This morning Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift, announced a new addition to the team. The company said that id Software co-founder and legendary programmer John Carmack has joined the Oculus team as the company's new Chief Technical Officer. Oculus says that Carmack "is one of the brightest minds of our generation - pioneer, visionary, and industry legend. There are very few people in the world that can contribute to the Oculus Rift and the future of virtual reality like John can."

For those of you who might be too young to remember, John Carmack is the brains behind revolutionary pioneer first-person shooter games such as DOOM, QUAKE, RAGE and Wolfenstein. Carmack is widely considered to be one of the pioneers of 3-D graphics and has recently worked as a programmer in the aerospace industry at Armadillo Aerospace. Carmack prepared a statement which I have pasted below.

"I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming - the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer's early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It's certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don't even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It's going to be awesome!"

Google have been hiding Android 5.0 "Key Lime Pie" behind some very sealed doors, but it looks like the first sliver of information has leaked out on Google's next-gen mobile OS.

Members of the Chromium Project are used to seeing countless Android builds, but the latest one is from a Chromium user who spotted a posting of bug 267659, who reported an issue with Cloud Print by listing out his devices. The Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 were both listed, running Android built KRS36B. These few digits and letters are very significant, to those who know what to look for.

The most important part? The "K" in KRS36B, which stands for "Key" in Key Lime Pie. All previous releases for Jelly Bean start with "J", and it continues backwards with "I" for Ice Cream Sandwich, "G" for Gingerbread, and so on. The most recent build pushed out to the original Nexus devices was JWR66V, so we have "J" for Jelly Bean, obviously.

Samsung has been working on Tizen for a while now, but in case you didn't know what Tizen was, you might want to do some light reading. Tizen is Samsung's mobile OS, that will see a bright future for the South Korean giant in the years to come.

But now there's some new information on just how much faith Samsung have in Tizen, with co-CEO, J.K. Shin, who runs Samsung's IT and Mobile Communications Division saying that Tizen is more than a small project for the company, and it isn't just a "simple alternative for Android." Shin sees a future of Tizen powering more than smartphones, a future where the mobile OS would move into vehicles and other industries.

Shin continues: "There are many convergences not only among IT gadgets, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and cameras, but also among different industries like cars, bio, or banks. Cross-convergence is the one [area] Samsung can do best since we do have various parts and finished products."

According to AMD's Vice President of Channel Sales, Roy Taylor, NVIDIA's CUDA and PhysX platforms are an utter failure. How does he get to that conclusion? Because the industry doesn't like proprietary standards.

Taylor continued: "NVIDIA should be congratulated for its invention. As a trend, GPGPU is absolutely fantastic and fabulous. But that was then, this is now. Now, collectively our industry doesn't want a proprietary standard. That's why people are migrating to OpenCL." The AMD VP says that Intel will continue adding more GPU to their die.

Taylor said that with Intel's Sandy Bridge platform, 17% of the die was GPU. Ivy Bridge notched that up to 27%, and Haswell sees 32% of its die reserved for GPU silicon. He thinks that Intel will eventually use the term APU, but not for a little while yet. He adds: "We think the reason they're doing that is because of GPGPU. It's not because of games. I think they see that HSA is an absolutely unstoppable force. I just don't know why they don't call [Haswell] an APU... it seems just like pride. If you remember [ATI] tried to join the coin term VPU... 'No, no, no, it's a VPU not a GPU,' they would say. GPU just became widely adopted they just quietly adopted it, and I believe Intel will do the same. Look [Intel] it's an APU, why are you protesting?"

Today, Amazon launched a new online fine art store named Amazon Art. This new marketplace will give customers direct access to more than 40,000 works of fine art from over 150 galleries around the world. Amazon says that the new store will showcase artwork from more than 4500 artists and is one of the largest online marketplace collections of original and limited-edition artwork in the world.

"We are excited to bring one of the largest selections of fine art direct from galleries to our customers. Amazon Art gives galleries a way to bring their passion and expertise about the artists they represent to our millions of customers," said Peter Faricy, vice president for the Amazon Marketplace. "We're thrilled to bring the excitement and emotional connection of art to our customers."

"Paddle8 Editions sells works by internationally renowned artists to benefit the world's leading non-profits and cultural institutions. Through our new relationship with Amazon, we can dramatically expand our audience while simultaneously providing access to affordable, limited-edition works by some of the most significant artists working today," said Osman Khan, COO and founding partner of Paddle8. "We're excited to list our artwork on Amazon to make it more convenient for our existing clientele, and to help us reach new clientele."

August holds a special event for stargazers across the nation in the form of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. This astronomical event occurs on an annual basis and produces more fireballs and "shooting stars" than any other meteor shower. During its peak, stargazers could see more than 100 meteors per hour with some streaking across the sky as bright fireballs.

"We have found that one meteor shower produces more fireballs than any other," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office said in a statement. "It's the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks on August 12 and 13."

Cook and a team of scientists from NASA have placed meteor observing cameras across the southern United States in an effort to count the amount of fireballs produced during the Perseid event and between 2008 and 2013, the project logged 568 fireballs. This is significantly more than next largest meteor shower event, The Geminids.

The world's smallest re-creation of the Mona Lisa has been painted on a surface that is just 30 microns in width, which is roughly one-third as wide as a human hair. This tiny feat was accomplished by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and used a process known as ThermoChemical NanoLithography, which is similar to the process used to etch the circuitry on the silicon used in microprocessors.

The process uses a precise application of heat in a painstaking process that "paints" the image pixel by pixel. Varying the amount of heat allows for changes in in the darkness of the gray used to illustrate the image. For example, the more heat used in a single pixel, the darker that pixel will be. Likewise, less heat produces a lighter pixel.

"By tuning the temperature, our team manipulated chemical reactions to yield variations in the molecular concentrations on the nanoscale. We've created a way to make independent patterns of multiple chemicals on a chip that can be drawn in whatever shape you want," Jennifer Curtis, an associate professor in the School of Physics and the study's lead author, said in a statement.

Today, Marvell announced that China Mobile's first self-branded smartphone will feature a Marvell ARMADA Mobile PXA988 processor. Dubbed the M601, the Android-based smartphone will feature unified 3G performance thanks to the ARMADA PXA988 which has been designed to deliver high-performance computing with industry-leading graphic capabilities, while at the same time producing best-in-class robust connectivity.

The ARMADA PXA988 is a unified 3G and LTE single-chip solution that integrates a high-performance low-power ARM Cortex A9 application processor alongside cutting-edge cellular modems that support advanced multimedia and graphics capabilities. The PXA988 also features TD-HSPA+ R8 as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM radio, and GPS.

"I am very pleased to see the launch of China Mobile's first self-branded smartphone, which is a major milestone for China Mobile and over a billion consumers in China. In the past several years, we have seen the fast development of China's 3G TD-SCDMA technology and the rapid growth of the smartphone market, thanks to the close collaboration among China Mobile and global companies, such as Samsung, ZTE, Yulong Coolpad, Lenovo and others," said Weili Dai, President and Co-founder of Marvell. "I am very proud of our collaboration with China Mobile and Marvell's investment in developing advanced TD-SCDMA technology. I am very thankful for the innovation, dedication and contributions made by the China Mobile and Marvell global engineering teams."

Today, CyanogenMod announced that it has added 11 new devices to its 10.1 white list, with most of the devices being of Motorola origin and a few Samsung handsets tossed in. Additionally, three new tablets have been added to the list as well.

For our readers who have never heard of CyanogenMod, it is a custom ROM for Android devices and is widely believed to be one of the best alternate Android ROMs on the market. Cyanogen 10.1 is based on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and is closer to stock Android than any other custom ROM. The development team behind CyanogenMod says that work on CM 10.2 is already underway and that it will be based on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. They alluded to what could be the next generation of Custom ROMs with a top secret project named Nemesis that will feature a new camera app called Focal.

The list below contains the names of all the new devices that been added to the 10.1 white list.

This morning, Nokia Asha owners have one more reason to use the phone today. Nokia has announced that the popular professional networking site LinkedIn has just released an app for the full-touch versions of its Asha smartphones, making it even easier to stay in touch with colleagues and coworkers.

"LinkedIn for Nokia Asha essentially brings the most popular features of LinkedIn to an app built specifically for Asha touch devices," said LinkedIn's Giovanni Iachello, responsible for international product management. It's made up of four main features:

We really wanted to design something for ambitious people on the go. What we always try to do with mobile applications is design something that's consistent with the user experience on the website itself, but something that's really useful for people in transit as well. If you're going into a meeting with somebody and want to look them up, it's easy to search and find out all about them from your Asha touch device. It's a way to reach our members in emerging markets, by offering a feature-rich app on devices that are readily available and affordable in many markets. It allows us to work where our members work.