Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Nvidia are working on a joint venture that will use the same chips found in video game consoles to shoot down female mosquitoes. While it sounds like a 1980's sci-fi movie, the project is very real and is meant to shrink the disease carrying mosquito population in third-world countries.

Nvidia is working with research company Intellectual Ventures to build laser fences that recognize and shoot female mosquitoes out of the air, according to San Franisco-based television station KGO.

The fences could sell for as little as $50, according to KGO. It's an interesting use of technology and if it is effective it could eliminate the use of poisons such as DDT in some regions.

Source: Forbes

According to a report on BigDownload, Microsoft and NVIDIA, two key players in the PC industry, have left the PC Gaming Alliance. BD confirmed the news with PC Gaming Alliance president Matt Ployhar. Microsoft and NVIDIA were founding member of the organization set up to champion creating and playing games on PC. Ployhar declined comment on why these companies have left the group.

Ployhar went on to tell BD that his organization will change its focus from research and reports on the industry to assisting game developers, publishers and hardware companies make better PC games.

"Another key thing we'll be doing is creating a more technical based advisory board that you'll all be hearing more about very soon," Plyhar said via his Intel Blog.

The street of dreams is paying attention to video game tech these days, and not just in terms of potential investments.

Wall Street & Technology reports that the same graphics processors (GPUs) employed in modern game consoles are powering specialized financial displays.

Frank Tan, a Deutsche Bank options trader, told WS&T:

With the advancement of computer gaming and graphics technology like PlayStation and Xbox, these graphics cards are a lot more capable [than ever]. The idea is to use the GPUs for financial calculations rather than playing games and generating graphics...

 

First, there is the sheer number of messages and data coming in... Every time the underlying price changes, or if there is a shift in the options quotes, the options prices... have to be recomputed. The GPU has the capability to solve the second computational issue. Before GPU technology came out, in order to solve this problem in real time, you would have to buy supercomputers.