GeForce, the product that sounds like a teen Superhero team, is back with the brand spankin' new GeForce GT 520, the perfect GPU to accelerate media, gaming and, well- pretty much everything now that we've opened up GPU-accelerated web browsing. It supports DirectX 11 (meh), GPU accelerated General Purpose Computing (CUDA), and the aptly named physics engine processor, PhysX. If you're a gamer looking to upgrade your GPU and you plan on playing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, Farming-Simulator 2011, or the bad-ass StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, you're going to want to check the GT 520 out as those games will take full and absolute advantage of this GPU's processing power. With 48 CUDA cores, 810 MHz Graphics Clock, 1620 MHz Processor Clock, and a Texture Fill Rate of 6.5 billion/sec, this GPU should some serious cajones to your gaming machine. Let's also not forget that it's 3D photo, 3D video, and 3D Blu-Ray ready.

Check out more at their product website, or more after the jump.

It also supports all of this cool stuff:

Norway's Opera Software is following up on their recent mobile success by rolling out upgrades for their desktop browser that take two of their most popular features, Opera Turbo and Speed Dial, and make them better. VP of Desktop Products, Jan Standal, ntoed:

Opera 11.10, codenamed "Barracuda", can boost browsing speeds by up to four times its previous capabilities by reducing the size of webpages before he user loads them, using Opera Turbo.

Antec are releasing something special for their 25th anniversary (btw, congrats Antec!) by releasing the Antec KÜHLER H2O 920 maximum-performance CPU cooler. Antec developed the KÜHLER H2O 920 in conjunction with Asetek, who are an industry-leading supplier of OEM liquid cooling systems for computers. The KÜHLER H2O 920 is an advancement on the popular KÜHLER H2O 620 with several upgrades that allow it to deliver better cooling results to your CPU.

The KÜHLER H2O 920 features a double-thick radiator with two 120mm fans as well as an interactive fan control in the form of Asetek's ChillControl software. The KÜHLER H2O 920 has some seriously great features and with it being only the second liquid-cooler from Antec, I'm quite excited to see what the future holds for Antec.

Intel put on a series of demo's at Day 0 of IDF Beijing 2011 showing off various ways that camera recognition, both facial and gesture, could be applied to everyday life.

The first demo controlled an avatar by mapping the human face to cause the avatar to animate on-screen characters to precisely replicate mimic facial expressions and head movement. The second demo has been making the rounds but we still love it since the idea of having in on our home TV excites since it would make looking at photo's a more interactive experience. One can control and navigate the user interface with the wave of a hand as well as zoom and rotate.

It is like having a Kinect, but all you need is a webcam! The big one that I thought was the best of the bunch was facial recognition to deliver directed personal advertising. That's right, your TV will watch you figure out how many males and females are in the room, whether they are young or old and even detect if they are happy or sad. Based on this information they will then service an appropriate targeted ad. Creepy, just a little.

The man of many Lord of the Ring fans wet dreams, Peter Jackson, is currently shooting The Hobbit and has taken some time out of his busy schedule to update the official Facebook account with some info on The Hobbit. He posted some production photos and an article explaining why he has decided to shoot the two-part Lord of the Rings prequel at 48 frames per second. He even took time to address critics of the move to 48fps:

Jackson also elaborated on Facebook saying:

That headline is as unbelievable as it sounds. But seriously, a public school district in Auburn, Maine in the cold, culturally and technologically barren state of Maine from which I hail, is giving all 285 students of its Kindergarten class a brand new iPad 2. Tell me that doesn't make you feel better as a parent if your child is a spring baby. Damn. Like, 3G enabled and everything? Do these kids even have iTunes accounts? What happens if they drop like 3k on Smurfberries?

Evidently Auburn school district, frankly, does not give a damn as they voted to budget $200,000 on the iPad 2 initiative, including insurance, cover, educational software and technical training. And the kindergarten teachers get them too. Eventually, the program plans to be expanded to include all six elementary schools in the district (right now it's just at Washburn Elementary). The idea was proposed by kindergarten teachers that noticed how useful the original iPad became in helping children having trouble with the alphabet.

Exsqueeze me? They haven't legalized marijuana in Maine while I've been gone have they? They're having trouble with the alphabet so you buy them a @#%ing $499 device? When I was a kid we had anthropomorphized Letters that taught us with VHS TAPES how to, you know, use them. WTF is going on in Maine? I mean, I know we had a lot of "failing" public schools guys, but maybe that has to do with drug use, poverty, lack of motivation, mundane higher education institutions and a shitty economy, not the lack of access to extremely expensive and complex post-pc @#$%ing devices!

Today was a big day for Google. Almost $170 million in solar power and a new Google-based trivia game all in 24 hours. Google announced today that they'll be implementing a new trivia game that encourages rather than prohibits the Googling of answers. It seems relatively redundant to have questions for which a player can just type a few words into a search engine, but Google is specifically crafting cryptic and difficult questions that will teach Google users how to better use their search engine. What about when people just post the answers online? Google has even refined their algorithm to exclude those types of sites from the results so as to not spoil the game for the rest of us.

You can start playing now by going to agoogleaday.com and checking out the first question. Questions will be posted daily, and will also be located conveniently above the New York Times Crossword puzzle each day.

This is an insanely clever way to get people to use their site. I would say it's evil (which it is), but I love trivia, especially challenging trivia. Hopefully Google will stick to its promise to keep the trivia challenging, as well as the excluding algorithm for spoilers. Every once in a while (and I am not at all ashamed to admit this) I'll Google or Wikipedia the answer to a particularly difficult NYT crossword clue, and I've come to appreciate the way that Crosswordsmiths have made their clues less and less searchable. The one thing that kills it for me are the crossword content farms and blogs that just post the answers straight-up. It's just as much fun strategically using Google as it is discerning the answer to the clue, so it's nice to know that Google is going to take steps to even the playing field.

Silicon Valley's favorite search engine giant just dropped a whopping $168 million in a new solar energy plant in California's Mojave Desert designed and developed by BrightSource Energy. Google is counting on BrightSource's Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) to generate 392 MegaWatts (gross) of minty-fresh clean solar energy. In a blog post today, Google wrote:

Which would be no small contribution to our nation's energy qualms, something Google is clearly dedicated to aiding as the tech firm has now invested more than $250 million in the future of clean, renewable energy. Google is investing in the proven technology of "Power Towers", which use fields of mirrors (heliostats) to focus solar rays onto a receiver placed on top of a large tower (seen above in the photo). According to the post, the first use of the technology was the fabled existence of Archimedes' heat ray that used a similar system to focus solar energy to burn the sails of enemy ships. Thankfully, BrightSource's Mojave Desert station is far enough from the ocean and any other life, for that matter, for us to worry about superweapons. Still, the Ivanpah station will utilize over 170k different heliostats, each with two mirrors. Construction began last October and will continue until sometime in 2013. Energy corporation NRG and the US Department of Energy are also funding the project.

European software company Autonomy has announced their upcoming augmented reality iPhone application, dubbed Aurasma. The application uses a form of Autonomy's already existing IDOL pattern recognition software to scan what appears to be print images of all types with the end goal of automatically inserting a related video of some sort. Aurasma seems to have been conceived as a competitor to Google's already available Google Googles visual search application that allows the user to search their environment by snapping pictures of it. Autonomy's founder, Michael Lynch, told the New York Times:

Aurasma will evidently be available sometime next month, debuting as part of an AR advertisement tie-in with an as-yet unnamed upcoming film. Lynch also reportedly mentioned the availability of a development platform which, like Aurasma, will be available for free download.

Optus has today launched the commercial pilot of femtocell technology which is designed to boost its 3G network coverage and speed with the customer's own fixed-line broadband service at home. Dubbed "Optus 3G Home Zone", the product uses technology built by Alcatel-Lucent, plugs into a fixed internet connection and allows 3G devices like mobiles, tablets and mobile broadband devices to utilise the network to make calls or access the internet within a 30-metre radius.

Optus is trialling the technology in multiple cities; Sydney, Brisbane, Wollongong and the Gold Coast. Optus consumer marketing director Gavin Williams has said: