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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Yep, just like we'd heard, the Phoenix lander has identified water in a soil sample it collected in Mars earlier, and NASA's extended the mission for another 90 days to go look for more. There's no analysis of the ice yet, but it doesn't look like there's any organic materials in the sample, and it'll take another three to four weeks before there's any more data to reveal. Hopefully that means we'll be packing up our silver go-go boots and taking off for our fabulous future lives on Mars in a month, but we'll see how things go.

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Trying to put pressure on their competition, or feeling the pressure from increasing Samsung and LG market share, Nokia has reduced many handset prices by 10%—mostly music and media phones—but also making discounts across the whole portfolio. Analyst and Sean Connery-fan David Hallden calls the move a Crazy Ivan:

This is basically a way to run away from competition. You're putting a lot of pressure on your less competitive peers. I think they're doing a Crazy Ivan.

And we think you are watching too many submarine movies lately, David, but you may be right. In any case, cheaper phones are good for everyone. [Reuters]

Filed under: Laptops

So now that HP's joined Dell in releasing information on which laptops have those defective NVIDIA GPUs, we can sort of piece together which chips are faulty -- and just as had been rumored, it looks like basically every Geforce 8600M and 8400M chip is affected. That's not good news for NVIDIA, which has been saying that only "previous-generation" chips were problematic -- unless the chipmaker is planning on updating the hugely popular 8x00 series sometime, say, now, that's not exactly true, now is it? Other affected chips appear to be in the GeForce Go 7000 and 6000 lines, as well as the Quadro NVS 135M and the Quadro FX 360M, but that's just looking at model numbers, and we can't be exactly sure. We'd say that if you've got a machine with any one of these GPUs, it might be wise to call in and see what your laptop maker is going to do -- and it would be smart for NVIDIA to come right out and say exactly how big and how bad this problem really is.

Read - Dell list of machines and patch
Read - HP list of machines, extended warranty info

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Reader Henry found this "mobile office" in New York last night, which is probably one of the strangest things I've ever seen. It consists of a desk, a keyboard, a desktop, a CRT, a lamp, a printer and flowers, all mounted on the passenger side of a convertible. Wha?

Apparently it's some sort of New York staple, as someone else spotted the same car two years ago with the exact same equipment. You can see the old photo here. What the hell is it? A moving art piece? It sure as hell can't be real, since all that equipment would probably have been stolen a while ago. We're stumped. Do any of you readers know more about this mysterious car office, the blonde and his pre-Windows applications he's working on? [Thanks Henry!]

Filed under: Laptops

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Forgetting to bring your electronics with you on a flight sucks really, really hard. This is why the DFW airport has allowed Best Buy to put Best Buy Express vending machines inside several terminals, giving travelers a chance to pick up the lost gadgets, chargers or headphones that they would otherwise have to do without. Is it a good deal? Probably not. But think of it as the electronics equivalent of having to buy a pack of Corn Nuts and going to town because you missed lunch. [Dallas News]

Forgetting to bring your electronics with you on a flight sucks really, really hard. This is why the DFW airport has allowed Best Buy to put Best Buy Express vending machines inside several terminals, giving travelers a chance to pick up the lost gadgets, chargers or headphones that they would otherwise have to do without. Is it a good deal? Probably not. But think of it as the electronics equivalent of having to buy a pack of Corn Nuts and going to town because you missed lunch. [Dallas News]

Filed under: Desktops

So we hate to break it to the good guys at Tom's Hardware, but while we're impressed that they managed to overclock a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 to 5.1GHz using a cryogenic cooling system, it's not nearly close to the world record they're claiming -- we've seen P4's at up to 8.18GHz, and just a couple months ago someone jacked a Core 2 Extreme QX9775 on a Skulltrail board to 6GHz. Still, it's always fun to watch people pour liquid nitrogen over a mobo -- video after the break.

[Via PC World]

Continue reading Team overclocks Core 2 Quad to 5.1GHz, claims world record -- too bad it's not

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For a long time, I just threw all of my gear into an Eastpak backpack I'd had since high school. But my laptop got all scuffy and gross like it had been hanging out in the wrong Starbucks or something, so I finally got an actual laptop bag to keep it all protected. (Also, the backpack made me feel like I was still in high school.) Now I have a couple I rotate between depending on the mission—I like Timbuk2's huge Hacker bag for trade show survival, and a smaller one for everyday. But it's messenger all the way (as it is for most of us at Giz). What do you carry all of your gear in? And what are you lugging, anyway?

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[Image via geishabot]

Good news, chubbies! Science has got your back. Researchers at the Salk Institute have found two drugs that trick the muscles in mice into thinking they've been working out like crazy, even when said mice have been playing World of Warcraft and eating Funyuns for 8 straight hours.

One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.

A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance, but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

“It’s a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,” said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group.

The results, Dr. Evans said, seem reasonably likely to apply to people, who control muscle tone with the same underlying genes as do mice. And if the drugs work and prove to be safe, they could be useful in a wide range of settings.

Yeah, settings such as your couch, your desk chair and your bed, as those are the only places you'll be sitting when you're taking a pill that tricks your body into thinking you're some sort of Olympian.

Of course, the initial uses are going to be for people with diseases such as diabetes that are improved with exercise, but you know the major pharmaceutical companies are licking their chops and looking at the insanely-large couch potato demographic. The future is now! [NY Times]