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London, Mar 2 (ANI):Archaeologists have discovered a four-inch long nail dating from thetime of Christ's crucifixion at a fort believed to have once been astronghold of the Knights Templar.

The Roman relic, stored in anornate box, is of the type used in thousands of crucifixions - but itis special, reports The Telegraph.

It was buried with threeskeletons and three swords, including one with the religious order'scross on its blade, on the tiny island of Ilheu de Pontinha, offMadeira.

Pontinha was thought to have been held by the KnightsTemplar, the religious order that was part of the Christian forceswhich occupied Jerusalem during the Crusades in the 12th century.

Bryn Walters, an archaeologist, said the iron nail's in remarkable condition.

"It dates from the first to second centuries," he told the Daily Mirror.

Christopher Macklin of the Knights Templar of Britannia said the discovery was "momentous".

The expert believes the original Knights Templar thought it was a genuine artefact from Christ's crucifixion. (ANI)

Formula One has tossed therefuelling rigs on the scrapheap, souped-up the scoring system andstretched the starting grid and the race calendar for 2010.

Themain aim is to make the glamour sport more exciting and encouragedrivers to do their utmost to try to win races, rather than settlingfor second place and safe points.

The following looks at the mainnovelties and changes for the 19-race season starting in Bahrain onMarch 14, as well as their likely impact on what happens on the track:

REFUELLING BAN

Forthe first time since 1993, cars must start with a full tank of fuel tolast the entire race. Fuel tanks have increased in size from around 80litres to 250, and the cars have a longer wheelbase.

Drivers willstill have to stop for tyre changes which could now take as little asthree seconds and become a key strategic focus.

"I think, lookingat testing, we are going to get a lot of very unusual strategies in therace," says world champion Jenson Button. "I think you are going tohave some teams trying to stop two or three laps before their rivals sothey can get out on new tyres and maybe bump them.

"You'll alsohave the teams that aren't so competitive trying crazy strategies likepitting after lap one and hoping to run to the end of the race."

With more emphasis on fuel economy, the sport also hopes to present a greener image.

The starting weights of cars will no longer be published.

POINTS

Thescoring system now looks more like that used in MotoGP, with the top 10picking up points and the winner getting 25 rather than 10.

The new system adopts a 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 format.

KERS

Teams have agreed not to use the Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) that helped McLaren and Ferrari to win races last season.

Thesystem, used to telling effect by Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen at Spa inBelgium last year, gave drivers a short extra burst of power at thepush of a button. The minimum weight of cars has been raised from 605kgto 620.

TYRES

The front tyres have been made narrower. Compounds will also be harder to compensate for the cars being heavier.

Driverswho reach the third and final phase of qualifying will have to startthe race on the same set of tyres with which their grid time was set.This will introduce an additional strategic element to the race.

Thenumber of sets of dry weather tyres allocated to each team per race hasbeen reduced from 14 to 11. One set must be returned after firstpractice and two after second practice.

Wheel rim covers, used by many in 2009, are not allowed.

TESTING

In-seasontesting remains banned but a new regulation allows teams to test areplacement driver if he has not taken part in a grand prix in the twoprevious calendar years.

In such a case, one day of track testingwill be allowed at a circuit not used by Formula One and "between thestart of the week preceding the second event and the last event of thechampionship".

TEAMS AND RACES

The grid hasbeen expanded from 10 teams and 20 cars to 13 teams and 26 cars. Fournew teams were given slots -- Virgin Racing, Lotus F1, Campos Meta andU.S. F1.

However, there could be only 12 teams in Bahrain with USF1 seemingly unready to race.

Anotheroutfit, Stefan GP, are waiting in the wings with the car designed byToyota before the Japanese manufacturer pulled out at the end of lastyear.

The championship has been expanded from 17 to 19 races, with the addition of South Korea and return of Canada.

QUALIFYING

Ifthere are 26 cars, then the slowest eight (instead of five in 2009)will be eliminated after the first qualifying session and a furthereight after the second.

All will qualify on low fuel.

STEWARDS

Experiencedformer F1 drivers will form part of the stewards' panel, with fourstewards sitting at each race instead of the previous three.

(Editing by Clare Fallon; To query or comment on this story email sportsfeedback@thomsonreuters.com)

Washington, March 2 (ANI):Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) havecreated a new infrared laser made from germanium that operates at roomtemperature, which has made light-speed computing come one step closerto reality.

The research removes the cryogenic cooling systemspreviously needed for infrared lasers and could lead to powerfulcomputer chips that operate at the speed of light.

"Using agermanium laser as a light source, you could communicate at very highdata rates at very low power," said Jurgen Michel of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, who developed the new germanium laser.

"Eventually, you could have the computing power of today's supercomputers inside a laptop," he said.

Thecreation of a new laser, even one based on germanium, is notnewsworthy; more than 15,000 different lasers, some of which usegermanium, have been created since the 1950s.

What makes this particular germanium laser unique is that it creates an infrared beam at room temperature.

Untilnow infrared germanium lasers required expensive cryogenic coolingsystems to operate. The new germanium laser operates at roomtemperature.

To create the germanium laser, the scientists take asix-inch, silvery-gray disk of silicon and spray it with a thin film ofgermanium.

These same disks are actually used to produce chips in today's computers.

An electrically powered, room-temperature, infrared laser for laptop computers is still years away, however, cautioned Michel.

If and when those laptops do arrive, they will be powerful - more powerful in fact than even today's supercomputers.

Thebattery that powers the laptop won't necessarily last any longer, butthe power it does hold will make calculations orders of magnitudefaster than today.

"We need high-density, low-power solutions," said Kock.

Computerchips are constantly getting smaller and smaller, but they areapproaching the fundamental limits of electron-based computing.

Light-based computing is one option to improve the speed and power of computers.

"Germanium-basedoptical computing is an especially attractive material for opticalcomputing because it wouldn't require any change to the existingcomputer chip industry," Kock said.

The same machines that use silicon could also use germanium to make future chips. (ANI)

nVidia's GT300 specifications revealed - it's a cGPU!

Over the pastsix months, we heard different bits'n'pieces of information when itcomes to GT300, nVidia's next-gen part. We decided to stay silent untilwe have information confirmed from multiple sources, and now we feelmore confident to disclose what is cooking in Santa Clara, India, Chinaand other nV sites around the world.

GT300 isn't the architecture that was envisioned by nVidia's Chief Architect, former Stanford professor Bill Dally, but this architecture will give you a pretty good idea why Bill told Intel to take a hike when the larger chip giant from Santa Clara offered him a job on the Larrabee project.

Thanks to Hardware-Infos, we managed to complete the puzzle what nVidia plans to bring to market in couple of months from now.

What is GT300?Eventhough it shares the same first two letters with GT200 architecture[GeForce Tesla], GT300 is the first truly new architecture since SIMD [Single-Instruction Multiple Data] units first appeared in graphical processors.

GT300architecture groups processing cores in sets of 32 - up from 8 in GT200architecture. But the difference between the two is that GT300 partsways with the SIMD architecture that dominate the GPU architecture oftoday. GT300 Cores rely on MIMD-similar functions [Multiple-Instruction Multiple Data]- all the units work in MPMD mode, executing simple and complex shaderand computing operations on-the-go. We're not exactly sure should wecontinue to use the word "shader processor" or "shader core" as theseunits are now almost on equal terms as FPUs inside latest AMD and IntelCPUs.

GT300 itself packs 16 groups with 32 cores - yes, we'retalking about 512 cores for the high-end part. This number itselfraises the computing power of GT300 by more than 2x when compared tothe GT200 core. Before the chip tapes-out, there is no way anybody canpredict working clocks, but if the clocks remain the same as on GT200,we would have over double the amount of computing power.

If forinstance, nVidia gets a 2 GHz clock for the 512 MIMD cores, we aretalking about no less than 3TFLOPS with Single-Precision. Dualprecision is highly-dependent on how efficient the MIMD-like units willbe, but you can count on 6-10x improvement over GT200.

Thisis not the only change - cluster organization is no longer static. TheScratch Cache is now much more granular and looks like L1 cacheorganization, allowing for larger interactivity between the coresinside the cluster. GPGPU e.g. GPU Computing applications should reallybenefit from this architectural choice. When it comes to gaming, thequestion is obviously - how good can GT300 be? Please do bear in mindthat this 32-core cluster will be used in next-generation Tegra, Tesla,GeForce and Quadro cards.

This architectural change should resultin dramatic increase in Dual-Precision performance, and if GT300 packsenough registers - performance of both Single-Precision andDual-Precision data might surprise all the players in the industry.Given the timeline when nVidia begun work on GT300, it looks to us likeGT200 architecture was a test for real things coming in 2009-2010timeframe.

Just like the CPU, GT300 gives direct hardware access[HAL] for CUDA 3.0, DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL. You can also dodirect programming on the GPU, but we're not exactly sure woulddevelopment of such a solution that be financially feasible. But thepoint in question is that now you can do it. It looks like Tim Sweeney's prophecy is slowly, but certainly - coming to life.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/22/nvidias-gt300-specifications-revealed---its-a-cgpu!.aspx