With Google Reader about to meet its maker, everyone's looking for a good alternative. Well, Feedly just rolled out an entirely cloud-based version of its reader, which makes it easier than ever to jump the Google ship—and it seems well worth checking out.

While you've been able to get Feedly to drag your Google Reader content across to its servers for a while, the reader's now transitioned to become entirely cloud-based. That means that you no longer have to mess around installing plugins or extensions in your browser—you just head to Feedly, hit one button, and your Google Reader is replicated by Feedly right there. It works in pretty much all browsers, too—even IE, grandpa.

Of course, Feedly isn't the only solution to your feed reading problems; this blogger in particular finds its graphical leanings a little distracting to work with all day long. But there's no denying that it's a slick service, and just perfect for casual reading. Seems it should be able to cope with demand, too, because Feedly's already processing over 25 million feeds every day, and it also links up with a bunch of new apps to try and make the most of your feeds. They might be worth digging through if you find you enjoy it—so go check it out now.

It looks dangerous—because it is—but there's more to fire breathing than meets the eye. In order to do it safely, you need to think about the science involved, and this video explains why.

It's not just a case of spitting out some fuel: you need to consider the volatility of the fuel, the oxygen in the air, and then nail the technique, too. It perhaps goes without saying that you probably shouldn't try this at home. [YouTube]

Bloomberg is reporting

According to "people with knowledge of the company’s plans" some new versions of the tablet will used Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor—rather than Nvidia's Tegra 3 chip which currently drives the device. Once source, however, suggested that Nvidia will remain a supplier for the Surface RT.

That makes it unclear whether the chips will be used side-by-side, or if the Qualcomm silicon—perhaps the Snapdragon 800—will land in a more powerful tablet. The latter would probably see the current Tegra 3-powered tablet remain as a budget option, if the sources are to be believed.

Regardless of what impact the move has on the product, it's a clear indication that Microsoft is keen to pursue its current interest in ARM processors for the portable market. Whether or not an injection of new silicon can provide the shot in the arm that the poor Surface needs, though, remains to be seen. [Bloomberg]

John McAfee is one weird guy, and this video only serves to bolster that reputation. Uploaded to YouTube last night, it's a hilarious—and entirely NSFW—video which sees the man himself teach you how to uninstall McAfee Antivirus.

The thing is full of bad language, misogyny partial nudity, drug references... all the kinds of things you'd expect from a video starring John McAfee. Above all, it's actually really quite funny. Enjoy. [YouTube via Verge]

While most high-end Android phones currently sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600, there's another chip announced earlier this year waiting to hit the scene: the Snapdragon 800. Now, the first benchmarks of that new chip are in—and its GPU promises to smoke the competition.

AnandTech has a raft of numbers comparing the Snapdragon 800's CPU and GPU to chips like the Snapdragon 600, Apple's A6 and A6X, and the Exynos 5 Dual and Octa, which have been neatly complied by Ars Technica. What they make clear is that, while the chip's CPU is only a modest upgrade over the 600, its GPU is going to blow you away. First, the CPU scores:

The Snapdragon 8000 almost manages to keep pace with the Tegra 4, though never manages to beat it. Look at the GPU scores, though, and it's quite a different story:

Here, the 800 smokes both the Tegra 4 and the A6X—impressive given Tegra 4 tablets are yet to land and Apple is usually ahead the game in terms of graphics. The only thing to ponder here—other than the huge promise such GPU performance offers—is power consumption. Qualcomm claims it'll be on par with the 600, but it's worth being a little skeptical about that claim—at least until devices start shipping. [Anandtech via Ars Technica]

Graphics by Ars Technica

Drunk driving is obviously super dumb, but it can sometimes be difficult to tell what kind of effect a beer has had on your body. Fortunately, Tokyoflash's latest watch straps a breathalyzer to your wrist so you can keep a check on things.

Blow into the sensor housed on the side of the watch and the LCD will change color to reflect your alcohol intake: green is sober, red is well over the limit. There's even a little on-board game to check your reactions.

Like most Tokyoflash watches the time is particularly tricky to read—but maybe that's another mechanism through which you can check your sobriety. For the next 48 hours the watch will sell for $100; you can buy it direct from Tokyoflash. [Tokyoflash via Engadget]

Two teams of physicists have stumbled across a weird new subatomic particle that's unlike anything else we've ever seen—and it could rewrite the rules of matter as we know them.

Researchers from both the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China have been studying a particle originally discovered 2005, called Y(4260). As physicists are wont to do, they've been smashing together electrons and positrons to create bucket loads of Y(4260), which exists for just 10^-23 seconds before falling apart into different subatomic particles.

But they've observed something weird: a bump in their data, at 3.9 gigaelectronvolts, that corresponds to about four times the weight of a proton. While it's far from certain, that suggests that there exists a new kind of particle—currently known as Z(3900)—which is made of four quarks.

Quarks are the subatomic building blocks that form much of the matter—like neutrons and protons—in our universe. There are six of 'em—called up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top—but most particles are made up of either two or three of the things, bound together by forces generated by teeny particles called gluons.

Y(4260) is itself thought to be made up of two quarks and an extra gluon, though that's still to be completely confirmed. But in analysing its properties, the teams have seen 460 of these weird new Z(3900) particles that have formed when Y(4260) decays. Their current thinking suggests that the new particle's made up of a charm, anti-charm, up and anti-down quark. That's a total of four—unlike any other particle ever observed.

There are other alternative explanations—it could, for instance, be two two-quark particles interacting so strongly it's impossible to distinguish between them—but it's not known that such a things can ever actually happen. The next step, then, is to keep producing Z(3900) particles and studying them as they decay. If they really are made of four quarks, their behavior should also be unlike anything we've seen before—and physicists will have to change the way they think about matter for good. [Physical Review Letters via Wired]

Image by SolarSeven/Shutterstock

You've probably heard people—including us—banging on about quantum computers for a long ol' time. But that doesn't necessarily mean you know exactly how they work. Fortunately this video is here to help.

It goes straight from the basic of how quantum bit—a qubit—can carry more information than a normal bit, right the way up to how that fact can be exploited to achieve mind-blowing computational power. Get watching. [YouTube]

Some people claim to have a great view from their bedroom window or work desk. Their claims are worth nothing compared to the view the astronauts in the ISS get.

This image shows the view from the Cupola on the Earth-facing side of the International Space Station, timed so that our planet entirely fills the field of view. Taken just last week, you can see the Russian Soyuz crew capsule top left, and solar array bottom right.

But none of that really matters, because it's just incredible to look at. Just imagine how inspired you'd feel waking up to see that view of a morning. [NASA]

Image by NASA

Adobe pulled the covers off its shiny new Creative Cloud earlier this month, but it's now finally available for you to get your grubby little hands on.

Head to the Creative Cloud website and you'll be able to download what you need. From now on, you won’t buy be able to buy CS6 or CS7—you’ll just buy a $50 per month subscription to CC. As an incentive, the first year will only cost $30 for anyone with a CS3 or later.

If you're intrigued as to what Creative Cloud will bring to your own artistic pursuits, you should read our round-up. But along with a bunch of new tools, Adobe is really also playing up the cloud-based nature of the software—changing the way you store and share work.

How that will work out for Adobe and its users remains to be seen. But at least now you can give it a try yourself. [Adobe]

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AMD is taking a leap into unknown waters, as it readies its first ever ARM chip.

The new chip—codenamed 'Seattle' and previously hinted at—is apparently based on the architecture designed by ARM which is now prolific in smartphones and tablets. Interestingly though, according to the Wall Street Journal, the chips will be aimed at server systems—where the same power savings required by mobile applications are becoming increasingly attractive.

It won't be the first time a company has offered up an ARM chip for use in servers—Applied Micro Circuits has done something similar before with the X-Gene server-on-a-chip—but AMD does carry enough weight to make the scheme potentially successful. That's a fairly big "potentially": there are enough question marks here—does the world want ARM in servers, can AMD offer a decent ARM products, blah, blah, blah—that success is far from guaranteed.

The Journal claims the processors will come in several versions, first with eight processor cores and later with the option of 16, all ticking by at 2GHz or higher. The Journal expects AMD to officially announce the chip later today, though also suggests it won't be available until the first half of 2014. [WSJ]

Image by Eye of Wolf under Creative Commons license

While solar power promises a lot, it's only ever going to help satisfy our energy needs if it becomes efficient enough. Fortunately, Sharp has just made the world's most efficient solar cell, which converts a staggering 44.4 percent of incident light into electricity. Take that, fossil fuels.

The cell uses a special lens-based concentrator system, which focuses sunlight onto the cell to help improve the efficiency Once the light's focussed, a stack of three photo-absorption layers convert it into electricity. Even then it's no mean feat to squeeze out an efficiency of 44.4 percent, and the process saw Sharp invest a huge amount of time in tuning the device's dimensions to focus the light properly and reduce losses between layers.

While it's impressive, you probably won't see one strapped to the roof of a house any time soon. Devices this exotic are more likely to end up on a spacecraft in the first instance, where efficiency trumps cost every time. That's not to say it won't ever make it to the domestic market—it might just take a little time. [PhysOrg]

After plenty of rumor and speculation, Microsoft has quietly launched its version of Office for iOS—but as of yet there's no iPad version. Oh, and you need a subscription.

That's right, the app requires an Office 365 subscription, before allowing you to view and edit Powerpoint, Excel, and Word files which are stored on the cloud or attached to emails. You can also edit recently used files offline, and create Word and Excel documents from scratch on your device.

The app is available for iPhone and iPod Touch, and requires iOS 6.1 or later. iPad support is curiously absent—especially given that it would be a more natural device for document editing—and the app is currently only available in the US. Why no iPad? Likely because Microsoft would rather steer people to its web apps (which are, incidentally, not very iPhone-friendly).

As exciting as it is to finally see Office and iOS merge, the subscription point is a bit of a disappointment, although the silver lining is that your iPhone won't count as one of your five total installations.

You can go check it out on the App Store. [App Store via Engadget]

It's sometimes easy to forget when you're watching an animated movie just how complex the underlying technology is. In this video, Steve Carell explains the 3D animation processes involved in taking an idea from the storyboard to the movie theater.

Really a promo for Despicable Me 2, the video gives a refreshingly accurate explanation of what's involved in the animation process. Turns out, some of the work was so tough that the team managed to break some of its computers during the production process. Oops [YouTube — Thanks, Eugénie!]

Since our planet was born, it's gone through periods of extreme cold known as ice ages—but you might not realise just how of the cold stuff came with them. Spoiler: a lot.

This neat visualization by Randall Monroe of XKCD fame shows just how thick the ice sheets covering our planet were 20,000 years ago. Towering 3,300 meteres above the Montreal skyline, these things were huge. So huge it's difficult to picture them, though this cartoon goes a long way in helping. Thank goodness they melted. [XKCD]

While everyone's skeptical about how and why so many tech companies are involved with PRISM, the New York Times has run a heartening piece which describes how Yahoo fought hard—but ultimately failed—to avoid joining the initiative.

A document dating back to 2008 shows that a company now identified to be Yahoo petitioned the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review an order from the government. Yahoo believed that its contents violated the Fourth Amendment; the FISC dismissed Yahoo's concerns as "overblown".

FISC apparently claimed that it was "settled beyond peradventure that incidental collections occurring as a result of constitutionally permissible acquisitions do not render those acquisitions unlawful." Claiming that Yahoo "presented no evidence of actual harm," the company's concerns were tossed aside.

So when Yahoo recently claimed to have "not joined any program in which we volunteer to share user data with the U.S. government", it was telling the truth. It has no option but to comply—despite making the best efforts it could. [New York Times via Verge]

Bloomberg is reporting

In return for providing "sensitive information", Bloomberg claims these companies receive benefits "that include access to classified intelligence." The news agency explains that many internet and telecom companies don't just hand over the details of their customers' private communications, but also details like equipment specifications, too.

While there's no list of named companies the article does claims that "makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies" all participate in government programs to supply data. It goes on to explain that the data is often used to both defend the nation and attack others.

It explains, for instance, how Microsoft gives government agencies a heads-up when it comes to bug fixes—and two sources describe how the news is used to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments. There are plenty of other examples given in the Bloomberg piece.

The overall message? Data sharing by high-powered organizations is rife and currently unstoppable. While that's not to say it's always a bad thing—clearly, if it can help maintain the security of the US, we should be happy—it fosters a mentality where data is just another commodity. Regardless of whose it is. [Bloomberg]

Image by Tischenko Irina/Shutterstock

There are some mathematical concepts that seem straightforward, but once you dig deeper seem to make less and less sense. Transcendental numbers are one of 'em—but what the hell are they?

This video seeks to explain. Essentially, it's a quality which means numbers like Pi can't be constructed properly using normal algebra. But at this points it probably makes sense to hand over to Simon Pampena, Australia's Numeracy Ambassador, who can do a much better job of explaining things. [YouTube]

Apple announced a new Airport Extreme earlier this week, and iFixit has already torn it apart. The good news? It's a hacker's dream.

Instead of opting for a new, custom case for the new router, Apple has opted to just reuse the case of its Time Capsule—just with the hard drive and connectors ripped out. That means there's a gaping 3.5 inch drive-shaped void on the inside, just waiting to be filled.

The iFixit teardown reveals that the SATA/power connectors required to use a drive are absent on the device they ripped apart. But no matter: if you feel so inclined, you could use the USB port and wire a bus-powered 2.5 inch hard drive around inside the case, as 9to5mac points out. Voila, a Time Capsule on a budget. Kinda. [iFixit]

This may look like your last bad trip, but in fact you're looking at a sample of damaged blood cells which is over 5,000 years old.

Taken from Ötzi, the iceman met his demise on the Schnalstal glacier in the Alps, the dark areas on the cells in the this microscope image show bruising that happened during his death. Scientists have long been confident that Ötzi died of serious injuries obtained in hand-to-hand combat—but these new images from the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, suggest he received a blow to the forehead. In turn, that caused his brain to knock against the back of his skull, bruising blood cells in the process. [Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences via New Scientist]

Reuters is reporting

Sources, "including those in the supply chain in Asia", have told Reuters that Apple is considering new phones which boast screens of 4.7 and 5.7 inches. The sources claim that, if Apple goes ahead with the plan, the phones would go on sale next year. It may pay to be at least a little wary of the rumor,not least because the idea of a 5.7-inch iPhone seems really quite ridiculous—iPad Micro, anyone?—but it's not beyond the realms of all possibility.

The same sources also suggest that Apple is toying with the idea of a lower-cost phone, and that the company has discussed a $100 price point. It's said the cheaper version would come sporting a plastic case, in several different colors. It's not clear if the price point is off-contract or carrier-subsidized, but the latter would be fairly underwhelming.

Reuters goes on to speculate that Apple will roll out an iPhone 5S later this year—mentioning, bewilderingly, just a fingerprint sensor as a new feature—alongside that $100 budget model.

There has, of course, been plenty of speculation about a cheaper iPhone, though Tim Cook has flatly denied the idea. That obviously suggests the rumor need be taken with a rather large grain or two of salt—but with so much speculation flying around, it seems it could at least be an interesting time for the ol' iPhone. [Reuters]