Continuing with a theme of science and space Friday, we would like to give you something to do over the weekend. It's time for the yearly Perseid meteor shower in the northern hemisphere and it promises to be a good one. NASA has called it the "best meteor shower of the year" so you really don't want to miss it.

The shower will run from August 11 to 13, with the night of August 12 expected to be the best. NASA is predicting that at its peak rate people could be making 100 wishes an hour. In other words, NASA expects it to peak at 100 shooting stars an hour. "We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour," NASA's Bill Cooke says.

Heading to the countryside away from city lights is usually advisable. According to NASA, "a visit to the countryside will typically triple the number of meteors you see." The best viewing time will be in the early morning darkness just before dawn. The show should start sometime after 10PM. I'll be heading to a remote location in the Northern California Sierra Nevadas to escape the Sacramento city light pollution.

It would appear that Google has partially caved to the music and movie industry. An update to the way search results are ranked will see pirate sites and other illegitimate content sources showing up lower in the results. As you may or may not know, Google looks at around 200 different signals to rank pages and the newest one is directly tied to piracy.

The latest signal to be used in ranking pages will be directly related to "the number of valid copyright removal notices" received for a given site. This means that sites which receive a large number of valid removal notices may appear lower in Google's search results. Google explains why this is a good thing:

It's time to start getting excited for Crysis 3 and CryEngine 3. I already gave it an award from when I saw it at E3 and it continues to impress. The creators of Crysis and CryEngine, CryTek, have given us a new glimpse into the technical capabilities of the CryEngine 3 graphics engine, the engine that powers Crysis 3. Make sure to watch the video below in 720p and full screen--it makes it that much better!

Words aren't really necessary, but I'll attempt to get them back after watching that video. The video highlights the technical achievements managed by the CryTek team. Lens flares, dynamic cloud shadows, dynamic fog shadows, cloth and vegetation simulation, and tessellated vegetation all combine to make the game world incredibly beautiful.

And then there's the "top secret tessellated toad tech." Not sure why they have this, but it certainly looks good. I wonder if it will rain toads in Crysis 3 as a sign of the apocalypse. No? Well, I'm sure it's there for a reason. Tell us what you think about the video in the comments or on our Facebook page!

Are you the owner of a 7 series Gigabyte motherboard? Tired of all those hackers plugging flash drives into your computer and giving you viruses? If so, Gigabyte has the download for you! Today, Gigabyte has announced a new piece of software which will disable certain types of USB devices from connecting to the computer.

The software features an easy-to-use GUI that allows you to select what can and cannot be seen by the operating system when physically connected. The software will currently run on Intel Z77, H77, B75 and H61 based motherboards produced by Gigabyte. Gigabyte has provided some excellent use-case scenarios:

The new line of hard drive docks from XIGMATEK are called the Secure III and are USB 3.0 compatible. The USB to SATA converter allows for transfer speeds up to 5Gbps, almost as much as the SATA3 spec calls for. This means its compatible with SATAII/III HDDs and SSDs of up to 3TB in size. It does all of this while looking great.

The features, as provided by XIGMATEK, are as follows:

A good keyboard can make all the difference in the world for a typist. Every person likes something slightly different, whether it be red or blue Cherry switches or the newer keyboards without switches. That's why companies make so many different models--to give you the choice to see what works best for your hands and typing style.

Das Keyboard has announced the release of a new Professional Model S that comes with the added functionality that media keys bring to a keyboard. They say that "fans have asked for a Das Keyboard with media functionality for a while now" and that this is the reason they have crafted this keyboard.

PC gamers are definitely getting looked after when it comes to United Front Games' title Sleeping Dogs. The developer is working with Square Enix's London Studios, and are looking to make the PC version of the game something special indeed.

A new post on the official Sleeping Dogs' website shows that a bunch of PC-specific features will bring the Hong Kong island to life. If you've got the horsepower, there's optimizations for the latest AMD and NVIDIA-based GPUs that'll impress. Sleeping Dogs will ship with a high-resolution texture pack, "bringing eye-watering detail and crisp clear rendering to everything from city skyscrapers to crumbling ancient temples."

The developers have added another layer of depth at higher resolutions, using increased small object detail which renders items from a much greater distance with an "incredible sense of scale and detail". In-game shadows have also received some lovin', where they'll have support for high-resolution shadow textures, high quality shadow filters and support for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO).

Samsung have just announced their brand new Exynos 5250 SoC, which is now called the Exynos 5 Dual. Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual is the world's first Cortex A15-based chip, and should be baked into devices later this year. The first of which should be Samsung's 11.8-inch tablet that sports the 2560x1600 resolution, that we've talked about a few times now. The important specs are:

So, this chip is quite the powerhouse it seems. It sports USB 3.0, SATA III and has enough power to decode 1080p video at 60ps on what seems like most codecs. The Exynos 5 Dual isn't all about the CPU, either, it also includes a next-generation GPU, too. Both the CPU and GPU are designed by ARM, who changes their GPU architecture every five years or so. This means that the GPU side of things, the Mali T604, is the first GPU design based on the company's new Midgard architecture, sporting unified shaders, OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.1 full profile.

This gives the Exynos 5 Dual an incredible 12.8GB/s of bandwidth, which is really required when pushing a 2560x1600-based display. Not only is the GPU required to be fast, but the memory bandwidth needs to be there, too. The Exynos 5 Dual includes support for the aforementioned 12.GB/sec, with two port 800MHz LPDDR3 RAM.

Chinese researchers have achieved something quite grand, where they've overcome some challenges in regards to open-air quantum teleportation. The team developed a highly accurate laser pointing and tracking system, reports Ars Technica.

The team of researchers teleported a qubit (which is a standard unit of data in quantum computing) 97 kilometers (!) across a lake, all using a small set of photons without fiberoptic cables, or other such technology. Juan Yin and his team developed the laser targeting device, and the team were necessary to counteract the minute seismic and atmosphere shifts that would usually break the link between the two locations.

Point-to-point accuracy problems are solved by fibreoptic cables, compared to open-air systems, where the cables are used to carry entangled photons, which carry the data required for quantum teleportation. But, this can cause what's referred to as "quantum decoherence", or the corruption of the proton's entanglement data. It's incredibly exciting, and while it's not teleporting people around yet, the aim of it is to transport data, which would require quantum repeater satellites to build the network required.

Rumors are circling that AMD could be an acquisition target, and these rumors have inflated AMD's share prices by close to 8%, where they hit $4.34 per share. MarketWatch hasn't gone into much length about the rumors themselves, where they've only quoted Evercore Partners analyst Patrick Wang.

Wang has said that Qualcomm and Samsung were both potential buyers with a possible bid on the chipmaker. Wang doesn't believe the rumors have much solidity, where he says "I think it's unlikely they get a take-out offer". But, we've seen what acquisition talks can do to a company's share prices, where rumors of OCZ being scooped up by Seagate saw OCZ's shares blow up by 22%.

EE Times' reporter Syvie Barak wrote a story listing the potential candidates of an AMD acquisition, where she pointed out Qualcomm as the number one suspect. She notes that Qualcomm have already acquired assets from AMD's done-and-dusted handheld business a few years ago. Barak also notes that by acquiring AMD, it would give Qualcomm "increased leverage with manufacturing partners like TSMC and Globalfoundries".