The World Health Organization raised the influenza epidemic level from 4 to 5 on Wednesday, signalling that a pandemic is imminent, and urged countries to implement their pandemic plans.

The annoucement came as the number of people infected with swine flu increased rapidly across the world Wednesday, and health officials scrambled to get more information about the virus — which has no vaccine. “It's a virus that we've never seen before,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “There's no background immunity in the population, and it is spreading from human to human, all of which has the potential for a pandemic.”

There’s WiMAX, and then there’s Wi-Fi. And now, there’s a chip that understands both wireless languages. As you well know, the former is a burgeoning next generation wireless data technology that operators such as Sprint have begun to roll out, and while LTE is largely believed to the true next gen data protocol for cell phones, it’s hard to disrespect a technology that’s already available and being used in select corners of the globe.That said, Wi-Fi is still entirely more ubiquitous, but it’s always nice to

And here you were thinking that NVIDIA was stretching its bounds by dabbling in the CPU and nettop arenas. Today — out of nowhere, really — NVIDIA has jointly announced with GeoStar that its hardware and software solution will “transform seismic computation for oil and gas companies in China.” Bold words, huh?As the story goes, GeoStar is a leading Chinese geophysical services provider, and it’s planning to utilize NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs to push its seismic software suite and “dramatically accelerates the performance

Another week, another news clipping involving SSD shipments. As the demand for solid state drives creeps up, more and more companies are joining in to snag a piece of the increasingly lucrative pie. This go around, we’re seeing Imation — you know, that company that makes all those CD-Rs you never got around to using — ship its M-Class and S-Class SSD drivers to US customers.The second-generation devices boast fast boot times and reliability that can’t be matched by traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), and

Panda Security released the public beta of its Panda Cloud Antivirus today. The company claims this is the first free cloud-based antivirus thin-client. Panda Cloud Antivirus consists of a lightweight antivirus agent that is connected in real-time to PandaLabs’ Collective Intelligence servers. PandaLabs’ Collective Intelligence servers work to automate the malware protection cycle by collecting samples, analyzing, categorizing, creating detection and disinfection routines, and delivering protection to each node.

When building your computer, your best bet to reliability is getting a sturdy yet powerful power supply. What better than the Xion PowerReal 1000-Watt Power Supply? This commanding device offers you 100 watts of pure media powering goodness. This deal ends Thursday at 12:00pm ET.

The Swiss low noise cooling solution provider ARCTIC COOLING today announced the launch of the Alpine 64 Pro, a new product of the acclaimed Alpine 64 series for AMD CPUs. Same as other Alpines, the Alpine 64 Pro offers outstanding price/performance ratio for mainstream users. The Alpine 64 Pro comes backed by a 6-year limited warranty. It will be available in May 2009 with an MSRP of just
$10.90 here in the United States.

The Alpine 64 Pro features a lot of high standard components. The 92mm fan comes with PWM function, which controls the fan speed, and thus, lowers the noise level to a minimum according to the CPU load. The PWM function guarantees sufficient cooling at the lowest noise level possible and saves energy simultaneously. Together with the patented fan case, low noise impeller and the vibration absorption, the Alpine 64 Pro is as quiet as 0.4 Sone at full speed (2,000 rpm).

EVGA GeForce GTS 250 Video Card Review @ motherboards.org and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

EVGA offers the best support on the planet for most of their cards. A 2-year warranty may not seem like much but the fact remains that few people have video cards longer than 2 years, especially for those that want the higher end cards and need a hold me over card until the next generation of cards are released or they can afford a new card with the features and performance that the GTS 250 would offer. This card really blew me away in terms of overclocking as I was able to overclock the card to 958MHz stably without visual artifacts. The Step-Up program is a nice touch especially if NVIDIA releases a new card between now and 90 days from now or if you want to upgrade to a GTX275/285. This card is online for a price of $149.99 currently from Newegg and it performs pretty well in standard testing and game play. Its overclocking abilities are what make this card stand apart from its peers as it excels in that arena, earning it an Editor's Choice product.

One of the key messages that members of the American Cable Association (ACA) are trying to get out is that we will definitely see metered bandwidth pricing at some point in the near future. ACA members are meeting this week outside of Washington, D.C., and they want us all to know that consumption-based billing for broadband usage will be a necessity in order for them to maintain infrastructures that can handle the growth of bandwidth-hogging high-definition (HD) video distribution.This message comes not from

Typical of any such crises, whether its the aftermath of an even such as an earthquake, or in this case, the swine flu, phishers and spammers are taking advantage of the situation. Symantec reports on spam that seems designed to simply gather email addresses and phone numbers for a future campaign perhaps. As shown above, one example contains a subject line that says “Suspected Mexican flu toll hits 81.” It asks recipients if they are located in Mexico or the U.S. and if they know anyone affected by the flu.