Most people know that when you flow an electric current through a wire, the wire heats up. Most of our readers will also know that heat is the killer of many of our favorite electronic devices. That's why this new discovery by the University of Maryland is very pertinent to our cause. It's uses could allow for more efficient heat dissipation.

Kamal H. Baloch, Norvik Voskanian, Merijntje Bronsgeest, and John Cumings found that they could outsmart the traditional "Joule heating" and have the heat dissipate into the substrate rather than into the wire. This is due to a process they have dubbed "remote Joule heating." When an electric current flows through a carbon nanotube, the heat will go into the material that the nanotube is sitting upon.

The researchers determined that as much as 84 percent of the power in the nanotube was transferred to the substrate. In the nanoscale that they were working on, it was a bit hard to determine just where the heat was going. They had to use electron thermal microscopy (EThM) in order to figure it out.

Nintendo is beating everybody to the next generation console with their Wii U. They have been trying to cut costs in production in order to be more profitable, but also have a low price in order to garner to a wider range of gamers. Even though it may not sport the greatest graphics, the innovative controls that Nintendo brings to the table wins over customers.

With all of this cost cutting pretty close to said and done, a Canadian media outlet is claiming to have spoken to sources close to the manufacturing of the new unit. They report that the total cost to build is somewhere in the neighborhood of $180 with $50 of that going to the new tablet controller that is being introduced with it.

The reports sources go into more detail. "Nintendo chose an economical GPU and CPU that could keep up with the performance of today's current consoles, but keep hardware costs down to maximize profits. Nintendo got a bargain price on the custom GPU and CPU that the Wii U uses. There is a bigger focus on downloadable content, applications, video content, digital distribution, and services to create a stream of revenue. Investors will be ecstatic with the news."

The insanely popular photo app and social sharing site Instagram has been aquired by none other than Facebook for a sum somewhere around $1 billion in cash and shares. CEO Kevin Systrom confirms that the service is not going anywhere and will continue to run as-is for now.

Zuckerberg confirms the acquisition and says that the Facebook team will be "able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests." This purchase comes with some incredible statistics.

This deal took place roughly 551 days after Instagram's launch meaning that they made $1B in value in less than 2 years. That's simply incredible. But there's more. This incredible company only has 13 employees! Also, with a valuation of $1 billion, that means each Instagram user is worth approximately $33 a piece.

A prototype HTC One X for AT&T has been sold on eBay and promptly purchased by an XDA Developers forum member @voteccow. The device itself clearly shows that it was not meant for sale, and was most likely used by an AT&T technician for network verification and device testing.

The device was being tested for AT&T, and is the One X handset that sports Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, and not the International version which features NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3 processor. @voteccow showed off several pictures as well as offering the XDA Developers forum members a tease of the pre-release OS built t hat might help in hacking efforts to root the device. Currently, the bootloader installed on the device is locked.

HTC's One X has been received well lately, where the dual-core Snapdragon S4 really kicks some ass, as well as having a great display. The processor also beats out NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3, which is quite the feat considering the S4 is only a dual-core. The other highlights filling out the HTC One X is that it sports a unibody polycarbonate body and high-resolution 4.7-inch 720p S-LCD display.

Intel's Ivy Bridge notebook chips have been tested, and have shown up with some impressive results. Bulgaria's Laptop.bg was given a reference notebook with an unreleased 2.3GHz Core i7-3610QM which has shown some serious power over the current 2.2GHz Core i7-2670QM.

For the CPU tests in Cinebench 10 and 11, the performance increase was eight and 22-percent, respectively. Photoshop didn't show the same improvements, but that could be because it was wanting some of that graphical power for some of its filter. The upgraded HD 4000-series graphics still isn't enough to keep up in current games, but this is an integrated solution, so it's to be expected, for now.

Gaming wasn't too bad on the HD 4000, details needed to be dropped, but that still doesn't put the HD 4000 in the box of "it can't run games", because it can. Just not amazingly well. Intel is expected to launch their first Ivy Bridge-based CPUs on April 29, with all first mobile processors to be the quad-core Core i7 models, and should hit mid- to large-size notebooks, including Apple's MacBook Pro or Dell's XPS15.

The latest rumors to come from DigiTimes, who quotes a report from China's Economic Daily News, says that supplier checks are now indicating that due to the late-April availability of Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs, Apple now plans to push back the launch of the refreshed MacBook Pro and iMac models to near the end of the company's fiscal second quarter, which ends in June.

But, these new rumors could prove to be real as earlier speculation points to Apple beginning to use new glass tech a company called G-Tech for the display screens, which are said to be less reflective and reduce glare.

Manufacturers of the new units are said to be handed over to Foxconn and Quanta, which will benefit from the smaller and more energy-efficient, but faster Ivy Bridge chips, as well as support for internal PCI-Express 3.0, USB 3.0 and faster graphics. Other reports are pointing toward the new iMac being thinner, which could then point to the new iMac losing its optical drive, just like the MacBook Air.

VR-Zone Chinese has leaked spec sheets on NVIDIA's upcoming system-on-a-chip (SoC) detailing the next-generation of Tegra chips codenamed "Wayne". We should expect four different Tegra 4 models in 2013, all using the same 4-PLUS-1 tech from NVIDIA.

We have two "Flagship" models, the first of which should drop in Q1 2013 dubbed "T40" and will clock in at 1.8GHz and be made from the Cortex-A15 architecture, the second Flagship model is the "T43" and clocks in at 2GHz, this is from the same Cortex-A15 tech. We then have two "Mainstream" products that should arrive in Q3 2013.

These two models are "AP40" and "SP3X", with the latter coming in between 1.2-1.8GHz, and the former arriving in 1.2-2.0GHz. They will be based off of Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A9 designs for the AP40 and SP3X, respectively. One thing to note of the SP3X chip, is that it will finally bring with it LTE connectivity in the form of LTE100/HSPA42 tech, it will also be designed for 7-inch tablets, with the other three models made for 10-inch designs.

Gigabyte have come along way over the years. Gone are the years of motherboard manufacturers not endorsing overclocking, to employing, listening and catering to the entire enthusiast and overclocking market. It's a great move, and I applaud Gigabyte for doing so.

The latest news comes from Taiwanese power user "Coolaler" who has smashed Gigabyte's previous memory overclocking record with his Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard. He pushed his memory up to an insane 1530MHz (which is 3060MHz in dual-channel) with 4 DIMMs.

I will add that it's not too hard to hit high overclock results on 1 or 2 DIMMs, but 4 DIMMs? That's another challenge altogether. Nice work, Coolaler!

TweakTown and Noctua are teaming up for the April Battlefield 3 contest. Noctua, market of premium grade CPU heatsinks, fans and thermal paste will give away three prize packages to the top three point scores spread across the two TweakTown Battlefield 3 game servers.

This contest is a little different than last month's contest that only took place on the Air Maps Server. TweakTown now has the Infantry Server up and running. The combined scores of both servers will be combined to determine the top three players by server score.

This is an amazing prize package donated by Noctua!

In stark contrast to the bleak news regarding HTC's financials, Samsung has reported record profits today as the first-quarter revenue is reported. Samsung close to doubled its profits from this time last year by bringing in $5.1 billion in profits which is up from $2.95 billion last year.

The figures have been helped along by the sales of the hot Galaxy lines of smartphones and tablets. The two main devices that aided these record profits have been the Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy Note. Sales of TVs, such as my own, have also helped propel the figures into the record setting range. "Sales of new models of smartphones, such as the Note, were better than expected," analyst James Strong told Bloomberg.

"They have a good line-up of new products, so they will be able to keep the momentum alive for two or three quarters, at least." Another analyst speculates that Samsung shipped 44 million smartphones during the first 3 months of the year. This would make Samsung the biggest manufacturer in the world for that time period.