.::REALITYRECALL::.

Yesterday afternoon, a blast occurred at Intel’s Arizona plant just outside Phoenix, injuring seven people with one suffering from severe burns. According to Phoenix Business Journal, the incident took place in a solvent waste treatment room at Fab 22 — not far from Fab 32 which will be manufacturing 22nm chips — but Intel Vice President Josh Walden assured us that “there was no damage or release of chemicals to the community,” and production has already resumed in both facilities. The company is currently looking into the possible causes of this accident — you’ll know it when we have an update, and we wish the victims a quick recovery.

[Image courtesy of neepster]

Blast at Intel’s Arizona plant injures seven, investigation under way originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 01:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kimberly Nordyke
The Emmy-winning actor opted not to renew his deal to continue on the series, which has been seeing a ratings decline.

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This bikini, called the N12, is the world’s first 3D-printed bikini. It’s a sexy design that uses small discs held together by springs. The cool thing is that the designerss want to use women’s body scans to create perfect fitting bikinis. More »

Calgary and Edmonton will be the next targets in the ongoing postal strike as union representatives considered their next moves, including a full-blown national walkout.

Facebook has slowly introduced a new facial recognition feature that finds pictures with your face and suggests to your friends that they tag you in it. If you’d rather this feature be turned off, here’s how to disable it. More »

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was not rushed to hospital after ‘an incident at breakfast’ on Tuesday, his office confirmed shortly after a fake news release appeared on the Conservative Party’s website.

The iPad 2 is skinny and pretty. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is skinny and pretty. The Toshiba Thrive is… big and beautiful? It’s definitely the latter. But is it as functionally bountiful as it is bootylicious? We’ve got hands on. More »

Android: For a much better SMS/MMS experience on Android, check out GO SMS Pro. This free app has an elegant, customizable UI and a ton of SMS features including scheduling, folders organization, sending over Wi-Fi, and more—with very little memory usage too. More »

We’ve been waiting for nearly an entire year to carve up battle droids with a Kinect-controlled lightsaber, and we got the chance last night, donning virtual Jedi robes alongside our friends at Joystiq and calling upon our inner midi-chlorians in a series of brief co-op fights. The interactive demo of Kinect Star Wars version is a fairly scripted affair — your light side avatars automatically dash from encounter to encounter with the occasional cutscene between, without any prompting from you, and when you get into a melee, the computer controls which enemies you face as well. Still, there are quite a few maneuvers available once combat begins in earnest. You can swing your right hand to swipe with the lightsaber, bring up your left for a powerful Force Push, jump to flip over hapless destroyer droids, step forward to dash directly at a foe, and tilt your body to dodge and flip. There’s a bit of a delay between the time you gesture and the time the game recognizes your actions, but it generally seemed to follow our saber strokes, and a product manager tells us a lag fix is inbound. Long story short, we can’t tell you quite yet if your 1:1 slicing fantasies will be fulfilled.

Kinect Star Wars hands-on: Engadget and Joystiq get in touch with the Force originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nintendo’s new console, the Wii U, was finally unveiled to the world today at E3 2011, and we got a glimpse of its graphical prowess at the company’s keynote. Details were scarce about the IBM silicon Nintendo’s new HD powerhouse was packing, but we did some digging to get a little more info. IBM tells us that within the Wii U there’s a 45nm custom chip with “a lot” of embedded DRAM (shown above). It’s a silicon on insulator design and packs the same processor technology found in Watson, the supercomputer that bested a couple of meatbags on Jeopardy awhile back. Unfortunately, IBM wouldn’t give us the chip’s clock speeds, but if it’s good enough to smoke Ken Jennings on national TV, we imagine it’ll do alright against its competition from Sony and Microsoft.

[Thanks, Sonny]

Continue reading IBM puts Watson’s brains in Nintendo Wii U

IBM puts Watson’s brains in Nintendo Wii U originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android/iOS: Pulse, an elegant news reader that side-scrolls your feeds, has been updated with some great functionality: You can now save stories to the newly launched Pulse.me web service or other read-it-later apps like Instapaper, and sync your starred items with Google Reader. More »

Since Motorola delayed the launch of the LTE-equipped Droid Bionic to carry out “several enhancements,” we’ve debated if this might entail swapping out Tegra 2 in favor of a PowerVR GPU. But now leaked photos are starting to surface, and it would seem that Motorola went and redesigned the body, too. These pics reveal a phone what might be a 4.5-inch qHD display running Gingerbread — not the 4.3-incher with Froyo that was originally slated to ship this spring. Even more intriguing, the revamped handset sports an Atrix-like docking connection, suggesting that new and improved user experience will include the option of a so-called lapdock. And, as an added flourish, Motorola smoothed out the rubberized back cover, nixing the pattern it had at CES. No further word on a launch date, but for now you can get your fill of spy shots at the source link.

New and improved Droid Bionic getting a 4.5-inch display and docking connection? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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