TRANSMAG 2013: Play Station 4 coming holiday 2013

We all have been anticipating the 8^th generation consoles and Sony has finally announced that Play Station 4 will be released holiday 2013.

 The announcement was made during the publisher's PlayStation Meeting 2013, broadcast live from New York.

Current president and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Andrew House and lead system architect Mark Cerny presented the new console, including a comprehensive breakdown of its hardware specifications.

The PS4 is centered around a custom chip that contains eight x86-64 cores and an enhanced PC GPU graphics processor. Sony says the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has been enhanced to allow for easier use of the GPU for general purpose computing (GPGPU), including physics simulation. The GPU contains a unified array of 18 compute units, which can reportedly collectively generate 1.84 Teraflops of processing power that Sony says will be applied to graphics and simulation tasks, or a mix of the two.

The new console is also equipped with 8GB of unified system memory using a GDDR5, giving the system 176 GB/second of bandwidth and reportedly providing a "further boost" to graphics performance.

Sony also revealed that PS4 will provide video compression and decompression systems that enable seamless uploading of gameplay via the share button on the new DualShock 4 controller, which will feature enhanced rumble capabilities, a touch pad, a headset jack, and a dual camera that senses the position of the controller.

The console will also reportedly reduce the lag time between players and content with a "suspend mode", which keeps the system in a low power state while preserving the game session. Gamers will need only to hit the power button again to be returned to the point where they left off. Additionally, users can reportedly boot a variety of applications including a web browser when playing PS4 games, and can download or update in the background while playing.

Digital titles will also be playable as they are being downloaded.

“The long-term goal of PS4 is to reduce download times of digital titles to zero: if the system knows enough about a player to predict the next game they will purchase, then that game can be loaded and ready to go before they even click the 'buy' button," Sony said.

And though the console isn't released yet, some of the video game industries have planned to release some games on the upcoming console, such as CAPCOM, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Activision, Konami, Rockstar, 2K …etc.

Sony also focused on its second screen strategy, unveiling a remote play functionality that will allow players to use the PlayStation Vita as a companion device to the PS4, pulling PS4 titles from the TV directly on to the Vita.

The publisher also unveiled a new iPhone, iPad, and Android application titled "PlayStation App", which will allow users to see things like maps on their second screens when playing a PS4 title, purchase games for the PS4 when not in front of the console, and remotely watch other gamers playing on their devices.

After talking about Sony's Play Station 4, let's not forget about Microsoft and its Xbox which nothing official has been known about yet. But of course we expect nothing less than great from Microsoft after seeing its capabilities in the Xbox 360.

For me, as a gamer, I'm really excited about both consoles, because they both have their own exclusive games and so on. But I won't lie about the fact that I'm into Sony a bit more than Microsoft because Sony's Play Station has been a part of my life as a gamer for a long time.

Prepared by: Daniel Nichola

TRANSMAG 2013: Boy finds 300-million-year-old fossil

Bruno Debattista, a 10-year-old from Oxford, found a fossil that was 300million years old.

Bruno found the item while on a family trip last summer in Cornwall and hadn’t imagined the importance of it.

But when specialists from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History looked closer, they found it was an old horseshoe crab footprint.

The institute’s education officer Chris Jarvis said: ‘Footprints of this age are incredibly rare and extremely hard to spot, so we were amazed when Bruno found them.

‘Still more impressive is the fact that Bruno had a hunch they might be some kind of footprints, even though the specimen had some of our world expert geologists arguing about it over their microscopes!’

Experts think the footprints were made during the Carboniferous period.

Young Bruno, who attends Oxford’s Windmill Primary School, has given the fossil to the museum where thousands of people will be able to see it every year.

Prepared by: Haneen Skull

Source METRO website: [http://metro.co.uk]

TRANSMAG 2013: Avoid Negative People!

One big source of negativity in our lives is other people. If colleagues constantly moan about their work, the management, the office building, their commutes, then it’s all too easy for you to get sucked into negative thinking too.

If friends spend their time gossiping about one another or making fun of total strangers, you’re going to get drawn into that sort of behavior.

Seek out friends who make you feel good about the world, not those who drag you down. Don’t join in with the office moaning.

If you’re stuck with someone negative (perhaps a relative or a member of your team at work) then make an extra effort to be positive when you’re with them.

Life can be tough at times. But by staying positive, we give ourselves the energy and strength to get through difficult times – and we’re more likely to make good choices and take action towards our goals.

Saleem D. Butti

TRANSMAG 2013: FUN FACTS ABOUT ENGLISH LANGUAGE

o  "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

o  The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

o  "Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."

o  The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."

o  There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

o  The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis  (a respiratory disease caused by inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust).

o  The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

o  'Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

o  The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

o  The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

o  The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable."

Prepared by:

Sahar T. Sulaiman