Distro Issue 93: The minds behind XPRIZE HD

During the course of a long weekend, a handful of the world's greatest thinkers assembled in California with the single goal of creating the next XPRIZE winner. In a brand new issue of our weekly, Tim Stevens takes a look inside the making of the next visionary challenge and offers a glimpse at how the the outfit decides which revolutionary ideas have earned its support. Weekly Stat tallies up the numbers on the Xbox One, Rec Reading peeks inside Google's secret lab and TechShop's Mark Hatch stops by for the Q&A. Some relaxing end-of-the-week gadget reading is here, thanks to a speedy download via the links that follow.

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SUNY partners with Coursera for massively open online course experiment

Massive open online courses have the potential to alter how we teach and learn as a society, but unlike other methods that are steeped in centuries of trial and error, the MMOC concept remains experimental and unproven -- often criticized as better suited for edification than rigorous education. Like edX, Coursera is working to challenge that assumption, and today the online course provider announced partnerships with ten public university systems that'll integrate lessons from Coursera into the classroom. Most notably, The State University of New York is participating, which boasts 64 campuses and an enrollment of nearly half a million students. While its implementation remains up in the air, SUNY aims to introduce Coursera materials this fall and over the next few years as part of its Open SUNY initiative.

Like SUNY, all partner schools may adapt lessons from Coursera as they see fit, and professors will have the opportunity to develop online courses for Coursera. Most significantly, the pilot programs will give universities an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of Coursera material, which could go a long way toward legitimizing the MMOC concept. As another happy consequence, universities may choose to offer for-credit courses from Coursera to non-matriculated students. For a greater understanding of this grand experiment, just hit up the source links.

NHK flaunts 8K Ultra HD compact broadcast camera HD

While you're still settling in to HDTV, NHK is already looking past 4K toward 8K broadcast trials -- and it has the hardware to do it. The Japanese broadcaster just showed off a compact 8K broadcast camera that joins the H.265 encoder we sawearlier, and packs a 33-megapixel sensor and drive circuits into a mere four square inch package. Like NHK's 8K Super Hi-Vision cam, the more compact model runs at 120Hz, and the company said it would soon upgrade its encoders to handle the higher resulting frame rates. Broadcast trials are scheduled to begin in 2016 in Japan, regardless of whether you can see the pixels or not.

Graphene camera sensors said to be 1,000 times more sensitive to light

While we're still scratching around with Ultrapixels and OIS, scientists in Singapore claim they're working on something that could change the entire field of photography. Researchers at the Nanyang Technological University have developed an image sensor made out of graphene that's 1,000 times better at capturing light than traditional CMOS or CCD sensors, all while using 10x less energy. These new sensors may initially be used in surveillance equipment and satellites -- when they do eventually end up in regular cameras, however, they're promised to be five times cheaper than the sensors they're replacing. Combine this with the work being done on graphene batteries, and we're that much closer to the perfect smartphone.