Our Grease Pencil Instructor Paul roadtests Wacom's portable pen display, the Movink 13! He offers up some key tips to working on pen displays in general, and shows us his set up for working on the go."WHO IS CG COOKIE?"We are real people! (OK, maybe some of us are cyborgs - we don't ask.) CG Cookie is a small crew of Blender artists, baking fresh videos for the Blender community. If you love what we do, consider enrolling to http://cgcookie.com to stream 100's of Blender courses with passionate Blender instructors there to answer your questions. "WHERE SHOULD I START LEARNING BLENDER?"For Blender beginners, we have a free tutorial series "Getting Started with Blender" https://rb.gy/khqdl7 "I WANT MORE CG COOKIE IN MY LIFE!"Got it. Here's where you can reach us!http://instagram.com/cgcookie http://twitter.com/cgcookie http://facebook.com/cgcookieinc Want Blender news in your mailbox? Sign up here for spam-free newsletter https://cgcookie.com/newsletter #CGCookie #blendertutorial #b3d

FAB - https://www.fab.com/sellers/CGHOW Whatsapp - https://bit.ly/3LYvxjK Patreon- https://www.patreon.com/Ashif NFT - https://opensea.io/CGHOW Twitter - https://twitter.com/cghow_ If you Liked it - http://bit.ly/2UZmiZ4 Channel Ashif - http://bit.ly/3aYaniw Support me on - paypal.me/9953280644Get the Edge of Any Texture in Unreal Engine 5.4 Material Tutorial #cghow #UE5 #UE4Niagara #gamefx #ue5niagara #ue4vfx #niagara #unrealengineniagara #realtimevfxVisit - https://cghow.com/ Unreal Engine Marketplace - https://bit.ly/3aojvAa Artstation Store - https://www.artstation.com/ashif/store Gumroad - https://cghow.gumroad.com/

How to add the bloom effect in the viewport and renders in Blender.FREE! hard surface pack: https://artstn.co/m/VXojd https://chuckcg.gumroad.com/l/czdfop?layout=profile Hard Surface Kitbashing in Blender / Create a Mech: https://youtu.be/boPc8_9FzDE HDRI: https://polyhaven.com/hdris 3D Assets(Free & Paid) https://chuckcg.gumroad.com/ https://www.artstation.com/chuckcg/store?tab=digital_product https://blendermarket.com/creators/3d-models Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/chuckcg Water shader for blender: https://chuckcg.gumroad.com/l/sxbcnw?layout=profile More TutorialsModeling and texturing temple ruins: https://youtu.be/70q0LzWYADU How to add vegetation and trees: https://youtu.be/gHSxy76yz0s How to create rocky surfaces: https://youtu.be/g9T3vDtTAPk #blender #b3d #3D

Ive loved Sid Meiers Civilization games for decades, so Im really excited about the upcoming Civilization VII. What Im not excited about is how my current laptop probably wont be able to handle one turn, let alone just one more turn. But this wouldnt be an issue if I had the latest MSI Titan 18 HX gaming laptop.Ive spent the last few days in Las Vegas at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, where Ive been eye-to-eye with the latest tech (more of which Ill share in the coming days). Few things, however, have been quite as eye-catching as the Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth and I might have caught its acid-etched eye, too.If youre wondering where the laptop gets its name, well, there it is, right there, carved into the magnesium-aluminum alloy lid. Its an incandescent dragons eye peering out from its textured motif, complete with Norse runes that mean Dragon. (The same mythical beast can be found on the medallion embedded in the laptops palm rest.) As for whats inside the Dragon Edition, well, thats fire, too.First theres the 18-inch Mini-LED 4K 120Hz 16:10 screen with VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification, which is run by an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM (another CES 2025 big reveal). Theres an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM, plus four M.2 NVMe slots in a Super RAID 5 configuration capable of read speeds of up to 18,000MB/s. And OverBoost Ultra gives up to 270W of headroom for pushing intense campaigns and applications. As for the I/O giving all that somewhere to go, there are two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports, three USB-A 3.2 Gen. 2 ports, HDMI 2.1 with up to 8K60 output, and a full-sized SD card reader.If all that sounds like it might run as hot as an angry dragon, it might if it wasnt for an exclusive Vapor Chamber Cooler and a dedicated heat pipe for the one PCIe Gen. 5 SSD (the rest are Gen. 4) to avoid thermal throttling. Powering this desktop-level nearly 8-pound transportable is a 99.9WHr battery, plus a 400-watt power supply. Rounding out the features are Intel Killer Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, a Dynaudio-designed six-speaker system (featuring two subwoofers), a SteelSeries keyboard with Cherry MX switches and per-key RBG illumination, and a Mystic Light seamless haptic RBG touchpad.OK, so you might need some of Smaugs treasure to afford the Dragon Edition, but you can always opt for the standard, more subdued Titan 18 HX and get the same specs without the styling (or choose step-down components if the budgets tighter). Or theres the rest of the 18-inch laptop family, including the new Raider, Stealth, Vector, and Crosshair Series. These offer many of the same core features, like the GeForce RTX 50 Series, but dont stack quite as many slots or push quite the same output. You can opt for AMD processors and different SoC chips. Plus, theyve got differing aestheticssome more gamer and others more office-friendly. The one thing they would all have in common if I had them is me angrily muttering about grain and gameplay mechanics.

A firefighter battles the Palisades Fire while it burns homes at Pacific Coast Highway amid a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Credit: Apu Gomes/Getty ImagesShareTens of thousands of Californians are turning to a crowdsourced, nonprofit app called Watch Duty for critical, up-to-the-moment disaster updates as deadly fires continue to rage through the state. The app, which uses a mixture of official government and volunteer data to track wildfires, surpassed OpenAIs ChatGPT and Metas Threads as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store on Wednesday. Social media users have encouraged residents in affected areas to download the app in order to track the fires rapid movements and stay aware of possible evacuation orders. Apps like Watch Duty, which have seen a surge in interest in recent years, may become even more important as climate change-related natural disasters intensify in scope and scale.As of Thursday, at least five people had died from the California fires, and more than 2,000 homes and businesses had been destroyed or damaged, according to The Los Angeles Times. More than 130,000 people from Los Angeles and Ventura counties have been ordered to evacuate. There seems to be no immediate relief in sight. Warnings remain in effect for much of LA and Ventura County throughout Thursday. The cause of the fires is still under investigation.How the app worksThe Watch Duty app shows users a map with flame icons denoting areas where fires are blazing. Users receive near real-time information on a fires trajectory as well as updates from government officials and any evacuation orders. In addition to official government accounts, the app also pulls in data from wildfire cameras, satellite images, and vetted 911 calls. A team of roughly 200 citizen reporterswhich include retired and active firefighters, journalists, and emergency respondersrapidly comb through that material and then send it to users through the app. The app makers say this combination of multiple data sources and rapid vetting makes it more reliable than often chaotic, social media sources and more immediately useful than government sources.Screenshot: Popular Science As Popular Science previously reported, Watch Duty was founded in 2021 by a California software engineer named John Mills who himself had experience evacuating from a fire. Mills took a wildland firefighting course and said he quickly saw a gap in communication during disaster events. Watch Dutch was launched to fill that gap. Mills told Popular Science the app gained 22,000 users within two days of its release. That number swelled to 80,000 in less than a month. Watch Duty said it had ended 2024 with 7.2 million users a figure up from just 1.9 million a year prior. This week, as fire rages, the app reportedly had more than 600,000 new users in just 24 hours.We just want to give people peace of mind and give them information so they can make informed decisions, Mills said. It is not complex by design. Its very simple, its very easy to operate.While the app pulls from a variety of information sources, Nick Russel, the apps vice president of operations, told NBC News it also maintains direct communication with official agencies in 22 states. These officials can help make sure the rapid information being pushed through the app is accurate and high quality.One of the big things for us, our big theme, is quality over quantity. Were not in a big hurry to get information that were going to have to go and retract later, Russel told NBC News this week. And so if it takes a few extra minutes to get it out there, thats fine, but we want it to be that official info.Watch Duty isnt just for firesWatch Duty is currently focused on tracking wildfires but the apps developers have plans to expand its remit this year. In a recent blog post, Watch Duty said its looking to expand its services to include flooding alerts as well as threshold-based wind alerts and weather events that can make wildfires worse.From day one, we knew that wildfire was just our beachhead and our name represents just who we areseemingly ordinary residents who stay up late on watch duty during a disaster, Watch Duty wrote in a blog post.This will be the year when our community discovers why our organization is not called Fire Duty the blog post added.That expansion to other natural disasters could prove critical in coming years as more parts of the world are expected to feel the impact of the increase in extreme weather events amplified by climate change. Annual greenhouse gas emissions reached an all-time high last year and have led to an overall uptick in global temperatures. A United Nations report released late last year said the world is currently in a climate crunch time.Apps like Watch Duty may inevitably become more common companions for people as a range of dangerous weather events, from fires and floods to stronger hurricanes, go from remarkable to common.

There may be a mathematical reason why crossword puzzles seem to get easier as you solve them. Credit: Deposit Photos / Jordan FeegShareWhats a 11-letter concept shared by crossword puzzles and avalanches, and starts with the letter P? According to one physicist, the answer is simple: Percolation.When a statistical physicist looks at a partially solved crossword puzzle, she or he sees immediately a percolation problem: Is there a spanning path consisting of fully solved words? writes the University of Oldenburgs Alexander Hartmann in a recent paper published in Physical Review E.Percolation is ubiquitous in all fields of sciences like physics, mathematics, computer science, social sciences, or biology, he adds.Percolation, in this sense, relates to what is known as percolation theory. In mathematics and statistical physics, percolation theory concerns the behavior of a network model as additional points, nodes, or links are added to the overall system. At a certain point, these interconnected frameworks undergo a geometric version of a phase transition, suddenly becoming a much larger, new formation with novel properties.Think of it like a tea bag so saturated by water droplets that it begins to leak out of its mesh container, the snowflake that shifts a mound of frozen powder into an avalanche. Or, as Hartmann describes, the letters and words that suddenly make a formerly difficult crossword puzzle much easier to solve.Hartmann, a crossword fan, was recently curious if he could generate a single block of letters that created words in every direction, minus the puzzles trademark black spacer squares. He soon realized, however, that he was encountering a variation on a percolation problem. In mathematics and statistical physics, percolation theory concerns the behavior of a network model as additional points, nodes, or links are added to the overall system. Hartmann then devised percolation-based calculations to illustrate the concept.In the present work, crossword-puzzle percolation is introduced, where letters or words are occupied with independent or neighbor-dependent probabilities. In the model, letters correspond to sites and words to segments of sites, bordered by black sites, he explains. But Hartmann noticed something after graphing his crossword-centric formula. Get the Popular Science newsletter Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.[I]t appears that crossword-puzzle percolation comprises a new type of universal behavior, he writes. This means Hartmanns new formula is unique among all other known percolation problems.The physicist theorizes one potential explanation may be that the uncertainty one feels while staring at a largely blank crossword puzzle changes as you make progress.Since solving a word leads to an increase of the probability of solving neighboring words, this leads to further iterations, i.e., avalanches of solving words, writes Hartmann.Hartmann believes this concept can be studied further to explore relations between these abstract phase transition concepts and their physical counterparts. In the meantime, crossword puzzlers can be comforted that physics now implies that as difficult a puzzle may seem, its often darkest before the dawn. All it often takes is one letter or word to bring a puzzle to its percolation point.

Nature, Published online: 08 January 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08391-zA foundation model learns transcriptional regulatory syntax from chromatin accessibility and sequence data across a range of cell types to predict gene expression and transcription factor interactions, with generalizability to unseen cell types.

Nature, Published online: 08 January 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-03852-xArtificial intelligence is already used extensively to infer outcomes from tables of data, but this typically involves creating a model for each task. A one-size-fits-all model just made the process substantially easier.

Nature, Published online: 08 January 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-04106-6Electrochemical reactions for organic synthesis typically require intricate, specialized equipment, slowing progress in this field. Minuscule electric generators now enable faster reaction discovery and development.

We'll be exploring the Vortex Solo's capabilities to determine its effectiveness for birding, outdoor activities and basic astronomy.