rays

Peter M. Ray, a biologist known for his contributions to plant biology and for his passion for winemaking, has died at the age of 94. The news was announced by Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences, where his career was based. Colleagues remember him as a dedicated scientist with a rich life beyond the laboratory.

Santa Clara University's College of Arts and Sciences is featuring student research on X-rays in a story on its website. The piece highlights undergraduate work in physics involving X-ray experiments and the students and faculty behind it. Little further detail is available, so the scope and findings of the research remain unclear.

Astronomers have detected an extraordinarily powerful X-ray flash that could mark the moment a magnetar — a neutron star with an extreme magnetic field — was born. Researchers say the event, described as record-breaking in energy and brightness, offers a rare possible glimpse into how these exotic objects form. Findings were reported via ScienceDaily, with details of the observation still drawing attention across science media.

Early benchmarks for The Witcher 3 Remastered show that path tracing places an unusually heavy load on processors, with AMD's X3D chips topping the performance charts. The findings suggest ray-traced lighting in the updated game is as much a CPU bottleneck as a GPU one, drawing attention from PC gamers weighing hardware upgrades ahead of the release.