NVIDIA’s Turing-powered GPUs are the first ever built for ray tracing

Earlier this year NVIDIA announced a new set of “RTX” features that included support for advanced ray tracing features, upgrading a graphics technique that simulates the way light works in the real world. It’s expected to usher in a new generation of hyper-realistic graphics but there was one small problem: no one made any hardware […]

Nvidia unveils real-time ray tracing Turing graphics architecture

Nvidia said it “reinvented computer graphics” with the unveiling of its Nvidia Turing graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture. The architecture will be the foundation for a whole family of future graphics chips that will focus on real-time ray tracing, or highly realistic, physically accurate graphics. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, s…Read More

In photos: Tracing the footsteps of Manitoba’s polar bears

Share this article For photographer Susan Portnoy, the opportunity to shoot polar bears—with her camera, of course—was an experience not to be missed. And so, lens at the ready, she ventured into Manitoba’s Hudson Bay. My fingers have gone numb. Again. I pull my mittens over my gloves and wait for the familiar prickly sensation […]

Tracing how horse domestication turned the Eurasian Steppe into a highway

Enlarge / Horses on the Kazakh Steppe. (credit: Togzhan Ibrayeva via Wikimedia Commons) From Neanderthals to human hunter-gatherers to the mounted horde of Genghis Khan, the Eurasian Steppe has long been a crossroads of humanity. And for the last 5,000 years or so, domesticated horses have shaped how people moved through, lived in, and dominated […]

What the Killers Left Us: Tracing the Saint Francis Dam Disaster in a 2017 Porsche 911 Turbo S

– William Mulholland was a ditch digger turned emperor, an Irish immigrant who presided over the transformation of Los Angeles from a dusty backwater settlement to the tail that wags the golden bear. Monterey Bay had been the first port of major import in California, and its namesake city was its first capital. San Francisco and […]

There’s no crisis in paradise: Tracing Greece’s youth ‘hippie trail’

Alex King September 26, 2017 Share this article In the midst of one of the worst financial crises the European Union has ever seen, young Greeks are finding freedom on the storied island of Ikaria. Athens-based journalist Alex King visits this new ‘hippie’ haven in search of the young people refusing the hand they’ve been […]