics-ready hardware. This also includes Intel and Havok, two companies that have joined forces in a recently anno...

1 October 2008
06:48 GMT

Top Physicists Ponder on the Idea of Universe in an Atom

Theoretical thinking certainly received a forward push in Monday's historic conference at Stanford University. World's brightest physicists gathered there to expose and discuss their revolutionary theories. Among the weirdest ideas stated was the one that suggests our universe is just a tiny atom in somethi...

12 September 2008
05:09 GMT

AMD Is Working on Havok, Final Thoughts on R700

It looks like AMD is working hard on the introduction of Havok on GPU. The company wants to make it run faster than Physics on a GPU, at least that is what AMD's Physics department seems to have told news site Fudzilla. While Ageia's PhysX was able to leverage the physics in original Ghost Recon Advanced Wa...

8 August 2008
05:07 GMT

Havok Will Not Support GPU Acceleration

NVIDIA is trying to convince us that its PhysX technology is the best way for handling in-game physics, although its technology isn't much supported by current games. In fact, Havok, NVIDIA's competitor in the physics department, is doing quite well, especially since it has support for almost 300 games and ...

3 July 2008
05:41 GMT

AMD and Intel Working on Further Development of Havok Physics Technology

If you haven't already found out, Advanced Micro Devices has entered a collaboration agreement with Intel's subsidiary, Havok, which is expected to bring forward a new physics engine for AMD's graphics cards. As part of this collaboration, the companies have recently announced that they will try to opt...

16 June 2008
06:02 GMT

ATI Working on Physics Support

Since the Santa-Clara based company has finalized the acquisition of Ageia, gaming users have been waiting for a graphics card that will implement the physics technology developed by Ageia. Although there have been extensive talks about NVIDIA's upcoming graphics card lineup, it appears that the real PhysX-enabl...

9 June 2008
08:52 GMT

Standard Model Confirmed by Computer Simulations

Strange, but true nonetheless. The Standard Model represents a theory that incorporates all the characteristics of the material which makes up the universe we live in. There is only one problem though, out of the four elementary forces exerted between interacting matter, the Standard Model only describes three of the...

3 March 2008
04:20 GMT

AMD Lay Their Cards on the Deck: They Will Not Buy Ageia

The rumors we have already been talking about seem to have reached the target. It is very likely that simple words, once laid down even digitally, get a contractual value. This might have been a little scary for the AMD monster who quickly decided to draw it all back. Or this could be as well seen as divulging corpor...

23 November 2007
08:55 GMT

GPU Physics, Dead and Buried Until DirectX 11

Computer gaming is more than classy graphics and excellent storyline. The digital television impacted over the gamers' brain, who now demand detail depth and realistic physics. Of course, these features get reflected in complicated mathematic calculations, necessary for particle rendering accuracy. If you experi...

22 November 2007
06:10 GMT

Google Maps Used in Schools… for Literature Classes?

Sowmya Subramanian, an Engineering Manager at Google Maps came across a very, no, extremely interesting application of the mapping tool provided by the Mountain View based company. Google Maps for literature? You might ask if you're still hooked on the title and intrigued as I was when I saw the Google Lat Long ...

16 November 2007
04:22 GMT

The Non-locality of a Single Particle Demonstrated

Non-locality, says in theory, can't possibly treat separated physical systems as independent. The simplest example of non-locality is a wave. Any object is space must obey the principle of wave-particle duality, therefore all objects in the universe are non-local. Non-locality does not imply the lack of causalit...

10 November 2007
04:08 GMT

AGEIA PhysX Goes Mobile

AGEIA is a well known company among the gamers, game development firms and hardware manufacturers communities that introduced some time ago a revolutionary processor dedicated to complex calculations that could make computer games feel more real. Unfortunately, the hardware support for such calculations already exist...

22 August 2007
10:10 GMT

Exotic Particle Axion May Not Exist After All

One of the basic ideas in physics is that one can't take credit for discovering something if the experimental procedure that led to the discovery cannot be repeated under controlled conditions, again and again. Basically, this is considered a fluke.Many so-called discoveries have actually been shown to be nothi...

2 July 2007
09:08 GMT


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