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Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn released: Happy 10th birthday, Ubuntu!

Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn released: Happy 10th birthday, Ubuntu!

In a blog post on the Ubuntu site, the Canonical staff runs down the list of highlights for this release. Unfortunately, Utopic Unicorn isn’t exactly a barn burner. The biggest addition is the Ubuntu Developer Tools Centre, but as the name suggests, it’s a developer-focused feature. This will make Android development easier on Ubuntu, but it’s not something that your average user will care about.

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Apple iTunes music sales down, so what next for Beats Music?

Apple iTunes music sales down, so what next for Beats Music?

Taylor Swift fans who pre-ordered her latest album 1989 are waking up today to a notification from Apple that it’s available to download from iTunes – the latest high-profile album to shun streaming services like Spotify in favour of Apple’s music downloads store. That puts Swift in the company of big artists including Beyoncé, Coldplay and U2 in 2014 so far, showing iTunes’ continued clout within the music industry. But the rise of streaming may be eroding that status faster than Apple or its label partners had expected.

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Decades-old scientific paper may hold clues to dark matter

Decades-old scientific paper may hold clues to dark matter

No one really knows what dark matter is. Since the 1980s, theorists' best hunch has been that it consists of so-called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. If they exist, WIMPs would have a mass between one and 1000 times that of a proton. They would interact only through the feeble weak nuclear force—one of two forces of nature that ordinarily flex their muscle only within the atomic nucleus—and could disappear only by colliding and annihilating one another. So if the infant universe cooked up lots of WIMPs, enough of them would naturally survive to produce the right amount of dark matter today. But physicists have yet to spot WIMPs, which every now and then should ping off atomic nuclei in sensitive detectors and send them flying.

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The Quest to Put More Reality in Virtual Reality

The Quest to Put More Reality in Virtual Reality

Philip Rosedale is telling me about his new company, but I can’t stop myself from looking down at my hands. With palms up, I watch with fascination as I slowly wiggle my fingers and form the “OK” sign. I curl my hands into fists as I reach my arms out in front. They look pinker than normal but work as usual. When I look back up at Rosedale, he’s wearing a smile, and his eyebrows rise slightly. “Isn’t it cool?” he says. In my right ear, I hear a quiet chuckle from one of his colleagues, Ryan Karpf, standing just outside my vision.

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