LJ Rich looks at how one artist is using computer code to turn internet radio from across the globe into a unique piece of music.

Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have disrupted a speech by a Beijing official who was explaining how new voting procedures will be introduced for the city.

India's new prime minister, Narendra Modi, meets Japan's Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on his first major foreign visit since taking office.

In our Haswell-E coverage we did some basic 24/7 type overclocking suitable for the system under the desk, and there will be users with custom loops willing to go a bit further. Overclocking beyond this requires a level of skill and exotic coolants not intended for the average user, akin to what drag cars are to normal runabouts. We have previously reported on overclocking events where the world’s best battle it out to see who can get the best results – to see who can do that quarter mile the fastest. With the launch of the new Haswell-E platform, each of the companies invested in overclocking performance products got their best in-house teams for day one results. Both ASUS and G.Skill are two of the big winners.

With a new memory system behaving differently in terms of voltage and setup, G.Skill and ASUS worked together to hit DDR4-4004 MHz using an i7-5930K and an ASUS Rampage V Extreme, with the memory at a rather tame 1.5 volts (compared to 1.2 volts standard, 1.35 volts for high performance kits). This was using a soon-to-be-announced DDR4-3300 memory kit from G.Skill. Absolute DRAM frequency records are similar to CPU frequency records: performed with a stripped out system with the aim to get that frequency number the highest. So while the record was performed under liquid nitrogen and with a single memory module, and ultimately has little real world value, both ASUS and G.Skill can claim together that they have the world’s fastest memory.

ASUS’ level of records go substantially deeper than just memory. After day one of Haswell-E launch, ASUS held no fewer than 37 records across CPU frequency, CPU absolute performance and popular 3D benchmarks such as 3DMark and Catzilla.

26 of these records comes from the new Rampage V Extreme paired with Haswell-E CPUs, with records coming from professional overclockers such as Shamino, 8Pack, Wizerty, Hazzan, Gunsligner, Slamms and Elmor. For example, the 3DMark Fire Strike 4-way record was performed using an i7-5960X at 5.624 GHz (+87% overclock) with four ASUS Matrix R9 290X cards at 1460/1750 (+46% overclock), G.Skill memory at DDR4-3000 C12 and the whole system under liquid nitrogen.

The records are continuously evolving, for example a new 8-core Cinebench R15 record has been posted in the past 24 hours with an MSI motherboard and a CPU at 5930 MHz. As overclockers start to understand the platform and the motherboard manufacturers update their BIOSes to be more amenable to extreme overclocking settings, no doubt there will be more records in the future, especially for benchmarks that can use all eight threads. Ultimately one might ask the point of all this – as an overclocker myself, sometimes getting a bigger number than the other guy is just more fun! Also learning how this hardware works outside their suggested thermal window can be an interesting experience in itself. Many of these manufacturers also use their records as an advertising tool, to say they have/support the fastest on the market as a nod towards their commitment to produce the better hardware with features that help regular users get the most from their setups.

Source: G.Skill, ASUS, HWBot for images

Germany's newest party, the Eurosceptic "Alternative for Germany" (AfD), has won its first seats in the state parliament of Saxony, according to preliminary results.

Global consumption of meat needs to fall to ensure future demand for food can be met and to help protect the environment, a study says.

Global consumption of meat needs to fall to ensure future demand for food can be met and to help protect the environment, a study says.

The US Space Agency Nasa has released new footage showing a series of powerful solar flares.

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David Goodfriend, founder of the Sports Fans Coalition.

Since 1973, the National Football League has prevented local TV stations from broadcasting games when tickets aren’t sold out—and Federal Communications Commission rules enable this decidedly fan-unfriendly policy. The rules are finally close to being overturned, and if they are you can thank David Goodfriend.

Founder of the Sports Fans Coalition, Goodfriend is an attorney and lobbyist with years of experience in government and private industry. He was a Clinton Administration official, a Congressional staffer, legal advisor at the FCC, and executive at Dish Network. The Sports Fans Coalition teamed with four consumer advocacy organizations in 2011 to petition the FCC to stop supporting the NFL’s blackout regime.

In practice, the FCC rules primarily benefit the NFL because the nation’s other major sports leagues don’t punish fans by keeping games off local TV when they aren’t sold out. The NFL has resorted to astroturfing to make it seem as though the general public supports blackouts, and dismissed opposition from fans as being incited by cable and satellite companies. NFL attorney Gerard Waldron (who also lobbies for broadcasters on other matters) disparaged Goodfriend’s motivations, telling Ars that the Sports Fans Coalition “has received funding from Dish, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon,” and that Goodfriend “has close and longtime ties to Dish as their former in-house lobbyist and now is an outside consultant.”

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Iraqi forces have reached the besieged town of Amerli in northern Iraq, where thousands have been trapped by jihadists, military officials say.

Apparently, my normal every-day resting face is SEVERELY GRUMPY when viewed in infrared.

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Like most geeks in my generation, my first real glimpse of thermal imaging was provided by John McTiernan’s 1987 film Predator, where Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team of badasses are stalked and killed by an even badassier three-meter-tall alien out on safari. The eponymous "predator" perceives the world through machine-augmented infrared vision, and Ahnold’s body heat is brightly visible to the creature as he and his crew scurry around amidst the comparatively cool jungle foliage.

It makes for a neat visual effect, and Ahnold must figure out how to evade the hunter’s thermal vision as the movie violently explodes toward the inevitable final showdown. But real-time infrared thermal imaging is expensive—McTiernan had a Hollywood budget and could afford to rent the bulky equipment required to capture the film’s iconic imagery. Thermal imaging is still most often seen as a tool of military and law enforcement, with even small hand-held thermal cameras costing thousands of dollars.

FLIR Systems wants to change that. The Oregon-based company is the largest manufacturer of thermal imaging systems in the world, and it has a substantial customer base in the United States Department of Defense (the company’s name comes from the acronym FLIR, which stands for forward looking infrared). The company also makes medical grade thermal imaging devices and even professional-level thermal cameras intended for use by civilian agencies (like local fire departments). But FLIR Systems’ newest product is aimed at normal folks who don’t necessarily have thousands of dollars to spend on a pro-grade thermal imaging system.

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Why Chinese couples are queuing up to put on waterproof make-up and get their wedding pictures taken underwater.

No matter how many emoticons you use, messaging apps (for the most part) remain a rather impersonal form of communication that fall somewhere between e-mail and phone calls on the formality scale.

Artist and actress Miranda July is hoping to change this with her new messaging app Somebody, which will send your missives not directly to your friend, but to a nearby human stranger who will relay the message verbally to its intended recipient.

While the app is very much a real piece of technology, it is also a far-reaching public art project that to some extent involves the sender replacing their avatar with a real-life messenger, who is being directed in a mini performance. On the app's website, July describes Somebody as: "The antithesis of the utilitarian efficiency that tech promises, here, finally, is an app that makes us nervous, giddy, and alert to the people around us."

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From 1 September, companies in the EU will be banned from making or importing vacuum cleaners above 1600 watts and it has led to a sharp rise in sales.

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YouTube can teach you many things from how to style your hair into victory rolls to how to play guitar, but if you want to pick up advanced first aid, you might be better off looking elsewhere.

A new study has analysed videos showing how to perform CPR and basic life support on YouTube and discovered that many are not consistent with health guidelines and do not qualify as educational material.

The research was carried out by a team of emergency medicine specialists from Turkey who filtered through thousands of results after searching using the terms "CPR", "cardiopulmonary resuscitation", "BLS" and "basic life support" to find the videos that were relevant enough to be analysed. Videos that incorporated advertising, were off-topic, that weren't posted between 2011 and 2013 or that weren't in English were excluded.

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Four people have been killed and eleven others injured after an explosion rocked a four-storey building in Rosny-sous-Bois, Paris on Sunday morning.

Atari 2600 Launch: Combat (1977) Believe it or not, those huge blocky walls and pixelated tanks were state-of-the-art graphics in their day.

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In the never-ending war between PC and console gamers, one of the PC side's favorite points is the fact that console hardware stays frustratingly static for years at a time, while PC users can upgrade everything from the RAM to the graphics card as technology improves. Thus, by the end of a given console generation (and sometimes earlier), a price-competitive PC will almost always be able to outclass the performance of its aging console competition.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});This is true, as far as it goes. But as any console owners can tell you, unchanging hardware does not mean unchanging graphical performance over the life of a console. On the contrary, as time goes on, developers are often able to extract more from a console's limited architecture than anyone ever thought possible when the system launched.

In the early days, new processors and memory chips in the actual game cartridges contributed to this evolution. More recently, it's become a function of developers having the time and experience to know how to get every last ounce of power from an architecture that is intimately familiar.

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China rules out open nominations for the next Hong Kong leadership election, in a move that has dismayed pro-democracy activists.

Continuing clashes in Pakistan between police and protesters demanding the toppling of PM Nawaz Sharif leave two dead and hundreds injured.