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LAS VEGAS--Nvidia has never been a timid company, and at CES 2013, the chipmaker stepped on the gas.

Nvidia's aggressive plans for cloud gaming, its Tegra 4 quad core processor, and Nvidia Shield, its first Nvidia-branded gaming device, set a course for placing the company in the limelight this coming year.

Project Shield: Portable gaming companion The Android-based Project Shield is Nvidia's first attempt at selling a device bearing the Nvidia name. It strongly resembles a console controller, complete with joysticks and buttons. It can play Android, Tegra, and PC games, as well as play games streamed from … Read more

Quick! Which keys on your keyboard are the filthiest? The most infested with nasty germs?

Come on down, E, S, T, return, and space bar! You're the most likely to harbor abhorrent bugs like E. coli. We need you to communicate but hate your freeloaders. What to do?

Enter the Influsaber, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

This wand from Japan's J-Force slays bugs with ultraviolet rays, namely UV-C light, which can penetrate the outer walls of viruses and bacteria, altering their genetic structure and killing them. … Read more

It's round three for the mysterious X-37B space plane.

An Atlas V rocket carrying the unmanned craft, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, has gotten clearance for a planned liftoff tomorrow at just after 10 a.m. PT from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. [Update, December 11 at 10:21 a.m. PT: The Associated Press reports that the rocket carrying the X-37B has launched.]

If the previous two trips into space are any indication, don't expect the X-37B to come home anytime soon -- or for the U.S. Air Force to say … Read more

Uninstalling bloated programs and process-hogging applications is one of the most critical ways to keep your system's performance snappy. Unfortunately, the built-in Windows uninstaller is limited when it comes to removing leftover files and residue.

Wise Program Uninstaller takes it up a notch as an alternative solution. When you first fire up the program, you're greeted with some basic options and metrics. The bottom status bar lets you know how many running programs are installed and how much space is occupied. There are two main uninstall approaches: safe and forced.

Safe uninstall guides you through the default uninstallation … Read more

The U.S. Air Force said today that an experimental test in August of its hypersonic X-51A Waverider failed due to a fin inadvertently unlocking and sending the aircraft into a corkscrew that ended in a crash into the Pacific Ocean.

At the time, the Air Force said only that the August flight had ended with the crash, but didn't reveal what had been at fault. But in a conference call today, X-51A program manager Charlie Brink explained what he and his colleagues have learned over a couple of months of investigation.

The August flight was the third of … Read more

Even if you're not a conspiracy theorist, and you don't believe that aliens have visited us or the U.S. government has developed alien-grade technology, recently declassified images from the National Archives are like a giant WTF.

They reveal Air Force plans to build a flying saucer. Also, it was going to outsource the work. And not to aliens, to Canadians.

A 1956 document entitled "Project 1794, Final Development Summary Report" from the Records of United States Air Force Commands, Activities, and Organizations includes several remarkable schematics. … Read more

A researcher showed today that Oracle's databases could be hacked with brute-force attacks using only the database's name and a username, according to Kaspersky Lab Security News.

Esteban Martinez Fayo, who works for AppSec Inc., was demonstrating his discovery at a security conference in Argentina and said that within just five hours on a regular PC using a special tool he could hack through easy passwords and access users' data.

"It's pretty simple," Martinez Fayo told the security blog Dark Reading. "The attacker just needs to know a valid username in the database, and … Read more

Good keyboards are a valued asset in the laptop world, and they're starting to become a major factor in the tablet landscape, too. The iPad has its Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover; Microsoft Surface has its Type Cover. Perhaps Synaptics should get into the Windows 8 tablet keyboard landscape, too. … Read more

Gearing up for the shift to Windows 8, Synaptics wants PC makers to switch to an entirely new kind of touchpad, called the ForcePad. We recently met with the company in New York to take this new touch interface, which eliminates moving parts and adds pressure sensitivity, for a test drive.

Synaptics invented the touchpad in 1995, and since then, touch has become an increasingly important part of our interaction with technology (and the company now makes touch screens for phones, tablets, and laptops as well).

But laptop touchpads have also been a frequent pain point for consumers, with laggy … Read more