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While Ghost Recon: Future Soldier may be a few more months away from a release, Ubisoft today is showing off a new gameplay trailer to get people excited for it. Sure, the opening may remind you of a couple other modern militay FPS games, but then you get to see what makes it a true Ghost Recon game. For one, there are some scenes with your character in optical camo, that is, you are invisible until you attack an enemy. Another scene shows what appears to be a remote controled quadrocopter letting you scout the lay of the land, while near the end you get to a see a four-legged robot walking near some soldiers. Ubisoft definitely looks to be using all aspects of military hardware, both current and upcoming, and it should help make Ghost Recon: Future Soldier worth the many delays.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will launch on May 22nd for the PC, PS3, and 360. The trailer is not safe for work due to language and violence.

NSFW

Quantum dots are nanoscale semiconducting crystals sometimes also referred to as designer molecules. All semiconductors will have electrons excited by certain frequencies of light, and also give off certain frequencies of light if there is enough energy available. This is key to both LEDs and photovoltaics. What the frequencies of light are though will differ from material to material. Quantum dots on the other hand can be made to respond to whatever frequency someone wants; only production techniques stand in the way.

This makes them very interesting to every field that deals with both electronics and optics. Unfortunately creating them is not always very easy, and one method that, on paper, looked promising was not performing as people wanted. Now researchers at Berkeley Lab have figured out why, by accident.

While cleaning out the lab, a researcher checked the luminescence of a sample of quantum dots that was ix months hold. To his surprise it was responding seven times stronger than when it was freshly made. Already that is a large improvement, but why? To figure it out the researcher heated the sample to 100 C, to accelerate whatever happened during those six months. The result was a 400-fold increase in just 30 hours and an explanation.

The production method used is solution-based as opposed to the traditional colloid-based technique. This was leaving behind cations though which were blocking the movement of charge carriers. Heat causes the impurities to leave the sample, and thus boost the luminescence. Perhaps we will be seeing quantum dot displays and solar panels sooner than we thought.

Valve has released a blog post giving details on what is on the horizon for Team Fortress 2 this year. There is a secret TF2 related project that will be released this year, and the only clues are that it isn't a hat, map, or combination of the two. Thousands of items continue to be submitted to the Steam Workshop, and the team is continuing to evaluate the good ideas. The Meet the Pyro video will finally be released as well, and the team has promised that it features far more blood that the movie There Will Be Blood. The Saxxy Awards will be making their return, allowing intrepid gamers to submit their gameplay videos for prizes.

Corsair was recently selected as the winner of four different awards from major European print publications and websites. The categories were voted on by the readers of the publications, and placed Corsair at the top of three different categories. The Obsidian 800D case grabbed the "Best Case" award from hardware.info, based in the Netherlands. The Vengeance series of DDR3 memory was awarded "Best Memory Modules" from the same site. Corsair received the Memory Manufacturer of the Year award from both PC Masters and Hardwareluxx magazine, both based in Germany. CEO Andy Paul was happy to hear the news of receiving awards that were voted on by the enthusiast community, "We're thrilled with the recognition from our customers around the world."

Researchers have been wondering for a long time how humans learn. After all, no one is born with an understanding of math or language, yet both of these develop throughout early life. In the case of math at least, many forms of life, including humans, have demonstrated an ability to understand when one set is larger than another, without counting the items. Now a virtual neural network has done the same.

This neural network was designed only to mimic the retina of an eye and then generate false images, similar to what it originally saw. How the neurons fire as the original image is viewed and the false ones made is recorded. The researchers found the lowest level of neurons, those furthest from the virtual retina, were firing based on the number of objects in the original image, despite the fact that there is no understanding of numbers in the program. This information was then given to a second program which was able to estimate whether the image had more or fewer objects than some reference number the researchers also gave it.

This finding could be very important for understanding not only how humans learn numbers, but also dyscalculia and robotic vision. Dyscalculia is a condition which makes it almost impossible for a person to acquire even basic math skills.

It was not all that long ago when Remedy Entertainment announced Alan Wake would be arriving on PCs in February. Well, February is finally here and that means Alan Wake is right around the corner, with a release date of February 16th. The game will be available on Steam for $29.99, giving a bit of a discount for PC gamers who have waited so long to try it out. Alan Wake for the PC also includes a couple of DLC packs, so there should be plenty there to keep you occupied. Remedy also released the minimum system specifications for Alan Wake, which you can check out below:

• OS: Windows Vista or Windows 7 (see below for Windows XP)
• PROCESSOR: AMD: Athlon X2 2.8GHz | Intel: Core 2 Duo 2GHz
• MEMORY: 2 GB
• HARD DRIVE: 8 GB
• VIDEO CARD: DirectX 10 compatible or later with 512MB RAM
  
  • AMD: ATI Radeon 3650, 4450, 5550, 6450 or higher (per series)
  • NVIDIA: GeForce 8600GT, 9500GT, GT120, GT430, GT520 (per series)
• SOUND CARD: DirectX 9.0c compatible
• INPUT: Mouse and keyboard, Xbox 360 controller also supported

All in all, there is nothing too fancy there. However, Alan Wake will be able to take advantage of quad-core CPUs, can support AMD HD3D and NVIDIA 3D Vision (including multiple screens for both), and support for high resolutions and graphics. All in all, it looks like Alan Wake for the PC has been worth the wait, however the proof will be in the pudding. A boxed retail copy of Alan Wake will launch at a later date, but for now it is digital only.

Sources: IGN, Gamespy, and Neoseeker

Some months ago researchers demonstrated an ability to reconstruct a silent video a person watches, just by measuring signals from the brain. Soon we may be getting a talkie from brain. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have successfully converted brainwaves into sounds close enough to the original word for it to be guessed accurately 80-90% of the time.

This technology required the use of electrodes placed on the brain (the volunteers were already going to receive such implants for a normal medical procedure) and the signal was recorded as single words were spoken to the subject. Using computational models the brain waves were translated into audible sounds which were close enough for the original word to be guessed. With hours of repetition it should be possible to perfect the sound, so a guess is not needed, but the researchers recognize this isn’t very helpful. In real life a conversation cannot be repeated over and over again; the conversion has to work on the first try.

This could be a huge advance for people who have lost the ability to speak due to disease or stroke. If neuroscientists can find where imaginary conversation occur within the brain (where one talks to him or herself), then it may be possible to return to these people the ability to talk. That may still be a ways off, but this is an impressive step towards that end. You can listen to the audio of the original words and the converted brainwaves at the source link.

With the announcement this week from AMD on the release of the Radeon HD 7950 video card we saw plenty of reviews on the release date and we picked up another in today's roundup. We also have a review covering GTX 560, 570 and 580 cards from ASUS. We also get a chance to examine a pair of full-tower cases from Thermaltake and Fractal Design. You can find reviews on memory kits and solid state drives as well in the roundup today and all you need to do is follow the links posted below.

Cases
Fractal Design Define XL Computer Case @ Benchmark Review
Thermaltake Overseer RX-I Full Tower Case @ ThinkComputers

Input Devices
Corsair Vengeance M90 Performance Laser Gaming Mouse @ Madshrimps

Memory
G.Skill Ripjaws Z 2133CL9Q-16GBZH Memory Kit @ Madshrimps

Speakers
Microlab M700 2.1 speakers @ XSReviews

Storage/Hard Drives>
SSD performance scaling across the spectrum @ Tech Report
Corsair Performance Series Pro 128GB Solid State Drive @ TweakTown

Video
Asus DirectCU II Roundup: ENGTX560, ENGTX570, and ENGTX580 @ PC Perspective
AMD Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card Overclocked @ TweakTown