As if society wasn’t lazy enough Hasbro has announced that they will be releasing new varieties of classic board games with an electronic tower that is going to run the game.

The tower will manage aspects of the game such as dice rolls, rent, cash flow, etc. The tower “bathes the board in infrared light, and a camera can see reflectors placed on each game piece.”  The days of dealing out paper money and a banker are gone apparently. Paper money is being replaced by a plastic money card that is automatically reloaded by the tower when you pass go, collect rent from another player, etc.

Monopoly Live will be available this fall for around $50. You can still pick up the classic for around $15 if you are terrified about Sauron’s tower being able to watch your every move don’t want to drop the cash for the electronic version. But just think of all you will be missing. As one of the games designers, Leif Askeland said “The tower never makes a mistake”.

Thermal grease,  thermal gel,  thermal compound,  thermal paste,  heat paste,  heat sink paste, heat transfer compound or heat sink compound. These are all names used to describe the fluid substance used to increase thermal conductivity between two components.  Often used in electronics to improve thermal dissipation by compensating  for the irregular surfaces of two components(such as a processor and a heat sink).

Despite how flat the top of a processor or base of a heat sink look there are sure to be imperfections that will prevent the two surfaces from fully sitting against each other. The thermal compound acts as a filler to ensure that 100% of the CPU will be touching the heat sink.

Another purpose of the compound is to fill in all the tiny crevices on the heat sink and metal plate that covers the CPU. To improve conductivity some extreme overclockers will sand down–also called lapping–the metal plate that covers their CPU as well as the heat sink in order to create two completely flat surfaces. This will allow you to use less thermal compound and the less thermal compound you are able to use the better the heat transfer from your processor to your heat sink. There are plenty of guides on how to do this–Google is your friend. If you have done it correctly you should have a shiny bronze surface on your processor that you can use as a mirror. From my experience I have only noticed a 2-4c degree improvement in temps on CPUs I have lapped which in my opinion doesn’t make the hours of time spent worth it. Not to mention you will void your warranty if you do this.

There are many different kinds of thermal compound ranging from silicon based to metal based. For the most part, metal based compounds have much better conductivity.

Is it worth it to remove my heat sink, remove the silicon compound and apply artic silver 5–or some other type of metal based compound–in its place? My answer–it depends on the individual. I have noticed a significant improvement moving from silicon paste to artic silver 5 with multiple processors. Currently I am using a Phenom II X4 Quad-Core clocked at the stock operating speed–3.0Ghz. With the stock silicon compound my idle temps were hovering around 42c which I felt was a bit high considering my ambient room temperature was 21c. I removed the heat sink, cleaned it and the CPU plate with alcohol and a cotton swab and applied a small dot of Artic Silver 5 to the center of the CPU plate–for instructions on your specific CPU view a complete list of guides here.

After going through about 5 heat cycles–allowing your CPU to reach max operating temps then completely cool helps the compound to settle–I was pleased to find that my idle temps had dropped a full 10c. This was a much better result than I was expecting. Usually I see a 4c-6c improvement but in this case I am assuming that the factory just did a poor job of applying the silicon compound.

So is it worth it? Ultimately it is up to you however in my opinion the 10-20 minutes you spend reapplying thermal compound is worth it. Especially in this case where for $5 and 10 minutes I gained a 10c degree temperature drop which allows for longer processor life or greater overclocking ability.  With the silicon compound that came on my processor I was only able to overclock from 3.0Ghz to 3.6Ghz. With the artic silver 5 I was able to stably reach 3.9Ghz and had no issues after running stability tests for 10 hours.

So once again reapplying new compound is worth it in my eyes but that doesn’t mean I am encouraging you to do it! If you don’t know what you are doing you could really mess something up and I am not going to be responsible when you do. If you do decide to reapply compound go find a good guide on the internet since I have barely touched on what needs to happen to successfully reapply compound.

A cheetah can run faster than any other animal. A gecko’s feet can stick to almost any surface without using liquids or surface tension. And some roaches scurry at nearly 50 times their body length in one second, which, scaled up to human levels, can be around 200 miles per hour.

MIT professor and robotic designer Sangbae Kim has looked at members of the animal kingdom in the past and successfully replicated their impressive abilities–two of which being the Stickybot,which can climb walls similar to a gecko and the iSprawl, a robot which mimics a cockroaches movement.

Kim’s next animal that he and his students are going to attempt to imitate is the cheetah. Current robots can be very efficient on flat terrain but in rough areas speed and mobility is very limited. The PackBot, for instance, which is used by the U.S. Military is barely able to go 5MPH.

Kim hopes that over the next 18 months he and his students are able to create a prototype that will have enough power to reach 70 MPH quickly.

The first step will be to create a computer model to calculate the optimal limb length, weight, gait and torque of the hip and knee joints.

The biggest challenge in this project won’t be the structure, but getting enough power from a motor to get to the desired speed quickly, says Kim.

If successful this could be a huge break through in the fight to bring functional sci-fi-esque robots to the world we live in. We will still be leagues away from an I,Robot or Star Wars world but imagine the uses of a robot capable of covering terrain quickly and efficiently! As long as it can handle stairs better than the Honda Asimo and can take control of our hands forcing us to learn an instrument by endless repetition then we will be impressed.

Then again, this could also be a huge break through in a robot uprising leading to the eventual destruction of the human race. One way or another, this is cool. [wired]

These videos show the VASIMR VX-200–the worlds hotest, most powerful space ship engine–being tested in a vacuum chamber. One of the best achievements of the VASIMR is that the plasma engine will make a huge cut in fuel consumption required for space travel. Currently 7.5 tons of propellant are used each year in the shuttle and other spaceships. With the VASIMR that will be cut down to 0.3 tons.

The engine is also much faster. So fast that instead of the current 6 months it would take us to get to Mars it would only take roughly 39 days.

The VASIMR will be tested at the International Space Station in 2013.

You thought I was kidding!? Well, I was–kinda. Activelink’s ‘Power Loader’ is constructed of 500lbs of aluminum alloy and 18 electromagnetic motors. The Power Loader also has force feedback so you can in a sense feel what the arms feel as far as if you have something in your hand or not.

The suit right now is limited to being able to pick up 220lbs but that is still pretty cool since it requires  literally no work on your side.

They hope to have a version that is more fluid and capable of lifting more commercially available by 2015–not official but we believe they will have jet packs as well.

Tired of that lousy Quad-Core PC with 8GB of RAM? You are in luck my friend. SGI now has a personal option for those of you in need of a super computer. As their tag line says they are “making supercomputing personal”.

The Octane 3 is now available starting at the low low price of $7999 (USD). If that isn’t enough machine for you the Octane III can handle up to 80 CPU Cores–EIGHTY!–1TB of RAM! and enough room for ten 2.5″ SATA 2 hard drives.

Hiroo Iwata–developer of the robot tiles seen above–has created what will one day be a virtual floor at a VR lab at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The Robot Tiles are covered with a conductive fabric that is able to detect the direction you are walking and bring the blocks in place in front of your feet.

As they are this is not very functional but with some work these could potentially be a seamless, infinite floor. In a virtual reality environment this could allow you to realistically feel like you were walking from California to New York while remaining in a relatively small room.

Once these became more efficient and usable they could even create different textured blocks or blocks with varying densities so that if in your virtual environment you walked from a street to the grass you would feel the difference below your feet.

Multiple monitor workstations is nothing new but this technology actually simulates one large monitor across the displays. The above is an example of six 30″ dell monitors pieced together as one to play a video game. In the past you could have these 6 monitors hooked up to your computer with a few graphics cards but you would only be able to play your game on one of them.

AMD says that they are working with manufactures to create monitors that have very thin bezels(borders) so that there is not as big of a gap between displays. Unfortunately, we do not have an ETA for these in sight.

AT&T has announced that they will be rolling out their 7.2Mbps HSPA 3G this year to a few markets. T-Mobile is now claiming that they will do the same–maybe they will start by rolling standard 3G out to more markets, we are still without 3G for T-Mobile where I live.

So, where do we go from here? Most carriers will soon be talking about their 4G networks however, T-Mobile is boasting their super-boosted 3G rocking out at 21Mbps.

While most carriers are doing the smart thing and dropping 3G at the 7.2Mbps barrier and moving up to 4G, T-Mobile is going to use and abuse the 3G network for as long as they can. They claim that they will be able to reach near 4G speeds in 2010. [mocoNews]

After 7 years of drafts and buggy hardware the IEEE alliance has finally settled on a standard. They hope to begin pushing out hardware with the official Wireless N logo on it in the second half of October. The previous standard was Wireless G rated at 54Mbps while the new Wireless N standard is rated at 300Mbps.