Uber Eats to Begin Delivering Food with Autonomous Vehicles

ExtremeTech

Autonomous vehicles have been getting smarter and safer, but can they replace human drivers? We’re about to find out with a new partnership between Uber and a robotic vehicle startup called Nuro. The two have signed a 10-year deal to have Nuro’s robotic vehicles delivering Uber Eats orders, and it might save you some cash if you’re lucky enough to have a robot deliver dinner. 

Nuro was founded in 2016 by former Googlers, and it recently became the first autonomous vehicle company to be granted a commercial license in California, followed by Arizona and Texas. That means Nuro robots can drive on public roads in a business capacity, as opposed to strictly for research, earning money for the company with every delivery. That makes it a natural choice for Uber’s ongoing efforts to phase out humans. 

The partnership will begin with autonomous deliveries in Mountain View, California and Houston, Texas. Service will expand to the greater Bay Area in the future. These are both regions we’ve seen other driverless vehicles get started — they don’t have the same volatile, inclement weather as many other areas. Rain, snow, and fog can confuse the sensors that allow autonomous vehicles to navigate roadways. Thus, Nuro’s permit with California only allows it to operate in fair weather. 

Uber says that customers in areas with Nuro service will see a notice in the app that their order may arrive in a robot. However, they won’t know until it shows up. The company will allow users to opt-out of autonomous deliveries, but then you’ll have to tip your driver. Any tips added to orders will be refunded if your order is handled by Nuro. 

Nuro’s compact delivery robot is about the size of a go-kart, and the company says it’s powered by renewable energy. Further, Nuro claims its vehicles have the most advanced sensor array in the industry with 360-degree coverage with LIDAR, radar, cameras, and thermal scopes. It’s all backed by custom HD maps and machine learning systems designed to prevent collisions. The small size also apparently makes it better at avoiding obstacles, and in the event of a crash, it won’t do as much damage. 

Nuro and Uber tell TechCrunch that they do not envision the robots replacing gig workers. Instead, they’ll use autonomous vehicles where it makes the most sense. There are still conditions and locations where only humans can be trusted to complete deliveries, but that may not be true for long. As robots get more capable, it seems inevitable that they will take over more driving from people. While Nuro focuses on deliveries, other companies are looking to transport people. That’s a higher-stakes game than dropping off dinner, but the technology is the same, and it’s getting better all the time.

Now read:

• Lyft Launches Autonomous Electric ‘Robotaxis’ in Las Vegas
• The Future of Sensors for Self-Driving Cars: All Roads, All Conditions
• GM’s Cruise Origin Is an Autonomous Vehicle From the Future

September 9th 2022, 3:58 pm

This Muzzle, Er, Microphone Lets You Swear Around Friends, Family

ExtremeTech

How far would you go to yell at the internet without disturbing those around you? If you answered, “as far as necessary,” then a company called Shiftall has you covered. Specifically, it will cover your mouth… with a microphone. The company’s upcoming Mutalk microphone fits over your mouth to keep your online rantings quiet. It also looks like a dystopian science fiction nightmare. So, bonus?

Shiftall, which is a subsidiary of Panasonic, pitches the Mutalk as a gaming and VR accessory ready for the metaverse, but it’s really just a fancy wireless microphone. The chassis attaches to the user’s face with straps that look like they should not interfere with VR headsets or headphones. Inside is a microphone that picks up your voice, which is transmitted over Bluetooth to a phone, computer, or headset. 

Mutalk is designed to detect when it’s being worn, allowing it to automatically begin broadcasting over Bluetooth. To the person on the other end of the voice chat, you’ll sound normal — maybe even better than usual considering the sound isolation of the Mutalk. To anyone in the room with you, your conversation should be difficult or impossible to overhear. Shiftall says that the Mutalk can lower speech volume in a room by about 30 decibels, ensuring you won’t disturb those around you. Although, I would counter that the visual effect of wearing this thing is nothing if not disturbing. 

This gaming accessory, as weird as it may look, is not without precedent. There’s a similar device called a stenomask, which features a microphone inside a soundproof enclosure. Court reporters sometimes use them to make real-time transcriptions in a courtroom so as not to interrupt the proceedings. These devices are usually held in place by hand, but some do have straps that make them more like the Mutalk. 

Shiftall first teased this product at CES in early 2022, but the company’s Japanese store is currently accepting reservations to purchase. There’s no movement on the US side, and Shiftall has not confirmed when it will finally be available. On that day, surely, the metaverse will become real.

Now read:

• Meta Increasing Quest 2 Price by $100 on August 1st, Will Include Beat Saber
• Quest 2 Add-On Increases VR Immersion by Making You Suffocate
• Farmer Uses VR to Make Cows Think They’re in a Green Pasture

September 9th 2022, 1:54 pm

Sony: Microsoft’s Call of Duty Guarantee for Playstation ‘Inadequate’

ExtremeTech

Microsoft is facing opposition in its quest to acquire Activision Blizzard, and the heat is coming from a predictable source: gaming rival Sony. According to Sony, Microsoft’s assurances on the availability of Call of Duty on PlayStation are “inadequate on many levels.” While Sony doesn’t get to decide if the deal goes through, regulators will have to take into account how the $68.7 billion takeover could affect the gaming industry. 

Microsoft has been on a tear lately, having already scooped up Bethesda parent company ZeniMax. That gives it control over popular franchises like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Doom. Picking up Activision Blizzard adds StarCraft, Diablo, and notably, Call of Duty. The military shooter is one of the most popular game franchises in the world, selling more than 400 million units in the last 20 years. There’s also the free-to-play Call of Duty Mobile, which has raked in $1 billion for the developer. 

When Microsoft announced the purchase, it said that Call of Duty (COD) would remain on PlayStation, at least for a while. Microsoft’s gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently told The Verge that Microsoft was committed to keeping COD on PlayStation for “several more years” beyond the current agreement, which is set to expire around 2024. 

In a statement to GamesIndustry.biz, PlayStation head Jim Ryan has elaborated on what “several” means. According to Ryan, Microsoft is only promising Sony three additional years of Call of Duty releases, placing the end date at roughly 2027. That could mean six more PlayStation COD games (including the upcoming Modern Warfare 2) if the developer can keep up its yearly cadence. With the inevitable delays that come from major business shakeups, future releases could be delayed, delivering less tactical shooting action to Sony customers before Microsoft pulls the plug. 

Spencer has said that its offer to Sony goes “well beyond” typical licensing agreements. Sony, however, has claimed in court filings that Call of Duty is so popular that it might as well be a gaming category of its own. Microsoft downplays the importance, but look at how much Microsoft is willing to pay for Activision Blizzard. It clearly feels there’s a lot of value there, and a big chunk of it is undoubtedly Call of Duty. 

Regulators like the Federal Trade Commission in the US and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority have yet to make a decision. If Sony’s lawyers can convince a major regulator that the deal is bad for the industry, it’s possible the acquisition could be canceled. However, Microsoft’s lawyers will be working equally hard to make the case that it should go through. We might not know for sure until well into next year.

Now read:

• Overwatch 2, Diablo IV Delayed Indefinitely
• Activision Lawsuit Demands End to ‘Frat Boy’ Company Culture
• Sony: Microsoft Acquiring Call of Duty ‘Could Influence Users’ Console Choice’

September 9th 2022, 11:40 am

Intel Confirms Raptor Lake Launch to Include Six CPUs

ExtremeTech

Intel is on the cusp of launching its 13th Generation Raptor Lake CPUs. These chips are an evolution of its Alder Lake architecture, with more efficiency cores, higher clocks, and other mild upgrades—the sort of “tock” refinement of a technology we’ve seen in previous years. As the company prepares to launch, it’s begun training its sales staff with new talking points for Raptor Lake. This obviously involves a lot of Powerpoint, along with conference calls with global sales teams. The folks over at Igor’s Lab have gotten ahold of Intel’s sales deck, allowing us to see its “go to market” strategy for Raptor Lake. Overall there’s nothing too surprising here, but it does show us what Intel considers the defining features of the new platform.

The company confirms it’s launching with six CPUs: The Core i9-13900, i7-13700, and i5-13600. All six CPUs will be offered in both K and KF variants, with K being unlocked and KF being unlocked and without an integrated GPU. We also see the spec differentiation here, as only the flagship CPU has Thermal Velocity Boost at “up to” 5.8GHz. This will allow a single core to reach those clocks if there’s enough thermal and voltage headroom. Additionally, we see that only the i9 and i7 SKUs offer Turbo Boost Max 3.0. This allows two cores to boost to the specified clocks, if there’s ample power and cooling.

That feature does not appear in the Core i5 models, though they can boost to 5.1GHz for the performance cores. That’s a 200MHz boost over the Alder Lake variant. The Core i9 gets a 500MHz boost clock, uh, boost, and the Core i7 gets a 400MHz maximum clock increase. The chart below also confirms a maximum TDP of 253W for the Core i9 and i7 variants. This will be going up against AMD’s 170W Ryzen 9 7950X and 7900X CPUs, with a maximum of 230W. Intel is rumored to offer an “extreme performance” mode on some Z790 boards that will lift this restrictor, allowing for up to 350W of juice to be consumed.

Overall the banner features of Raptor Lake, according to slides obtained by Igor’s Lab, include more efficiency cores, faster memory support, better motherboard compatibility than AMD, more cache, and faster performance cores. Starting at the top, the more cores thing is simple; it’s adding eight more efficiency cores to the i9 CPU, for a total of 16. This will allow for Intel’s first 32-thread CPU in the Core i9-13900K as the performance cores are hyper-threaded. Finally, it’ll be able to compete thread-to-thread with AMD’s Zen 4.

As far as memory goes, Raptor Lake will support DDR5 5600 MT/s, compared with Alder Lake’s maximum of 4800 MT/s. It will also support DDR4 for budget-friendly builds, which is a big selling point compared with the DDR5-only Zen 4. It’s unclear what AMD’s target is as far as memory speeds go but 6000 MT/s has already been discussed as the sweet spot. Either way, “better compatibility” than AMD is a legit point here. The same goes for its motherboard support, as it will work with older 600 series motherboards. That’s not the case for Zen 4, which requires an all-new motherboard purchase, along with new memory.

On the cache front, Intel is taking a page from AMD’s playbook. It’s increased both L2 and L3 cache for Raptor Lake. For L2, it used 1.25MB per performance core in Alder Lake. That’s been increased to 2MB per core, for a total of up to 32MB. It’s also doubled the L2 on the efficiency cores from 2MB to 4MB per, and that’s shared between four core clusters. L3 has been increased from 30MB of shared memory to 36MB total.

The new performance cores are called Raptor Cove, as opposed to Alder Lake’s Golden Cove cores. They’re made on a refined Intel 7 process, allowing for higher clocks. The efficiency cores, called Gracemont, are unchanged, but there are more of them.

The only other significant change Intel is pushing is more PCIe 4.0 lanes compared with Alder Lake, going from 12 to 20. At the same time, it’s reducing the number of PCIe 3.0 lanes from 16 to eight. PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 lanes to the CPU are unchanged at four and 16, respectively. The Z790 chipset will offer one additional USB 3.2 lane, which makes five versus four on the Z690.

All in all, a mild upgrade, as expected. However, it might be just what Intel needed to do before it moves onto its “disaggregated” architecture with Meteor Lake. Raptor Lake was always a stop-gap before Intel takes a huge step forward with its first tile-based processor. Despite its evolutionary design, leaked benchmarks have shown it making impressive gains over Alder Lake. How that will fare against an all-new AMD architecture remains to be seen.

AMD is launching Zen 4 on Sept. 27. Intel is rumored to be launching around the same time, as it looks to steal AMD’s thunder.

Now Read:

• Intel May Drop TSMC’s 3nm tGPU From Meteor Lake
• Intel CEO: Chips Will Have 1 Trillion Transistors by 2030
• Intel Shows Off Tile-Based Meteor Lake, Ponte Vecchio CPUs at Vision Event

September 9th 2022, 10:55 am

Tim Cook’s Solution to Green Bubbles Is to Just Buy an iPhone

ExtremeTech

At Vox Media’s Code 2022 conference on Wednesday, a journalist asked Cook how Apple could improve communication between its own users and Android’s. “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy into that,” Cook said. When the journalist dug in further, saying he had trouble sending videos to his mother’s Android phone, Cook joked: “Buy your mom an iPhone.”

With the green-vs-blue bubble dichotomy having re-emerged across the internet in recent weeks, some hoped Apple would eventually give in and adopt RCS (“Rich Communications Service”). RCS would improve interoperability between Apple and Android devices, eliminating the modern bubble war and eliminating warp when photos and videos are sent between operating systems. Last month Android launched a web campaign urging Apple to make the switch. The mobile operating system’s website educated users of both smartphone classes on how Apple’s standard, SMS/MMS (“Short Message Service” and “Multimedia Messaging Service”), creates more problems than it solves. The campaign even prompted visitors to use the hashtag #GetTheMessage on social media to raise awareness.

But Apple appears to be flat-out refusing to budge on its SMS/MMS stance. Cook’s response about a lack of interest from Apple users in switching to RCS might look like a cheap defense, but he’s probably right. If you’re an iPhone user, you’re probably comfortable using iMessage, especially if the people you chat with most also have iPhones. Most of the problems that arise when Apple and Android users text each other are felt by the latter—even if behind the scenes, the Apple user is the one who suffers from a lack of end-to-end encryption.

At this point, it’s obvious that Apple wants its users to continue pushing friends and family to “convert to iPhone” (as Cook himself said at Code 2022). In fact, emails revealed during the 2020 Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit showed that Apple had at one point come close to adopting RCS, then dropped the issue because “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” If that doesn’t make Apple’s reasoning clear enough, nothing will.

Now Read:

• Google Announces Oct. 6 Event for Pixel 7, Pixel Watch, Nest Devices
• SharkBot Malware Reappears in the Google Play Store
• Apple Unveils iPhone 14 Lineup, Watch Ultra, New Emergency Services

September 9th 2022, 10:11 am

Apple to Use Globalstar for SOS Satellite Communication on iPhone 14

ExtremeTech

The new feature is owed to an updated wireless chipset exclusive to the iPhone 14/Plus and 14 Pro/Max. Apple didn’t disclose exactly how users will initiate satellite SOS (i.e. via lock screen widget or an app of its own), but it did show a number of options users can select in a crisis: vehicle issue, sickness or injury, crime, lost or trapped, and fire. Users will be instructed to point their iPhone toward a satellite above—something Apple built an orientation interface to help users with. Once connected, the interface will notify first responders of the user’s location and tell the user to keep their phone pointed in the satellite’s direction.

The interface will also offer a few quick messages users can select to communicate with first responders while they wait. Each signal conveyed via satellite will bounce down to a ground station, which will relay the message to a public safety access point (PSAP), or emergency communications center. But not all PSAPs support text-to-911. Smaller PSAPs often surround the exact types of places where you might get lost or injured without cell service, like mountain ranges and rural areas. They also receive sparse funding and are slower to adopt new technologies when compared with larger PSAPs. (I say this as someone who worked for one of the country’s largest PSAPs before moving to one that covered a mountainous 16 square miles.)

Apple’s solution to this problem is to build and staff local relay stations, which will orally communicate information to public safety agencies without text-to-911 capabilities. This still creates a delay—and room for error—in the communication process, but given that stranded iPhone users wouldn’t otherwise get much help out of their phones, it’s certainly better than nothing. That being said, the service is only free with a new iPhone purchase for the first two years; after that, users will be expected to pay for access to the feature themselves.

Though Apple didn’t say which satellite company it was contracting to support the feature, SEC filings from Wednesday confirm that Globalstar will be offering iPhone users the satellite connectivity they’ll need to reach first responders in a pinch. Globalstar followed up this news by saying it was allocating 85 percent of its current and future network capacity to Apple, as well as prioritizing iPhone SOS activity.

Satellite SOS accompanies one other new safety feature exclusive to the Apple Watch Series 8, iPhone 14, and 14 Pro: crash detection. Using an advanced gyroscope and a new dual-core accelerometer, these devices detect when a user has experienced a crash and alert emergency contact and public safety services if the user doesn’t intervene. As of now, this feature does not appear to mesh with satellite SOS.

Now Read:

• Google Announces Oct. 6 Event for Pixel 7, Pixel Watch, Nest Devices
• Samsung Ad Talks Smack Ahead of iPhone 14 Launch
• Google Wants Future Android Apps to Work Across a Range of Devices

September 9th 2022, 9:27 am

This Week in Space: Crickets, Cosmic Spiders, and Sass About the SLS

ExtremeTech

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to This Week in Space. Normally we’ve got a diverse set of space news and rocket launches to discuss. But since the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s inaugural launch was scrubbed twice last week, it’s like everyone at NASA is running around with their hair on fire. They’ve been mum since Saturday, and in the silence, you can practically hear crickets chirping. The media finally got a briefing update last night. We’ve also got an update from NASA’s DART asteroid mission. And we’ll also discuss reports that the James Webb telescope captured a “cosmic tarantula.”

This post is 100% free of actual spiders, we promise.

Artemis Hunting Ghosts in the System After Failed SLS Launch

After scrubbing multiple launches last week during countdown, NASA took a short pause on trying to launch the Artemis 1 mission. They’re chasing ghosts in the Space Launch System’s hydrogen cryofuel system. There are also cracks in the rocket’s insulating foam.

At first, everyone thought the Artemis team would have to roll the SLS rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. That’s such an ordeal that it would have delayed the launch until at least well into October. However, the Artemis 1 team has chosen to make its repairs to the rocket’s hydrogen systems right there on the launchpad.

It makes sense; these problems happen when they try to go live. Hydrogen fueling is this rocket’s Achilles’ heel. Testing in situ lets the Artemis team hone right in with root cause analysis. And there’s no shortage of problems to solve. The agency has never completed a successful fueling test of the SLS. There’s a bad temperature sensor in one engine. The hydrogen fuel line got over-pressurized, which NASA is marking up as operator error. (They are, however, acknowledging that the administration rushed the operators, and rushing created problems.) And there’s a bad seal on the “quick disconnect” for the core stage’s hydrogen line. Let’s call it a target-rich environment.

Listen. All this intensive hydrogen troubleshooting is great. And the folks at NASA are legends for their resourcefulness. But I can’t be the only person who gets the bad kind of goosebumps when I hear “…a crack in the tank’s insulation.”

Do y’all know what a BLEVE is? It stands for Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion. When you heat up a tank too far, the liquid inside can start to boil. It pressurizes the tank. When the tank finally lets go, the escaping gases can suddenly ignite in an explosion of remarkable force. And I get that I’m a layman here, but if the crack in the rocket’s fuel tank insulation exposes the tank to the heat of atmospheric drag. To paraphrase, you are having a bad problem, and you will not go to space today.

Oh Sure, Blame It On the Sensors

If you say “Senate Launch System” three times into a mirror, Richard Shelby (R-Ala) will appear and start defending the SLS’s viability in light of SpaceX’s clearly superior business proposition, and justifying the cost-plus contracts and mandatory fees issued to defense contractors like Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne. Besides, he’d say, it’s a jobs program.

The jobs part, at least, is true. The SLS created almost 25,000 jobs, distributed throughout all 50 states. (Never mind that over 13,000 of those jobs went to Alabama.) And we’re reusing the RS-25 engines from the Shuttle, which is great because they were supposed to be reusable. Except we’re “reusing” these RS-25 engines once for each SLS launch, and then throwing them out. So now, thanks to acts of Congress and their attendant defense-industry secret handshakes, Ars Technica wrote back in 2020: “NASA is spending at least three times more for an engine that was previously built for reuse, but now is expendable. And in the news release, Aerojet brags about reducing the price of these engines.” (emphasis original)

Even lowball estimates peg the cost of a single SLS launch at upwards of $870 million. One analyst calculated that on the high end, an SLS launch could run $2 billion or more. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy can lift two-thirds of the SLS rocket’s throw weight, at one-twentieth the price per launch. SpaceX is also developing a super-heavy-lift rocket called Starship. It’ll be the tallest and most powerful rocket humans have ever built.

NASA already has plans to involve Starship in future Artemis missions. And the agency’s Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew programs have long since been courting (and funding) private space companies. NASA’s long-term mission is to become “one of many” entities with a presence in orbit and on the moon.

‘You Don’t Want to Light That Candle Until It’s Ready’

NASA’s official YouTube channel currently has the moon rocket scheduled for another launch window that opens on Sept. 19. However, Jim Free, the agency’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, said today (Sept. 8) that the Artemis 1 moon mission could launch on Sept. 23 or Sept. 27. But the Kennedy Space Center is uncertain enough that the rocket will be ready that they’re pointedly not selling tickets.

Those launch dates depend on a whole array of conditions, including one that could delay the launch still further. NASA has to get an extension on the deadline for checking batteries on the rocket’s flight termination system (FTS), which is designed to destroy the rocket if it veers off course during launch. That’s right: this rocket actually has a self-destruct system. And the US Space Force requires NASA to test it every three weeks. However, that testing process would require the Artemis team to roll the SLS rocket back to the VAB. This would incur weeks of additional delay.

“We don’t launch until it’s right,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a briefing after the agency first scrubbed the SLS launch, on August 29th. “You don’t want to light that candle until it’s ready to go.”

Webb Telescope Captures ‘Cosmic Tarantula’

In keeping with the James Webb space telescope’s spidery name, NASA and ESA officials announced this week that Webb has captured a ‘cosmic tarantula.’

NASA and the ESA both say that the image “resembles a burrowing tarantula’s home, lined with [its] silk.” (Personally, I think that’s a reach, but sure, let’s go with it.)

This ‘cosmic tarantula’ is actually a stellar nursery called 30 Doradus. It’s the largest and brightest star-forming region in the entire Local Group. It’s also home to some of the hottest, most massive stars in the visible universe. Researchers hope to use Webb’s exquisite resolution to study the region in detail, because its stellar chemistry may reveal insights about the early universe.

NASA Picks Axiom Space for First Artemis Space Suits

Earlier this summer, NASA picked two different companies to build next-generation space suits for future astronauts: Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space. The agency selected Axiom Space to build the suits that future Artemis III astronauts will wear. While Artemis II will have humans aboard, it will orbit the moon without touching down. Artemis III will be the first time humans set boots on the lunar surface in more than 50 years. According to NASA, this specific contract is worth $228.5 million. The space agency expects to award as much as $3.5 billion to Collins and Axiom to build space suits through 2034.

“NASA is proud to partner with commercial industry on this historic mission that will kickstart the United States building a lasting presence on the surface of the Moon,” said the manager of NASA’s Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility program, Lara Kearney. “What we learn on Artemis III and future missions on and around the Moon will pave the way for missions to Mars. Spacesuits enable us to literally take that next step.”

NASA has already laid down the requirements and specifications for future manufacturers to achieve. Axiom Space will also have to test the suits in a space-like environment planet-side before they’re actually used for a mission. But the agency badly needs new space suits. The suits currently aboard the ISS are decades old. Suits intended for lunar EVA undoubtedly have some specific requirements, and there’s not a lot of Apollo-era hardware still in service. While we can all be very glad about that, it does mean NASA is starting from scratch.

DART Glimpses Its Final Destination

In just under three weeks, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will slam a 1,340-pound weight into a small moon to see what happens. DART is heading for the double asteroid Didymos and its tiny moonlet, Dimorphos. (NASA calls the moonlet ‘Didymoon.’ 💙) This week the DART probe caught the first glimpse of its target, or at least its target’s primary body. The following image is a composite of 243 separate images, courtesy of DART’s camera, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO).

“This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques,” said Elena Adams, the DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. “The quality of the image is similar to what we could obtain from ground-based telescopes, but it is important to show that DRACO is working properly and can see its target to make any adjustments needed before we begin using the images to guide the spacecraft into the asteroid autonomously.”

Smashing Things, For Science

While slamming heavy objects into asteroids is fun in any context, NASA has some practical science objectives it wants to accomplish. The question of whether we can deflect a potentially deadly asteroid before it strikes Earth is one of the “Low Likelihood / High Impact” type of events that keeps astronomers awake at night.

After DART hits Didymos, we’ll measure the results of the impact and how it changes Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos. Earlier this summer, my colleague Ryan Whitwam discussed predictions that Dimorphos might resemble a loose rubble pile as opposed to a rocky body. If that’s true, DART’s impact could radically reshape or even destroy the moonlet. Regardless of the outcome, we’ll know more about the makeup of asteroids in orbit around the sun and what it might take to deflect one.

DART will continue to fine-tune its trajectory as it approaches Didymos with multiple orbital corrections over the next few weeks. NASA predicts the probe will reach its target on Sept. 26.

Skywatchers Corner

Tonight (Friday, Sept. 9), if you’re outside around 10 p.m. EDT, look to the southeast. Two big, bright points of light should be visible, one on either side of the nearly full moon: Jupiter and Saturn, escorting Luna through the night sky. And on the morning of the 11th, if you have clear weather, you can find the moon just a few degrees away from Jupiter in the sky. With a pair of binoculars, you might even be able to make out the gas giant’s four largest moons, as “little starlike points of light.”

Two weeks from today, the Northern Hemisphere will celebrate the autumn equinox. For those in the Southern Hemisphere, the September equinox marks the start of spring. The equinoxes are a twice-yearly celestial holiday, when the lengths of day and night are equal. But they don’t necessarily mean anything about the weather. The entire continental U.S. can back me up on this because we’re all broiling under yet another heat wave. It might be the autumn equinox in a couple of weeks, but that doesn’t mean the seasons have changed from summer to fall.

History and religion are full of solar and lunar holidays. But these days are more than just an excuse for a feast. Take note of exactly where the Sun appears to rise and set on the equinoxes. Those points mark the cardinal directions of due east and due west, respectively.

See you next week!

Now Read

• NASA Identifies 13 Lunar Regions Where Artemis 3 Crew Could Land
• NASA’s Revamped Eyes on the Solar System Lets You Explore Space in Your Browser
• Moonshadow: China Mulls Fleet of Orbital Telescopes

September 9th 2022, 9:27 am

A Nearby Super-Earth May Be Suitable for Life

ExtremeTech

The number of planets in just our galaxy is unfathomably large, but so far, scientists have only confirmed about 5,000 of them. Even this small fraction of the total has revealed intriguing worlds, some of which might even support life. You can add two more to the list today. An international team of astronomers, led by astrophysicist Laetitia Delrez from the University of Liège, has confirmed two new super-Earth planets in the habitable zone of a star just 100 light years away. 

The team went planet-hunting based on data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which scans the sky for evidence of exoplanets transiting in front of their host stars. These observations need to be verified, though, and that’s where the University of Liège initiative began. The researchers turned the ground-based SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes toward a star known as LP 890-9 (also known as TOI-4306), hoping to confirm an exoplanet. They found two.

LP 890-9 is notable not only because it’s close (in astronomical terms), but also because it’s a very cool red dwarf star. It’s the second coolest star confirmed to have a planetary system after TRAPPIST-1. That means LP 890-9b and LP 890-9c (also called SPECULOOS-2c) are potentially habitable even though they orbit very close to the star. LP 890-9b completes an orbit in just 2.7 Earth days, and LP 890-9c is a bit farther out at 8.5 days. Both are well inside the orbit of Mercury when compared with our solar system. 

The planets are roughly the same size, about 40 percent larger than Earth. That puts them squarely in the super-Earth category, which means they probably have rocky surfaces rather than a thick gaseous envelope like the small-ish gas giants Neptune and Uranus. In the case of bonus exoplanet LP 890-9c, it appears to be in the star’s habitable zone with temperatures that support liquid water—it’s “potentially habitable,” in the words of the research team. These worlds would be subjected to piercing radiation and frequent solar flare effects orbiting so close to a star, but wherever there is water on Earth, we find life.  

The researchers cite the solar system as one ripe for follow-up observations. A nearby solar system with two closely orbiting rocky planets, they say, is an ideal target for the James Webb Space Telescope, which just recently returned its first direct observations of an exoplanet. Its sensitive infrared optics might be able to help characterize the atmospheres of these exoplanets, if indeed they have any. That would tell us a great deal about an increasingly common category of alien worlds.

Now read:

• Webb Telescope Just Detected Carbon Dioxide on a Distant World for the First Time
• Astronomers Discover ‘Water World’ Perfect for Observation With Webb Telescope
• Astronomers Prepare to Turn Webb Telescope Toward Nearby Super-Earths

September 9th 2022, 8:08 am

SharkBot Malware Reappears in the Google Play Store

ExtremeTech

The best way to prevent malware from creeping onto your Android phone is to only download apps from the official Play Store. However, no method is foolproof. Malware creators occasionally find a way to hide malware in Google’s repository, at least for a little bit. Earlier his year, security researchers spotted a malicious software package called SharkBot spreading through the Play Store. It was stamped out, of course, but now it’s back with a vengeance. 

In the early days of the Play Store, Google would allow every app to go live with minimal oversight. Slowly, it has ratcheted up its automated and human-powered checks, which makes it very difficult to upload a known piece of malware. So, most malware campaigns today attempt to distribute a seemingly innocuous app that then downloads a malicious payload. That’s what SharkBot does. 

When originally detected in February 2022, SharkBot dropper was ironically pretending to be an antivirus app. It used Android’s Accessibility service to download and install its malicious code without user interaction, giving the creators access to banking information, keystrokes, and even the ability to take over a phone completely. The latest version even adds a feature to steal login cookies so the attackers can access user accounts. 

The new dropper doesn’t have the same installation trick. Google has started cracking down on apps that use the Accessibility service for exactly this reason. The same systems that help disabled people use their phones can be hijacked to install malware without the user’s knowledge. Now, apps that call for Accessibility need to have a good reason, and Google will boot apps that don’t. Instead, the new SharkBot dropper downloads the malware, which masquerades as a fake security update and has to be installed by the user. 

Since the new dropper can’t use Accessibility to get the job done, it relies on the user to manually allow unknown sources and install the dangerous code. That’s much less likely, but it still happens. The dropper popped up in several listings, including a phone cleaner and a security suite (both now deleted). They have tens of thousands of downloads, so probably at least some of those people went through all the steps to install the malware. 

Security researchers at Fox-It, who detected SharkBot, believe that the ongoing development means we can expect it to continue sneaking into the Play Store. If any app asks you to manually install something, you probably want to go the other way and uninstall the whole thing.

Now read:

• Google Warns of Sophisticated Malware Distributed With The Help of ISPs
• Android Antivirus Apps Are Useless — Here’s What to Do Instead
• Clever Malware Masquerades as Windows 11 Installer

September 8th 2022, 2:45 pm

Researchers Release 8K Footage of the Decaying Titanic

ExtremeTech

New 8K footage reveals previously uncaptured details of the sunken ship in all its haunting glory. OceanGate Expeditions, a company that specializes in using submersible vessels to “explore and document” the seafloor, conducted an undersea Titanic visit earlier this year. Its crew, which included six citizen explorers, used a submersible called Titan to reach the ship. With room for up to five occupants, the titanium and carbon fiber submersible is the only vessel in the world capable of reaching 4,000 meters (or 2.5 miles) undersea.

The crew’s visit (and the resulting video) offered unprecedented visibility into the Titanic’s architecture. For the first time, the crew was able to make out the words “Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd” on the ship’s portside anchor—a detail Titanic scholar and expedition veteran Rory Golden, who was part of the expedition, had never witnessed before. The crane used to lift the massive 15-ton anchor still resting on the deck can be seen early on in the video, which OceanGate shared on YouTube late last month. The second half of the video reveals three round structures, which Titanic diver and crew member PH Nargeolet says were used to feed the docking ropes to shore when the ship was at port. Perhaps the most gripping part of the crew’s 8K video is toward the beginning, when the Titanic’s decaying rail can be seen leaning away from the ship.

Every now and then a pair of green lights appears in the video. These are lasers spaced 10 centimeters apart, which are used to measure the size of objects viewed on-camera and through the Titan’s viewport. Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s president, says this technology—combined with the 8K video and the collaboration of multiple Titanic enthusiasts—will help its own scientists and maritime archaeologists study the ship’s decay more accurately. There’s no doubt the video will inspire a new era of Titanic scholars as well.

Thanks to the success of the company’s 2022 expedition, OceanGate is already working toward organizing a 2023 Titanic visit.

Now Read:

• An Astronomer Is Privately Funding a Search for Alien Technology on the Ocean Floor
• Billionaires are Searching for ‘Green’ Minerals Under Greenland’s Melting Ice
• Self-Propelled Robo-Fish Can Grab Microplastics Out of the Ocean

September 8th 2022, 2:45 pm

Archeologists Discover 17th Century Remains of Suspected ‘Vampire’

ExtremeTech

The skeleton was found during an excavation near the city of Bydgoszcz. Early medieval graves had been uncovered in the area more than a decade before, when archeologists found jewelry, semi-precious stones, and remnants of silk clothing that had been buried with the deceased. A team from Poland’s Nicholas Copernicus University returned to the region this year to seek out artifacts from a 17th-century cemetery that had been damaged over the years by agriculture.

While human remains are to be expected in a cemetery, anti-vampiric customs are a little less common. The archeologists uncovered the intact skeleton of an adult female whose neck was pinned to the earth with the blade of a sickle. A padlock was also on the big toe of the skeleton’s left foot.

The team instantly recognized that the woman had been buried by someone (or a group of people) who had suspected she was a vampire. Both the sickle and the padlock were placed there by design: the sickle to injure or sever her head if she began to rise from the dead, and the padlock to “symbolize the impossibility of returning.” Her large, protruding front tooth also suggests the woman’s appearance had startled those around her, prompting cruel or superstitious people to assume she were a vampire or a witch.

Back when people more habitually labeled their neighbors as supernatural beings, it was somewhat common to bury suspected evildoers in a way that prevented any potential return. This is why we often associate cinematic vampire-killing with a wooden stake through the heart. In specific German and Slavic cultures, suspected vampires would be decapitated prior to burial, with the head placed away from the body or between the feet. Some would be cremated, dismembered, or buried upside down for similar reasons. Still, a sickle placed over the deceased’s neck is a first for excavated Polish graves—even those from hundreds of years ago.

The suspected vampire from Bydgoszcz was, however, wearing a silk cap, suggesting some people in her community revered her. Silk was an extremely expensive material in the 1600s; according to the archeologists, the woman would have needed to enjoy some form of elevated social or financial status to have been able to afford the cap (or receive it as a gift). While many of the details surrounding the woman’s social life might remain a mystery, her remains are headed to the university, where more information about her physical condition might be uncovered.

Now Read:

• Scientists Turn Cockroach Into Solar-Powered Cyborg
• New Coating Keeps Surfaces Germ-Free for Months at a Time
• Scientists Have Discovered How to Break Down Some ‘Forever Chemicals’

September 8th 2022, 11:10 am

Sony’s Third PlayStation 5 Redesign Sheds More Weight, Uses Less Power

ExtremeTech

The PlayStation 5 is still hard to find in stores, but maybe you’ll be thankful it was almost impossible to buy at launch. Sony has revamped the hardware for a third time, and the latest revision appears to be noticeably better. According to a new teardown analysis, the latest model is lighter, cooler, and more power efficient. 

Just looking at a PS5, you won’t be able to tell the various hardware revisions apart. The only way to know for sure is to check the model number — the new “1200” PS5 should have a model number starting with 12, be it digital or disc. YouTuber Austin Evans got his hands on a unit fresh from Australia, which is one of the first places the new hardware has appeared. Evans previously compared the original 1000 and revised 1100 models, and now he’s adding the latest one to the mix. 

The 1100 that shipped last year had a smaller heatsink than the original, which had a monstrously large pile of metal inside. The 1100 slimmed that down dramatically, and the 1200 goes even further, with a smaller heatsink and an additional heat pipe. The motherboard has also been redesigned. It takes up less space, which leaves more metal exposed inside the case. Evans speculates this might have something to do with heat dissipation. Unfortunately, the new board places the CMOS battery under the heatsink. If you ever need to replace that, it’s going to require much more disassembly. 

Weight is not an important factor in a game console that’s just going to sit on a shelf, but it’s interesting how much mass the PS5 has shed in its brief time on the market. Evans says that the new (digital-only) model is 3.302 kilograms (7.28 pounds), versus 3.547 kilograms (7.82 pounds) for the 1100, and 3.817 kilograms (8.415 pounds) for the original. That’s a total loss of 1.1 pounds, or half a kilogram since the console launched. Thermal imaging also shows the heat spread out more evenly, and hot spots are less toasty than the 1100 or 1000. 

The reduction in weight is thanks to the slimmed-down heatsink, but the plastic shell is a bit more extensive to support the redesigned interior, which eats into the savings. In addition to being lighter, Evans shows that the 1200 model PS5 also draws less power. It sits at about 201W in a game, which is lower than the 1100 (229W) and 1000 (218W) models. 

If you’re in the market for a PS5, the new 1200 model is expected to start appearing on shelves soon. They probably won’t be there for long before they get snapped up — eBay sellers are still offering the console for several hundred dollars above retail. Sony’s prices are also going up in many places, but just the equivalent of $20-50. Still, this is the point in a console’s life cycle we should be seeing prices go down, not up. Meta also announced a price increase for the Quest 2 recently.

Now read:

• Sony Unveils DualSense Edge Wireless Controller
• Sony’s Revamped PlayStation Plus Launches in The US
• Sony: We Are Going to Build So Very Many PlayStations 5s

September 8th 2022, 10:24 am

Google Announces Oct. 6 Event for Pixel 7, Pixel Watch, Nest Devices

ExtremeTech

Google has largely given up on keeping its upcoming announcements secret. We already know it’s going to launch new phones, a watch, and other goodies this year, and now we know the full reveal will take place on Oct. 6. Google will have all the details on the new Pixel 7 phones, as well as the long-awaited Pixel Watch. There will also be some new Nest gear. 

Try as it might, Google couldn’t keep its smartphones from leaking in full prior to the announcement. Back in summer 2018, a whole shipment of Pixel 3 XL phones went on sale after they were “misplaced” in transit. Google hadn’t even announced the phone at that point. The following year, it revealed key features of the Pixel 4 months early, and it’s been sharing more with each successive generation. 

For the Pixel 7, Google offered a sneak preview at its I/O conference in May 2022. Google showed so much that there hasn’t been much new information gleaned from leaks. These phones will look similar to the Pixel 6 family with the large camera bar across the back, but the design looks more cohesive and refined. This is also the first time Google has stuck with a single design aesthetic for more than one generation. 

It's all coming together.

Join us live for #MadeByGoogle on October 6th at 10am ET.

Sign up for updates and add to your calendar: https://t.co/SAeNERjey0 pic.twitter.com/NaeUtChx7X

— Made By Google (@madebygoogle) September 6, 2022

Inside, the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro will have a new second-generation Tensor processor. Google’s first custom silicon debuted in the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, and it used the same flagship-level chip in the cheaper Pixel 6a. Tensor caused some early update issues with the Pixels, but it was overall an impressive showing for Google’s first custom mobile chip. Hopefully, the Tensor G2 is better still. 

The Pixel Watch was similarly pre-announced months ago. This device has the same curvy aesthetic as the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro — imagine an Apple Watch but round, and you have the Pixel Watch. Google’s wearable platform has struggled in recent years, propped up almost entirely by Fossil and Samsung. The latter just released a new batch of smartwatches running Google’s software, but the Pixel Watch won’t have Samsung’s UI — it’ll be pure Google. 

The event will also include some new Nest hardware, but it’s hard to get excited about that. Google’s stewardship of Nest has been marked by long delays in launching new hardware, confusing app splits, and missing features. This year, we’re expecting a new Nest Doorbell, a cheaper Chromecast HD, and a refreshed mesh router with Wi-Fi 6E support. 

Google’s hardware will do battle with Apple this holiday season, including the newly announced iPhone 14. Although, we all know who’s going to win that fight.

Now read:

• Google Pixel 7 Appears on eBay Six Months Early
• Fitbit Announces Google-Infused Sense 2, Versa 4 Smartwatches
• Android 13 Now Available for Google Pixel Devices

September 8th 2022, 9:39 am

Canada Is Working On the World’s Largest Geothermal Solar Lagoon

ExtremeTech

If you’re thinking the term “geothermal solar lagoon” looks at first like a jumble of buzzwords, you’re not the only one. But each aspect of the self-sufficient, environmentally-friendly destination is carefully planned. The center will be a large, open-air lagoon heated to 100.4 F (38 C) year-round. The heat will come from an “energy ecosystem” consisting of solar, air, and biomass resources, as well as built-in geothermal equipment. Under the lagoon will sit a thermal reservoir heated to 150 F (70 C) by both solar and geothermal energy.

This ecosystem will help power a village of condominiums called Soleils Village, which will contain 150 “Airbnb-type” residences for both short-term and long-term use. These Scandinavian-style residences will be arranged in circular neighborhoods nested within wooded areas near the lagoon. GeoLAGOON will also eventually get a restaurant and a second village called LagonVillage, in which 100 solar-powered “urban-style waterfront cottages” will sit closer to the water.

The project is inspired by Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, another geothermal lagoon and one of the 25 wonders of the world. Like the Blue Lagoon, GeoLAGOON hopes to draw in locals and tourists alike with the promise of an otherworldly spa experience that doesn’t negatively impact the environment and won’t require a connection to Hydro-Québec, the region’s public energy utility. But first, the project must be fully funded.

Approximately 80 percent of GeoLAGOON’s residences have been sold to investors so far. The firm’s goal is to sell all of the units to investors prior to beginning construction in winter 2023. While the idea of selling residences exclusively to investors might not be appealing to some, the firm says upfront cash is essential to its funding model, which strives to avoid “asking for subsidies.”

Should GeoLAGOON prove successful upon completion, the firm plans on constructing similar destinations in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and other parts of Quebec.

Now Read:

• Floating City in The Maldives Will Rise With The Sea Level
• Japan Successfully Produces Electricity With Kairyu Deep Sea Turbine
• Hawaii Startup Launches World’s First Ocean-Assisted Carbon Removal Plant

September 8th 2022, 9:39 am

Microsoft Adds 3 New Windows Tools in PowerToys v0.62

ExtremeTech

Microsoft revived its storied PowerToys toolkit for Windows in 2019, and it wasn’t a one-time thing. Microsoft has continued updating PowerToys, and the latest version adds three more tools to improve on-screen measurements, typing accents, and copying text. All the power is yours with a single install from the Microsoft Store. 

The update to v0.62 brings the total number of tools to 15, some of which are surprisingly robust. PowerRename is a personal favorite, which is handy if you need to manage a large number of files and you’re not great about naming conventions. But that’s old news. Of the three new tools, two of them are enabled by default. 

As soon as you get PowerTools installed, you’ll be able to access the new Screen Ruler and text extractor. The ruler appears after pressing Win + Shift + M, but it’s easy to miss at the very top of the screen. The buttons let you choose between a measurement box or lines that snap to the UI elements on your screen. You can even change the threshold at which it detects edges by spinning the mouse wheel. 

The Text Extractor is behind the Win + Shift + T shortcut. This will bring up a cursor with which you can highlight the text in any image on the screen. It can be a photo or just a list of options in another program. If the text is visible on your screen, Text Extractor can copy it to your clipboard in a snap. 

The last new tool is Quick Accent, and you’ll have to enable this one in the PowerToys settings. It’s only useful if you find yourself needing to enter accented characters. It’s a little tricky to use: You must press and hold the character you want to accent, and then hit the Quick Accent hotkeys before the character starts repeating. This brings up a selection of the available accented forms of that letter, which you select with the arrows. Release the key, and PowerToys inserts your selection. 

A few of the older tools have also gotten updates and bug fixes. So, if you dropped PowerToys because something was busted, it might be time to check it out again. PowerToys is free to download, and it’s probably safe to get used to having it around. It’s persisted for a few years across two versions of Windows, so we can only hope it’ll stick around for the long haul. 

Now read:

• Microsoft Releases First Windows 10 PowerToys Add-Ons
• Microsoft Testing PC Game Pass Widget for Windows 11
• Microsoft Testing ‘Taskbar Overflow’ Feature for Power Users

September 8th 2022, 9:39 am

Apple Unveils iPhone 14 Lineup, Watch Ultra, New Emergency Services

ExtremeTech

Apple held its Far Out event today, and the company launched several new bits of hardware. It announced upgraded iPhones as expected, and also announced a brand new Apple Watch Ultra designed for extreme sports enthusiasts. It also introduced several new features designed to improve your personal safety in the case of an emergency.

The iPhone 14 Pro/Max

Apple has made some big changes to its phone lineup this year, and it will undoubtedly annoy some people. For the first time, it’s segmented its Pro line from the non-Pro with different hardware. Previously, Apple put the same SoC in both phones but differentiated the Pro with more camera options, a ProMotion display, and other features. This year, that changes. The regular 14 gets the same A15 Bionic SoC from the iPhone 13, while the Pro model gets a new A16 chip built on TSMC’s 4nm node.

The iPhone Pro has a new pill-shaped “notch.” However, instead of it being a static shape, Apple has totally redesigned how it behaves. In addition to housing the front-facing sensors and cameras, it’s also a notification center called Dynamic Island. The pill will expand in any direction to notify you of events such as pairing a device, an incoming call, or when music is playing. Tapping the “island” will open the app’s controls. It can track two different activities at once, so you can text while also watching a timer counting down and seeing what music is playing (see below). When you swipe up to close an app, it slides into the island, too. Apple says it’s a whole new way of interacting with the iPhone, and we believe it. It is definitely slick, and not something that was leaked previously.

Other big changes include a hugely upgraded 48MP rear main camera. That’s 4x the resolution of the regular iPhone 14, so it’s quite an upgrade. The Pro model will also feature an always-on display, which is paired with the 120Hz ProMotion display. Apple says it can still go all day on a charge, thanks to the A16’s increased efficiency. It says it has the capability of dropping the refresh rate down to 1Hz, which allows for it to have a long-lasting battery despite always being visible. The Pro and Pro Max will be available at the same price as their predecessors — $999 and $1,099 — starting Sept. 16, with pre-orders beginning this Friday, Sep.t 9.

iPhone 14 Plus

Anyone hoping Apple was going to launch an iPhone 14 Mini will be sorely disappointed to see Cupertino is going in the opposite direction. People seem to want bigger phones. So, instead of only offering an expensive Pro Max version for those who want a huge phone, it now has a 14 Plus. It’s the same size as the Pro Max, but features the same hardware as the regular 14, just with a 6.7-inch display. Standout features on the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus include the new safety system (see bottom), the A15 Bionic silicon, auto-focus on the front camera, and an “action mode” for stabilized video. The regular iPhone 14 starts at $799, with the Plus costing $100 more at $899. Pre-orders begin Sept.9, with the iPhone 14 also arriving on the 16th, but the Plus won’t arrive until Oct. 7.

Apple Watch Ultra

Though it was rumored the new Apple watch would simply be a Pro version, it turns out Apple went hardcore and made it the Ultra. It’s designed throughout for extreme conditions, and for those who enjoy dangerous adventures. It features an all-new design with a larger 49mm watch face surrounded by a titanium body. The display is mounted inside the chassis to prevent cracks if it hits the ground, and the buttons are all submerged within the casing as well. On the right side, the crown and side button are protected by a protruding enclosure to keep the elements out, and there’s a new “action” button on the left side that’s customizable. All three controls are designed to be accessible while wearing gloves too.

The new action button on the side lets you start a workout, set a waypoint, or switch to a different leg of a triathlon. Apple also designed a new face for the Ultra called Wayfinder that includes a compass along with specific location information. You can also switch to an evil-looking all-red night mode that should be easily visible at night, and the 2,000 nits display helps with that as well. That’s all aided by dual-band GPS, which Apple says is more accurate and reliable than its previous single-band technology.

Speaking of bands, Apple developed three new ones for specific purposes to ensure it stays put: Ocean, Trail, and Alpine. Each has a custom locking mechanism to make sure it will not move, even in extreme conditions. Apple says the watch will function in temperatures as cold as -68F, as well as climates up to 130F as well. Since adventuring can take a while, its battery lasts up to 60 hours. It will cost $799 and only comes in GPS and Cellular.

Emergency Services

Apple has added two new features to its iPhones that could save your life in certain scenarios. The first is called Crash Detection, and it’s self-explanatory. By using the sensors in the phone, it can detect if you’ve been involved in a car accident and automatically call 911 for you. The phone will show a prompt asking if you are okay, and if you don’t tap it, the phone will atomically dial EMS and notify your favorite contacts. It’s not clear how long you have to make this decision.

Additionally, Apple has added a way for you to call for help via satellite if you’re without cell service. Once you activate the signal the phone will tell you where to point it in order to communicate with a satellite above. From there, it will relay the signal to stations on the ground, then to infrastructure it’s created to send the signal to local authorities. This could be a godsend to folks trapped in the wilderness, as most of us have experienced the panic of being somewhere without cellular service before.

Apple says it will offer two years of this service for free for any purchase of an iPhone 14. However, it’s not clear what it will cost beyond that period, and older phones (even the iphone 13) won’t get it. Both crash detection and satellite rescue are offered on all iPhone 14 models.

At the event, the company also launched the Apple Watch Series 8 along with an upgraded SE model, as well as enhanced AirPods Pro. You can watch the event in its entirety right here.

Now Read:

• Apple Unveils Redesigned MacBook Air With M2 SoC
• Mac Studio Teardown Shows Massive Chip, Hints at Future Upgradeability
• It’s Not ‘Too Late’ for Intel to Beat the Apple M1

September 7th 2022, 4:54 pm

Mining CEO: There Isn’t Enough Lithium to Support Global EV Deadlines

ExtremeTech

Keith Phillips, CEO of Piedmont Lithium, recently conducted an interview with Yahoo Finance in which he stated there’d be a “real crunch” to get enough lithium for every region’s EV goals. “Yes, we’ll have enough, but not by that time,” he said. “We don’t have enough in the world to turn that much [lithium] production in the world by 2035.”

Phillips’ interview closely follows the announcement of two significant US emissions reduction goals. The Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law a few weeks ago, seeks to reduce carbon emissions by as much as 40 percent. It also incentivizes drivers to buy electric and fuel cell vehicles by providing up to $7,500 in tax credits (the full amount of which is only provided if the vehicle is manufactured in the US). Though it isn’t quite as environmentally aggressive as the failed Build Back Better Act, the Inflation Reduction Act is said to accomplish 90 percent of the former’s greenhouse gas reduction goals by 2035.

California legislators also made history recently by voting to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by the same year. This would ideally help slow climate change and have an incredibly positive impact on California’s air, which—between smog and wildfires—is some of the worst-quality air in the country. But many Californians are concerned about the state’s ability to handle a large increase in EVs; its energy grid is already struggling to the point that residents have been told to stop charging their EVs during certain times, turn up their thermostats, and think twice before running large appliances. Now they have the global lithium supply to worry about, too.

Lithium is an essential component of any EV battery. The average EV battery requires eight to 10 kilograms of the material, which is found in lithium carbonate, the ore sought by miners. There are only a few lithium mining operations based in the US, Piedmont Lithium being one of them. Piedmont plans on opening a lithium processing plant in Tennessee next year, which will help support the country’s impending demand by processing 30,000 metric tons of lithium per year. But that’s small potatoes compared with Australia, Latin America, and China, which conducted 98 percent of the world’s lithium mining in 2020. While these regions’ mining operations are expected to expand as much as 20 percent year over year, Phillips is skeptical that all the world’s EV goals will be able to remain on track.

“The world has changed. We’re now in an era where everyone’s going to want an electric car. The car companies can’t make them fast enough, and people are now looking for the lithium they need for the batteries to go in those electric cars,” Phillips told Yahoo. “Energy security is a national issue.”

Now Read:

• Lyft Launches Autonomous Electric ‘Robotaxis’ in Las Vegas
• France Will Lease EVs to Drivers for Just €100 Per Month
• Japan Successfully Produces Electricity With Kairyu Deep Sea Turbine

September 7th 2022, 11:26 am

US Army to Take Delivery of First Microsoft HoloLens Devices After Successful Tests

ExtremeTech

The controversial partnership goes back as far as 2018, when Microsoft won a $480 million contract to provide AR tech to the US military. Their mutual goal? To “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide, and engage before the enemy.” Some of Microsoft’s own employees protested the company’s bid for the contract, noting that it was inappropriate for the tech giant to develop tools that might eventually be used to wage war. But Microsoft went through with it anyway, and aside from this most recent exception, it’s been fumbling the bag ever since.

In March, Business Insider obtained an internal Microsoft memo in which an employee said the HoloLens team was “expecting negative feedback from the customer.” The employee went on to say soldiers’ expectations were low, which might work out in Microsoft’s favor given that the “delivery delta might not be big.” The HoloLens devices, which are referred to officially as Integrated Visual Augmentation Systems (IVAS), were said to adapt poorly to low light and possess degraded thermal imaging performance. Just a month later, a US government watchdog warned that the Pentagon might have wasted its time and money on the deal—the latter of which, at the time, had stacked up to $22 billion.

But things appear to have turned around since. Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Douglas Bush has reportedly cleared a delivery of an undisclosed number of devices, according to Bloomberg. Field testing has reportedly yielded encouraging results. “We did a good test and will learn from it,” Bush said in a statement. “The Army remains confident that the program will succeed.”

This doesn’t mean everything is all butterflies and rainbows, however. Army spokesperson Jamal Beck said in a separate statement that the branch is “adjusting its fielding plan to allow for time to correct deficiencies,” which weren’t elaborated on further. Nothing appears to have been said about Microsoft’s ability (or failure) to correct the aforementioned low light and thermal imaging issues, which are likely foundational to the Army’s potential success with the program. Bloomberg reports that the Pentagon’s director of operational tests and evaluation is working on a final test report slated for next month, at which point these adjustments might be revealed.

Now Read:

• Microsoft CEO: Selling HoloLens to Military Is a ‘Principled Decision’
• Microsoft Partners With VW on HoloLens 2
• IDC: Apple, Sony Will Challenge Meta’s VR Dominance in 2023

September 7th 2022, 11:26 am

NASA’s Revamped Eyes on the Solar System Lets You Explore Space in Your Browser

ExtremeTech

NASA released an impressive desktop app some years back called “NASA’s Eyes Visualization,” which allowed you to check out the solar system, along with all the spacecraft exploring it. But who installs programs anymore? It graduated to the web recently, and now it has an updated interface and tools. Simply head to the “Eyes on the Solar System” site on your device of choice, and start exploring. 

The main interface of the new site is simply the orbits of the planets, color-coded with highlights to show you their current positions. The layout is accurate for the current time, but you can use either buttons or the slider at the bottom to speed up or reverse time. It goes as high or as low as three years per second. You have to figure this revamp was supposed to coincide with NASA’s Artemis program, but that’s taking a bit longer than expected to get off the ground. 

In addition to the clickable overview of the solar system, there are several suggested “points of interest” on the side of the screen. These are all along the same lines as the Eyes on the Solar System engine, but some (like the Perseverance landing simulation) load on a separate page. 

You can click on anything rendered in the interface to zoom in and center your view. An info panel will also appear to give you relevant information and links to content and exploration history on NASA’s sites. Some planets also have unique rendering options. For example, clicking on Venus gives you the option of seeing it in its natural cloudy state or with radar surface mapping. 

Clicking on space probes is also a treat — the site shows you the spacecraft’s live location and mission milestones, plus there’s a tool to compare the size of various probes. This is going to feel weirdly familiar if you’ve ever played Kerbal Space Program. 

Eyes on the Solar System seems pretty platform agnostic. If you load the site on your phone, it will work just as well, if not better. The touch interface is handy for scrolling around and rotating around your target, and the points of interest collapse down out of the way to give you more room to explore in the palm of your hand. 

The updated Eyes tool, spotted by HotHardware, could be a cool way to keep tabs on Artemis 1 when it launches. It was already supposed to be in space, en route to the moon. However, a series of last-minute glitches have caused yet another delay. NASA’s new mega-rocket will have another chance to make its appearance in Eyes later this year.

Now read:

• ‘Ridiculously Detailed’ Photo of the Moon Uses Over 200,000 Images
• NASA Kicks Off Artemis Lunar Program with CAPSTONE Launch
• NASA Hopes to Pinpoint Water on the Moon With Tiny, High-Powered Laser

September 7th 2022, 10:10 am

Webb Telescope Captures Stunning ‘Cosmic Tarantula’

ExtremeTech

Since it opened for science in July, the James Webb space telescope has delivered a steady stream of images that are both beautiful and scientifically useful. Now, in keeping with Webb’s spidery theme, NASA reports that the space telescope has captured a “cosmic tarantula.” So, we’ve scoured the reports to bring you the very best of Webb’s spidery science images. Instead of squishing this cosmic tarantula, let’s zoom in on it and see what Webb really caught.

This post is 100% free of actual spiders, we promise. 

Webb’s cosmic tarantula is actually a stellar nursery called 30 Doradus, the largest and brightest star-forming region in the entire Local Group of galaxies nearest to our Milky Way. Some 161,000 light-years away from us in the Large Magellanic Cloud, it lies within the Tarantula Nebula. This stellar nursery is home to some of the hottest, most massive stars in the visible universe. So, what better target for a space telescope and its array of infrared and visible-spectrum instruments?

The Cosmic Tarantula, Through Webb’s Infrared Eyes

Viewed through Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the Tarantula Nebula “resembles a burrowing tarantula’s home, lined with silk.” (Personally, I think that’s a reach, but sure, let’s go with it.) The pale blue stars at the center of the image have hollowed out the nebula with their unrelenting stellar winds. Only the densest clouds of stardust and gas can withstand the new stars’ constant assault. Over the eons, these dense regions form “pillars” that point back toward their stellar nursery.

Hidden inside these celestial pillars, protostars wait to take their turn shaping the nebula. The JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) caught one such proto-star just as it began to cast off its veil of dust and gas. This star is so young it’s still shrouded in a cloud of insulating dust. It hasn’t even started blowing its bubble yet.

Through Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the region takes on a whole different look. MIRI sees longer wavelengths of light. That means cooler regions stand out over warmer ones. Stars fade into the background, while cool dust and gas begin to glow. Hydrocarbons light up the surfaces of the dust clouds in blue and purple.

The JWST’s excellent spectral resolution makes these observations so crisp. The space telescope can zero in on the specific wavelengths of light its operators want to capture, with extreme precision. But Webb’s angular resolution is also outstanding among its space telescope peers. NASA explains that Hubble “sees shorter wavelengths of light than Webb can, but Webb has a mirror that is 2.75 times larger in diameter than Hubble. If you do the math, this means Hubble has about the same angular resolution at 700 nm that Webb does at 2000 nm (a.k.a 2 microns).”

One reason astronomers are so keen on looking at the Tarantula Nebula is that it may open a window into the early history of the universe. The nebula’s chemical composition is very close to the gigantic star-forming regions from the early universe, when the cosmos reached a brilliant “high noon” of explosive star formation.

Now Read:

• NASA’s James Webb Telescope Snaps Its First Picture of an Exoplanet
• NASA Solves Voyager 1 Mystery Glitch, Finds Another
• Webb Telescope Captures Amazing ‘Grand Spiral’ of the Phantom Galaxy

September 7th 2022, 8:54 am

Intel Confirms New Details for Arc GPUs, Says It Will Launch ‘Very Soon’

ExtremeTech

The Intel PR team is still making the rounds with popular YouTubers, and recent interviews shed some light on the company’s launch plans for its Arc discrete GPUs. The PR duo of Tom Peterson and Ryan Shrout confirmed new details in recent appearances, and stated Intel’s GPUs will launch “very soon.”

The pair recently gave interviews to both Digital Foundry and PC Games Hardware to discuss Arc graphics. They have been doing this for the past month or so to help inform gamers about what to expect from Arc when it launches. They confirmed the US launch will involve two high-end SKUs: the A770 and A750. As expected, the A770 will be offered in both 8GB and 16GB versions, with a TDP target of 225W. The flagship A770 will offer performance slightly above the RTX 3060, but not quite RTX 3060 Ti levels, according to a transcript from Videocardz. It will be faster than the Radeon RX 6600 XT though. The A770 is likely to be priced around $349, with the A750 probably close to $279. The goal, it seems, is to beat AMD and Nvidia on price-to-performance. Its GPUs will likely be very close in outright FPS in certain games while costing slightly less. On top of that Intel will provide superscaling (XeSS), ray tracing, and AV1 encoding at a reasonable price. Now, whether its software stack will be comparable is up for debate.

The spokesmen also confirmed the importance of using resizable BAR. Whereas it’s considered optional for AMD and Nvidia GPUs, that is not the case here. Intel says if you don’t have that option on your motherboard, don’t buy an Intel GPU. The reps say Arc is optimized for large file transactions, which resizable BAR enables. Without it, your GPU will be stuck performing a lot of smaller file transfers. This supposedly reduces performance by up to 40 percent, so it’s quite a hindrance. This shouldn’t be an issue for most people, as it’s supported on the majority of motherboards made in the past few years. If you have a really old system, do your research before pulling the trigger. Intel says this is just how it is for Alchemist, but it’s working to change that on future architectures such as Battlemage.

As far as the launch goes, Intel is going to find itself mired in a flurry of hardware news if it doesn’t launch soon. Nvidia is rumored to announce its RTX 40-series at GTC on Sept. 19. AMD’s Zen 4 CPUs will also go on sale on Sept. 27. Intel says its GPUs will be available on its website at launch, but it’s not clear which partners it will have alongside it. Peterson did say there will be partners with custom boards at launch though. It was previously reported that Intel was having a tough time finding launch partners for Arc, so it’ll be interesting to see which companies are onboard. The Arc GPUs also might have limited availability at launch. However, given the currently plunging prices of GPUs, it seems unlikely people will wait very long to find an Arc GPU when they can pick up a Radeon or GeForce card on the cheap.

We’re cautiously optimistic about the Arc launch. It’s been years in the making and Intel has confirmed it’s in it for the long haul. However, it remains to be seen how Intel’s value proposition will hold up in the face of next-gen GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. There’s also the lingering question of the stability of its drivers. That will be a make-or-break part of its launch, as that seems like Intel’s Achilles heel right now. On a personal note, we’re just as tired as you probably are of the “it’s coming soon” announcements from Intel. In that light, the next post you see about this topic will be “it’s launching.” You have our word on that.

Now Read:

• Intel’s Arc GPUs Reports Clock Speeds Differently Than Nvidia, AMD
• Intel: Arc High-End Desktop GPU Launch ‘Now in Sight’
• Intel Roadmap Details Plans for Arc GPUs, New Cloud Gaming Service

September 7th 2022, 8:54 am

Scientists Turn Cockroach Into Solar-Powered Cyborg

ExtremeTech

Cockroaches have existed for hundreds of millions of years, and it’s often said they’ll go on living even if humanity nukes itself into oblivion. Before the roaches inherit the Earth, they are at the mercy of scientists who seem obsessed with turning them into cyborgs. The latest robo-roach advance utilizes a flexible solar cell to power a circuit that plugs right into the insect’s nervous system. Press a button, and the roach does as commanded. What could go wrong? 

Like many insects, roaches have a pair of sensory appendages called cerci — they’re the small antenna-like projections on the back end. These structures are like a mainline into the roach’s nervous system. Applying a small electrical impulse to one or the other can make the insect turn left or right, depending on which cerci is activated. Previous studies have shown that it’s possible to use electrical stimulation to essentially steer a roach around obstacles. 

While you don’t need a lot of power to drive a roach, even small batteries are heavy and bulky. Cockroaches have flexible abdomens, which can help them flip over or roll up if they should get stuck, and mounting electronics to them limits their locomotion and makes them less useful as robotic drones. A team from the Riken research institute in Japan sought to address this shortcoming with an innovative flexible solar cell. You can see the cell plastered on the Madagascar hissing cockroach’s abdomen, where it provides power to the electronics package without inhibiting the insect’s movement. 

The team tested numerous ultra-thin materials on which to build the solar cell. Eventually, they settled on an organic thin film with a pattern of adhesive and non-adhesive segments that preserve the hissing cockroach’s natural flexibility. According to the newly published study, the roach-mounted solar panel is capable of generating 17.2 mW of power, which is more than enough to power the backpack’s microcontroller. 

Getting a controllable roach with most of its natural mobility intact is just the start. If you want a useful cyborg, you need to add things like cameras and sensors, all of which require power. The solar panel as devised in this case isn’t powerful enough for cameras, but some low-power sensors could work. Scientists believe cyborg insects could eventually explore tight spaces and assist in rescue operations following a disaster, and they’ll only get more capable as electronics continue to get smaller and more flexible.

Now read:

• Scientists Discover Plastic-Eating Worms That Digest Styrofoam
• RoboFly Is the First Wireless Insectoid Robot to Take Flight
• Bee-inspired robot uses static electricity to land anywhere

September 7th 2022, 8:54 am

Valve Plans ‘Next-Gen’ Steam Decks, With Multiple Games In Development

ExtremeTech

Last week we covered Valve’s confirmation that there will eventually be a “Steam Deck 2.” The company snuck this into an online booklet introducing its console to four new Asian markets, where customers can now reserve Steam Decks for the first time. But Valve was pretty vague at the time, saying the Steam Deck was “a multi-generational product line” that will someday come in “new versions.” Now, in a new issue of Weekly Famitsu magazine translated by VGC, Steam Deck designer Greg Coomer has confirmed that future iterations of the console will come with some drastic changes.

“Unless something major changes, there will be a next generation of Steam Deck products in the future,” Coomer said. “The theme, size, and shape will change, and it might even become a streaming machine. Development of the Steam Deck will continue.” Later, Coomer mentioned this was because the Steam Deck is “an extension of the core Steam platform,” which has “many other uses besides this handheld device.” Developer Pierre-Loup Griffais expanded on Coomer’s statement by specifying that battery life and optimization were top-of-mind for future versions of the console.

Another Famitsu-Coomer interview reveals that Valve—whose spotlight has understandably been focused on its hardware—has “a lot of games” in development. “Game development is very important to Valve. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the percentage of employees involved in game development is high. A lot of people are involved,” Coomer said.

The developer, whose face was one of many referenced for Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman’s design, confirmed Valve “has more to say” about the beloved FPS franchise. Though this doesn’t necessarily mean Half-Life 3 will be the next title Valve publishes, it does mean there might be more to Freeman’s story beyond Half-Life: Alyx. Coomer also mentioned he would “like to make another Portal someday.”

It’s unknown whether Valve is focusing exclusively on established franchises or sprinkling in a few new ones. Before Alyx, Valve pushed out a couple of brief virtual reality experiences to promote its Index Controllers. Before that, it mainly focused on the next installments of a few popular titles, like Counter-Strike, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Valve’s one-offs, like Saliens, haven’t been particularly popular…but that doesn’t mean the company won’t have something new up its sleeve.

Now Read:

• Intel Says It’s Committed to Discrete Graphics Despite Rocky Arc Rollout
• Images Leak of Logitech’s Cloud Gaming Handheld
• eBay Collector Asks $1 Million for Almost Every Game Console Ever Made

September 6th 2022, 1:40 pm

Meta Announces Qualcomm Partnership for Custom VR Chipsets

ExtremeTech

Despite deepening losses, Facebook parent company Meta is still full speed ahead with virtual reality and the “metaverse.” The company is expected to release the premium Project Cambria headset in the coming months, but that’s not the only thing on Meta’s plate. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg made a virtual (non-VR) appearance at IFA 2022 with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon to announce the companies would collaborate on new virtual reality chipsets. 

This is far from the first instance of cooperation between the companies. Meta and Qualcomm previously linked up to work on the XR2 platform, which is the ARM-based chip powering the successful (and now more expensive) Meta Quest 2. This announcement marks an even closer relationship, which makes sense given Qualcomm’s interest in the metaverse.

Mark Zuckerberg is so sure the metaverse is the next step for connected technology that he changed the name of his company. While the current iterations of virtual spaces are on the low-fi side, Meta has enough money and influence to drive the effort forward, and Qualcomm is uniquely positioned to provide the chips that will power future head-mounted displays. 

Big news from @IFA_Berlin: @Qualcomm and @Meta are partnering on a new era of spatial computing, developing custom @Snapdragon #XR experiences for the Meta Quest platform. We’re making the #metaverse reality. #IFA2022 #TeamQualcomm https://t.co/Q7QeHI6F9k pic.twitter.com/XY6aEDtVgF

— Cristiano R. Amon (@cristianoamon) September 2, 2022

The current Meta Quest 2 runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 platform, which was designed for use in VR applications. However, it’s still built on the same technology as the aging Snapdragon 865 mobile chipset. Designing new chips from the ground up for VR and metaverse applications could allow for greater focus on specific applications. “Unlike mobile phones, building VR brings novel multidimensional challenges in spatial computing, cost, and form factor,” Zuckerberg said at the event. 

This deal also makes sense when you look at the future of metaverse competition. Rumors point to Apple finally launching its much-anticipated VR headset in the coming year, and it may be the only device that can come close to Meta’s offerings. For all the frustrations and laughable low-fi images of current pseudo-metaverse applications, Meta’s VR hardware is leading the way. Even two years on, the Quest 2 is the best standalone VR experience you can get. The Apple headset will run custom silicon like Apple’s other devices, shutting Qualcomm out from half of the next-gen VR market. The best way to get a piece of the metaverse is to join up with Meta. The chipsets created in the partnership will not be exclusive to Meta hardware, but they will have specific optimizations for what the company builds in the future.

Now read:

• Meta to Clash With Apple Over ‘Open or Closed’ Metaverse
• Mojo Vision Details Its First Smart Contact Lens
• Internal Memo From Meta Warns of ‘Serious Times’ For The Company

September 6th 2022, 12:37 pm

Samsung Ad Talks Smack Ahead of iPhone 14 Launch

ExtremeTech

Apple fanatics aren’t the only ones paying attention to the iPhone 14’s debut tomorrow. Samsung—maker of the iPhone’s closest competitor—has also found a reason to keep a close eye on Apple’s highly anticipated event. To Samsung, the iPhone 14’s release presents something special: a marketing opportunity.

On Thursday the multinational tech conglomerate’s US arm published an ad on its YouTube channel titled “Buckle Up | Galaxy S22 Ultra & Z Flip4.” At first glance, this isn’t particularly interesting, at least to Apple fans; Samsung posts videos about its products all the time. But pressing play reveals the video’s true purpose. In a gruff voice cocky enough to give Ford’s marketing team a run for its money, the ad spends 30 seconds lauding the features on its two newest smartphones…and then telling the viewer those features aren’t available on iPhone. “What will they not think of next?” the video’s description teases.

The Galaxy S22 Ultra and Z Flip4 feature the Flip4’s foldable touch screen and the S22 Ultra’s 108-megapixel camera—two things iPhone buyers will indeed fail to find on any of Apple’s smartphones. Samsung’s ad specifically points to the S22 Ultra’s ability to capture relatively detailed photos of the moon. Meanwhile, Apple’s sharpest existing smartphone camera is that of the iPhone 13 Pro Max at only 12 megapixels. Though the iPhone 14 is rumored to improve from this significantly with a 48-megapixel back camera, there’s no question that Samsung’s ad, though snarky, does ring true.

But does that even matter? Apple officially overtook Android phones to make up more than 50 percent of the US smartphone market in Q2 2022, reaching a level of success it hasn’t seen since the iPhone first launched in 2007. Even if there are smartphones with better cameras than those found on the iPhone, there are plenty of people willing to sing their 12-megapixel camera’s praises. (Apple’s annual Shot on iPhone challenge, the winners of which are featured on Apple’s site and on its 28.1 million-follower Instagram page, likely helps with this.) Samsung’s ad looks a little less like friendly banter and a little more like a desperate attempt at grabbing a bit of Apple’s spotlight.

This isn’t the first time Samsung has done this, either. The company has previously published videos teasing Apple for eliminating the iPhone’s headphone jack and no longer including a charging brick with new phones—two things Samsung eventually did. In fact, Samsung was caught deleting those ads from its YouTube page around the same time it stopped supplying a charging brick. Whoops.

Now Read:

• Samsung Patent Hints at Dual-Screen Phone With Rear-Facing, Transparent Display
• AirPods and iPhone 15 Expected to Have USB-C Charging in 2023
• Google Wants Future Android Apps to Work Across a Range of Devices

September 6th 2022, 11:23 am

People Have Begun to Sell Their Prompts for AI-Generated Artwork

ExtremeTech

As AI art has caught the eye and interest of more unsuspecting viewers, opportunistic entrepreneurs have turned their text prompts—which are said to be more impactful than those written by less experienced users—into a product. For just $2 to $5, someone looking for a specific AI-generated image can buy a prompt that promises to deliver on what they’ve conjured in their imagination, no re-running required.

AI-generated art is certainly having its moment. DALL-E 2, a free-to-use AI algorithm that produces impressive (albeit sometimes unsettling) images based on the user’s text prompt, became so popular this summer that it made meme history. Also, last week an AI-generated “painting” generated controversy by winning the Colorado State Fair’s digital art contest—despite the fact that all of the other entries had been made by humans. This very likely made AI art more appealing. With the right text prompts, anyone can be considered an “artist,” with no real artistic skills required.

There are already entire online platforms dedicated to these prompts. The Verge’s Adi Robertson recently interviewed Justin Reckling about his experience making prompts for PromptBase, an AI prompt marketplace. Reckling mentioned that there are style keywords, like “long shot,” “hyper-detailed,” or “cinematic lighting,” that can be added to prompts to add depth to AI-generated artwork. Some systems, like Midjourney, allow for more customized prompts in which certain keywords can be weighted more than others. Others, like DALL-E 2, run on simpler prompts.

The prompts available on PromptBase generate a range of images, from ape avatars (an obvious nod to Bored Ape NFTs) and 3D wallpapers to food clip art and futuristic building renderings. Reckling’s most popular prompts are those that generate 3D “block buildings” and T-shirt product shots, onto which shirt designers can add their own images. To someone out of the loop, the results from these prompts are so well put together that they could easily be attributed to a human artist, not an AI algorithm—which some view as cause for concern.

As we touched on in our story about the art competition ordeal, the rise of AI-generated art (and the commercialization thereof) has some artists worried that their labor will eventually lose relevance. I can’t really blame them. As a writer, I can’t help but worry there will someday be a market for prompts that feed copywriting AIs like Jasper and HyperWrite, which claim to generate entire paragraphs of clear copy in seconds. (There might already be one, but if so, I’m choosing to live in ignorant bliss.) Some even worry these artsy AI algorithms might be guilty of plagiarism, since their results are based on existent works that were painstakingly created by humans. But by now, it’s too late: AI-generated art has wriggled its way into the mainstream, and it only makes sense that various ways to profit off this new commodity would follow.

Now Read:

• Google Promises to Tackle Clickbait With Search Algorithm Update
• DeepMind AI Breakthrough Allows Prediction of More Than 200 Million Protein Structures
• What Video AI Upscalers Can and Can’t Do, and How to Make Them Do It Better

September 6th 2022, 11:23 am

LG Is Adding NFTs to Its Smart TVs, Because of Course

ExtremeTech

You can barely use the internet anymore without seeing NFTs. These crypto-backed digital assets skyrocketed in value last year, only to fall to Earth with cryptocurrency prices in 2022. LG has chosen this moment to roll out the LG Art Lab platform on its TVs. Those with select LG smart TVs will soon be able to use the platform to buy, sell, and view NFTs, which LG calls “high-quality artwork.” 

LG has partnered with the Hedera network, which bills itself as a faster, more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional blockchains. The Hedera hashgraph technology isn’t very popular currently — Hedera’s Axis NFT platform does a few thousand in transactions per day, but Ethereum is in the hundreds of millions even after recent drops in NFT interest. It makes sense for LG, though, which has been on the Hedera governing council since 2020. 

NFTs will be available on LG TVs running webOS 5.0 or later, and it integrates with LG’s Wallypto crypto wallet on smartphones. To purchase NFTs on your TV, you’ll need a phone with the Wallypto app. The TV displays a QR code, allowing you to scan with your phone to complete the purchase with a stablecoin called USD Coin. Once that’s done, you can view your NFTs in the My Collection area of Art Lab. They can also be used as screensavers on your TV when it’s not in use. 

LG says you can trade NFTs if you get tired of looking at them, and that appears to be all they’re good for. You can access information on the artist from your NFT collection, but you hardly need to buy an NFT to look someone up on the internet. Some projects promise access to exclusive features or products with NFT ownership, but most are just JPEGs linked to a cell in a spreadsheet that says you own it. LG says its first NFT drop will come on September 22 from sculptor Barry X Ball. It appears that each of the designs will be limited to 350 NFTs. 

Many see NFTs as a key component of the metaverse, a spatially-aware replacement for the internet promulgated by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. The idea is NFTs would integrate into virtual spaces, making it more like owning real property instead of just a JPEG. None of that exists yet, making the pictures of cartoon apes and sculptures on your TV little more than a novelty. With NFT trading volume down by as much as 99% compared with a few months ago, you probably don’t want to get into NFTs for investment purposes, either. 

Now read:

• NFT Group Blocked from Minecraft Vows to Make Its Own Version of the Game
• Bill Gates Says He Wants Nothing to do With Crypto, NFTs
• Limewire Is Coming Back as a Musical NFT Marketplace

September 6th 2022, 11:23 am

AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs Reportedly Run Hot, Up to 95C

ExtremeTech

Right after AMD’s launch of Zen 4, we now have a report of its new CPUs running at blistering temperatures. This isn’t a huge shock since AMD is notably increasing TDP for Zen 4 in order to crank the clocks. However, Zen 3 was famous for its efficiency, especially compared with its competition from Intel. So while Intel’s chips have always run a bit hot under full load, that wasn’t the case with AMD’s consumer CPUs. That might change with Zen 4, though. According to a new report, the Ryzen 9 7950X can get as hot as 95C. The mainstream Ryzen 5 7600X can also hit temps as high as 90C. Keep in mind these are engineering samples though, so this might not be the case with actual retail CPUs.

News of the surprisingly high temps comes from a normally reliable source: Enthusiast Citizen at Bilibili, via Wccftech. It was previously reported that AMD would allow for up to 230W to be consumed by its flagship CPU. In a post, he notes when that happens, the 7950X can hit 95C. This is a CPU with a 5.7GHz boost clock, but he says it struggles to maintain 5GHz at that temperature. The 7600X is also reported to consume 120W under full load, and to run at 90C.

This could be partially due to the tiny size of AMD’s chiplets, which the company says are half the size of Alder Lake’s monolithic dies. Raptor Lake has the same design, and Enthusiast Citizen concludes Intel’s 13th generation CPU will easily vanquish AMD’s Zen 4 flagship. “Multi-core 7950X will basically lose to 13900K without suspense. The heat accumulation combined with the temperature wall will cause 7950X under heavy loads to be unable to maintain 5G, 230W 95 degrees, and it will be ashes when it comes out,” he wrote.

It should be noted that 230W is in the vicinity of the Core i9-13900K’s power envelope, which is reportedly around 25oW. However, Intel is also reportedly planning an “extreme performance” mode on some high-end motherboards that will let it consume up to 350W. However, we doubt a lot of people will use that feature given the cooling requirements. It also needs to be said that like Alder Lake and assumedly Raptor Lake, the Ryzen CPU will only hit those temps under intense, all-core workloads. That’s not something that will typically happen when casually gaming.

Still, Enthusiast Citizen thinks the high temps along with the mandatory purchase of DDR5 memory could tip the balance in Intel’s favor this round. That’s because Raptor Lake will support less expensive DDR4 memory, as well as DDR5. Wccftech also reports the Ryzen 9 7000 chips will run over 90C, even with a 360mm AIO cooler attached. In contrast, the Core i9-13900K is said to hit just 85C under full load across all cores.

We’ll need to wait for third-party benchmarks with retail CPUs to verify this information. However, news of high temps is not that surprising. AMD specifically noted the incredible density of its chiplets in its recent presentation. It also covered the Zen 4 cores in gold to boost thermal conductivity (see image, top). However, it’s still a change of fortune for AMD, which had previously differentiated itself from Intel with its superior efficiency. AMD’s Zen 4 chips are set to go on sale Sept. 27, so hopefully, we’ll have benchmarks before then. Regardless, anyone interested in upgrading to Zen 4 or Raptor Lake will likely need to have a beefy CPU cooler waiting in the wings.

Now Read:

• Ryzen Revisited: AMD’s 5800X3D, 5800X Are Great Upgrades for X370 Motherboard Owners
• AMD-Powered Supercomputer is The First to Break The Exascale Barrier
• AMD Announces Zen 2-Based ‘Mendocino’ Mainstream Mobile Platform

September 6th 2022, 9:08 am

IRS Accidentally Makes 120,000 Taxpayers’ Data Public

ExtremeTech

Names, contact information, and financial information—including organizational income data—were included in the accidental exposure. This information came from Form 990-T, which is typically filled out by those holding self-directed IRA or HSA accounts. The form is used to report various financial data including unrelated business income, income tax refunds, unrelated business income tax liability, and more. Once completed, Form 990-T houses a person’s or organization’s address, employer identification number, and income and tax amounts.

According to the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) and other regulatory criteria, the IRS is required to inform Congress of data breaches affecting more than 100,000 individuals within seven days of the error’s discovery. IRS acting assistant secretary Anna Canfield Roth sent a letter to Congress complying with these requirements on Friday. While business contact information appears to have been made public, Roth reported the compromised information “did not include Social Security numbers, individual income information, detailed financial account data, or other sensitive information that could impact a taxpayer’s credit.”

The blunder was allegedly the result of a human coding error from last year, when Form 990-T was first eligible for electronic filing. As the form’s data was processed, confidential information was accidentally thrown in with public data, resulting in the whole lot being searchable and downloadable online. It wasn’t until the last few weeks that an in-house IRS researcher stumbled upon the error and initiated an investigation accordingly. The affected confidential data has since been removed, and those affected will receive notice from the IRS in the coming weeks.

Roth’s letter says the IRS will be reviewing its own practices to ensure it has safeguards in place that might prevent future unauthorized data disclosures. Should the IRS find any areas for improvement (and given its unfortunate history with data breaches, it probably will) it might find solace in the Inflation Reduction Act, which will bump up the agency’s budget by about $80 million over the next decade. IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig has previously said the budget increase will help “meaningfully improve taxpayer service and technology.” For the 120,000 individuals affected by this security gaffe, that had better be the case.

Now Read:

• Crypto.com Trying to Get Accidental $10.5 Million AUD Refund Back
• Congress Begins Looking Into Fraud Protections for Cryptocurrency Market
• Subdermal Chip Implants Open Teslas, Store Vital Documents

September 6th 2022, 8:23 am

NASA’s James Webb Telescope Snaps Its First Picture of an Exoplanet

ExtremeTech

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken pictures of stars, planets, and galaxies — now we can add exoplanets to the list. NASA reports that Webb has seen its first exoplanet, known as HIP 65426 b. This isn’t a new discovery, but it shows that the telescope is working even better than its designers had hoped. 

HIP 65426 b orbits a star 385 light years away from Earth, which is nearby in the grand scheme. The planet, which is 6-12 times the mass of Jupiter, was discovered in 2017 by the SPHERE instrument on the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope. The VLT successfully captured an image of the alien world, making it one of just a handful of exoplanets to be directly imaged. The new JWST image reveals even more detail, though. 

While astronomers have confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, most of those have been identified from gravitational or stellar transit observations. Directly imaging these worlds is challenging because the stars they orbit are orders of magnitude brighter. In the case of HIP 65426 b, the star is 10,000 times brighter. It’s only visible because it’s enormous and orbits at a much greater distance than the planets in our solar system. Neptune is about 30 AU (30 times the distance between Earth and the sun) from the sun, but HIP 65426 b is 87 AU from its star. 

The image below shows HIP 65426 b in four different infrared wavelengths — from left to right: 3 micrometers, 4.44 micrometers, 11.4 micrometers, and 15.5 micrometers. The pill-shaped lights in the shorter wavelength images are not part of the HIP 65426 system. The star marks the location of host star HIP 65426. NASA says they’re just artifacts of the telescope’s optics. Regardless of the distortion, this is the first time an exoplanet has been imaged below 5 micrometers. Webb is designed to operate in the infrared, which is why it’s at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange Point. Ground-based observatories encounter more infrared interference from Earth’s atmosphere. 

“This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally,” said the University of Exeter’s Sasha Hinkley, who led the international team. While the data has not yet been peer-reviewed, it appears Webb was able to provide more accurate mass and luminance data on HIP 65426 b. This further confirms that the planet doesn’t conform to our current models of planetary formation. Future observations might be able to explain why, but this is just the beginning of Webb’s work on exoplanets. 

Based on this early data, it appears the telescope will exceed its predicted performance by a factor of 10. It should be able to resolve a planet one-third the size of Jupiter at 100 AU from a sun-like star. A planet like Neptune should be visible at 100-200 AU from a red dwarf. In the nearby Alpha Centauri system, Webb should be capable of seeing a planet just five times the radius of Earth between 0.5 and 2.5 AU. It was a rough ride, but all the years of work on the JWST are paying off.

Now read:

• Webb Telescope Captures Amazing ‘Grand Spiral’ of the Phantom Galaxy
• Webb Telescope Just Detected Carbon Dioxide on a Distant World for the First Time
• Webb Telescope Captures Absolutely Massive Mosaic Filled With Galaxies

September 6th 2022, 7:53 am

Man Wins First Prize in Art Competition With AI-Generated Piece

ExtremeTech

Jason Allen submitted “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” to the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition, which began on August 26. On Monday he was declared the first-place winner of the competition’s “Digital Arts/Digitally-Manipulated Photography” category—despite the fact that he himself didn’t create the piece. Instead, an AI program called Midjourney generated the artwork based on a text prompt. Allen then took the generated image and touched it up in Photoshop before upscaling with Gigapixel.

The piece is admittedly beautiful. The scene depicted is both timeless and a bit futuristic, between the subjects’ flowing gowns and a massive window—or is it a portal?—dousing the room with sunlight. But the beauty of “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” isn’t the point. If no artistic skill was required to create the piece, can it truly be considered a work of art? If so, can it reasonably be considered Allen’s art, not Midjourney’s? Should it be compared with the art painstakingly created by humans with long histories of trial and error, as it was at the Colorado State Fair?

“AI art wouldn’t exist without someone telling it what to make. So the person telling it what to make is the artist of the work.”

This is the most common argument I’ve seen trying to validate AI “artists”.

When I tell a waiter at a restaurant what I want to eat, am I the chef?

— 🏳️‍🌈Chris Shehan🔪 (@ChrisShehanArt) August 31, 2022

Unsurprisingly, these questions have sparked a heated debate online. Some artists swear Allen’s blue ribbon signifies impending doom for those who draw, paint, print, or otherwise produce their own work, instead of having an algorithm do it for them. “There’s no effort put into typing some words into AI and it feels like it discredits artists who actually put work into their art,” one Twitter user put it simply.

Allen, of course, sees it differently. “How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?” he posted to the Midjourney Discord server following his win. “I’m not stopping now. This win has only emboldened my mission.”

If AI-generated images are going to continue to be passed off as art—and it appears they will be—there’s nothing to say artists and AI fanatics wouldn’t be able to reach a compromise. Allen, for one, could have been clearer about his use of AI to create “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” Though he allegedly labeled the piece “Jason Allen via Midjourney” when he submitted it to the fair’s competition, this was not noted on the placard accompanying the piece when it was on display. Additionally, most people don’t know what Midjourney is; the algorithm could have easily been mistaken for a Photoshop competitor. Future art competitions might also benefit from having a category solely for AI-generated art.

Now Read:

• MIT Researchers Say All Network Congestion Algorithms Are Unfair
• French Tax Authorities Use Google’s AI to Go After Undeclared Swimming Pools
• Meta Settles with DOJ Over Discriminatory Ad Algorithms

September 4th 2022, 7:44 pm

New Mid-Tower ATX Case Lets You Customize It With Your Own Drawings

ExtremeTech

The ATX chassis market has undergone a kind of renaissance in the past few years. All of a sudden, tempered glass windows have become the standard, along with vertically-mounted GPUs to show off your hardware. Despite all these changes, most cases are still pretty much the same, at least on the outside. Now a new ATX chassis is looking to change that by allowing you to customize the exterior to your heart’s content. That is, assuming you’re handy with a marker.

The case is made by AeroCool and it’s appropriately named the Skribble. It’s an ATX mid-tower chassis that includes tempered glass “drawing panels” on the side and front. Both are detachable, allowing you to put them on a table and go crazy with the included “liquid chalk” pen. The company also throws in a soft towel that lets you wipe away your creation and start again. Alternatively, you can remove the glass front panel if you want unrestricted airflow into your PC. Where things really get interesting is when you combine your drawing with the internal RGB lighting from your hardware. There are a lot of possibilities for those with some artistic talent to make a really unique-looking case.

One of the key features is the interaction between your artwork and the interior RGB lights. For that, it includes a six-port ARGB control hub to plug your fans into. Sadly, you will need to provide your own though. It only includes a single 120mm RGB fan; there are two more in the front but they’re black. The hub also syncs with RGB lighting from hardware made by MSI, Gigabyte, and Asus. That includes motherboards and GPUs. Once you have that all up and running, you can change the global color for the lights with a button on the front panel. You can see how it interacts with the artwork in the video below.

Drawing capabilities aside, it’s a pretty typical mid-tower chassis. It supports GPUs up to 362mm long, assuming you don’t have a radiator installed up front. You can also mount a GPU vertically, as there are two vertical PCIe slots. The case can handle liquid cooling too, with space for radiators in the front, top, and rear of the chassis. The front allows 120/240/280/360mm radiators, while the top can only fit 120/240mm. The only option in the rear is a single 120mm radiator. Data hoarders will want to steer clear though; it only supports two 3.5-inch drives. However, it can host up to five 2.5-inch SSDs.

If you’re now hankering to get your doodle on, you might have to wait a bit. We couldn’t find it on either Amazon or Newegg. Its pricing has also not been revealed, but given its size, it’s probably not outrageously priced. It’s just a fun idea; we’re surprised nobody came up with this earlier. All it needs to do now is begin selling artwork to trace for those of us who can’t draw our way out of a paper bag.

Now Read:

• Alienware Shows Off Concept Nyx Gaming Platform
• EVGA Unveils Outrageous Open Air PC with Carbon Fiber Chassis
• CES Roundup: The Wildest PC Cases of the Show

September 4th 2022, 7:42 pm

Perseverance Mars Experiment Capable of Producing as Much Oxygen as a Single Tree

ExtremeTech

NASA’s Perseverance rover is a lot of things: a nuclear-powered planetary explorer, the first step in returning Mars samples to Earth, and a communications platform that enables the first-ever helicopter to fly on an alien world. It is, apparently, also a mechanized tree. The team behind Persverance’s MOXIE project has announced it can produce as much oxygen on Mars as a respectable tree here on Earth. This hardware is only an experiment, but it suggests producing breathable air from the red planet’s thin atmosphere is going to be feasible. 

MOXIE, or the MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, has been operating since April 2021, early in the rover’s mission. However, the new study published in Science Advances is the first real update on the project. MOXIE is about the size of a lunchbox, designed to test a method for processing Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere into oxygen. The MIT researchers managing the project say that in each of the machine’s seven experimental runs, it hit its target of six grams of oxygen per hour. 

“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” says MIT’s Jeffrey Hoffman. In situ resource utilization is a hot topic in planetary exploration. Every bit of mass you have to launch from Earth adds to the cost and complexity of a mission. The ability to produce what you need at the destination could revolutionize space exploration and make it feasible to send humans to more distant locations. 

MOXIE works by drawing in air on Mars, which is almost entirely carbon dioxide. The air is filtered to remove contaminants and pressurized to make processing it more efficient. The air is then directed through an instrument called the Solid OXide Electrolyzer (SOXE). It electrochemically splits the carbon dioxide molecules into oxygen ions and carbon monoxide. The oxygen ions are joined in pairs to form molecular oxygen, which is what we breathe. Perseverance doesn’t save this gas, though. MOXIE assesses the purity and then vents the oxygen and carbon monoxide back into the atmosphere. 

The team ran MOXIE in a variety of conditions to ensure this technique is workable on Mars. There are still some details to work out — they still need to test oxygen production in the dawn and dusk periods when temperatures vary wildly, and MOXIE will also be pushed beyond the six-gram target. 

If all continues to go well, MOXIE could serve as the basis for future life support systems on Mars. This experiment was designed to be small and low-power so it could ride along on Perseverance. In the future, a larger version could be sent to Mars ahead of human explorers to produce as much oxygen as a small forest. Astronauts would arrive to find all the breathable air they need. Oxygen is also useful as a propellant, which could fuel a return trip to Earth.

Now read:

• Perseverance Has a Pet Rock! But It’s No Ordinary Rock…
• At Long Last, Perseverance Reaches Three Forks River Delta
• That ‘Lake’ at Mars’ South Pole is Probably Just a Giant Hunk of Rock

September 4th 2022, 7:42 pm

NASA Solves Voyager 1 Mystery Glitch, Finds Another

ExtremeTech

The Voyager probes began their trek to the edge of the unknown in 1977, and they’re still operating all these decades later. Earlier this year, NASA started to get garbled communications from Voyager 1, raising concerns the iconic spacecraft could be headed for a major system failure. Thankfully, NASA now reports it was able to fix the issue with the 45-year-old spacecraft, but solving this mystery has led to another that may be harder to crack. 

Despite the naming scheme, Voyager 1 was the second of the probes to launch. Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets to execute the “Grand Tour,” visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 took a direct path to Jupiter and Saturn before heading for interstellar space and overtaking Voyager 2. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system. 

NASA announced something had gone wrong with the craft’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) this past May. This system is responsible for ensuring Voyager’s antenna remains pointed at Earth. If it stops working, NASA could lose communication with the aging probe forever. Bizarrely, the agency was still getting valid data while AACS was sending back scrambled updates. Clearly, something was amiss. 

Communicating with a spacecraft this old is never going to be easy, but add to that Voyager 1 is more than 14.6 billion miles (23.5 billion kilometers) away, give or take a million miles — it takes almost a full day for each transmission to travel to or from Voyager 1. After several months of investigation, NASA says it has fixed the skewed AACS telemetry. The system itself was working properly, but it started sending telemetry data through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years ago. 

The team attempted a low-risk fix: telling AACS to switch to the functional computer, and it worked like a charm. Voyager 1 is again sending accurate telemetry, and this does explain why the probe continued working even with the garbled orientation updates. It doesn’t explain why AACS switched to using a busted computer in the first place, though. 

NASA is still investigating the root cause of the error. The next step is to complete a full memory readout of the AACS, which could point to the triggering event. That will hopefully allow engineers to understand what went wrong. The team is “cautiously optimistic” that it will be possible to identify and fix the underlying glitch and keep Voyager exploring.

Now read:

• NASA Just Fired Voyager 1’s Thrusters For the First Time in 37 Years
• NASA confirms that Voyager 1 has finally left the Solar System
• After 41 Years, Voyager 2 Probe Has Left the Solar System

September 4th 2022, 7:40 pm

France Will Lease EVs to Drivers for Just €100 Per Month

ExtremeTech

As of now, France offers subsidies as high as €6,000 for EVs that cost €47,000 or less. Some drivers enjoy even more savings when they participate in a federal trade-in program that offers money in exchange for gas-powered cars. But for those without the upfront funds to make such a significant purchase (or those who are hesitant about committing to an EV in the first place), a discount on a brand-new car isn’t enough. Drastic times call for drastic measures; with France and other parts of the world experiencing remarkably high temperatures due to climate change, Macron’s administration is under pressure to find creative ways to incentivize Earth-saving habits.

Attal says the €100 monthly price tag on a leased EV is less than many French drivers spend on gas. So far, however, nothing’s been said about how drivers will charge their leased EVs. From a practical standpoint, some might not want to invest in having a charging station installed at home. Doing so costs anywhere from $1,000 to $4,500 here in the US. Once the charging station purchase and installation are considered, it might not be worth it to someone whose lease only lasts a year or so. Based on France’s otherwise slow adoption of EVs, it’s unlikely there are sufficient publicly-accessible charging stations to support mainstream EV leases. According to Bloomberg, EVs have only made up 12 percent of the country’s new car sales so far this year.

Nevertheless, the French government is reportedly hard at work figuring out how quickly the new leasing program can be made available. Timing appears to depend on the available stock of EVs, which it’s safe to assume has been affected by supply chain issues like the chip shortage.

Now Read:

• California Legislators Vote to Ban Sale of New Gas-Powered Cars After 2035
• Lyft Launches Autonomous Electric ‘Robotaxis’ in Las Vegas
• Stanford Engineers Have Gotten Solar Panels to Generate Electricity at Night

September 4th 2022, 7:40 pm

This Week in Space: NASA Scrambles to Troubleshoot Moon Rocket

ExtremeTech

Welcome to This Week in Space: your favorite Friday morning roundup of space news for cool kids. This week, we’ve got a ton of news from NASA. The agency is troubleshooting equipment from here to the heliopause. We’ve also got a report on a rocky “super-Earth” exoplanet just 37 light-years away — that can’t decide whether it’s habitable or not. Last but not least, we’ll wrap up with a word on some great telescope targets for September. Allons-y!

NASA News

This is quite a busy week for NASA, and it’s not over yet. It’s been playing Whac-a-Mole with problems on multiple fronts. Voyager 1 mission scientists solved one problem, only to discover another. There’s also news from Perseverance about some surprising Martian geology. The agency’s Monday Artemis 1 launch never got off the ground, but they’ve rescheduled for tomorrow — which may or may not be a good idea.

Artemis 1 Launching Saturday — We Hope

Tensions are rising as the new Artemis 1 launch window approaches. After a botched Monday launch attempt, flight controllers scrubbed and rescheduled the Artemis 1 launch to Saturday, Sept. 3. But NASA has never yet completed a successful fueling test for the Space Launch System rocket — including during Monday’s countdown to launch. In fact, that’s exactly when the countdown ground to a halt: during the part when the flight crew tried to start up the moon rocket’s hydrogen fuel system. Worse, they had to ‘fool’ the flight computer to get through the most recent ‘wet dress’ rehearsal. This raises real questions about whether the rocket is ready to fly. Six years late, and yet it may still be too soon.

The agency will be webcasting the Artemis 1 launch this Saturday on its official YouTube channel, NASA Live. Weather permitting, the launch window opens at 2:17 PM EDT. There’s another backup date on Sept. 5. However, if the SLS doesn’t launch by then, the agency will have to roll it back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Such a move would delay Artemis 1 until at least October.

NASA, Axiom Ink New Agreement for Second Private Astronaut Mission

Earlier this year, Axiom Space successfully flew the first private space mission to the International Space Station and back aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon. This initial flight went smoothly in all respects. Now, NASA and Axiom have announced a second mission to the ISS, dubbed Ax-2. The mission will carry four crew members to the ISS for a 10-day stay.

The description in NASA’s blog makes it sound as if Ax-2 will be modeled closely on the successful Ax-1. As with Ax-1, the mission commander will be a NASA astronaut with previous flight experience. Like last time, SpaceX will also be the launch provider for the Ax-2 flight, which NASA projects will take off in Q3 2023. However, unlike last time, one of the four crew members will win their seat by way of the Discovery reality show Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?.

“With each new step forward, we are working together with commercial space companies and growing the economy in low-Earth orbit,” said Phil McAlister, the commercial spaceflight director at NASA headquarters. “In addition to expanding access to orbit for more people, we are also hoping these private astronaut missions will help the industry learn and develop the skillset to conduct such missions, and NASA is benefitting from gaining additional capability, particularly with returning additional cargo from the space station.”

Webb Captures First Direct Image of an Exoplanet

For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. Meet HIP 65426 b, an exoplanet less than 20 million years old:

HIP 65426 b is a gas giant, six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter. The four inset panes in the above image show what Webb’s MIRI and NIRCam infrared instruments see, looking at the exoplanet through different filters. Both infrared cameras have a built-in coronagraph, which is a tiny mask that lets astronomers block out starlight. Between the coronagraph and the fact that this exoplanet is about 100 times further out from its host star than we are from Earth, astronomers were able to isolate the fainter light of the planet.

“Obtaining this image felt like digging for space treasure,” said Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz who led an analysis of the images. “At first all I could see was light from the star, but with careful image processing I was able to remove that light and uncover the planet.”

Perseverance Rover Reports Surprising Geology in Jezero Crater

New radar images from NASA’s Perseverance rover show that there’s more to Jezero Crater than meets the eye. The rover’s onboard radar uncovered variations beneath the regolith that could indicate ancient, slowly cooling lava flows. They could even hint at a river delta buried below the crater floor, much older than the one Perseverance is exploring today.

“We were quite surprised to find rocks stacked up at an inclined angle,” said David Paige, one of the lead researchers on Perseverance’s Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, or RIMFAX. “We were expecting to see horizontal rocks on the crater floor. The fact that they are tilted like this requires a more complex geologic history. They could have been formed when molten rock rose up towards the surface, or, alternatively, they could represent an older delta deposit buried in the crater floor.”

Voyager 1 Team Troubleshooting Mystery Failure Mode

NASA announced this week that it has finally solved a problem with Voyager 1 sending back garbled data. Unfortunately, it creates more questions than it answers.

The agency traced the original problem to a fault in Voyager 1’s AE-35 unit AACS (Attitude Articulation and Control System). If the AACS stops working, Voyager could lose its bearings and stop pointing its antenna back towards Earth. If that happens, NASA could lose contact with the probe forever.

What’s going on is a bit of a puzzle. The AACS started returning garbled data because it switched to an onboard computer “known to have stopped working years ago.” The solution was as simple as telling the probe to switch back to a still-functional backup computer. While Voyager 1 is now working properly again, the scientists maintaining contact with the probe now have a new question to solve: Why did Voyager 1 switch to using the wrong computer at all?

“We’re happy to have the telemetry back,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager. “We’ll do a full memory readout of the AACS and look at everything it’s been doing. That will help us try to diagnose the problem that caused the telemetry issue in the first place. So we’re cautiously optimistic, but we still have more investigating to do.”

NASA Wants YOU to Help Spot These Mesmerizing Vortices on Jupiter

Calling all classroom investigators and space enthusiasts: A NASA citizen science project called “Jovian Vortex Hunter” is seeking volunteers to “spot and help categorize vortices and other atmospheric phenomena visible in JunoCam photos of Jupiter.”

Volunteers don’t need any training, or any special hardware or software. Anyone, anywhere, can participate with a cell phone or laptop. Here are some examples of what the scientists are looking for:

NASA scientists are particularly interested in the vortices’ varying shapes, sizes, and colors. For example, cyclones, which spin counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern, and anti-cyclones, which rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere, exhibit very different colors and shapes. Figuring out how these storms develop is key to understanding the fluid dynamics and cloud chemistry of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

You can find more information about NASA citizen science at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience and https://www.nasa.gov/solve/opportunities/citizenscience.

Space Weather

Solar weather this week has been mercifully quiet. It’s a nice contrast to the last couple of weeks, which have featured several episodes of beautiful — and threatening — space weather. NASA’s Goddard Space Center put together this lovely video of the highlights.

The data here came from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, captured in the 171-angstrom wavelength of extreme UV light. The agency explains that “this wavelength is particularly good at showing off loop structures in the Sun’s corona, or atmosphere.”

The space weather forecast for the next few days may be less idyllic. SpaceWeather.com reports that sunspot AR3089 has developed “a delta-class magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class solar flares.” NOAA gives the thing a five percent chance to let go while it’s pointed just right to hit Earth. If it does so, we can expect significant radio and GPS interference. We shouldn’t see much interference down here on the ground.

‘Super-Earth’ Can’t Decide Whether It’s Habitable or Not

Red dwarf stars present a unique problem for astronomers. They’re cool and dim, which makes them difficult to see with our deep-sky telescopes. And the problem goes double for exoplanet hunters trying to find a red dwarf star’s planets. Rocky exoplanets around red dwarfs are almost impossible to see. It’s like hunting for a black cat in a windowless room at midnight. However, Japan’s flagship Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea managed to find one: Ross 508, a red dwarf just 37 light-years from Earth. Not only does Ross 508 have an exoplanet — Ross 508b — but it’s a rocky “super-Earth,” perhaps four times the mass of Earth. And the planet can’t decide whether it’s in its star’s habitable zone or not.

Because Ross 508 is so small and dim, its habitable zone is very close to the star. Consequently, the exoplanet orbits at a breakneck speed, completing an orbit every 11 days. But Ross 508b has an eccentric orbit that dips in and out of the star’s habitable zone. That means it’s only at a temperature compatible with liquid water some of the time. Between that and the radiation from its star, this exoplanet is no one’s idea of a vacation getaway.

A shiny new infrared Doppler (IRD) instrument on the Subaru telescope made this discovery possible. “Ross 508b is the first successful detection of a super-Earth using only near-infrared spectroscopy,” said lead author Dr. Hiroki Harakawa in a press release. “Prior to this, in the detection of low-mass planets such as super-Earths, near-infrared observations alone were not accurate enough, and verification by high-precision line-of-sight velocity measurements in visible light was necessary. This study shows that IRD-SSP alone is capable of detecting planets, and clearly demonstrates the advantage of IRD-SSP in its ability to search with a high precision even for late-type red dwarfs that are too faint to be observed with visible light.”

Skywatchers Corner

This month starts out with a waxing crescent moon, which is great news for evening skywatchers because moonlight won’t wash out the sky. You’ll find Mars high in the southern sky before sunrise this month. Likewise, Jupiter and Saturn will be hanging out together in the evening sky all through September. By the end of this coming week, Jupiter and Saturn will form a lovely conjunction with the Moon, shortly after sunset.

Jupiter’s at opposition this month: on the other side of the Sun, it’s fully illuminated, so it will be visible all night under clear skies. This is also when the solar system’s largest planet is at its best for telescope viewing. With a telescope or a good pair of binoculars, you may even be able to make out four of Jupiter’s moons, visible as tiny, “star-like” points of light around the planet.

September also heralds the autumn equinox, although you’d never know it from the weather. This year, the September equinox falls on the 23rd, which marks the start of fall here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the start of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

—

That’s all for this week. But we’ll be watching the live webcast of Saturday’s Artemis 1 launch, right along with everyone else, on NASA TV.

Now Read:

• Webb Telescope Captures Amazing ‘Grand Spiral’ of the Phantom Galaxy
• NASA Identifies 13 Lunar Regions Where Artemis 3 Crew Could Land
• NASA’s Artemis 1 Moon Capsule to Include Legos, Snoopy Pins

September 4th 2022, 7:40 pm

US Life Expectancy Falls to Lowest Level Since 1996

ExtremeTech

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which collects, analyzes, and disseminates the country’s official vital statistics, released its provisional life expectancy report on Wednesday. The report finalizes lifespan data for 2019 and 2020 while providing provisional life expectancy data for those born in 2021. While the former years have sufficient death certificate data to confidently predict the lifespan of people born in the former years, death certificates from 2021 can still be changed. This might alter the 2021 life expectancy just a bit, but the available data is solid enough to provide a relatively reliable estimate, and it isn’t great.

With its 2.7-year decline, the provisional life expectancy for those born in 2021 marks the biggest drop in average lifespan for nearly a century. For people of some ethnic groups, this drop is even worse. American Indian and Alaskan Native people’s life expectancy dropped by 6.6 years between 2019 and 2021—a major loss especially when compared with white and Asian people’s life expectancies, which dropped by 2.4 years and 2.1 years respectively. In every single ethnic category, the male life expectancy dropped significantly more than that of the female.

Though the NCHS didn’t provide discrepancies in causes of death for each ethnic category, it did break down the reasons for the decreased life expectancy overall. The organization reports that COVID-19 deaths were a significant player in Americans’ lifespan reduction, having been responsible for exactly 50 percent of the 2.7-year drop. Heart disease, chronic liver disease, suicide, and “unintentional injuries” also contributed to the decrease. The NCHS reported that these causes would have had a more significant impact on Americans’ projected lifespan if not for fewer deaths caused by influenza, pneumonia, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, perinatal conditions, and Parkinson’s.

It’s important to note that the 76.1-year life expectancy for those born in 2021 isn’t a sure-fired predictor of how long an individual will live, but a gauge of sorts allowing one to look at a society’s health as a whole. Life expectancies offer a high-level view of the impact of external circumstances, quality of life, medical care, and other factors that influence American lives. As the COVID-19 pandemic loses its edge and other medical advancements are discovered and perfected, this number will hopefully improve—if, of course, nothing new gets in the way.

Now Read:

• White House Bans Paywalls on Taxpayer-Funded Research
• Obsessively Checking News Linked to Anxiety, Stress, Ill Health, Study Finds
• ‘Mind-Reading’ Technology Can Turn Brain Activity Into Images

September 4th 2022, 7:40 pm

eBay Collector Asks $1 Million for Almost Every Game Console Ever Made

ExtremeTech

According to the translated listing from French eBay, Kaori30 began collecting game consoles in the 1990s, but he tried to get out of the hobby around 2000 by selling off the collection. Still, he continued to pick up the odd piece of hardware here and there before stopping due to time constraints in 2011. Then came a fateful visit to Tokyo in 2018 that rekindled his need to have all the consoles in the world. Since then, Kaori30 has assembled a truly amazing collection, including most of the items he sold off 20 years ago. 

Even if you don’t have a million dollars sitting around to buy the collection, exploring the photos is fascinating. This collection features all the names you know like the NES, Xbox, Game Boy, and PlayStation, along with more obscure devices like the NEC TurboGrafx handheld, the Atari Jaguar CD, and the Watara Supervision. There’s even a Nokia Ngage, a pre-smartphone mobile device with a gamepad and emulator support. Success is not a requirement to be included, as evidenced by the presence of the Ouya microconsole. The thoroughness of the collection is genuinely impressive. 

The collection doesn’t just feature one copy of each console — in the interest of completeness, Kaori30 has sought out every variation of the hardware. For example, the collection includes the NES Action Set with the light gun that was so popular in the early 90s, but he also has the European Super Set that came with a controller hub. Not rare enough? How about the original Japanese NES that shipped with a robot? Or maybe you want to get your hands on one of the handful of Nintendo-licensed Famicom clones from Sharp. Kaori30 has those, too. 

On the more modern side, Kaori30 has almost every color variation and special editions of consoles like the N64, Xbox 360, and Game Boy — Nintendo really pumped out special editions of the DS, so there’s a whole wall of those in the pics. 

Kaori30 believes some of the items in his collection are basically impossible to find for sale elsewhere. He suggests a museum might be interested in displaying the collection, but only if there’s one with a million dollars to spend, and shipping is probably going to be spendy as well. Naturally, Kaori30 does not accept returns.

Now read:

• Museum Uses $10,000 of Video Equipment to Make GoldenEye 007 Multiplayer Even Better
• Internet Archive Adds 2,500 Playable MS-DOS Games
• Questionable ‘PC Classic’ Console Promises Major 80s, 90s Games

September 4th 2022, 7:40 pm

An Astronomer Is Privately Funding a Search for Alien Technology on the Ocean Floor

ExtremeTech

Meteors have been raining down on Earth since time immemorial, but we are only beginning to understand that some of them have very exotic origins. In 2014, a small space rock hit the atmosphere and broke apart like so many others, but upon investigating this event, astronomers realized it came from beyond our solar system. Now, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is putting together a privately funded expedition to hunt for pieces of the mysterious object on the ocean floor. He’s even holding out hope that the object could show evidence of alien intelligence. 

Loeb’s interest in this object traces back to a different interstellar interloper. In 2017, telescopes around the world turned to peer at a pancake-shaped object known as ʻOumuamua. This was the very first interstellar visitor ever detected, and its bizarre properties made its brief transit through the solar system all the more fascinating. ʻOumuamua exhibited a small change in course as it tumbled past, possibly from outgassing or some other natural force. We’re not even certain what it is — an asteroid, a comet, or perhaps something more unusual like a fragment of an icy dwarf planet. Avi Loeb has advanced the hypothesis that ʻOumuamua was so hard to categorize because it wasn’t natural at all. Perhaps, instead, it was a piece of alien technology like a solar sail, which would explain why it drifted off course. 

The astronomical community has treated Loeb’s suggestions with skepticism, as you would expect from those in a profession that thrives on evidence. The confirmation that CNEOS 2014-01-08 came from another solar system has given Loeb something new on which to focus. In 2019, Loeb and collaborator Amir Siraj published a paper speculating that the 2014 asteroid was interstellar, but they were unable to confirm that until earlier this year when the US government released classified data from a sensor network used to monitor for nuclear detonations. That data confirmed that CNEOS 2014-01-08 came from another star. 

6/ “I had the pleasure of signing a memo with @ussfspoc’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Mozer, to confirm that a previously-detected interstellar object was indeed an interstellar object, a confirmation that assisted the broader astronomical community.” pic.twitter.com/PGlIOnCSrW

— U.S. Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) April 7, 2022

A piece of another solar system could yield untold scientific discoveries, but it’s at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean in pieces. That’s why Loeb has put together $1.5 million in funding to go looking for it. Loeb plans to focus on an area about 40 square miles in size. The team will use a sled with a powerful magnet to scrape a thin layer of muck off the ocean floor. By testing the composition of whatever they find, it should be possible to identify something that doesn’t match our little corner of the galaxy. He also muses about the possibility they’ll find something composed of an artificial alloy, which implies extraterrestrial intelligence. “If it has any buttons on it, I would love to press them,” Loeb joked to NPR. 

Still, some astronomers are hesitant even to accept that CNEOS 2014-01-08 is extrasolar in origin. Before the object flew apart in the atmosphere, it was only a few feet across. It’s difficult to get accurate data on something so small, and the classified nature of the sensor system means potentially important data could be missing. Others don’t believe it’s even possible to find fragments of an eight-year-old impact on the ocean floor. It might be a long shot, but Loeb sees it as a chance to make a world-altering discovery, and he’s not passing it up.

Now read:

• Scientists: Sorry, ‘Oumuamua Still Isn’t an Alien Spaceship
• Some Asteroids May Be Fragments of a Long-Lost Alien Solar System
• Harvard-Backed ‘Galileo Project’ Will Search for Signs of Alien Technology

September 4th 2022, 7:40 pm

Intel Says It’s Committed to Discrete Graphics Despite Rocky Arc Rollout

ExtremeTech

A lot of press attention has been rightly focused on Intel’s long-awaited launch of its Arc discrete GPUs. As you are well aware, there have been many delays, and now that it’s September we still don’t have a firm launch date, pricing, or any specific information on its high-end GPUs. The company had previously stated these GPUs would launch “later this summer,” which is precisely now. The constant delays along with the underwhelming first GPU to launch — the Arc A380 — even caused industry heavyweight Jon Peddie to advise Intel to abandon its fledgling effort to stop the bleeding. In response, Intel has now gone on the record saying its discrete GPU program is not going anywhere.

Tom Peterson, who was famously poached from Nvidia recently, made the remarks to PC Gamer. In his statements, he doubled down on Arc’s importance. “We’re not going anywhere on our discrete business. And our discrete business is the basic technology development that goes both into the data center and integrated GPUs,” said Petersen. Asked to summarize his position, he emphatically stated, “Yeah, we’re not going anywhere. I feel like there’s a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there. I’d just like to be clear: we’re not going anywhere.”

Despite the rocky rollout of Arc, Peterson says the reason Intel is committed to Arc for the long haul is the company sees it as a critical technology, both for gamers and for the data center. This echoes a lot of comments on the previous article we posted about Peddie telling Intel to ditch the effort. Intel has to have a competitive GPU going forward, for several markets in which it competes with AMD. To make this point, Peterson stated, “The thing I happen to believe—Pat, and I, and Roger, and Lisa, and Ryan, everybody is aligned on the idea—that graphics is a critical technology to the client, is a critical technology to the data center, and we want to start competing in the mainstream area where our competitors are making a tonne of money. So all three of those things are critically important for Intel.”

Also, we must be close to the launch of Intel’s first-generation product — Arc Alchemist — because Peterson says most of the engineers have already moved on to its next-generation product, Battlemage. “Most of our ASIC team is on Battlemage,” he said. “A small portion of it is on our future, which is Celestial. And then there’s a very small portion on Alchemist today, but they’re kind of different function sets.”

The fact that Intel is already working on the next-generation architecture is certainly encouraging. It probably wouldn’t be bothering if it was just going to 86 the entire project. Still, some of that FUD that Peterson mentioned came directly from Intel. After all, it publicly declared it was delaying the Arc launch due to software issues previously. Then it said it won’t be hitting its sales goals due to its own drivers. It also was found to have offered CPUs to people who won an Arc GPU in its scavenger hunt. There was also that time when Intel said it submitted 43 tickets to its programmers to fix driver issues discovered by Gamers Nexus. It’s those types of events that are leading to uncertainty. That said, we don’t doubt there’s a lot of naysayers online, and on YouTube. But Intel has a role in this as well.

We doubt there’s anyone who really wants to see Intel fail at this endeavor, as every gamer would welcome healthy competition in the GPU market. After all, we just want the best GPUs we can get for our hard-earned dollars, and if Intel can provide that service, or force AMD and Nvidia to lower prices, everyone wins. All that said, we’re glad to hear Chipzilla is in it for the long haul.

Now Read:

• Intel’s Arc GPUs Reports Clock Speeds Differently Than Nvidia, AMD
• Intel: Arc High-End Desktop GPU Launch ‘Now in Sight’
• Intel Roadmap Details Plans for Arc GPUs, New Cloud Gaming Service

September 4th 2022, 7:40 pm

MIT Researchers Say All Network Congestion Algorithms Are Unfair

ExtremeTech

(Credit: Getty Images)

We’re all using more data than ever before, and the bandwidth caps ISPs force on us do little to slow people down — they’re just a tool to make more money. Legitimate network management has to go beyond penalizing people for using more data, but researchers from MIT say the algorithms that are supposed to do that don’t work as well as we thought. A newly published study suggests that it’s impossible for these algorithms to distribute bandwidth fairly. 

We’ve all been there, struggling to get enough bandwidth during peak usage to stream a video or upload large files. Your devices don’t know how fast to send packets because they lack information on upstream network conditions. If they send packets too slow, you waste available bandwidth. If they go too fast, packets can be lost, and resent packets cause delays. You have to rely on the network to adjust, which can be frustrating even though academics and businesses have spent years developing algorithms that are supposed to reduce the impact of network saturation. These systems, like the BBR algorithm devised by Google, aim to control delays from packets waiting in queues on the network to make sure everyone gets some bandwidth. 

But can this type of system ever be equitable? The new study contends that there will always be at least one sender who gets screwed in the deal. This hapless connection will get no data while others get a share of what’s available, a problem known as “starvation.” The team developed a mathematical model of network congestion and fed it all the algorithms currently used to control congestion. No matter what they did, every scenario ended up shutting out at least one user. 

The problem appears to be the overwhelming complexity of the internet. Algorithms use signals like packet loss to estimate congestion, but packets can also be lost for reasons unrelated to congestion. This “jitter” delay is unpredictable and causes the algorithm to spiral toward starvation, say the researchers. This led the team to define these systems as “delay-convergent algorithms” to indicate that starvation is inevitable. 

Study author and MIT grad student Venkat Arun explains that the failure modes identified by the team have been present on the internet for years. The fact no one knew about them speaks to the difficulty of the problem. Existing algorithms may fail to avoid starvation, but the researchers believe a solution is possible. They continue to explore other classes of algorithms that could do a better job, perhaps by accepting wider variation in delay across a network. These same modeling tools could also help us understand other unsolved problems in networked systems.

Now read:

• Democrats Introduce Bill to Reinstate Net Neutrality Rules
• Two Senators Call for a Ban on ‘Predatory’ Data Caps
• FCC Chair Proposes Increasing US Broadband Standard to 100Mbps

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

NASA: Tonga Volcanic Eruption Blasted ‘Unprecedented’ Amount of Water Into Atmosphere

ExtremeTech

In late 2021, an underwater volcano in the Tonga island chain awakened and began belching ash into the sky. The eruption culminated with an enormous explosion on January 15, 2022, and scientists are still working to understand the impact of this cataclysmic event. A new study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggests that the eruption may have sent so much water vapor into the atmosphere that it could damage the ozone layer and exacerbate Earth’s already dangerous warming. 

The new analysis was led by NASA atmospheric scientist Luis Millán, finding that the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption sent around 146 teragrams (146 trillion grams) of water into the atmosphere. That’s enough to fill 58,000 Olympic swimming pools, or about 10 percent of the total water already in the atmosphere. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Millán. This is by far the largest explosion recorded with modern instruments, surpassing all 20th-century eruptions and even nuclear weapon tests. You’d have to go back to the 1883 Krakatoa eruption to find something bigger. 

Millán and his team reviewed data from the NASA Aura satellite’s Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument. NASA designed this orbiter to measure atmospheric gasses, including water vapor. It shows that Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai injected most of that water vapor into the stratosphere. That’s the layer of the atmosphere between 8 and 33 miles (12 and 53 kilometers) above sea level. Most volcanic eruptions cool the planet by blasting particulates and aerosols into the sky, but the Tonga event didn’t do that. 

The eruption was a perfect storm of sorts. The underwater volcano’s caldera was about 490 feet (150 meters) below the surface, which was just right to launch the maximum amount of water into the atmosphere. If it was shallower, there wouldn’t have been enough superheated seawater to impact the planet. If it was deeper, the water would have muted the eruption. The MLS was able to calculate the volume of vaporized water because it relies on natural microwave signals emitted by Earth’s atmosphere. While other instruments were blinded by the volcanic ash, MLS could see it all. 

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, says that all the excess water vapor will affect atmospheric chemistry in the short term. It may exacerbate the depletion of the ozone layer, which could increase ultraviolet levels on Earth. In addition, water vapor traps heat and will likely contribute to higher temperatures. The good news is that water vapor cycles out of the atmosphere over time. Any increase in temperatures should be temporary, but it’s not like Earth needs to get any warmer. Scientists warn that we are on the precipice of disaster if carbon emissions are not brought under control.

Now read:

• NASA Warns This Sulfurous, Acidic ‘Sharkcano’ Is About to Erupt
• NASA: Mars Was Rocked By Thousands of Gigantic Volcanic Explosions
• Toba Supervolcano Probably Didn’t Kill Off Most Humans 74,000 Years Ago

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

Living With the Synology RT6600ax Wi-Fi 6 Router

ExtremeTech

Synology is best known for its NAS (Network-Attached Storage) devices, but over the last few years, it’s expanded into selling routers and access points. I’ve been pleased with my existing Synology router. But lately, I’ve been looking for more throughput now that I have a gigabit cable speed as well as an increasing reliance on active intrusion detection. So, I upgraded my home office router, a Synology RT2200ac, to the new Synology RT6600ax Tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router shortly after it came out. It has an MSRP of $299, but it’s currently $399 on Amazon.

As with its NAS units, part of the appeal is Synology’s easy-to-use and well-supported software. This is especially true for those who are already familiar with Synology’s NAS OS or its DiskStation Manager (DSM). If you’ve experienced those, its router OS, Synology Router Manager (SRM), will be totally familiar.

I’ve waited to write a review until Synology updated SRM to allow me to use the new router with my old router and MR2200ac access points, so I could evaluate its mesh routing performance. Overall, the new router is a huge upgrade and a very competitive offering.

Synology RT6600ax by the Numbers

The 6600 upgrades the dual-core 1.7GHz CPU of the 2600 to a quad-core 1.8GHz model. More cores do seem to make the system more responsive and capable of handling more applications at the same time. There are also two more antennas, and one of the ethernet ports can handle up to 2.5Gbps.

The SD card reader is gone, but there is a USB 3 port for external storage. You’ll need that for certain applications like intrusion detection. Its top speed is increased to 4.8Gbps using 802.11ax. It’s also significantly larger and heavier than its predecessor, but that shouldn’t make a difference in most use cases. The 6600 comes with the same two-year warranty and has about the same 11-watt power consumption when active.

As far as theoretical total throughput goes, the RT6600ax is a tri-band AX6600 router, rated for speeds of up to 600Mbps on the 2.4GHz band, 4.8Gbps on its first 5GHz band, and 1.2Gbps on its other 5GHz band, for a potential total of 6.6Gbps. It supports the 5.9GHz band, giving it some extra channels. It does not support Wi-Fi 6e, although the 5.9GHz band gives you many of the same advantages if you have hardware that supports its 160MHz channels.

A few other specs have been bumped up that may make the router more exciting for sophisticated users—including the addition of VLAN support. In the case of our home + office, we have close to 50 devices on our LAN, about 30 of which relate to IoT of some kind. It’d make a lot of sense to move those to their own VLAN given how prevalent security issues are for low-level devices.

There are some increased Safe Access and Parental Control options, but I haven’t had time to experiment with either of those. There are also plenty of other packages you can install if you want to do more tweaking of the router’s functionality, by adding a DNS or VPN server, for example. Synology’s packages are essentially curated versions of Linux apps with a simple interface for installing and updating them.

Synology SRM 1.3 Software

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time dealing with obtuse router, switch, and ATA configurations to get my work done, I appreciate Synology’s ability to provide a simple, mostly-clickable, interface to the functionality of its devices compared with the command-line tools many others require. It’s not perfect, though. In particular, finding its list of DHCP clients always seems elusive. However, SRM’s Search feature is great for finding commands and settings, and the screens are well-designed, with good feedback when you make a change, or when a change is incompatible. There are also plenty of options for how and when you want to get upgrades for both packages and the OS, and I’ve always found the upgrade process seamless.

Mesh Routing Using the RT6600ax

One reason I’ve waited to publish this review is that mesh routing wasn’t fully supported until recently. With SRM 1.3.1, you can use your RT2600ac and MT2200ac devices as Wi-Fi connection points. The interface is very similar to that of the older model, and lets you add Wi-Fi access points either wired or over Wi-Fi. I got confused at first because the help file says to reset the access points before you add them, but it also says they need to be upgraded to the latest OS version. Given my assumption that a reset would reset the OS, I went around in circles a bit until Synology support helped me out by saying I could upgrade and then reset without losing the new OS.

The only issue I’ve had with the mesh solution so far is that if I position two access points and the router in a triangle, then devices can sometimes get dropped. I thought it might be because one of the APs changes from getting fed by the router to getting its backhaul from the other AP. I locked that down in settings (a nice feature), but that wasn’t the answer. Ultimately, I just moved the APs to be in more of a “line” out from the router.

High-performance Threat Prevention

One issue I’ve found with many routers is that even though they might offer an option for intrusion and threat protection, that option greatly reduced the device’s throughput. With the RT6600ax, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could run Synology’s Active Threat Prevention and still get nearly 1Gbps from our cable provider through to connected devices. On the 2600ac router, activating its equivalent package caused a performance hit, even at lower speeds.

Synology Updates and Support

In my experience, Synology’s software updates and support are highlights of the company’s offerings. Every product I’ve tested has a straightforward interface that allows you to check for, download, and install updates. Newer releases let you set those up to happen automatically. That’s especially handy if you have some “appliance” NAS units for video surveillance or other low-level functions that you aren’t spending time actively managing. All the releases also have comprehensive release notes. Synology support has also been quite responsive, always with better than a 24-hour turnaround in my experience.

Price and Availability

At its MSRP of $299, the Synology RT6600ax is a little more expensive than some models with similar specs, but you get an excellent set of pre-packaged applications, an easy interface for adding and managing new packages, and a well-tested router OS. However, right now it is hard to find one for that price, for some reason. Hopefully, that will change soon.

Now Read:

• How to Boost Your Wi-Fi Speed by Choosing the Right Channel
• Netgear Has the First Quad-Band Wi-Fi 6E Mesh Router, but it Costs $1,500
• Hands on with Synology’s RT2600ac monster Wi-Fi router

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

Rumor: TSMC to Slow 3nm Expansion Amid Delays From Intel

ExtremeTech

In early July it was reported that Intel might be asking TSMC to slow its roll in producing the 3nm GPU tile it needs for Meteor Lake. That tGPU, short for tiled-GPU, will be matched with Intel’s own tiles to create its 14th generation Meteor Lake CPU. This is the company’s first “disaggregated” CPU, or tile-based design. Now there’s a second report stating Intel has asked TSMC to delay production of that tile until late 2023. The reporting indicates this will have a domino effect on TSMC, causing it to slow its 3nm expansion plans.

TSMC has previously announced it was full steam ahead with 3nm production, which is supposed to be taking place in the second half of 2022. A new report from Trendforce says TSMC might be softly applying the brakes to those plans, however. It states mass production of the 3nm GPU tile was supposed to occur this year, then was pushed to 1H2023. Now it’s been pushed back even further, to the end of 2023.

If that’s the case, it’ll likely mean Meteor Lake would debut in 2024, almost a year and a half after it launches Raptor Lake. That is not the timeline Intel has on its roadmap, so this is a serious delay. Trendforce says the delay is due to “product design and process verification issues.” However, it isn’t clear if those issues are with TSMC’s node, or Intel’s. As reportedly previously, Intel is using its own Intel 4 process, previously known as 7nm, for the compute and I/O tiles.

The previous reporting by DigiTimes stated the delays were due to Intel’s difficulties with its own tiles, not TSMC’s. In response to the latest rumors, TSMC said its 3nm manufacturing is all going according to plan and declined to comment on the business of its customers.

Still, Trendforce says this will have a significant impact on TSMC’s capital expenditure plans going forward. It had originally planned on having Apple and Intel as its first 3nm customers. Now it might just be Apple that utilizes its most advanced node. It’s been previously reported the company would be using it for its M2 Pro and Max SoCs. The article says it will also tap its 3nm node for its 2024 iPhone SoC.

This is bad news for Intel and TSMC. Trendforce says the allegedly now-idle capacity will stall its plans to expand its 3nm production. It will effectively push mass production for multiple customers into late next year, as opposed to the first quarter or two. In response, it has notified its suppliers of its plans to slow down its 3nm expansion so that it doesn’t have equipment gathering dust.

The craziest part of Trendforce’s report is it not only repeats the previous rumors of this delay, but it also states Intel might decide to outsource Meteor Lake’s compute tile to TSMC if it can’t get Intel 4 into mass production on time. That was supposed to be happening in early 2023. That is a scenario we cannot see happening, for many obvious reasons.

This past week, Intel held its quarterly earnings call. On the call CEO Pat Gelsinger said Meteor Lake is still on-target via a transcript from Fool.com. “In 2023, we will deliver our first disaggregated CPU built on Intel 4, Meteor Lake, which is showing good health in both our and our customers’ labs,” he said. In the Q/A portion of the call, Gelsinger followed up on that point definitively. “Intel 4, right, we said is, hey, Meteor Lake, looking good at this point.”

Now Read:

• Intel Raptor Lake Benchmark Shows it Dominating AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X
• Intel’s Raptor Lake to Support Both DDR4-3200 And DDR5-5600
• Intel Shows Off Tile-Based Meteor Lake, Ponte Vecchio CPUs at Vision Event

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

Samsung Adds Amazon Luna to Its Smart TV Gaming Hub

ExtremeTech

Samsung’s 2022 lineup of TVs and monitors got a gaming upgrade in June with the addition of Stadia, GeForce Now, and Xbox Cloud Gaming support. At the time, Samsung said its new Gaming Hub would get support for Amazon Luna in the future, and the wait was shorter than expected. As promised, Luna is now available on compatible Samsung smart TVs.

The Samsung Gaming Hub is built into the company’s current TV lineup, so you don’t have to get a streaming dongle or a separate TV box to stream games. It’s rare to find a media streaming device that supports more than one of these services, but with the latest edition, 2022 Samsung TVs support all of them. All you need is a compatible controller and a subscription to the service of your choice. Well, you need the TV as well, but Samsung’s offerings run the gamut from a budget-friendly 43-inch 4K model for as little as $550 all the way up to the latest 85-inch 8K set that costs $7,000.

Of course, none of these streaming services can manage 8K resolution — 4K is the best you’ll get (only 1080p on Luna), and the image clarity might not be what you expect from traditional gaming. Cloud gaming services like Luna render games on a server and then stream the video to you. That’s why a TV with a modest integrated processor can bring you games that usually require a powerful video card or game console. 

Amazon officially launched Luna in the US earlier this year, and it’s got a different pitch than the competition. Amazon Prime members get access to one of several “channels” with a handful of free games — just don’t expect any hot new blockbusters. Gamers have the option of subscribing to other channels with their own selection of games. At $10, Luna+ is the general channel with more than 100 titles like Control, Devil May Cry 5, and Overcooked 2. The $5 retro channel includes a few dozen games from past eras in gaming, and the $18 Ubisoft+ channel has, you guessed it, all Ubisoft titles you can shake a controller at. 

If Luna doesn’t strike your fancy, Samsung Gaming Hub still has three other major streaming platforms. Game selection isn’t the only thing to worry about, though. Your connection quality might vary between services. Even if you prefer the selection of GeForce Now, you might find Microsoft’s offering works better for you. They all require moderately high speeds, but reliability is paramount. Games are played in real-time, so there’s no way to buffer like you can with a video. Samsung’s Gaming Hub is a great way to give all the clouds a shot to see what works best.

Now read:

• Samsung Caught Cheating Customers Again, But On TVs This Time
• Analogue Pocket Gets the World’s First Video Game From 1962
• Rumor: Is Google About to Kill Stadia?

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

High Temps Are Causing Most Florida Sea Turtles to be Born Female

ExtremeTech

Rising atmospheric temperatures are causing the sand in tropical regions to become hotter. Because female sea turtles nest and lay their eggs on the beach, the hot sand has the ability to impact embryonic development. Sea turtles are somewhat unique in that sex determination doesn’t occur during fertilization; instead, the temperature of the surrounding sand ultimately determines which sexual organs a baby sea turtle develops. Hotter sand means the turtles are more likely to develop female characteristics.

That’s not a small likelihood, either. Bette Zirkelbach, manager of the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys, told Reuters that 99 percent of sea turtles born in the region over the past four years have been female. That’s because every one of the last four summers has been the hottest summer on record. The Turtle Hospital opened in 1986; this is the highest ratio of female to male baby turtles it’s seen since.

The stark contrast in sea turtle demographics critically affects the species’ chance at long-term survival. Without male sea turtles, females won’t be able to reproduce, which means the population’s numbers will quickly suffer. Organizations from zoos to sea turtle-specific nonprofits regularly maintain breeding programs to help fertilize eggs and ensure newly-hatched turtles’ safe journey to the water. But even these programs will slow to a halt if they can’t identify a sufficient number of male turtles.

“Over the years, you’re going to see a sharp decline in their population because we just don’t have the genetic diversity,” a keeper at the turtle hospital at the Miami Zoo told Reuters. “We don’t have the male-to-female ratio needed in order to be able to have successful breeding sessions.”

Sex-skewing hot sands are just one of sea turtles’ many climate change-related obstacles to survival. NASA warns that sea level rise and increasingly destructive storms could make quick work of sea turtles’ beach habitats. Currents are expected to change thanks to increasing ocean temperatures, which could subject the turtles to unexpected predators. Higher temperatures are also widely known to threaten coral reefs, which are otherwise good sources of algae and seagrass: two major sources of sea turtle nutrition.

Now Read:

• Migrating Turtles Aren’t As Good At Navigation As We Thought
• Largest Study of Its Kind Reveals Secrets of Reptile, Amphibian Aging
• Scientists Discover The World’s Largest Plant

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

EA Pays Lip Service to Single-Player Games, but Live Services Are More Profitable Than Ever

ExtremeTech

Game publisher Electronic Arts has been repeatedly recognized as the worst company in America, and yet it still rakes in money. During the company’s recent earnings call, EA was asked about its plans for single-player games. Although CEO Andrew Wilson claimed solo experiences are still part of its DNA, EA’s chief financial officer Chris Suh cut him off at the knees, reminding everyone that most of the company’s revenue comes from live services.

EA is behind some of the most popular and iconic franchises in gaming, including Apex Legends, Battlefield, and Star Wars Battlefront. It should come as no surprise it has been in hot water over the way it handles those games on numerous occasions. The company doesn’t ruin things you like with microtransactions and loot boxes just for fun, though. It makes a lot of money doing it. 

A “live service game” is simply a title that maintains a connection to the company’s servers to deliver content and experiences, often for additional fees. For example, loot boxes in Apex Legends and card packs in FIFA. It’s not hard to see why EA is addicted to live services. When you buy a single-player game, that might be the only money EA sees. But live services keep making money over the life of a game. The increasing share of revenue coming from these sources tells you all you need to know — microtransactions are only going to become more common. 

According to the company’s latest releases, EA took in $1.78 billion in its first 2023 fiscal quarter. That’s several hundred million higher than analysts expected. Despite having kind things to say about single-player experiences, that’s not where Electronic Arts is making its money. It’s mostly live services, according to VGC. However, the impact of live services is only increasing. Revenue from these sources was up 20 percent over last year, accounting for a whopping 73 percent of EA’s total revenue. 

The live services windfall is at least funding some new single-player games. A Dead Space remake will launch in early 2023, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor will be available later in the year. There’s also the hotly anticipated Mass Effect 4, which will be the first new installment in the series since Mass Effect 3 in 2012. However, that one isn’t expected until later in 2024.

Now read:

• EA CEO Softens Company’s Stance on NFTs in Earnings Call
• EA Will ‘Allow’ BioWare to Pull Dragon Age 4’s Unnecessary Multiplayer
• EA Receives Guinness World Record for Most Downvoted Comment in History

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

Microsoft Testing PC Game Pass Widget for Windows 11

ExtremeTech

Microsoft announced earlier this week that it was introducing a Game Pass widget to the Dev Channel. The widget will display new additions to Game Pass as well as warn users when titles are about to leave the service. It will also highlight games from certain categories. Although Microsoft didn’t specify whether these highlights would feature categories the user is known to purchase from (versus periodically highlighting various categories of Microsoft’s own choosing), the company did say later on in its announcement that it was excited to offer “personalized recommendations” of games it believes users will love, so it could very well be the former.

The widget will provide quick access to the Xbox app, where users will be able to check out reviews before choosing whether to give the game a try. On one hand, it’s hard not to envision the widget as a sort of personalized ad carousel that exists on the user’s desktop. On the other, it’s fair that some avid Game Pass users might want to jump on the next big title as soon as it’s available. (After all, that’s what the subscription is for.)

The Game Pass widget-in-progress is likely to be Windows 11’s first gaming-related widget. Unlike Windows Vista and Windows 7, Windows 11 has yet to support third-party widgets, leaving users with a pretty basic set of Microsoft-made options. Though rumor has it Windows 11 will eventually allow third-party widgets onto its store, we don’t know exactly when that’ll be.

Those who are a part of Microsoft’s Dev Channel can try out the Game Pass widget by clicking the “+” icon on the widget board, then selecting the “+” icon next to the widget itself.

Now Read:

• Tencent and Logitech Are Developing a Handheld Cloud Gaming Device
• Microsoft: Activision Blizzard Has ‘No Must Have’ Titles
• Samsung Adds Amazon Luna to Its Smart TV Gaming Hub

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

Tencent and Logitech Are Developing a Handheld Cloud Gaming Device

ExtremeTech

Just a few short years ago, you needed expensive gaming hardware to play AAA titles, but cloud gaming is changing that. By offloading all the rendering to a server, these services can turn almost any screen into a portal for your gaming obsession, and Logitech wants in on the action. No, it’s not launching yet another gaming service. Logitech has partnered with Chinese megafirm Tencent to develop a “handheld cloud gaming” device. 

You have several options for accessing cloud gaming services like GeForce Now, Luna, and Stadia. You can use a TV or media streamer that supports your chosen service, and then you’ve always got the phone in your pocket for a portable gaming experience. However, streaming a game to your phone will drain the battery, and you probably need your phone for other things. The mysterious, unnamed Logitech x Tencent handheld could be the solution. 

The companies have not provided any details on the proposed handheld, but we can assume some things just based on the intended use case. Such a device could (and should be) cheaper than a traditional handheld console like the Switch. All you need for streaming a game from the cloud is a screen, an internet connection, and enough power to decode high-resolution video (which is cheap). By focusing on this one experience, the Logitech x Tencent handheld could be better at streaming games than your phone and cost much less. 

The announcement post mentions both Xbox Cloud Gaming and GeForce Now. It’s possible more services will work on the device, but Google’s ailing Stadia and Amazon’s embryonic Luna are nowhere to be seen at this time. The offerings from Microsoft and Nvidia are arguably the leaders in cloud gaming right now anyway. Microsoft has the backing of popular game franchises and legions of dedicated Xbox fans, and Nvidia lets you play the games you already own on platforms like Steam and Epic. It makes sense for Logitech to start there. 

Read more about this official announcement on our blog: https://t.co/YgKGb8cFBy

— Logitech G (@LogitechG) August 2, 2022

Price is going to be key to the success or failure of this product, but the ability to use modest hardware and rely on servers to do all the hard work should keep manufacturing costs low. Adding mobile data (LTE or 5G) could make the device easier to use on the go, but that would crank up the price — Wi-Fi-only seems like the safer bet. It needs to remain cheap enough that people won’t just use their phone or buy a Switch for on-the-go gaming. 

If you’re as intrigued by the unnamed cloud gaming gadget as we are, Logitech would be happy to tell you all about it when the time comes — just register for updates. There’s no official timeline for release, but the post does mention updates on the “development process,” so it could be a while.

Now read:

• Nvidia’s GeForce Now Rolls Out 120FPS Gameplay to All 120Hz Android Phones
• Samsung’s Smart TV Hub Adds Stadia, Xbox, And GeForce Now Streaming
• Microsoft Was Going to Release a Game Streaming Dongle, But Now It’s Starting From Scratch

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

Majority of Species We Know Little About Could be Heading Towards Extinction

ExtremeTech

The impact of having eight billion humans is undeniable — from climate change to omnipresent microplastics, Earth is becoming a very different place. Some scientists even believe we are witnessing a sixth mass extinction as a result of human activity. In light of this, a team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology used computer models to study the risks to the species we know the least about, and it looks like they may be in more danger than anyone expected. 

The study focused on so-called “data deficient” species like the Sequoia slender salamander above. These are creatures that are small in number, difficult to observe, or otherwise poorly understood by science. In the world of conservation, you need data to determine the risk posed to a species. The research, led by Ph.D. student Jan Borgelt, concludes that conservation priorities, like the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, are wildly wrong. 

The Norwegian study attempted to assess the true risk to data deficient species using a machine learning algorithm that takes into account various factors like geographical distribution, exposure to climate change effects, and contact with human expansion. The model predicted the likelihood of extinction for 26,363 species on the Red List (data sufficient species) with a high degree of accuracy. When the researchers plugged in a subset of 7,699 data deficient organisms, they found that most have shockingly poor prospects, reports Vice. 

The model predicts that 56 percent of data deficient species are at risk of going extinct. That’s twice as high as the Red List estimate of 28 percent. Amphibians may have the worst luck going forward, with about 85 percent likely to be threatened by extinction, but other types of life are in trouble, too. More than half of the mammals, insects, marine invertebrates, and reptiles analyzed in the study are also at high risk. Animals with the dimmest prospects are those with small ranges in isolated areas of central Africa, southern Asia, and Madagascar. 

Unfortunately, the lack of data on these animals has caused many studies to exclude them, and that biases conservation recommendations. The Norwegian team says that we should try to include data deficient species in planning and decision-making whenever possible. They also encourage other researchers to use machine learning to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.

Now read:

• Largest Study of Its Kind Reveals Secrets of Reptile, Amphibian Aging
• Scientist Identifies Mysterious Fossils as the Oldest Animals on Earth
• Mass Extinction May Have Been Caused By Near-Earth Supernova

August 6th 2022, 3:29 pm

Intel to Unveil Wi-Fi 7 in 2024, Will Double the Speed of Wi-Fi 6E

ExtremeTech

Intel is hard at work on the next generation of Wi-Fi standards, according to a report from Korea IT News. Wi-Fi 7 will replace the current Wi-Fi 6/6E as the latest standard when it debuts in 2024. It theoretically allows for data transfer rates that are more than twice as fast as those with Wi-Fi 6E. Intel says it plans on submitting its plans to the Wi-Fi Alliance in order to gain certification. Once that occurs, it will offer it in mobile products first, with desktops to follow. If all goes according to plan, it should be hitting major markets by 2025.

Wi-Fi 7‘s actual name is 802.11be. The new standard will boost data transfer rates from ~2.4Gb/s to ~5.8Gb/s according to Intel. The maximum transfer rate for the access point will skyrocket from ~9.6Gb/s to ~36Gb/s as well. Naturally, these are all rough numbers, and various factors are involved in determining wireless network speeds. Still, it represents a notable leap forward compared with Wi-Fi 6E. Intel says it’s designed on the foundation of Wi-Fi 6E, but offers improved performance, lower latency, and more reliability. Like Wi-Fi 6E it allows for operation in the 6GHz band. However, it introduces three ultra-wide channels at 320MHz, which are twice as wide as before. This allows for more data to be included in each transmission.

Another feature that helps increase bandwidth is 4K Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM). This is a big upgrade over 1024-QAM (1K QAM) found in Wi-Fi 6. The much-older Wi-Fi 5 standard only offered 256-QAM. It allows for higher peak data transfer rates and a more reliable signal.

Multi-Link Operation (MLO) is also a key feature of Wi-Fi 7, and it allows for a simultaneous connection to two frequency bands at once. It will let people connect to both the 5GHz and 6GHz band. The access point can then intelligently switch bands according to traffic, or use both bands at the same time. Typically uncontested bands deliver maximum performance. This is why 5GHz is usually better for performance than the congested 2.4GHz frequency (design differences aside). With Wi-Fi 7, you will be able to use both uncongested frequency bands at once, which should allow for noticeable performance improvements.

According to Korea IT News, even though the technology is years away, Intel thinks it can make it even faster. “Wi-Fi 7 almost doubles the frequency bandwidth of 802.11ax (170 MHz) to 320MHz and doubles the speed of Wi-Fi,” said Eric McLaughlin, VP of Intel’s wireless division. “Since there is more than a year left before the release of 802.11be, there is still a chance that we could improve the processing speed even further.”

It’s notable Intel is working on the next standard for Wi-Fi when many companies still haven’t officially adopted Wi-Fi 6E yet. As MacRumors points out, Apple has yet to switch, despite its reputation for offering next-gen hardware before other companies. It did so most notably with USB Type-C, way back in 2015. It’s expected to roll it out with its upcoming iPhone 14, however.

Now Read:

• VPNFilter Malware May Be Even More Dangerous Than We Thought
• The FCC Opens Up Spectrum for Faster 6GHz Wi-Fi
• MIT Created 2D Material to Convert Wi-Fi into Power

August 3rd 2022, 1:44 pm

Microsoft: Activision Blizzard Has ‘No Must Have’ Titles

ExtremeTech

“There is nothing unique about the video games developed and published by Activision Blizzard that is a ‘must have’ for rival PC and console video game distributors that give rise to a foreclosure concern,” Microsoft writes. The filing was first spotted yesterday by Rock Paper Shotgun (who understandably referred to the statement as a “weird flex, but okay”).

While it might appear at first like Microsoft is testing the type of reverse psychology that Tom Sawyer used to get his friends to do his chores, the filing provides additional context. When Microsoft mentions “foreclosure concerns,” it’s specifically referring to post-acquisition Activision’s ability to foreclose other game distributors from accessing the content they need to participate and compete in the market—a major concern for those wary of the potential merger. From Microsoft’s perspective, the filing is meant to reassure the Commission that the acquisition wouldn’t disrupt industry competition. By saying none of Activision’s games are all that important, it’s displaying (or at least feigning) confidence that other distributors will continue to be able to compete…albeit in kind of a weird way.

Though almost half of the filing is spent explaining the intricacies of the video game market to the Commission, the other half attempts to defend Microsoft from horizontal competition concerns. Microsoft argues that due to the market’s fragmented nature, it couldn’t develop what most of us would consider a monopoly; post-transaction, plenty of “industry heavyweights” would remain, along with “a vibrant long tail of smaller competitors.” The company points to Tencent (which owns Riot Games and has a stake in Epic Games) and Nintendo before digging into Sony’s murky waters.

Despite Sony’s despair regarding Microsoft’s potential acquisition of Activision, Microsoft reminds the Commission that Sony owns Naughty Dog and has recently acquired Bungie, further cementing its place as the second largest player in the industry. Later on in the filing, Microsoft speculates that Sony will remain a particularly rigorous competitor in relation to subscription services—something Activision only offers in-game.

Speaking of Sony (which insists that Call of Duty, one of Activision’s top franchises, is an unreplicable “blockbuster”) Microsoft’s filing makes mention of its commitment to keeping Call of Duty multi-platform: “Microsoft has demonstrated that it is not withdrawing content from other platforms, having made multiple public statements that it will continue to make Call of Duty and other popular Activision Blizzard titles available on PlayStation through the term of any existing agreement and beyond.”

Now Read:

• Google Cracking Down on Spam and Scams With New Play Store Rules
• NFT Group Blocked from Minecraft Vows to Make Its Own Version of the Game
• Meta to Clash With Apple Over ‘Open or Closed’ Metaverse

August 3rd 2022, 12:14 pm

Study Reveals Why Anti-Piracy Campaigns Don’t Work

ExtremeTech

New research from France’s ESSCA School of Management reveals why anti-piracy campaigns have failed to stop or slow digital theft. In a paper published late last month, economics and management professors Gilles Grolleau and Luc Meunier inspect the commonalities uniting popular (and sometimes infamous) anti-piracy campaigns, then explain why those common threads aren’t as useful as one might think.

One of the professors’ main focus is the “more-is-better heuristic,” or the idea that the more arguments one presents in favor or against something, the more likely it is that their audience will eventually agree. But more arguments don’t always produce a better outcome. Grolleau and Meunier argue that by tacking weaker arguments onto stronger ones, the stronger ones become less effective; the overall statement essentially has diminishing returns. While someone might be sympathetic to the very real risks of malware and criminal or civil penalties, telling them about a pirated movie’s lack of HD options and actors’ personal feelings on digital piracy are actually more likely to deter them from abstaining from piracy than anything else.’

“The most striking example might be the (in)famous ‘You would not steal a car’ awareness video aired in cinemas and on DVDs worldwide during the 2000s,” the professors write, referring to the infinitely meme-able flop of an anti-piracy campaign. “It compared downloading a movie to various forms of stealing, including reasonably relevant ones (stealing a DVD in a store) and somewhat absurd others (stealing handbags, TVs, cars), which diluted down the message.”

Many campaigns lack the context necessary to “convert” their audiences, too. Dry numbers aren’t usually enough to move people out of their comfort zones, as a campaign out of the UK illustrates. Called “Get It Right From a Genuine Site,” the campaign states that the “UK’s creative industry supports around 2.8 million UK jobs each year, contributes about £18 billion in exports around the world, and contributes about £10 million per hour to the UK economy.” But this isn’t something the average person can feel anything about or relate to, so the message falls flat.

It doesn’t help that most digital pirates view their actions as relatively victimless. For example, “stealing” a movie doesn’t actually remove it from the distributor’s possession; it just prevents the distributor from earning the few dollars it would otherwise earn by selling the movie. In a digital pirate’s mind, $4.99 on Apple TV is chump change compared with the millions upon millions sitting in that distributor’s bank account. What’s the harm in watching the film on an illegal streaming site or getting a USB copy from a friend—especially if others do it all the time without consequence?

Going forward, Grolleau and Meunier recommend using a “homo heuristicus” approach when devising anti-piracy campaigns. This approach acknowledges that most people have biased minds that will subconsciously ignore certain information, whether or not that information should be considered reliable or transformative. The solution is to present less information, not more, and to speak to the solutions why someone might pirate media in the first place.

Now Read:

• Google Cracking Down on Spam and Scams With New Play Store Rules
• Google’s Plan to Phase Out Third-Party Cookies in Chrome Delayed to 2024
• Democrats Introduce Bill to Reinstate Net Neutrality Rules

August 3rd 2022, 12:14 pm

Winamp Is Back to Whip the Llama After 4 Years of Development

ExtremeTech

Today, streaming music is everywhere, but in the before times, it was all about locally stored MP3s — all legally ripped from CDs, of course. Winamp was one of the most popular ways to listen to those files, but it fell into disrepair as listening shifted to online services. A project to refresh the app began a few years back, and you can now get a look at the final version. The first release candidate is available for download, and it still whips the llama — yes, Winamp 5.9 plays that iconic intro when you first launch it. 

The younger folks out there might be a little confused by all this fuss over a desktop music app, but Winamp was almost a required download in the early 2000s. It was among the best ways for non-iTunes people to listen to music on a computer, and it was free. It played music CDs and MP3 files, and it even facilitated ripping those CDs to MP3 format — which is how we all got MP3s (certainly no one was pirating them!). There were a ton of skins and visualizations built into the app, too. Development stalled in 2013 as people moved away from locally stored music, but the team has spent the last four years working on v5.9 RC1. 

Setting up the new Winamp might seem positively archaic by 2022 standards. You’ll have to point it to your music library and then wait while it scans files and downloads metadata. It supports all the major formats like MP3, FLAC, and m4a. Anyone who has used Winamp before will feel right at home — there’s even a classic skin that’ll transport you back to 2003. The UI consists of several panels, each with configurable content. Winamp is particularly good at creating and managing playlists. 

The new version might have been out sooner if not for the pandemic, which slowed progress considerably. The devs also struggled to update the app’s codebase from Visual Studio 2009 to the 2019 version. As a result, Winamp no longer supports Windows XP or Vista. You’ll need to be on Windows 7 or later, but hopefully, you’re running something that still gets security updates. The team says that it has the hard parts done, and going forward they can focus on features. Future additions include support for more formats like opus, ogm, H.265, HLS, and VP9. If you want to check out the new Winamp, the installer is available in the official forums.

Now read:

• Limewire Is Coming Back as a Musical NFT Marketplace
• Scientists Built an Artificial Intelligence to Finish Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony
• Google Will Begin Shutting Down Play Music Next Month

August 3rd 2022, 10:01 am

NASA Wants YOU to Help Spot These Mesmerizing Vortices on Jupiter

ExtremeTech

Analysis of a set of July photos from NASA’s JunoCam has revealed a cluster of swirling storms near Jupiter’s north pole. The agency released the entire dataset, which is cool enough all on its own. But now, a NASA citizen science project called “Jovian Vortex Hunter” is seeking volunteers to “spot and help categorize vortices and other atmospheric phenomena visible in JunoCam photos of Jupiter.” That’s right: NASA wants YOU to help spot these swirling vortices on Jupiter.

Volunteers don’t need any training or any special hardware or software. Anyone, anywhere, can participate with a cellphone or laptop. What you’re looking for is storms like these:

These powerful storms can be over 30 miles (50 kilometers) in height and hundreds of miles across. The largest one — in fact, the largest storm in the entire solar system — is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which is ten thousand miles from side to side. It could swallow the Earth with no trouble. Figuring out how these storms develop is key to understanding Jupiter’s atmosphere, as well as the fluid dynamics and cloud chemistry that create the planet’s other atmospheric features.

NASA scientists are particularly interested in the vortices’ varying shapes, sizes, and colors. For example, cyclones, which spin counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern, and anti-cyclones, which rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere, exhibit very different colors and shapes.

Music of the Spheres

Gigantic, stable, long-lived storms are a recurring theme on Jupiter. But with Juno, we can look through the tops of the clouds. Jupiter is mostly hydrogen by mass, and it has no true surface. If you fell from space onto Jupiter, there’s no surface to land on. Instead, we think it makes a gradual transition through thicker and denser clouds into an opaque, ammoniac slush with perhaps the density of water. At a thousand kilometers below the cloud-tops, it’s so cold that the distinction between liquid and gas begins to blur. Hydrogen becomes a supercritical fluid, free of surface tension and capable of wafting through solids like a gas instead of seeping like a liquid. But there’s nothing solid on Jupiter.

Wind belts carve unobstructed paths through the gas giant’s atmosphere. These stable circulations produce resident storms that dance around the planet’s poles with geometric precision. In 2021, Jupiter had storms in a perfect octagon at the north pole and a perfect hexagon at the south. Before that, the gas giant’s south pole had five storms arranged around a central maelstrom, itself the size of the United States.

But the Jovian spirals are just one of the places we can find geometric shapes on gas giants in our solar system. Scientists are working to explain why storms on Jupiter form these whorls and vortices, instead of behaving like Saturn. Saturn, too, has a vortex at its north pole that dances to the music of the spheres. But currently, it forms a precise hexagon:

Mathematical studies show that these polar vortices can form stable regular polygons with anywhere from three to eight sides. But the jury’s still out on why Jupiter’s polar storms don’t look like Saturn’s. Projects like this help scientists to explain why storms on these gas giants behave as they do.

NASA Citizen Science Projects

Participating in NASA’s citizen science efforts can open up an entirely new universe of Cool Space Stuff. And just a little bit of digging around on their citizen-science website revealed a whole host of planetary science projects suitable for kids K-12. Right now, they’ve got a little bit of everything. In addition to this Jupiter project, NASA has a project called Feature Hunter, where participants study photographs of the Earth to pick out geographical features such as volcanoes, glaciers, cities, and islands. And while it’s geared for family and kids K-12, anyone can join the Artemis mission to the Moon.

You can find more information about NASA citizen science at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience and https://www.nasa.gov/solve/opportunities/citizenscience.

Now Read:

• NASA Ditches Rover for Mars Sample Return, Adds Two Helicopters
• Amateur Astronomers Detect Massive Impact Flash on Jupiter
• This Week in Space: The Moon is a Slightly Less Harsh Mistress

August 3rd 2022, 10:01 am

Diablo Immortal Player Drops $100K, Becomes Too Powerful to Find a Match

ExtremeTech

Diablo Immortal has been available for several months, and it’s turning out to be quite the cash cow for Activision Blizzard. The free-to-play title has raked in more than $100 million, and it’s probably going to keep printing money. In the early days, gamers calculated it would cost around a hundred thousand dollars to completely level up a character, and now we have a real-life example. One streamer spent that, and he’s “won” the game. His prize: being too overpowered to play with anyone else. 

Streamer Jtisallbusiness has posted dozens of Diablo Immortal videos since the game launched earlier this summer. Along the way, he’s put $100,000 into his character, making him what we call a “whale.” If you’ve ever looked at those $99 or $149 item packs in mobile games and wondered why the developers even include something so silly, it’s for people like Jtisallbusiness.

Diablo Immortal is free, and you can play the entire game without dropping any cash — you just have to grind for hours and hours to find powerful gems that will buff your character. Or, you can spend money. Immortal has a system of “Elder Rifts” that are essentially loot boxes wrapped up in a miniature dungeon. You might have to do a lot of rift runs before you’ll find the gems you need to advance, and that costs money. 

Early on, gamers estimated it would cost over $100,000 to fully level up a character, and now we have real-world data on that. Jtisallbusiness spent that much, making him a steamroller in the game’s popular PVP Battlegrounds mode. After clobbering almost every opponent he faced, his MMR (match-making rank) has climbed so high that he can’t find anyone to battle anymore. This also interferes with his ability to complete special events, which tie into PVP, reports Kotaku. 

According to Jtisallbusiness, he can leave the game searching for a match for two or three days with no luck. The streamer is now talking about asking Blizzard for a refund, but good luck with that. Blizzard has told Jtisallbusiness that the “problem” will be fixed, but there’s no movement so far. It’s not clear what the fix is, though. Will Blizzard just feed lesser players to the whales, knowing their massive financial investment makes them unbeatable? Even in a free-to-play game, that seems unfair. 

No one should feel sorry for Jtisallbusiness, who did this whole thing to make content. He’s getting what he wanted because here we are talking about his antics. It’s not just about a streamer with a lot of disposable income — a lot of people are firing up this game expecting it to be fairly balanced, and that’s just not the case. Spending money in Diablo Immortal doesn’t just get you sweet cosmetics. The more you spend, the better you are at the game, which doesn’t seem very fair.

Now read:

• Diablo Immortal Finally Launching in China After Mysterious Delay
• Blizzard Exec Confirms Diablo IV Won’t Have Awful Microtransactions
• Pay-To-Win Mechanics Are Turning Fans Against Diablo Immortal

August 3rd 2022, 8:30 am

Webb Telescope Captures Stunning Image of the Cartwheel Galaxy

ExtremeTech

For years, we’ve been talking about all the amazing things the James Webb Space Telescope could do, and now it’s actually doing them. From its vantage out beyond the moon, Webb is turning its infrared eye toward far-away objects we’ve never been able to see before. It’s also providing images of well-known objects like the Cartwheel Galaxy (above) with an unprecedented level of detail. 

The Cartwheel Galaxy is about 500 million light years away in the Sculptor constellation. This galaxy is the subject of intense study because it’s a rarity — a survivor of a massive collision oriented to give us a perfect view. In the distant past, a smaller galaxy collided with this one before flying off into the infinite void. As a result, the Cartwheel Galaxy was left with two rings. There’s an irregular ring around the edge and a tighter spiral in the center. 

The Webb telescope was designed to operate in the infrared range so it could peer through clouds of dust and gas, and that’s exactly what it’s doing here. The above image is actually a composite of two images. The blue, orange, and yellow tints come from the primary NIRCam instrument, which operates from 0.6 to 5 microns. The blue and white colors come from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). 

According to NASA, the central spiral is bright because it’s rich in established star clusters and hot dust. Following the collision about 440 million years ago, the external ring began expanding. As it expanded, it encountered intergalactic gasses that fueled star formation. Thus, the expanding ring is dominated by star formation and supernovas. 

The image immediately above is Hubble’s most recent attempt at imaging the Cartwheel Galaxy from 2018. It’s certainly recognizable as the same object, but Webb picked up much more detail. For example, astronomers have noted the smoother distribution of older star populations in the core versus the clumpy nature of younger populations in the expanding ring. Neither of these was discernible in Hubble’s data. The red veins weaving through the galaxy are also much sharper in Webb’s image — you can barely see them with Hubble. NASA says these are like the skeleton of the Cartwheel Galaxy, composed mainly of hydrocarbons and silicate dust (similar to Earthside dust).

Astronomers believe the Cartwheel Galaxy was once much like our own Milky Way, and there are hints that Andromeda may be on a collision course with us (maybe for the second time). By studying the Cartwheel Galaxy, we may be getting a preview of what will happen to our little corner of the cosmos in a billion years or so.

Now read:

• Astronomers May Have Found the First Exoplanet in Another Galaxy
• James Webb is Open for Science! See The First Images From The Fully Operational JWST
• A Micrometeoroid Hit The James Webb Space Telescope’s Primary Mirror

August 3rd 2022, 8:30 am

TSMC Chairman: Fabs Would Be ‘Not Operable’ If China Invades

ExtremeTech

Tensions are running high as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi touched down in Taiwan today. The controversial visit was undertaken despite stark warnings from the Chinese government of “forceful measures” if she went through with it. She is the highest-ranking official to visit the self-ruled island since Newt Gingrich in 1997.

The Chinese government sees it as an unnecessary escalation by the West. That’s despite National Security Council spokesman John Kirby stating on Monday that the US doesn’t support Taiwan’s independence. It’s with this escalation in mind that CNN’s Fareed Zakaria sat down with TSMC chairman Mark Liu for a rare interview. The big question of course was what would happen to TSMC if China invaded?  It’s a scenario that’s been envisioned for years, but now, for the first time, seems like a real possibility.

In the interview, Liu was defiant when asked about a theoretical invasion. “Nobody could control TSMC by force,” he stated. He added that if the military tried to take over TSMC’s factories, they’d become “not operable.”

This is due to the inherent sophistication of the manufacturing process. Liu said it depends on real-time connections with global supply chains in the US, Europe, and Japan. These connections are what keep the fab running with materials, chemicals, diagnostic software, and more. China also depends on TSMC as well, which he said is 10 percent of its business. He noted that TSMC only works with China’s consumer market, not its military. CNN said China buys 90 percent of its silicon from other countries.

Liu said China’s dependency is “not a bad thing,” indicating he’s confident China wouldn’t invade solely for selfish reasons. Fears over the disruption of the Taiwanese chip supply and the resulting economic damage have been termed a “Silicon Shield” by analysts. It wouldn’t just be a Chinese problem though; US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warned about it recently as well. She stated the US would go into a “deep and immediate” recession if US firms were abruptly cut off from TSMC’s supply. Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all depend on TSMC for their most advanced products. It’s one of the primary reasons the CHIPS Act was passed this week. It seeks to bolster US silicon manufacturing in order to reduce our dependence on China and Taiwan.

Also, back in June a Chinese economist who works for a government-funded think tank said a takeover of Taiwan would be necessary if the US and the West imposed sanctions on China as they have against Russia. She also added that TSMC would be seized, according to TechSpot.

As of press time, Speaker Pelosi had just landed in Taipei despite Bejing’s saber rattling. The Washington Post reported Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, had accused the US of escalating tensions. She also warned of “disastrous consequences” if the situation was mishandled. In response, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby sought to lower the temperature by stating US policy toward Taiwan remains unchanged.

“Nothing has changed — nothing has changed — about our Taiwan policy,” Kirby said.

Now Read:

• TSMC Founder Says US Silicon Fab Expansion Plans ‘an Exercise in Futility’
• TSMC Executive Says Chip Shortage to Last Several More Years
• Silicon Wafer Supplier Says Its 300mm Capacity is Sold Out Through 2026

August 2nd 2022, 12:59 pm

Intel Says It Won’t Hit Arc Discrete Sales Goals, Blames Its Drivers

ExtremeTech

In last week’s quarterly earnings call, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger mentioned something we all kind of knew was the case: Its Arc drivers are not up to snuff. Because of this, the company will not meet its previous goal of shipping four million Arc GPUs to gamers in 2022. Who could have seen this coming? Aside from, you know, everyone?

Backing up a bit, in January Intel graphics Chief Raja Koduri responded to a tweet from PC Gamer imploring Intel to deliver Arc GPUs immediately. Back then, we were still in the grips of the GPU shortage, and COVID-19 was still causing mayhem. It was expected that Arc GPUs would be arriving shortly, and PC Gamer had seen this as the perfect solution to the GPU shortage. Indeed, if Intel had dropped its GPUs back then, at affordable prices, it would have had the market all to itself. Raja tweeted, “@IntelGraphics is working hard to find a path towards the mission – getting millions of Arc GPUs into the hands of PC gamers every year.” As it turns out, reaching that goal would be harder than Intel anticipated.

According to a transcript of the call from Tom’s Hardware, Gelsinger pinned the blame on its drivers. The main issue, shockingly, is the company figured it could just tweak the drivers it was already using for its iGPUs on Intel CPUs. As it turns out, that did not work, at all.

“Our software release on our discrete graphics was clearly underperforming,” Gelsinger said. “We thought that we would be able to leverage the integrated graphics software stack, and it was wholly inadequate for the performance levels, gaming compatibility, etc. that we needed. So we are not hitting our four million unit goal in the discrete graphics space, even as we are now catching up and getting better software releases.”

Despite the setback, Gelsinger remains optimistic about Arc’s future. “While we will not hit our GPU unit target, we remain on track to deliver over $1 billion in revenue this year,” he said. “COVID-related supply chain issues and our own software-readiness challenges caused availability delays that we continue to work to overcome. Intel Arc A5 and A7 desktop cards will start to ship in Q3.” Ah yes, “software-readiness challenges,” that old bugaboo. Back when Intel announced one of the earlier delays, it had blamed “software readiness delays.”

It’s remarkable Intel figured it could just tweak its existing software stack for an entirely new GPU lineup. Like most shortcuts, instead of saving the company time, it just made the problem worse. Still, it sounds like Intel has figured out what went wrong, so hopefully it’s full steam ahead now. Drivers seem like Intel’s Achilles heel for Arc, however. It not only has to compete against AMD and Intel’s hardware on performance but on software. That’s no small feat, as both companies have been refining their software packages for years now. Not only that but both Adrenaline and GeForce offer many ancillary features, such as Radeon Noise Suppression, Nvidia’s Ansel, RTX Voice, and Shadowplay.

We’ll find out soon enough whether Intel has fully baked its drivers. The company recently said the launch of Arc in the US is “now in sight.” This follows it saying it would be launching “later this summer,” which should mean soon. Ahead of its launch its PR reps have been making the rounds as well to explain Arc’s features and capabilities. Pricing and availability are still the big unknowns.

Intel is also facing an unprecedented market situation, with tons of GPUs languishing on virtual store shelves. How that will affect Arc’s launch is anyone’s guess. Many gamers will hold off on buying an Arc GPU, at least at first, because AMD and Nvidia will be unveiling next-gen GPUs soon. Once that occurs, we will have a rare event on our hands: a three-way battle for GPU supremacy. At this point, Intel is clearly the underdog.

Now Read:

• Intel’s Arc GPUs Reports Clock Speeds Differently Than Nvidia, AMD
• Pics and Video Leak of Intel’s Upcoming Arc Alchemist GPU
• Intel Roadmap Details Plans for Arc GPUs, New Cloud Gaming Service

August 2nd 2022, 12:42 pm

Sony: Microsoft Acquiring Call of Duty ‘Could Influence Users’ Console Choice’

ExtremeTech

Idas, a member of the online video game forum ResetEra, found Sunday that Brazil is legally required to keep its regulatory reviews accessible to the public. Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (known locally as CADE) requested comments from various major tech companies about the acquisition, including Ubisoft, Riot Games, Google, Apple, and Sony. According to Idas—who claims to be a tenured IT lawyer and native Spanish speaker—the former companies are largely unconcerned about the merger. Sony, however, feels differently.

Call of Duty, which currently has about 100 million players across several different platforms, might “influence users’ console choice” if acquired by Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony told the CADE. Right now gamers can play Call of Duty on PlayStation systems 2 through 5, meaning the popular franchise doesn’t (yet) act as an ultimatum for those who feel they must dedicate themselves to a single console. If Microsoft acquires Activision, however, it could easily put an end to the franchise’s availability on PlayStation, along with other fan favorites like Diablo and Starcraft.

This wasn’t originally expected to be a problem. When Microsoft first placed its bid for Activision in January, Sony told the Wall Street Journal that it expected Activision games to remain multiplatform due to “contractual agreements.” Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Gaming, solidified this expectation. “Activision Blizzard games are enjoyed on a variety of platforms and we plan to continue to support those communities moving forward,” Spencer said. But when it comes to Call of Duty specifically, only the next three titles are committed on paper to multiplatform availability. (This includes Modern Warfare 2, which is slated for later this year.)

According to translations conducted by Idas and gaming news outlet VGC, Sony views Call of Duty as “an essential game: a blockbuster, an AAA-type game that has no rival.” Sony doesn’t think it can match the money and time (read: hundreds of millions of dollars and at least 2,700 full-time employees) it would take to create a true Call of Duty competitor. “No other developer can devote the same level of resources and expertise in game development. Even if they could do that, Call of Duty is overly entrenched, so that no rival—no matter how relevant they are—can catch up.”

Sony went so far as to project a bit of its melancholy into the future, telling the CADE that “given its plans to recruit 2,000 additional developers, Activision probably expects Call of Duty to become even more successful in the future.”

How much of an impact Sony’s concerns will have on Brazil’s probe of the potential merger is unknown. Regardless, the merger has plenty of other regulatory hurdles to jump: the US Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing Microsoft’s bid since February, and the UK started its own probe earlier this summer. Microsoft is said to require clearance from several other countries’ regulatory entities as well, from Japan and Australia to China and South Korea.

Now Read:

• FTC Sues Meta to Prevent it from Using Acquisitions to Expand its ‘Virtual Reality Empire”
• Rumor: Is Google About to Kill Stadia?
• Valve Bans Game Awards and Review Scores From Steam Listing Visuals

August 2nd 2022, 12:29 pm

MIT Engineers Develop Stamp-Sized Stickers That Can Perform Ultrasounds

ExtremeTech

At two centimeters across and three millimeters thick, the tiny ultrasound devices can be worn for up to 48 hours. They adhere to the body using a sort of elastomer sandwich; while one layer clings to the skin, the other attaches to an array of transducers MIT custom-designed for the project. Between the elastomer layers sits a thin spread of hydrogel—the same cold jelly spread on the skin during a traditional ultrasound—which acts as a medium for acoustic waves.

These acoustic waves are what form an ultrasound image, the applications of which are endless. While many associate ultrasounds with distinguishing the sex of a baby in utero, the technology is frequently used to find gallstones, guide biopsies, monitor tumor progression, and diagnose conditions from blood flow obstructions to kidney disease. Some of these applications are relatively quick and can be performed in a few minutes, while others require longer, steadier internal monitoring. That’s where the stickers come in.

It isn’t practical to require an ultrasound technician to hold a transducer over a patient’s body for hours at a time, between technician discomfort and staffing concerns. Longer ultrasounds like this also allow the hydrogel on a patient’s body to dry out, which interrupts the imaging process. Some hospitals have the privilege of attaching transducers to robotic arms for extended periods of time, but this doesn’t fix the hydrogel issue. Meanwhile, the two layers of elastomer in MIT’s ultrasound stickers keep the hydrogel contained, which prevents dehydration. It also frees ultrasound technicians to focus on patients for whom long-term monitoring isn’t required.

The engineers tested the stickers on a number of healthy volunteers, who wore the devices on the neck, chest, abdomen, and arms. Despite performing activities like biking, jogging, and weightlifting (as well as sitting and standing), the stickers remained attached to the volunteers’ bodies and continued to provide clear internal images. The team was able to use the stickers to monitor the volunteers’ blood vessel dilation and heart exertion during exercise, as well as watch their stomachs digest juice. They were even able to use the tiny ultrasound devices to detect microdamage in volunteers’ muscle tissue as they lifted weights.

The team at MIT is still working to make the devices 100 percent wireless, meaning it’ll be a long while before the public gets to try sticker ultrasounds for themselves. But the engineers have high hopes for their invention. “We envision a few patches adhered to different locations on the body, and the patches would communicate with your cell phone, where AI algorithms would analyze the images on demand,” the study’s senior author, mechanical engineering professor Xuanhe Zhao, told MIT. “We believe we’ve opened a new era of wearable imaging: With a few patches on your body, you could see your internal organs.”

Now Read:

• DeepMind AI Breakthrough Allows Prediction of More Than 200 Million Protein Structures
• A Fourth HIV Patient Appears To Have Been Cured
• Potential Research Fabrication Bombshell Threatens Amyloid Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease

August 2nd 2022, 12:29 pm

Samsung’s ‘Repair Mode’ Will Hide Your Data From Sketchy Repair Techs

ExtremeTech

No one likes to deal with a busted phone, but deleting all your personal data before you have it patched up makes matters even worse. Samsung has added a new feature to some of its phones that could alleviate this headache. The new Repair Mode will keep your private data private, no matter who’s going to be tinkering with your phone in the repair shop. 

If you’ve ever needed to have your phone repaired, you might have been advised to reset it or remove your secure lock. Technicians often need access to the phone’s software to complete or test a fix, and you don’t want to leave your data accessible if you can avoid it. Some people will take any opportunity to snoop in search of racy pics and valuable personal data. Personally, I always remove all my personal data before I leave a phone with someone else, but Repair Mode could make things easier. 

So far, this feature is only available on the Galaxy S21 family in South Korea. The feature lives in the Battery and Device Care menu of the settings, says Samsung (Korean). After enabling Repair Mode, your phone will reboot with all of your personal data locked down. Repair Mode gives techs access to the base Android OS along with the pre-installed apps. However, none of your apps, messages, or photos will be visible. That should provide everything they need to complete a repair, like swapping a display or battery. 

Your data will remain intact on the phone. So, once you get it back, you can enter your password or PIN in settings to boot the phone into standard mode with all your stuff visible again. That’s bound to be much faster and less annoying than rebuilding from a factory reset. Samsung hasn’t offered many details on how Repair Mode works, but it’s probably tied into the company’s Knox security platform that controls data security and boot validation. 

Samsung plans to expand Repair Mode to more phones in the future, according to Ars Technica. It’s telling the company started with last year’s flagship phones in just one market, so it might be a while. We are expecting a new version of Samsung’s One UI to arrive later this year based on Android 13. Perhaps Repair Mode will be bundled in that for more phones, but most devices won’t see that software until 2023. Or, you could just do repairs yourself with replacement parts made available through iFixit. 

Now read:

• Samsung Says Foldable Phone Shipments Were Up 300 Percent Last Year
• Samsung Galaxy S23 May Ditch Exynos Chips in Favor of Snapdragon Globally
• Samsung Promises App Throttling Controls in Future Galaxy S22 Update

August 2nd 2022, 10:28 am

ESA Begins Designing Probe to Explore Deep Within Venus’ Hellish Atmosphere

ExtremeTech

Venus is considered Earth’s sister planet because they’re about the same size and have similar compositions. That’s where the similarities end, though. Once scientists got a close-up look at Venus, they were greeted with a blistering hot hellscape with clouds of sulfuric acid. The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning a new mission to Venus, where its EnVision probe could conduct detailed science that has never been possible before. First, engineers have to figure out how to keep the spacecraft from blowing itself to bits as it descends into the planet’s ferocious atmosphere. 

The ESA announced its selection of EnVision last year, and in recent days, it provided an update on the design and construction of the probe. The plan is for EnVision to perform an aerobraking maneuver in orbit of Venus, allowing it to gradually lower its orbit as it scans the surface. The agency has experience with this process from the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), as well as Venus Express. In the latter case, the ESA only attempted aerobraking at the end of the mission in 2014, and it did burn up in the atmosphere. With EnVision, the ESA needs to surf the corrosive soup clinging to Venus before it can get started doing science. 

The Venusian atmosphere is 92 times denser than Earth, composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, and probably doesn’t support life. The crushing pressure is complemented by temperatures that reach 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius). For the record, that’s several hundred degrees above the melting point of lead. This is what makes it so difficult to study Venus up close, but EnVision is being designed specifically for these conditions. 

EnVision will most likely launch in the early 2030s on an Ariane 6 rocket. The ESA says it cannot budget enough mass to give the orbiter fuel to lower its orbit, so it will rely on aerobraking. The mission will begin in a very high orbit at 250,000 kilometers (155,000 miles), and through successive passes through the atmosphere, it will drop to a 500-kilometer (310-mile) polar orbit for science operations — it won’t land on the surface.

The ESA plans to take it slow with EnVision. Because heat is generated as a cube of velocity, it will spend about twice as long slowing down as the TGO did. Engineers are also hard at work testing different aerobraking materials. They have extreme temperatures to contend with, and Venus’ atmosphere is also high in reactive atomic oxygen. Luckily, the ESA has a facility that can generate atomic oxygen at energy levels that are equivalent to orbital speed. They are testing materials for insulation, antennas, star tracker elements, and more. These materials need to resist erosion while also maintaining their optical properties, which ensures the probe’s sensitive instruments work after it’s reached the intended orbit. The team expects to have the results of this testing by late this year. 

When EnVision settles into its final orbit, it will map the planet in greater detail than ever before. Scientists hope that by studying Venus, which may be a victim of a runaway greenhouse effect, we could gain insights into what’s happening on Earth.

Now read:

• NASA Probe Returns Amazing Image of Venus
• New ‘Collision Chain’ Model Challenges Great Impact Theory
• NASA Captures First Glimpse of Venus’ Surface in Visible Light

August 2nd 2022, 9:29 am

Intel Plans to Raise Prices on CPUs, Wi-Fi Chips in Q4

ExtremeTech

In case you haven’t heard, Intel had a pretty rough second quarter. Its revenue was down 22 percent year-over-year, and overall, it was the worst quarter financially for Intel since 1999. “We do think we’re on the bottom in terms of revenue,” CFO David Zinsner said on the earnings call. One way Intel is looking to rebound from this predicament is to raise its prices in the fourth quarter, confirming the previously reported rumor.

Despite the lousy results, Zinsner says everything is about to turn around, thanks to a solid lineup of products and the price increases. “[I] think we’re kind of operating with wind at our sails in terms of product offerings in all of our businesses,” Zinsner said on the call. He added that inflation factored into the decision to raise prices. He said the company thought it might be transitory at first, but now that it’s become more entrenched, it’s time to pass that on to its customers. Intel didn’t discuss numbers, but the hikes are rumored to be as high as 20 percent for certain products, according to Wccftech.

The timing of the price increase is interesting as Raptor Lake is already undergoing validation. Many leaks have already appeared online too, suggesting the launch is quite close. This makes me wonder if the price increase will affect Raptor Lake or just Intel’s current products. The jittery economic conditions around the globe have combined with inflation to make consumers more budget-conscious. Launching an expensive CPU lineup while doing battle with AMD’s Zen 4 architecture might prove challenging.

It also remains to be seen if Intel raising prices will alleviate some of its financial headwinds. It’s reportedly already told its partners about the impending price increase. That might spur them to order more product now, before the price hike kicks in. However, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in the earnings call that lowered demand for PCs was a prime factor in its reduced earnings. “The sudden and rapid decline in economic activity was the largest driver of the shortfall,” said Gelsinger. So if Intel’s customers have a ton of inventory sitting around, why would they order even more?

Regardless, Intel says Q3 and Q4 should allow it to reverse its fortunes. That will be due to Raptor Lake’s launch, as well as the typical surge in sales that accompanies the holiday season. Gelsinger reconfirmed Raptor Lake will deliver “double-digit performance gains” over Alder Lake and said he expects it to do quite well. He added that Intel has sold over 35 million Alder Lake CPUs.

Now Read:

• Intel Raptor Lake Benchmark Shows it Dominating AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X
• Intel’s Raptor Lake to Support Both DDR4-3200 And DDR5-5600
• Intel Shows Off Tile-Based Meteor Lake, Ponte Vecchio CPUs at Vision Event

August 2nd 2022, 8:30 am

US Regulators to Certify First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Design

ExtremeTech

Since 2016, engineering firm NuScale has been working toward getting approval for a first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor, and late last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave it the green light. The company’s pint-sized nuclear reactor has numerous safety benefits over larger reactors, and the small size makes it possible to build them at a centralized facility before shipping them to their final destination. 

Nuclear power seems to flip between savior and boogeyman every few years. As climate change escalates due to the use of fossil fuels, nuclear is seen as a way to reduce carbon emissions while maintaining high electricity generation. However, all it takes is one accident like Fukushima or a reminder that Chernobyl is still incredibly dangerous decades later to make people second-guess the construction of new fission generators. 

NuScale, which has been anticipating approval of this design since the last technology review in 2020, says its small modular reactor (SMR) addresses these concerns. It’s based on a “Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor” developed at Oregon State University in the early 2000s. It has a compact uranium nuclear core along with helical coil steam generators inside the same steel reactor vessel. So, it generates power through the same mechanism as a traditional reactor (no fancy uranium or thorium salts here), but each SMR only produces about 50 MWe (megawatts electrical) compared with 1,000 or more in existing reactor designs. 

The compact SMR designed by NuScale can be produced in one place and then moved to another, eliminating many of the costs associated with building a bespoke reactor chamber at a power plant’s final location. It also includes safety features that could make the horror of nuclear accidents a thing of the past. If left unattended, gravity will pull the control rods down into the reactor, and the design also calls for SMRs to be completely submerged in water that acts as a heatsink. That eliminates water piping, which can be a failure point for traditional reactors. 

The configuration tested by the NRC calls for 12 SMRs, each about nine feet tall, all sunk in a reactor pool. They each generate 160 MWt (megawatts of thermal energy) with a yield of 50 MWe for a total of 600 MWe. 

With certification now complete, the designs will be published in the Federal Register. This is only the seventh reactor design approved for use in the US. After publication, new energy projects will be able to specify they are using the NuScale SMR without duplicating the design certification. One project is already aiming to use NuScale’s technology, but the “Carbon Free Power Project” at Idaho National Lab won’t be ready to begin operation until 2030 at the earliest.

Now read:

• Nobel Laureate Wants to Blast Nuclear Waste With Lasers Until It’s Safe
• The Navy Just Patented a Compact Fusion Reactor, but Will It Work?
• NASA Successfully Tests Nuclear Reactor to Power Future Missions

August 2nd 2022, 7:59 am

Valve Bans Game Awards and Review Scores From Steam Listing Visuals

ExtremeTech

An upcoming Steam update will prohibit developers from adding award and major review scores to their games’ primary visual assets. 

According to Valve, developers have gradually prioritized their titles’ various accolades in Steam banner images (officially referred to as capsule images). This has resulted in cluttered visual assets that confuse potential customers when shopping for their next favorite game. Rather than allowing the eye to take in a game’s name and general design, these jam-packed capsule images often contain multiple review scores, impressive review quotes, and award information.

While some seasoned Steam users might have learned over time to tune these out, others tend to find the award and review information cluttered. That goes doubly for listings in which award and review information obfuscate the game’s story, theme, or purpose. (It reminds me of flipping over a paperback to read the blurb on the cover, only to find a bunch of reviews from The New York Times instead. Like, what is this book even about?)

In a blog post covering the update, Valve argued some developers were even adding inaccurate or heavily outdated scores to their games’ visuals. When that’s the first thing a prospective customer sees, it makes sense that the company would want to take another stab at its capsule image guidelines. 

Valve’s new rules will roll out Sept. 1, 2022, and will cover a number of capsule image limits. “Content on base graphical asset capsules on Steam is limited to game artwork, the game name, and any official subtitle,” Valve says. Developers will no longer be able to add review scores (including those garnered on Steam), award information, or discount marketing copy to their titles’ capsule images. They won’t be able to advertise wholly separate products in a game’s capsule images, either. Valve has even included a “No other miscellaneous text” rule, likely to prevent developers from finding a roundabout way to include the aforementioned information. 

Valve is willing to make an exception to the last rule for specific, time-limited cases. Developers will be required to submit a temporary “Capsule Artwork Override” if they want to quickly inform customers of a recent game update or a seasonal event, and even then, restrictions will apply. Most notably, developers will need to localize the image’s language (or set of languages) to match the language(s) used in-game. (This is reportedly to avoid the longstanding issue of marketing material being in English, even when the game is played in another language.) 

Games found out of compliance with the new rules after Sept. 1 “may have limits to visibility within the Steam store,” Valve says. Uncooperative developers may also have their games removed from official Steam sales and events.

Now Read:

• Rumor: Is Google About to Kill Stadia?
• Intel Arc Tech Talk Focuses on VRR, HDR, and HDMI 2.1
• FTC Sues Meta to Prevent it from Using Acquisitions to Expand its ‘Virtual Reality Empire”

August 1st 2022, 12:13 pm

Startup Introduces ‘Clean’ Air Conditioning to Reduce Carbon Emissions

ExtremeTech

The way we currently cool our homes, schools, and businesses reportedly has a heavier impact on climate change than one would assume. Some researchers estimate air conditioning could be responsible for up to four percent of the world’s annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, with that figure expected to rise with global temperatures.

Conventional air conditioning has already received one Earth-friendly update: Chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons have largely been removed from major refrigerants due to their negative effect on the ozone layer. But there’s still a long way to go if we want to remove air conditioning’s climate culpability altogether. The refrigerants used today still contribute to air conditioning’s overall CO2 emissions, as does the transportation of said refrigerants and actual air conditioning equipment. Additionally, nearly a third of the energy used to power an air conditioning unit isn’t even used to cool the air—it’s used to dehumidify it. 

Blue Frontier says its system significantly reduces the amount of energy needed to cool a building while also massively reducing refrigerants’ effect on the environment. The system works by using electricity to power a heat pump, which concentrates a liquid desiccant and stores it in an energy storage tank. When cooling is needed, that high-concentration desiccant can dehumidify air and subject the air to indirect evaporative cooling. This means the system is capable of removing excess moisture from the air for users’ comfort without sacrificing energy efficiency, even in generally humid locations. (However, Blue Frontier’s site does say its technology is 10 times as efficient in arid climates, like Phoenix, Arizona, as opposed to humid ones like Miami.) 

The startup is still in its early stages, but it plans on testing its system in the “real world” soon. Blue Frontier will install a few units in buildings as early as this year, with commercial tests coming in 2023. Commercial units could be on the market as soon as 2025, with residential units to come in the years following. 

In an age when celebrities’ gratuitous private flights are responsible for half of the world’s plane-related CO2 emissions, it’s difficult to stomach blaming conventional air conditioning (which individuals increasingly need to, you know, survive) for even some portion of climate change. But one might argue the planet needs all the help it can get, and if 1,950 million tons of annual CO2 emissions might be reduced or erased by revamped air conditioning techniques, Blue Frontier’s technology may be worth a try. 

Blue Frontier’s website doesn’t appear to say anything about the cost of entry for homeowners, property management companies, or business owners who might be interested in installing one of its systems someday. Reduced long-term energy costs aren’t as convincing if Blue Frontier’s system costs significantly more than a standard HVAC unit. Blue Frontier might still be working to figure these costs out, but a lot of sustainability technology remains out of reach to those without the discretionary funds necessary to test it out. 

Now Read:

• Delaware Farmers Use Underwear to Check Soil Health
• Chess-Playing Robot Breaks 7-Year-Old Opponent’s Finger
• US Water Supply Might Contain More ‘Forever Chemicals’ Than EPA Tests Indicate

August 1st 2022, 10:28 am

Google Cracking Down on Spam and Scams With New Play Store Rules

ExtremeTech

Most of the Android malware scares we hear about originate in shady third-party marketplaces, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing suspicious in the Play Store. Google has announced a series of changes to make the apps safer and less annoying for users. In fact, one of the first moves will limit how long intrusive video ads can be. 

The first change won’t be immediately apparent to users, but it could have a positive impact on your battery. On July 31, Google will begin enforcing stricter limits on the use of exact alarms. An “alarm” in this context is a trigger that wakes up your device so it can perform a task. Any apps targeting the latest version of Android will need to use the new USE_EXACT_ALARM permission if they need to wake your phone from a low-power state without delay. However, only apps that really need this, like timers and event notifications, will be allowed to do so. 

Starting Sept. 30, developers will have to limit the length of full-screen video ads. Those are a common feature in free apps, which insert the videos between levels (if you’re lucky) or right in the middle of gameplay (if you’re not). Going forward, these ads must be dismissable after no more than 15 seconds. However, if you’re using an app that lets you watch videos to unlock content or features, those ads can be longer. 

At the end of August, Google will implement a number of changes aimed at improving security and safety. For one, the new impersonation guidelines mean apps won’t be able to use misleading icons that make them appear to be affiliated with governments or organizations. Google offers a few examples of icons that will be forbidden after the change. Google will also ban apps that “contradict existing medical consensus” and harm users. 

Another August policy change is something I’m surprised Google didn’t ban a long time ago. Android supports a feature called FLAG_SECURE, which allows developers to indicate an app has sensitive information and should not allow screenshots. This is common for streaming and banking apps. Google will no longer permit apps that attempt to bypass this feature to record content on the screen. The lone exception is screen reader accessibility tools. 

Finally, Google is cracking down on VPN apps in the Play Store. Beginning on Aug. 31, apps in the Play Store will not be allowed to access the VPN functionality of Android if they are collecting personal information, manipulating traffic, or manipulating ads. Google will still allow some exceptions like apps for parental control, app usage tracking, and network analysis tools. However, there is some concern this could affect valid, privacy-preserving features like DuckDuckGo’s app tracking prevention. Even if that’s not the intention, Google’s app reviewers often apply the rules with little regard for it.

Now read:

• Rumor: Is Google About to Kill Stadia?
• Google’s Plan to Phase Out Third-Party Cookies in Chrome Delayed to 2024
• Google Reverses Course on Play Store Permissions Change

August 1st 2022, 9:11 am

Analogue Pocket Gets the World’s First Video Game From 1962

ExtremeTech

The world’s oldest video game is now available on a sought-after handheld game machine — and no, I don’t mean the Steam Deck. Developers have released the iconic 1962 game Spacewar! on the Analogue Pocket. This Game Boy-style device is built from the ground up to preserve the games of yesteryear, but it does have one thing in common with the Steam Deck: There’s a very long wait to get your hands on one. 

In 1962, computer scientists at MIT, including Martin Graetz and Steve Russell, created Spacewar! on their brand new DEC PDP-1 minicomputer. This machine cost $120,000, the equivalent of more than a million dollars today. It consisted of 2,700 transistors and 3,000 diodes, and it used a 1024 x 1024 type 30 CRT for display output. Only 53 were made, and one of them gave birth to the first program we would recognize today as a video game. 

Decades later, you can play this game on the Analogue Pocket. Well, you can in theory. The $220 device is heavily back-ordered, but that’s a hell of a lot cheaper and more accessible than the PDP-1. As you might expect, the gameplay in Spacewar! is simple. It consists of two spacecraft orbiting a star. Each ship has a limited supply of torpedoes and fuel. The goal is to destroy your opponent or simply wait for them to make a mistake and crash into the star. 

A third-party developer known as Spacemen3 recreated Spacewar! for the Analogue Pocket, which was only possible thanks to its OpenFPGA architecture. The game had a unique way of generating images on the PDP-1 vector display, which was a challenge to recreate on modern hardware, but the original source code for the game and the PDP-1 are in the public domain. 

Using openFPGA, a 3rd party developer “Spacemen3” recreated the PDP-1 and Spacewar! using the original source code in the public domain. You can play it today on Pocket with openFPGA by following this guide here: https://t.co/XFS3ARmaUe pic.twitter.com/ut6N6Ovois

— Analogue (@analogue) July 29, 2022

The original game was a two-player affair, complete with custom controllers that The Verge notes were designed to be silent so you couldn’t tell when your opponent was starting an attack run. The Analogue Pocket version doesn’t have AI for the other player, but it’s apparently still plenty fun to slingshot around the star and blast another vessel. 

To play the game, you’ll need an Analogue Pocket, which is the hardest part — current orders will be fulfilled in 2023. After that, you can grab the PDP-1 and Spacewar! openFGPA files from Github. After loading them on the device’s SD card, you should be able to experience the dawn of video games in the palm of your hand.

Now read:

• DOSBox Pure Launches to Make Classic Games Easier to Play
• One Developer Is Fixing SNES Game Lag After 30 Years
• Pocket Perfect: New Analogue FPGA Handheld Promises Flawless Retro Gaming

August 1st 2022, 7:41 am

US Congress Passes CHIPS Act, Sends it to Biden’s Desk

ExtremeTech

After years of being stuck in legislative gridlock, the CHIPS act has finally passed both the House and the Senate. It will now proceed to President Biden’s desk, where it will be signed immediately. The passage of the bill by the House marks the end of a tumultuous legislative journey for the bill, which will provide billions in subsidies for US-based semiconductor manufacturing. The bill passed 243-187, with every Democrat and twenty-four Republicans voting for the bill.

The full name of the bill is the Chips and Science Act of 2o22. It provides more than $52 billion to bolster US silicon manufacturing efforts, as well as billions more in tax credits for companies investing in similar efforts. The bill earmarks $39 billion for US firms that want to “build, expand, or modernize domestic facilities and equipment for semiconductor fabrication, assembly, testing, advanced packaging, or research and development, including $2 billion specifically for mature semiconductors.” Additionally, $11 billion is earmarked for a public-private partnership with the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC). This will provide funds to conduct “advanced semiconductor manufacturing R&D and prototyping; invest in new technologies; and expand workforce training and development opportunities.”

The bill has long been seen as a crucial step in allowing American silicon manufacturers like Intel to increase their fab capacity at home. This could provide some reassurance that American companies wouldn’t have to depend on Taiwan’s TSMC so much. The US Commerce Secretary recently issued a stark warning about this very real possibility on CNBC. She noted that the top US chip designers like Apple, AMD, and Nvidia purchase 90 percent of their silicon (and probably upwards of 90 percent of their highest-performing silicon) from Taiwan. This leaves those companies and the US economy as a whole vulnerable to actions by countries like China. AMD still builds I/O dies with GlobalFoundries, but Zen 4 will move away from that.

The CHIPS Act is meant to bolster the US’s position in the industry, especially with regards to advanced nodes. Right now the most advanced processes are all made overseas, and none exist in the US. Intel is aiming to change that, so that one day companies won’t have to rely on TSMC for the most cutting edge technology. Still, those plans will take years to come to fruition, even if the money spigot opens at 8am on Monday morning.

The news will be music to Intel CEO’s Pat Gelsinger’s ears. He’s been pushing for the act, and has said the company needs the funds to help build its recently announced “megafab” in Ohio. Just a few weeks ago the company delayed the groundbreaking ceremony for the fab after the CHIPS act became stalled in Congress. Gelsinger said if the funds weren’t delivered, it would severely impact the company’s expansion plans in the US.

Not everyone is pleased with its passage though, as chip design companies like AMD and Nvidia were reportedly unhappy with the bill as it could disproportionately favor Intel. Those companies supported a different version of the bill, which also provided subsides for chip designers. “It’s going to benefit just a few companies,” said one person from a chip design company, who declined to be identified to CNBC.

Regardless, Biden will sign the bill into law post-haste. In a statement, the President said “The CHIPS and Science Act is exactly what we need to be doing to grow our economy right now. By making more semiconductors in the United States, this bill will increase domestic manufacturing and lower costs for families.  And, it will strengthen our national security by making us less dependent on foreign sources of semiconductors.  I look forward to signing this bill into law and continuing to grow our economy from the bottom up and middle out for working families all across the country.”

Now Read:

• TSMC Founder Says US Silicon Fab Expansion Plans ‘an Exercise in Futility’
• TSMC Executive Says Chip Shortage to Last Several More Years
• Silicon Wafer Supplier Says Its 300mm Capacity is Sold Out Through 2026

July 29th 2022, 3:22 pm

This Week in Space: The Moon is a Slightly Less Harsh Mistress

ExtremeTech

Hello, lovelies, and welcome to your favorite space news breakdown. This week, it’s mostly planets and geopolitics, with relatively little launch news. Shall we?

SpaceX Next Crew Launch Delayed By Damage During Transport

NASA and SpaceX have delayed the launch of SpaceX’s next crewed flight to the International Space Station, to no earlier than September 29. The Falcon 9 booster stage, riding horizontally on a truck and trailer, struck a bridge during the trip from SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California, to the company’s test facility in McGregor, Texas.

According to NASA, “SpaceX is removing and replacing the rocket’s interstage and some onboard instrumentation after the hardware was damaged during transport from SpaceX’s production factory in Hawthorne, California, to the company’s McGregor test facility in Texas for stage testing.”

Womp womp.

“After all replacement hardware is installed,” the agency said in a statement, “the booster will undergo stage testing and be further assessed prior to acceptance and certification for flight.”

I want to be sympathetic, but listen. In my hometown, there’s a 12’6” bridge, and there are signs for it miles away. Every few months, some hapless trucker hits the bridge. The interstate sends truckers to an entirely different exit, just to avoid this bridge. And yet.

Mars Sample Return Mission Has Two, TWO Space Copters

The surface of Mars is made of unrelenting suck. It’s nearly a vacuum, and the Martian regolith is terrible for our rovers and their moving parts. Nevertheless, NASA’s space helicopter, Ingenuity, has done very well on Mars. So well, in fact, that NASA scientists have decided to scrap the rover for their upcoming Mars Sample Return mission. Instead of a rover, they plan to include not one but two space helicopters. Now that we know it’s possible to fly on Mars, NASA is eager to explore.

Blue Dunes on the Red Planet

Elsewhere on Mars, scientists are looking to wind patterns to describe the Red Planet’s weather and geology.

This Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image shows sand dunes near the center of Mars’ Gamboa Crater. Larger sand dunes form sinuous crests and individual domes. There are tiny ripples on the tops of the dunes, only several feet from crest-to-crest. These merge into larger mega-ripples about 30 feet apart that radiate outward from the dunes.

The larger, brighter formations that are roughly parallel are called “Transverse Aeolian Ridges” (TAR), and they’re covered with very coarse sand. The mega-ripples appear blue-green on one side of an enhanced color cutout while the TAR appear brighter blue on the other. This could be because the TAR are actively moving under the force of the wind, clearing away darker dust and making them brighter.

Didn’t the Marcels sing about this?

Chinese Space Junk Crashes This Weekend

This weekend, there’s a significant piece of space junk falling out of the sky. It’s the skeleton core stage of China’s Long March 5B rocket, and current estimates have it hitting Saturday evening — plus or minus sixteen hours or so. Perhaps 25 metric tons remain of the spent rocket stage. Analysts believe that only 20% or so of the debris will make it to Earth’s surface.

Statistically, the debris will probably hit the Pacific. In 2020, debris from the first Long March 5B fell over the Ivory Coast, damaging some buildings. However, “The worst case in this event is going to be less serious than a single cruise missile strike that we’ve been seeing every day in the Ukraine war, so let’s put it in some perspective here,” said astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who hails from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a webcast discussion.

Borisov Bails on the ISS

Speaking of space junk, the new head of Russian space agency Roscosmos went take-backsies on the agency’s recent declaration that Russia would leave the ISS collaboration, effective 2024. The current target is 2028. Evidently Roscosmos joined the rest of the world in understanding that Russia probably can’t build a space station by 2024. You know, what with the worldwide sanctions over Ukraine, and all.

Now, if we all think very hard, we might be able to find something Russia could do to mitigate the sanctions.

“The decision to leave the station after 2024 has been made,” said Borisov in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week. However, one of them must have changed their tune. A NASA official told Reuters that Roscosmos would like to keep flying astronauts to the ISS “until their own orbital outpost is built and operational.”

Contrition? Never. Sometimes I think these people make announcements just to see how the press receives them, and then make their policy decisions based on the public reaction. Or maybe Borisov just wants to start off with a swagger to match his predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin. Then again, since Putin apparently gave Rogozin his pink slip because of poor performance… is matching that incendiary little man really a good idea?

Luna: Now Slightly Less Awful In Certain Very Specific Places

Observations from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have shown that pits or caves in the Moon’s surface could serve as nice little spots to put a moon base. Night or day, the temperature within the pits hovers around a balmy 63F. The research ran this week in Geophysical Research Letters.

“About 16 of the more than 200 pits are probably collapsed lava tubes,” said Tyler Horvath, in a statement. Horvath is a doctoral student in planetary science at UCLA, and led the new research.

“Humans evolved living in caves,” said co-author David Paige, “and to caves we might return when we live on the Moon.” Paige is a professor of planetary science at UCLA. He also leads the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment aboard LRO that made the temperature measurements used in the study.

Now we just have to figure out how to deal with the vacuum.

Skywatchers Corner

August begins with a conjunction of Mars and Uranus, high overhead. On the morning of August 1st, you’ll find the tiny, bluish disc of Uranus just northwest of Mars in the morning sky. The two will easily fit within the same field of view through binoculars.

The morning-sky planetary gathering of early summer will drift apart in the coming days, as Venus and Saturn exit on opposite sides. However, Jupiter and Saturn are rising earlier every night. By mid-August, Jupiter will appear just beside the waning moon. Like Mars and Uranus, it should be an easy one to spot with binoculars. Under the right lighting conditions, you may even catch a glimpse of Jupiter’s four largest moons; we’ll have more about that next week.

The Southern Delta Aquariids peak early Saturday morning. But their radiant is in the Southern Hemisphere, which means that northerly viewers will have a more difficult time. Even so, we might see a few fireballs. Similarly, this year’s Perseids will spend the next two weeks ramping up, only to be washed out by the full moon on August 12, the day of their peak.

—

So long, space nerds. No homework today; we’ll see you next week.

Now Read:

• NASA Ditches Rover for Mars Sample Return, Adds Two Helicopters
• Roscosmos Will Leave the ISS in 2024 2028
• 5 Reasons Space Exploration Is More Important Than Ever

July 29th 2022, 3:22 pm

5 Reasons Space Exploration Is More Important Than Ever

ExtremeTech

Year by year, humanity’s situation on Earth becomes more precarious. With climate change, economic insecurity, and viral pandemics stressing the world’s resources, why spend all this money on space? It’s easy to see why this argument comes up: there are big problems to solve here on Earth, and going to space is expensive. This oversimplification ignores the nature of humanity, the drive that has made us the dominant species on Earth. If we want to stay that way, space exploration is vital. Here are five reasons why we belong up there.

New Technologies and Research

Humans did not evolve to go into space, but we go there anyway. That has led to the development of various technologies that feed back into the economy and improve our lives on Earth. Without space programs, we wouldn’t have GPS, accurate weather prediction, solar cells, or the ultraviolet filters in sunglasses and cameras. There’s also medical research happening in space right now that could cure diseases and prolong human lives, and these experiments can’t be done on Earth. Space exploration could save your life.

Asteroids Don’t Care About Us

Speaking of saving lives, space exploration could save all our lives. The solar system has calmed down a lot since the early eons, but there are still an unknown number of big asteroids and comets out there that could smack into the planet and make the COVID-19 pandemic seem like a pleasant memory. It’s not a matter of if another large asteroid hits Earth, but when. A robust space program is the only hope we have of deflecting such an object. If we’re not working toward that goal, humanity already has an expiration date. NASA is currently making plans to run a spacecraft into an asteroid to test one possible method of saving Earth from such an impact.

Colonization Is the Ultimate Backup

There are currently almost 8 billion humans, which is a lot. However, we’re all crammed together on this one planet. If something happened to Earth, our species could be wiped out. For example, the aforementioned asteroid impact. Colonizing other bodies in the solar system (or building our own orbiting habitats) is a way to create a “backup” of humanity that will survive no matter what happens to Earth. Maybe future humans will be Martians who will never set foot on Earth. The technology to make that possible and sustain people independently of Earth isn’t going to develop itself.

Space Mining Could Save the World

As the population continues its inexorable upward climb, the strain on our natural resources continues to increase. The extraction of valuable minerals has led to a host of problems, including environmental damage and human exploitation, but there’s a wealth of precious materials in space. Startups like AstroForge want to mine asteroids instead of Earth, which would mean an effectively unlimited supply of raw materials that are rare on Earth.

We Are Explorers

There are more practical reasons for space exploration, but one of the principal reasons we must continue is that we’re explorers. That’s why humans number in the billions — from our earliest upright steps, we’ve endeavored to learn more about the world around us, and this allowed us to build a planet-spanning civilization. Exploring space is an opportunity not only to discover new worlds and build advanced technologies, but to work together toward a larger goal irrespective of nationality, race, or gender. If we stop exploring, we stop being human.

Now read:

• Harvard-Backed ‘Galileo Project’ Will Search for Signs of Alien Technology
• Mysterious Record-Breaking Comet Has Now Grown a Tail
• Astronomers Successfully Measure the Motion of 66 Nearby Galaxies

July 29th 2022, 3:06 pm

FTC Sues Meta to Prevent it from Using Acquisitions to Expand its ‘Virtual Reality Empire”

ExtremeTech

The hits just keep on coming for Meta, it seems. We don’t have room to rehash all the setbacks it’s faced recently, but now we can add one more to the list: a new FTC lawsuit. This newest suit isn’t about jeopardizing the mental health of its customers though. This one has to do with its recent attempt to purchase a company that makes Virtual Reality (VR) games. In October of last year Meta announced it was buying Within, which makes several popular VR titles. One of those is a workout app named Supernatural. It appears to be a “Beat Saber-esque” workout game. This week the FTC filed suit to stop the acquisition. The FTC says the buyout equates to an “illegal acquisition to expand [its] virtual reality empire.”

The FTC’s logic is pretty straightforward. Meta already controls almost every aspect of the VR industry. The complaint states it owns the top-selling hardware with the Quest 2. In addition it also has the most popular app store, owns seven of the most popular app developers, and also has the best-selling VR app of all time (presumably Beat Saber). Now it wants to add a very popular workout app to its roster. The FTC is crying foul because it competes with Meta’s own workout app. Therefore, it’s accusing Meta of trying to “buy its way to the top,” which some argue is what it did with its purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram. The charge is when faced with competition, instead of competing, Facebook just buys its competitor.

The FTC charges that Meta began its journey to conquer the market by purchasing Oculus VR in 2014. Since then it’s gone on to become the leading VR brand, and has also scooped up popular VR developers along the way. Within is just the latest company it hopes to acquire, which the FTC says will reduce competition in the marketplace. Because of that dilution of competition, the acquisition would be illegal, according to the FTC. “If Meta is allowed to buy Within, that competitive pressure will slacken. That lessening of competition violates the antitrust laws,” reads the complaint.

According to a statement from Meta posted by PCMag, Meta is ready to battle it out in court. “The idea that this acquisition would lead to anticompetitive outcomes in a dynamic space with as much entry and growth as online and connected fitness is simply not credible. By attacking this deal in a 3-2 vote, the FTC is sending a chilling message to anyone who wishes to innovate in VR. We are confident that our acquisition of Within will be good for people, developers and the VR space.”

For now, the commission successfully passed a vote to seek a restraining order and preliminary injunction against the buyout. That allowed it to file a Federal request for relief in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in order to halt the transaction.

Now Read:

• Meta Increasing Quest 2 Price by $100 on August 1st, Will Include Beat Saber
• Review: The Oculus Quest 2 Could Be the Tipping Point for VR Mass Adoption
• Quest 2 Add-On Increases VR Immersion by Making You Suffocate

July 29th 2022, 3:06 pm

Democrats Introduce Bill to Reinstate Net Neutrality Rules

ExtremeTech

Senators Edward Markey and Ron Wyden introduced the bill Thursday alongside Representative Doris Matsui. Titled the Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act, the bill promises to reinstate net neutrality rules originally implemented by the FCC toward the end of Obama’s second term. It would do so in part by amending the Communications Act of 1934 to classify broadband as a telecommunications service.

The aforementioned Obama-era rules prohibited broadband service providers from blocking or throttling content, implementing paid prioritization of certain content, or harming “edge providers” like Google or Netflix. They also required providers to maintain a certain level of transparency in regards to how they manage their networks, as well as conduct “reasonable network management” in such a way that doesn’t prioritize the provider’s commercial interests. As one can imagine, companies like Verizon and Comcast didn’t love these rules, despite a large majority of Americans favoring them. Corporate interests eventually won: within just a couple years, Congress repealed the rules. It’s been up to individual for-profit providers to maintain a sense of fairness and transparency ever since. 

As Markey’s statement regarding the Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act points out, a lot has changed since then. “The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the present need to promote an accessible and just broadband future, with students having spent upwards of two years studying online, entrepreneurs creating new businesses through remote work, and patients receiving the care they need through telemedicine services,” the statement reads. Americans rely on the internet now more than ever, meaning the consequences of potential blocking and throttling from providers have never been more severe. As Markey himself puts it, “Broadband is not a luxury. It is essential.” (One thing, it’s worth noting, has not changed: a majority of Americans still support net neutrality and would like it reinstated.) 

Meanwhile, classifying broadband as a telecommunications service would in turn allow the FCC more authority over providers. This would mean promoting competition, policing potential abuses, and updating Universal Service Fund programs to provide broadband to schools, libraries, and lower-income Americans. 

Many expected the Biden administration to resolve this issue by filling the FCC’s fifth seat, thus settling the agency’s even partisan split and facilitating a transition into a new set of internet rules. But the Senate has yet to confirm Biden’s pick, and midterm elections are quickly approaching. Hence the introduction of the Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act, though it, too, is expected to face an uphill battle in the Senate. 

Now Read:

• Legislators Ask Federal Agencies to Monitor Crypto Emissions
• Lawmakers Urge FTC to Reign in Deceptive VPN Advertising
• FCC Bans Deals Blocking ISP Competition in Apartments

July 29th 2022, 3:06 pm

Rumor: Is Google About to Kill Stadia?

ExtremeTech

Google announced Stadia in 2019, and from the start, there were concerns about the company’s commitment. Google has a reputation for neglecting and then killing services after people have become dependent on them, and Stadia seemed like a prime candidate for the Google graveyard. And now, one tracker of Google’s fickleness claims the end is nigh for Stadia. 

The aptly named Killed By Google is a website that enumerates all of Google’s canceled products, and a recent tweet is causing waves. The post, visible below, includes a message alleging that Google has planned to discontinue Stadia by the end of this summer. The report claims that users will get 30-60 days of notice, and the final month of the service will be free. That would be an extremely aggressive timeline that would no doubt upset the small but dedicated Stadia community. 

Google has since said that Stadia is not shutting down, but is that the last word? While the original report is completely unsourced, it has the ring of truth simply based on how Google has run Stadia so far. At launch, Google promised unique features and first-party games that you wouldn’t be able to play anywhere else. Then, it closed its Stadia Games & Entertainment studio just a few days after launching its first games and praising the staff. This frantic, ham-fisted approach to developing the product makes even this unverified claim seem plausible. Plus, we know Stadia’s subscriber numbers are falling far short of Google’s goals. 

🍿 pic.twitter.com/p0ONYBDXCI

— Killed by Google 🌻🇺🇦 (@killedbygoogle) July 28, 2022

Perhaps Stadia’s biggest problem is a lack of compelling content. It rarely gets AAA games, and those it does get are often late. As this problem has become more obvious, Google seems to be moving away from Stadia as a consumer service. It recently reframed what Stadia means to the company: it’s no longer the core of a gaming platform but simply the first product to use Google’s Immersive Stream technology. It has since licensed Immersive Stream to other companies (like AT&T) to run cloud gaming experiences. In some cases, these are games you can’t even get in the Stadia store. 

Given what we’ve seen so far, it’s no wonder people are ready to believe Killed By Google. Regardless of whether this comes to be, Google is getting to the point that it has to do something with Stadia. Stadia has blundered its way through the pandemic, offering little in the way of compelling content. Google can give away all the indie games it wants, but you can’t build a service entirely on that when Xbox Game Pass, Luna, and GeForce Now exist.

Now read:

• Google May Announce Windows Game Support for Stadia
• AT&T’s Free Batman Cloud Gaming Points to a Different Future for Google’s Stadia
• Report: Stadia Missed Active User Targets by Hundreds of Thousands

July 29th 2022, 1:24 pm

White House Launches Website to Help People Deal With Heatwaves

ExtremeTech

The site, HEAT.gov, houses an almost overwhelming amount of information about extreme heat. Visual tools, like the Heat-Related Illness and Temperature map—which displays regional rates of first responder visits associated with heat-related illness—are aplenty (and scarily red). Other parts of the site share tips on staying safe when you must be outdoors. There’s a section on preparing for the next heatwave, including signing up for energy assistance programs and learning the differences between heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Those who have lived in regions susceptible to earthquakes or hurricanes might even feel a twinge of deja vu when they get to the part about assembling emergency kits and sorting out family communication plans.

That’s because heatwaves are, despite their sneaky nature, a deadly and increasingly unavoidable natural hazard. Immediately upon launch on Tuesday, HEAT.gov warned that nearly one in every 10 Americans were experiencing extreme heat. This is expected to get worse, thanks to climate change. According to the site’s Climate Explorer tool, New York County’s average daily maximum temperature is expected to balloon from 65 degrees Fahrenheit to 70.2 between now and 2070, while Dallas County could go from 79.1 degrees to 84.3 in the same time. 

While some might be used to higher temperatures, those so accustomed are more likely to be somewhat spoiled with the infrastructure to match. (Take Phoenix, Arizona, for example, where residences are legally required to have air conditioning.) Still, that doesn’t mean the heat isn’t deadly in those regions. Hundreds of people die from heat-related illness each year in counties with such infrastructure. Not only that, but temperatures are rising year over year in desert regions, not just in their more temperate counterparts. Everyone is getting a piece of the country’s hottest pie to date, like it or not.

HEAT.gov is said to be just one part of the Biden-Harris administration’s plan to address extreme heat. A release from earlier this month details a handful of executive actions including resilient infrastructure funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), offshore wind energy prioritization, various workplace safety measures, and home energy assistance to help families with cooling costs.

Now Read:

• How Cat Litter Could Fight Climate Change
• Corn-Based Ethanol Is Actually Worse For The Environment Than Gasoline, Study Finds
• Scientists Discover Plastic-Eating Worms That Digest Styrofoam

July 29th 2022, 9:04 am

Intel Arc Tech Talk Focuses on VRR, HDR, and HDMI 2.1

ExtremeTech

Intel’s PR rep for its Arc discrete graphics has sat down for another “Between Two Monitors” tech chat. The company has promised to continually offer information about Arc prior to its upcoming launch. The rationale is it will allow gamers to have all the info they need prior to purchase. To do that it will be releasing short videos tackling questions from gamers. This week it released a new briefing discussing how Arc would handle Variable Refresh Rates (VRR) and HDR, and there’s talk of support for HDMI 2.1.

Starting with VRR, the GPU world is currently bifurcated between Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD’s FreeSync. However, in May the Video Electronics Standard Association (VESA) formally announced its own open standard based on Adaptive Sync. This is an attempt to offer an open standard that quantifies a display’s ability to offer variable refresh rates with DisplayPort using various performance tests. This effort was designed to override the competing standards, and hopefully lessen confusion among customers. After all, the average gamer may not be able to parse the various G-Sync and FreeSync versions available, especially with ratings like “G-Sync compatible” and “FreeSync Premium Pro” making things a bit muddier.

To demonstrate Arc’s capabilities in this arena, Ryan Shrout fired up Death Stranding on a 4K, 120Hz Acer monitor using an Arc A750 GPU. He didn’t state which certification the monitor has, only that it supports variable refresh rates. He shows the monitor syncing the refresh rate with the game’s frame rate, which is around 100 FPS/Hz. It’s running at 1440p, so overall the GPU is performing quite well in this game. He states Arc is “fully supporting DisplayPort VRR standards.” He summarizes by stating Arc will support “any and all” VESA Adaptive Sync standard. In addition, the company will also be validating Arc on the over 100 of the most popular VRR displays to ensure a smooth experience at launch. As an aside, it’s not clear by Ryan is wearing two watches in this video; easter egg of some kind?

Moving on to HDR, he says Arc will support it on compliant monitors. However, there are many different certifications for HDR that vary depending on a monitor’s brightness capabilities. Those include Display HDR400, DisplayHDR 600, etc. From there, he mentions that HDR is difficult to show on a video since you’d need an HDR display of your own to see it. Therefore, as proof it’s working he jokingly says Intel spares no expense and has a highly-accurate external testing device. That “device” is a person named Ken, who looks at the monitor and agrees it’s working.

Finally, he says the the lower-end Arc GPUs will support HDMI 2.0 natively. That includes the A310, A380, and A580. However, they can be modified with a PCON chip to support HDMI 2.1. That decision will be left up to the partners making the GPUs though. The higher-end GPUs, which includes the Arc A750 and the A770, will support HDMI 2.1 natively. A chyron on the screen also states all Arc GPUs will support DisplayPort 2.0 as well. The PCON chip he mentions performs a protocol conversion from DisplayPort 2.0 to HDMI 2.1.

The company recently stated Arc’s launch is “now in sight” but it’s still not clear when that will happen. The big question is whether Intel will be able to launch before AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs arrive, which might be around September. Intel is probably hoping it can pull it off, as its competition’s GPUs are rumored to be quite powerful. However, that power might come at a great cost, with a lot of heat as well. Therefore, it’s possible Intel is hoping to undercut them on price-to-performance and efficiency.

Now Read:

• Intel’s Arc GPUs Reports Clock Speeds Differently Than Nvidia, AMD
• Pics and Video Leak of Intel’s Upcoming Arc Alchemist GPU
• Intel Roadmap Details Plans for Arc GPUs, New Cloud Gaming Service

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

Samsung Galaxy S23 May Ditch Exynos Chips in Favor of Snapdragon Globally

ExtremeTech

Samsung has long partnered with Qualcomm on mobile technology, and the pair have just announced an expanded relationship. Not only will they maintain their patent licensing agreement through the end of the decade, but Samsung will use Qualcomm chips in more of its phones. That might mean Exynos haters will get their wish for a global Samsung flagship with Snapdragon instead of Exynos. 

Most iterations of the Galaxy S family have been bifurcated — in North America, these phones rely on the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM chips. For instance, the latest Galaxy S22 series has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. However, the global variant of Samsung’s flagships usually sport the latest Samsung Exynos chip — that’s the Exynos 2200 for the S22. This chip has almost the same CPU configuration with a Cortex X2, three Cortex A710s, and four Cortex A510s. For whatever reason, Samsung’s chip doesn’t perform as well, and Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU dominates the RDNA2-based Xclipse 920 in the Exynos. 

The newly announced partnership is still a bit vague, and Samsung stopped short of explicitly confirming that it was ditching Exynos. However, it certainly sounds that way. During the Qualcomm earnings call, CEO Cristiano Amon noted the agreement means that Samsung will be “expanding the use of Snapdragon platforms for future premium Samsung Galaxy products globally.” This goes into effect next year, just in time for the Galaxy S23. 

This could be a rare instance of a business alliance that makes consumers happy. The Exynos system-on-a-chip (SoC) has most of the same bone stock ARM components as other mobile processors, but its performance, battery efficiency, and heat generation are worse than the corresponding Qualcomm parts. This has been true generation after generation, with the sole exception of 2015 when Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 had such severe heat issues that Samsung used the Exynos 7420 even in the US. 

The situation is so bad that Samsung customers have started petitions asking for the company to stop using the Exynos SoC altogether. The almost 50,000 signatories to that petition might get their wish. Although, Qualcomm’s latest chips aren’t exactly bowling over picky smartphone consumers. The 8 Gen 1, based on Samsung’s 4nm process, exhibits higher heat and battery consumption than the last-gen Snapdragon 888. Early results from the 8+ Gen 1 with TSMC’s 4nm process are more encouraging. Should Samsung actually move all Galaxy S23 models to Qualcomm, we’d be looking at the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which will hopefully refine the formula further.

Now Read:

• Intel Hiring Top Talent From Rivals TSMC, Samsung
• Samsung Rumored to Begin 3nm Mass Production Next Week
• Qualcomm Has New Wearable Chips, And It Swears This Time They’ll Be Good

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

EVGA’s Open Air, Carbon Fiber Chassis Will Set You Back $1,599

ExtremeTech

Back in January EVGA showed off a concept ATX chassis it was working on named the E1. It’s a pretty unique design, to say the least. It uses a carbon fiber frame that “hangs” the motherboard inside of it like an insect caught in a web. This makes it unlike other “open air” case designs, in that you can see your hardware from pretty much any angle. EVGA includes some unique features too, like analog system information gauges that attach to the front I/O. The barebones case is finally available, but in limited quantities. At $1,599, it’s one of the most exotic ATX cases we’ve ever seen. EVGA is also selling some EVGA hardware kits with the E1 too, in case you’ve got a few grand burning a hole in your pocket.

The E1 hasn’t changed much since it first broke cover in January. It’s made entirely from 3k plain weave carbon fiber, and weighs a feathery 2.76lbs. EVGA claims its the lightest case by volume in its class. The motherboard is suspended in mid-air by steel cables via a system EVGA calls “independent suspension.” The case by itself includes just the frame, a vertical GPU mount, and the analog gauges with front I/O ports. The gauges display temps for the CPU, GPU, and system. If you end up ordering just the case, EVGA will ship it to you in a custom-cut Pelican case. The company claims this case has an $800 value.

Now, about those upgrade kits. If you thought paying $1,599 for a chassis was extreme, EVGA says, “hold my screwdriver.” EVGA also offers two “upgrade” kits, and both add thousands of dollars to the initial price.

The first level of upgrade adds the company’s most expensive (and powerful) GPU — the RTX 3090 Ti Kingpin — along with a 1600W PSU to power it. We previously dubbed this GPU package from EVGA to be “outlandish.” That GPU/PSU package alone is $2,500, as it includes a 360mm AIO cooler along with a beefy PSU. However, EVGA is actually cutting people a deal here. The price of the kit only goes up $2,100 if you add the PSU and GPU, so you actually save $400 versus buying them separately. The Kingpin GPU looks like it was made for this chassis too, thanks to its external OLED display.

If that’s not enough for you, there’s the final kit. This includes the same bits as before, with a motherboard, case, and GPU power cable kit thrown in. The motherboard is the company’s flagship Z690 board, the Dark Kingpin model. Naturally, it’s made for extreme overclocking and has an MSRP of $829. Then there’s the $800 carrying case, for LAN party action.

Finally, it includes the PowerLink 52u. This allows for a 5-into-2 arrangement for the cables powering the GPU. The RTX 3090 Ti Kingpin  requires dual 16-pin connectors from the PSU. This attaches to the power ports on the PSU, and you plug in five eight-pin cables on the other side. It allows for a cleaner look overall; a paramount consideration for an open air chassis. Overall, this is actually good deal, provided you think these components are worth the price tags EVGA wants for them.  You’re paying an extra $1,300 over the previous option, and getting an $800 case, an $829 motherboard, and the GPU adapter.

EVGA notes that the kits that include hardware are built to order, so they might take a few weeks to arrive at your command center. We should mention that this week’s Mega Millions is already over $1 billion dollars, so if you think you can’t afford the E1 in any of its forms, you might want to head to your nearest convince store before Friday’s drawing.

Now Read:

• Alienware Shows Off Concept Nyx Gaming Platform
• Dell’s ‘Concept Luna’ Laptop is a Great Idea. Too Bad It’s Made By Dell
• CES: BMW Built a Color-Changing Concept Car

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

Meta to Clash With Apple Over ‘Open or Closed’ Metaverse

ExtremeTech

It’s the PC vs. Mac war all over again, but this time it’s Meta vs. Apple. At least, that’s what’s about to unfold according to Mark Zuckerberg. In a recent all-hands meeting, the Meta CEO stated the coming battle for control over the metaverse will be not just between it and Apple. It will also be a philosophical battle pitting open standards against Apple’s locked-down, walled garden. If that sounds familiar, it’s almost the exact same battle that played out decades ago between Apple and Microsoft. Apple wanted to control both the hardware and software for Mac, while Microsoft took the opposite approach. It let other companies design hardware for its software, and it ultimately won that battle. Now it appears a similar showdown of ideas will occur in the metaverse.

The comments from Zuckerberg laid out Meta’s position quite clearly. It’s building Virtual Reality (VR) hardware that can be used in various online platforms. So, if you have a Meta Quest 2 headset you’re not confined to only being able to enjoy software or online worlds built by Meta. You could theoretically go to other metaverses, and move valuables around between platforms too. Though Apple has not announced or released its VR headset yet, when it does it’s expected to be typical Apple. That means Apple will be the gatekeeper. There will likely be no way, for example, for you to use an Apple headset in a Meta-based online world. That is, unless Meta makes a version you can download from the Apple App store, which is highly unlikely.

In his comments, Zuckerberg also draws a comparison to Android versus iOS as well. iOS is famously locked down, as all apps have to be approved by Apple. However, Android allows side-loading of non-approved apps. Such lax policies have allowed Android to overtake iOS in global market share, but iOS is still top dog in the US. Zuckerberg goes on to say Apple’s strategy has largely worked for mobile though, as it’s hard to argue with the iPhone’s success. However, he noted it’s not clear if that same approach will work for the metaverse. “One of the things I think is interesting is that it’s not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better,” he said. (Open versus closed is much less important than “Facebook” versus literally “Anyone else but Facebook. – Ed)

As proof of its commitment to open standards, last month Meta helped spearhead the development of an open standards group for the metaverse. It was joined in that effort by companies such as Epic Games, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Sony. Apple did not join the consortium, to the surprise of precisely nobody. Apple’s refusal to join the group, combined with its past behavior, seem to signal it will continue its locked-down approach with its VR headset.

Overall, Zuckerberg sees this coming battle as a war over philosophies, according to The Verge. “This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience. And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across different companies, and [that] will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist.”

Apple is expected to announce its fledgling VR headset at its October hardware event. It would theoretically go on sale sometime in 2023. The company has reportedly been working on its design for over seven years now. It’s also been revamping all its native apps to work with an all-new mixed reality operating system dubbed rOS for Reality Operating System. At the same time, Meta has shown glimpses of its first high-end headset dubbed Project Cambria (above), which is expected to compete directly with Apple’s headset.

Despite Apple losing the war for the lion’s share of the PC market with its “tightly integrated” approach, it remains to be seen if that will work for the meterverse, as Zuckerberg states. Still, it’s hard to count Apple out of anything as it tends to dominate every market it enters. A big factor will be pricing though, as Zuckerberg alludes to in his comments. He says the company breaks even or loses money on every Quest 2 headset it sells. That’s because it just wants people to get into the metaverse, then open their wallets.

In contrast, that is not how Apple operates. It has to have a non-trivial profit margin, or else it wouldn’t bother. That is, unless it can make money on the software side of things like it does with gaming. The metaverse doesn’t work that way though, as you will likely need Apple’s headset to enjoy its company-approved offerings.

Now Read:

• Meta Replaces Facebook Account Requirement With New, More Onerous Restrictions
• Mojo Vision Details Its First Smart Contact Lens
• iPod Inventor Tony Fadell: ‘F*ck The Metaverse’

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

AMD Allegedly Unveiling Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ CPUs on August 5th

ExtremeTech

For months we’ve speculated on the launch window for AMD’s next-gen CPU platform, and now we have a date. The company has posted an online registration portal for an August 5th (Taipei time) “Meet The Experts” event. The topic of discussion will be the new flagship X670 motherboards from AMD’s partners. However, even though it’s the official AM5 socket launch, AMD’s portal says it will be “Supporting the recent launch of AMD Ryzen™ 7000 Series processors.” So mark it on your calendar: Zen 4 will likely be unveiled on or before August 4th US time, at 9AM PDT.

The event will feature PR reps, aka “the experts” from some of AMD’s partners. That includes ASRock, ASUS, BIOSTAR, GIGABYTE, and MSI. Each rep will likely give a walkthrough of their board’s features and capabilities, while hopefully showing off some new features. Naturally, overclocking will be top-of-mind for many watching. Since the boards shown by AMD are all touted as “flagship” models, we expect that to be covered in-depth. Also, two of the five boards that will be featured are X670 Extreme, which as the name states, allow for extreme overclocking. We’re very curious to see what that will entail, as AM4 wasn’t especially overclockable. AMD has already teased this too, as it showed a Zen 4 CPU running at 5.5GHz at Computex earlier this year.

The event will be a showcase for the motherboards shown below. It will detail “How the Socket AM5 platform and AMD Ryzen™ 7000 Series processors deliver unbeatable performance,” according to the landing page. It’s a given that PCIe 5.0 storage will be covered, as it’s eagerly anticipated by gamers and storage enthusiasts despite there being almost no drives available for purchase currently. AMD’s new memory overclocking profiles will also likely be a topic of discussion.

Another big question is whether any CPUs with offer 3D-stacked V-cache will be available at launch. AMD has already stated there will be Zen 4 CPUs with V-Cache. However, it’s unknown if they will be offered alongside launch CPUs. It might be analogous to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which came out long after the original Ryzen 7 5800 was available. There have been periodic hints that AMD might launch more V-cache chips, but nothing has popped up yet.

The timing of the announcement is curious too, as nobody expected AMD to launch this soon. It previously stated Zen 4/AM5 would debut “this fall,” but that’s not until September. Therefore, it’s possible it’ll be showing off its new wares on August 5th, and they’ll go on sale in September.

Regardless, we’ll certainly be tuning in to see what AMD has up its sleeve. The launch of AM5 is one of the most highly-anticipated events in recent PC history. AM4 was a massive success for AMD, so it’s expected to keep the pressure on Intel with a hugely expanded feature set. Plus, AM4 was supported for six years, so this could also be the AMD’s platform for Zen 5 in 2024 as well.

Now Read:

• AMD Implies Its Drivers Are More Stable Than Nvidia’s
• AMD Engineer Confirms RDNA3 GPU Power Consumption Will Increase
• AMD Announces Zen 2-Based ‘Mendocino’ Mainstream Mobile Platform

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

Google’s Plan to Phase Out Third-Party Cookies in Chrome Delayed to 2024

ExtremeTech

Virtually everyone agrees third-party tracking cookies are a bad thing, but no one can agree on what to do about it. Google has offered up a few solutions — naturally, none of them involve ending user tracking. Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” won’t be ready as soon as the company hoped. Instead of phasing out third-party cookies this year, it’s pushed that deadline back to 2024. 

The internet is largely free and open, allowing you to access content on innumerable websites hosted around the world. Instead of paying directly, most websites have ads (including this one). A cookie is simply a file deposited on your device by the website. First-party cookies can do useful things like retain your login info, save form fills, and so on. A third-party cookie, which comes from an entity other than the website you’re visiting, is almost always used to track you and target ads. 

Google said in 2020 that it would block third-party cookies in Chrome within two years, but that’s not happening. That’s when it announced the nebulous Privacy Sandbox. Google is an advertising company first and foremost, so it can’t just do away with tracking technologies if it’s going to sell targeted ads. Its first solution, known as Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, was criticized for being insufficiently anonymous. 

Google’s new angle is called Topics, which will consist of 300 different topics. Your online actions will determine which of those topics become associated with you. When you visit a website, the Privacy Sandbox will be able to provide it with three random topics from that list. Websites can pass that data to ad networks and target ads around those topics. 

Google announced the new delay under the heading of “Expanding testing for the Privacy Sandbox,” which is true. Google plans to expand the trial of its Topics model for ad targeting to millions of new users in the coming months. However, this test is going to stretch into 2023, and the final Privacy Sandbox API won’t be ready until Q3 2023. Chrome won’t end support for third-party cookies until the second half of 2024. That’s quite a bit later than initially promised. 

In the meantime, you can activate the Do Not Track flag in your browser, which is supported in all the major players — even Google. However, Do Not Track is merely a polite suggestion. Most websites don’t respect that request. Browsers like Firefox and Edge have more robust tracking prevention that can make your online activity more private, but no method is foolproof.

Now read:

• Google Reverses Course on Play Store Permissions Change
• Google to Make Chrome ‘More Helpful’ With New Machine Learning Additions
• Google Will Let Free Legacy G Suite Users Keep Their Accounts After All

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

DeepMind AI Breakthrough Allows Prediction of More Than 200 Million Protein Structures

ExtremeTech

Google’s DeepMind division has rolled out a few fascinating and impressive AI models, including one that can play StarCraft II better than you (and almost anyone else). DeepMind isn’t only interested in AI to play games though. Last year, the company unveiled AlphaFold, a machine learning model that can predict the shape of proteins. Now, DeepMind has announced that it has generated structures for all 200+ million proteins in the centralized UniProt database. This is a big deal for basic biological research as well as for efforts to tackle some of the most important scientific conundrums of our time.

Proteins are the basis of all biological life on Earth, but even if you know the amino acid sequence of a protein, that doesn’t mean you know what it does or how it works. The sequence of a protein gives it patterns of positive and negative charges, hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions, and cross-linked segments. This is what determines the protein’s active shape, or “conformation” as it’s known in the lab, and a protein’s conformation is what gives it its function. Even a few mistakes in the structural prediction can be the difference between an enzyme that correctly catalyzes a reaction and one that does literally nothing. 

Determining the conformation can be a painstaking process, often relying on advanced techniques like X-ray crystallography. AlphaFold helps put that data in context with highly accurate conformation predictions. In the video below, you can see a team from the University of Colorado, Boulder talking about the challenges of studying proteins involved in bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The team spent ten years puzzling over the shape of a protein that AlphaFold was able to predict in just a few minutes. That’s possible because AlphaFold has been trained on over 170,000 known protein structures, giving it the ability to predict what new sequences will look like in 3D.  

When DeepMind announced AlphaFold last year, it decided to make the AlphaFold database freely accessible. At the time, there were only one million structures available, making the 200-fold increase over the past 12 months quite impressive. DeepMind says AlphaFold has been cited in more than 4,000 scientific papers since its debut, and it could help scientists understand pressing issues like antibiotic resistance, food security, and the effects of plastic pollution. 

With the entire UniProt database now done, DeepMind will provide a predicted sequence right on the web page. The full database of all 200 million structures will also be available as a bulk download from a Google Cloud Public Database.

Now Read:

• DeepMind Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman Placed on Leave
• Google’s DeepMind Can Support, Defeat Humans in Quake III Arena
• DeepMind’s WaveNet Voice Synthesizer Is Live in Google Assistant

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

NASA Ditches Rover for Mars Sample Return, Adds Two Helicopters

ExtremeTech

NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently trundling around the red planet, collecting samples and beaming data back to Earth. NASA plans to launch new missions in the next few years in partnership with the ESA aimed at collecting those samples and returning them to Earth. The agency has just completed a major review of the Mars Sample Return Program, and there are some significant changes (and not the first). NASA is canceling the Sample Fetch Rover, and it’s adding a pair of helicopters based on Ingenuity’s design. 

In addition to its raft of cameras and scientific instruments, the Perseverance rover has a Sample Caching System designed to store rock cores in ultra-sterile containers. NASA had a little trouble with this mechanism early on, but the rover has gone on to successfully stock up on Martian rocks. NASA only had a vague outline of the plan to return those samples to Earth when Perseverance touched down on Mars in 2021, but we’re getting closer to a final blueprint for this ambitious mission. 

NASA says updated projections of Perseverance’s lifespan mean that the sample return mission won’t need a new rover at all. Instead, Perseverance will be the primary means of transporting samples to the Mars Ascent Vehicle, but the lander will also include a pair of sample recovery helicopters that build on the design of Ingenuity. NASA initially expected that aircraft, the first ever to fly on another planet, would only last a few months before its off-the-shelf hardware failed. And yet, it has flown 29 times and survived a year beyond the original estimate. The new helicopters will act as a secondary method of retrieving samples from the surface. 

Getting pristine Martian samples to Earth opens up a range of scientific study that isn’t possible with a robotic mission on Mars. So far, Perseverance has picked up 11 potentially interesting samples, and it has room for a few dozen more.

After the samples are loaded on the Capture, Containment, and Return System, the Mars Ascent Vehicle will send them into orbit. There, the payload will rendezvous with the ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter — no changes are recommended for this part of the mission. NASA expects to launch the Sample Retrieval Lander in 2028, and the ESA’s orbiter will leave Earth (temporarily) in 2027. The samples should arrive on Earth in 2033, if all goes as planned. The timing could still shift dramatically if either NASA or the ESA miss their launch windows. China also recently announced that it hopes to beat NASA and the ESA to the punch. 

Now read:

• NASA’s InSight Lander Mission Is Coming to an End
• NASA Suspended Perseverance Operations to Save Mars Helicopter
• Perseverance Has a Pet Rock! But It’s No Ordinary Rock…

July 29th 2022, 8:36 am

Roscosmos Will Leave the ISS in 2024 2028

ExtremeTech

The International Space Station was conceived and built as a symbol of post-Cold War cooperation between America and Russia. And for thirty years, it’s been sailing peacefully in low-earth orbit. However, all that is about to change. Yuri Borisov, the new head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has finally put paid to his predecessor’s threats that Russia will leave the ISS after 2024 2028.

The reason for the strikeout is because a few days after announcing that it would no-fooling leave the ISS by 2024, Roscosmos is now saying it will stick around until 2028. “The decision to leave the station after 2024 has been made,” said Borisov in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week. But that decision appears to have already changed according to a NASA official, which told Reuters that Roscosmos would like to keep flying astronauts to the ISS “until their own orbital outpost is built and operational.”

Whether Russia withdraws or not, the ISS is in no immediate danger. America and other nations — including Russia — have signed on to keep the Station aloft through 2024.

“The withdrawal will take some time,” said Dr. Pavel Luzin, a Russian military and space analyst. “Most likely, we need to interpret this as Russia’s refusal to extend the station’s operation up until 2030.”

Borisov took office just a few weeks ago, after Putin fired his predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, for poor performance. At about the same time, NASA and Roscosmos signed a seat-sharing agreement. It provided that astronauts and cosmonauts would swap seats on future Soyuz and SpaceX missions to the ISS. What will happen now is uncertain.

Can Russia Just Leave the ISS?

Well… sort of.

Earlier this year, we noted that it makes no sense for Russia to directly imperil the International Space Station. And that point still stands. However, Russia doesn’t have to renew its cooperation agreements beyond 2024 2028 or whenever the country manages to launch its own station. Even if Roscosmos doesn’t physically drop the ISS out of the sky, they can make everyone else’s day worse. For one, during his tenure as chief of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin repeatedly threatened to withdraw access to key ISS infrastructure. To date, we’ve used Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts back and forth from the ISS. Moreover, the Station uses the Progress spacecraft for altitude-keeping.

Not long ago, it was the United States proposing to sunset the International Space Station. NASA organized its Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew programs more than a decade ago, in order to diversify American access to LEO. Now, the Dragon-crewed vehicles make our reliance on Russian launch vehicles a little less absolute. Public and private, there are other options in the works.

“We are exploring options to mitigate any potential impacts on the I.S.S. beyond 2024 if in fact Russia withdraws,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Russian Space Station: Coming Real Soon Now

According to The New York Times, Borisov told Russian President Vladimir Putin that withdrawing from the ISS consortium in 2024 would give Roscosmos time to figure out the logistics. “I think that by this time, we will begin to form the Russian orbital station,” he said. This latest delay seems to indicate Russia is a little less certain it can meet that timeline.

Borisov’s confidence hides some important truths. First, Roscosmos was in dire financial straits long before the Western sanctions. Russia will face great difficulty in sourcing and paying for complex electronics. And second — who does Roscosmos expect will pay it for launch services? Russia can’t just go running to China to redeem its behavior on the international stage. In fact, since last year, Roscosmos has been pleading with the Chinese Space Agency to let Russia send cosmonauts to the Chinese Space Station. But Russian spacecraft struggle to reach the Chinese station’s orbital inclination. And if the ISS and CSS are out of the question, where will the cosmonauts go?

“The prospect of cooperating with China is a fiction,” said Dr. Luzin. “The Chinese have looked at Russia as a prospective partner up until 2012 and have stopped since then. Today, Russia cannot offer anything to China in terms of space.”

Meanwhile, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement that “NASA is committed to the safe operation of the International Space Station through 2030.”

Now Read:

• Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus Spacecraft Successfully Boosts The International Space Station
• NASA Reveals How and When it Will Destroy the International Space Station
• What Will Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Mean For the ISS?

July 28th 2022, 1:09 pm

Mars Orbiter Photographs Canyon Five Times Deeper Than Grand Canyon

ExtremeTech

Mars is a world of extremes. Not only does it have the largest volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons), but it’s also home to the deepest known canyon, called Valles Marineris. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently captured new images of this grander canyon. The ESA didn’t need a fancy new mission to snap these images either. You can thank the venerable Mars Express orbiter, which has been in service for almost 20 years. 

Mars Express captured the stunning new images on its 23,123th orbit of the red planet. Using its High Resolution Stereo Camera, the probe captured so much detail the images could be confused with aerial shots. The team generated photos of a region toward the western end known as Tithonium Chasma. This is one of two giant rifts that merge together to form the widest section of the canyon. 

The Tithonium Chasma trench by itself is more than 500 miles long. Above, you can see patches of dark sand near the top of the rift. The team believes this may have come from past volcanic activity in the Tharsis region. Below is a second view from “inside” the canyon, depicting two lighter mounds on the floor of the canyon, but they’re more like heavily eroded mountains. The scale is hard to grasp, but these gentle “hills” rise almost two miles (3000 meters) above the canyon floor. Mars Express has detected water-bearing sulfate minerals in the bumpy region between the mounds.

Even if you’re not familiar with Valles Marineris by name, you’ve seen it if you’ve ever looked at an image of Mars. It’s the enormous gash near the equator, making it one of the planet’s most distinguishing features. Valles Marineris is 2,500 miles (400 kilometers) long, making it about the same width as the continental United States. In places, it slices more than four miles (7 kilometers) into the crust of Mars. 

Comparing Valles Marineris to the Grand Canyon on Earth further illustrates how enormous this feature is. Despite having “grand” right in the name, the Martian canyon is five times deeper and ten times longer. Scientists believe Valles Marineris reached this extreme scale because it was not carved by water like the Grand Canyon. Instead, it’s the result of tectonic plate movement, back when Mars was geologically active. 

The aerial-style photos above can make it difficult to comprehend the scale of Valles Marineris, but take a look at the topographical map below. That scale is in kilometers. It also shows the path Mars Express took as it conducted the new observations. 

It’s amazing to see a spacecraft continue to do science after so long. The ESA even worked recently to update the probe’s software, which was no simple feat as the original development was based on Windows 98.

Now Read:

• That ‘Lake’ at Mars’ South Pole is Probably Just a Giant Hunk of Rock
• NASA’s InSight Lander Mission Is Coming to an End
• You Can Now Help NASA Hunt For Martian Clouds

July 28th 2022, 10:11 am

A Fourth HIV Patient Appears To Have Been Cured

ExtremeTech

Doctors say a patient in California appears to have been cured of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It’s the fourth time anyone in the world has seemingly been relieved of the virus. 

The patient, a 66-year-old man who otherwise wished to remain unidentified, has been living with HIV since the 1980’s. Prior to receiving the treatment that seems to have cured him, the patient was taking antiretroviral drugs, which have been used for the last few decades to prevent the virus from replicating in the body. While such drugs have the ability to extend an HIV-positive patient’s life, they also come with adverse side effects from gastrointestinal issues to bone loss. These reactions are difficult to manage long-term.

Banishing the virus for good, however, can free someone from having to endure miserable side effects over a long period of time. It’s just a matter of making sure the virus stays gone. This patient received a bone marrow transplant at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. Thanks to a protein mutation within the donor’s white blood cells, the donor was naturally resistant to HIV. The mutation, known as CCR5-Δ32 (pronounced “CCR5-delta 32”), proved useful to the patient in the days following his transplant. Over time, HIV became undetectable in the patient’s body. That was 17 months ago. The patient has been in remission ever since. 

Despite what looks like a miracle, the patient’s success story comes with more than one catch. The patient only received the blood marrow transplant following a blood cancer leukaemia diagnosis; his donor just happened to carry the CCR5-Δ32 variant. Blood marrow transplants are also painful and complex procedures, making them impractical for frequent use with HIV-positive patients. 

Doctors warn the CCR5-Δ32 variant is also relatively uncommon, especially among those who are not of European descent. Additionally, some worry the variant itself could shorten people’s lifespans. Further research is required to ensure that it’s safe to “give” the variant to others. 

Of course, there’s a chance CCR5-Δ32 ends up being safe to use for wider HIV treatment (or at least worth its disadvantages, given those associated with HIV). In that case, doctors will hopefully be well prepared as scientists seek out ways to use gene therapy in conjunction with CCR5-Δ32. 

Now Read:

• Potential Research Fabrication Bombshell Threatens Amyloid Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease
• Mojo Vision Details Its First Smart Contact Lens
• New Technology Uses Tears to Detect Ocular Disorders, Diabetes

July 28th 2022, 10:11 am

Russia is Running Out of Usable Keyboards

ExtremeTech

Keyboards acquired through Russia’s “parallel imports” strategy are proving impractical for the country, which is now scrambling to provide workers with the hardware they need. Russia adopted the parallel imports scheme following a slew of sanctions from tech companies in the US and other parts of the world. On paper, the strategy was meant to facilitate Russia’s continued import of products made in countries that had issued sanctions, but in a roundabout way. But the plan is clearly backfiring. 

Under the parallel imports scheme, Russia is allowed to purchase sanctioned goods from third-party countries not experiencing sanctions, so long as the third-party country acquired those goods legally. In practice, this means Russia can obtain tech like Apple and Microsoft devices from, say, China, because China isn’t being sanctioned by Apple and Microsoft. However, this strategy has a major caveat: because the devices shipped to third-party countries are made for the people within those countries, they aren’t exactly compatible with the Russian language. 

It doesn’t take a linguist to see that Russian is not Mandarin is not Serbian (as Serbia is another third-party country willing to trade out sanction-enforcing countries’ devices). If a keyboard is set up for Mandarin speakers, it’s not going to be very useful to those who conduct their work in Russian. This has proven challenging for a country that’s contractually obligated to provide government workers with individual workstations, each with their own Russian keyboard.

The issue is so prevalent that experts believe at least 10 percent of the country’s keyboard stock will consist of non-Russian keyboards by the end of the year. According to the independent Russian news outlet The Moscow Times, the country’s Industry and Trade Ministry has begun engraving Cryllic (the alphabet used in Russian and other Slavic languages) into individual keys. But doing this comes with its own disadvantages: engraving the keys requires taking keyboards out of their packaging, which makes them less attractive to potential customers. Worse, configurations that require keyboard disassembly and reassembly can void the hardware’s warranty. 

Should the Russian government have seen this coming when it implemented its parallel imports strategy? Probably. Is a keyboard shortage going to be the straw that breaks Russia’s back? Almost definitely not. Nevertheless, the tech hardware companies that sanctioned Russia in the first place are likely pleased that their punitive measures are working. 

Now Read:

• The Devil You Know: Head of Russian Space Agency Dmitry Rogozin ‘Dismissed’ From Roscosmos
• Micron Cracks the 200-Layer NAND Barrier, 200TB SSDs Could Follow (Eventually)
• Motherboards are Getting Updates for Unannounced Raptor Lake CPUs

July 28th 2022, 10:11 am

Backblaze Reveals Latest Hard Drive Life Expectancy Data

ExtremeTech

A dead hard drive can be a genuine disaster in the modern age. With capacities exceeding 20TB, that could mean a ton of lost data if you don’t have a good backup solution. Buying reliable hard drives from the start can mitigate the risk, but it’s difficult to know which drives are the most robust. Cloud storage provider Blackblaze keeps meticulous track of hard drive reliability, and it’s back with another round of analysis, calling out the most and least trustworthy drives. 

Backblaze offers both business and personal backup solutions, which it claims is a truly “unlimited” service. With a promise like that, Backblaze goes through a lot of hard drives. The company’s engineers track hundreds of thousands of hard drives, using a technique called a Kaplan-Meier Curve to forecast the failure rate. This statistical model is most often used in biological sciences to predict survival rates, but it can be used equally well for hard drives. 

Backblaze has provided data on 4, 8, 12, and 14TB hard drives. At the smallest tier, Backblaze compared an HGST (HMS5C4040BLE640) drive and a Seagate drive (ST4000DM000), and there’s a stark difference in failure rates. HGST (a division of Western Digital) charges a little more for the hardware, but 97 percent of these drives are still working after six years. It’s only 81 percent for the Seagate model. However, Backblaze notes that when factoring in the higher cost of HGST 4TB drives, it actually makes sense to use Seagate drives in a large-scale operation. If you’re just slapping a single drive in your PC, not so much. 

Stepping up to 8TB, Backblaze tested a pair of Seagate drives, one consumer (ST8000DM002) and the other enterprise (ST8000NM0055). Surprisingly, the consumer drives had a 95 percent six-year survival rate, but the enterprise model was a little lower at 93.6 percent. There might be an argument for the enterprise drive as it has a longer warranty, and the failure rate is only a bit worse. 

At 12TB, Backblaze compared an HGST drive and two Seagate models, and one of the Seagates (ST12000NM0008) exhibited a higher failure rate than the others. That said, all three were generally very reliable. After 24 months, the worse Seagate was still at 98 percent survival, while the other one and the HGST 12TB were over 99 percent. 

The 14TB capacity is the largest Backblaze used, as well as the group with the shortest testing period. Backblaze notes that the early failure rate is now within the range of randomness, so there’s no longer a clear issue with early mortality in large, high-capacity drives. The Toshiba, Seagate, and Western Digital 14TB drives all maintained at least 99 percent survival after a year. The Seagate (ST14000NM001G) does appear to be trending lower, but the Toshiba drives began failing at a higher rate around two years. The difference is only one percent lower than projected after three years, though. 

If you’re looking at smaller hard drives, Backblaze’s data suggests you should avoid Seagate. While Seagate does have higher failure rates across the board, the differences with 8TB and higher drives is on the order of just one or two percentage points. As long as you maintain good backups, price should be your primary concern.

Now Read:

• Western Digital Unveils Enormous 26TB Hard Drive, Speedy New SSDs
• Report: Microsoft Wants to Kill HDD Boot Drives By 2023
• Backblaze Publishes Stats for Hard Drive Failure in 2021

July 28th 2022, 10:11 am

Meta Increasing Quest 2 Price by $100 on August 1st, Will Include Beat Saber

ExtremeTech

You’re running out of time to get Meta’s best virtual reality headset for a lower price. Almost two years after its release, Meta (formerly Oculus) has announced the Quest 2 is getting a price hike from $299.99 to $399.99. New customers will get one of the best VR games free with their Quest 2, but that hardly makes up for such a substantial increase at this late stage. 

The Oculus blog (yes, that’s still what it’s called) says that the cost of manufacturing the Meta Quest 2 has increased, but that’s no surprise considering high inflation around the globe. As a result, the company is boosting the price by $100 starting on August 1st. That means the base model headset with 128GB of storage will rise to $400, and the step up with 256GB of storage will go to $500. Meta also notes that pricing for accessories and refurbished units will be increasing. 

In way of compensation, Meta will include a free copy of Beat Saber with every headset. This rhythm-based title is one of the most popular on the Quest, and it also happens to be a great way to demo the features of the Quest 2. Beat Saber only costs $30, and it doesn’t include a ton of songs. You can, of course, buy all the songs you want in the game. The song packs aren’t cheap, either. 

This price hike doesn’t bode well for Facebook’s upcoming high-end Project Cambria headset. This device is expected to be much more compact and comfortable thanks to its use of pancake lenses, and it’ll have full-color video passthrough. Leaks earlier this year pointed to an $800 price tag, but UploadVR confirmed with Meta that the price would be “significantly” higher. More recent reports have suggested the premium headset could cost as much as $1,500. It’s unclear if that’s what we can expect before inflation adjustments, but in either case, Meta’s first real metaverse play is not going to be cheap. 

Unlike the early days of the pandemic, you can actually buy a Quest 2 for retail price direct from Meta. So, you still have time if you want to order a unit at the lower price. It’s disappointing to see Meta increase the price of a device after it’s already been on the market so long, but we can all appreciate the warning.

Now Read:

• Alleged Schematics For Meta’s Project Cambria Headset Have Leaked
• Review: The Oculus Quest 2 Could Be the Tipping Point for VR Mass Adoption
• Quest 2 Add-On Increases VR Immersion by Making You Suffocate

July 28th 2022, 10:11 am

Potential Research Fabrication Bombshell Threatens Amyloid Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease

ExtremeTech

Alzheimer’s disease is a form of progressive dementia that we’ve labored to figure out for decades. Scientists made some headway with the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease, but progress is slow, and the hypothesis is incomplete. Now, a startling report has surfaced, accusing a prestigious Alzheimer’s researcher of systemic, deliberate research fraud. The results of this investigation could imperil the amyloid hypothesis as a whole.

The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease names a sticky protein called amyloid-beta as the disease’s primary cause. Scientists have identified “plaques and tangles” of amyloid-beta (Aβ) and tau (T) proteins in the brains of people who died of Alzheimer’s disease. But the amyloid hypothesis of the disease doesn’t fully explain its symptoms. Nor does it explain the scattershot absence of the protein in some Alzheimer’s victims’ brains.

But in 2006, Sylvain Lesné, of the University of Minnesota (UMN), shook up the Alzheimer’s research community with an extraordinary claim. Lesné and his team reported that they had discovered a “56-kDa soluble amyloid-β assembly,” a type of amyloid molecule which caused memory disruptions when they injected it into the brains of rats. (The “56-kDa” means 56 kiloDaltons, and it refers to the protein’s molecular weight.)

In the report, the authors propose that “Aβ*56 impairs memory independently of plaques or neuronal loss, and may contribute to cognitive deficits associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

‘Aβ Star is Born’

It looked like a smoking gun. The 2006 paper made it to Nature, one of the big-name scientific publishing houses. Alzforum, a “widely read online hub” for researchers, titled its writeup “Aβ Star is Born?” So, researchers leapt to explore the possibility of a treatment for Alzheimer’s that suppressed our Aβ precursor genes, or scrubbed Aβ itself from the brain.

Since then, much work has focused on amyloid plaques. More than two thousand papers cite Lesne’s 2006 paper. But it’s slow going. Since the amyloid explanation took precedence, it’s become difficult to get funding for research into other treatments or causes for the disease. Scientists complain that they’ve been sidelined by the “amyloid mafia.” However, none of the amyloid research resulted in a drug or treatment that slows, stops, or cures Alzheimer’s. That is, until Biogen debuted aducanumab.

Late in 2021, the FDA approved aducanumab, or Aduhelm: a monoclonal antibody targeting Aβ. But the drug hasn’t lived up to its promises. Aduhelm is the subject of tremendous controversy, because the FDA approved it despite massive scientific outcry.

Plaques Entangled

Aduhelm actually had to try for FDA approval twice. The first time Biogen sought approval for aducanumab, it fell short because its research receipts didn’t add up. The drug had flunked out of two prior Phase III clinical trials. Two internal FDA reviews of Aduhelm dismantled its claims. But, for reasons, Biogen decided to put Aduhelm forth for approval again.

The second time around, Biogen’s own data showed Aduhelm had failed one of its two new trials. They also showed that some 40 percent of people who got the FDA-approved higher dosage developed brain swelling. When the FDA gave Aduhelm fast-track approval, three members of the FDA’s advisory committee resigned in protest.

All this was already piling up when an aducanumab whistleblower named Matthew Schrag quietly approached Science with allegations that Lesné had engaged in widespread, deliberate research fraud. Science‘s six-month investigation uncovered a history of scientific misconduct shadowing Lesné’s twenty-year career. The results could spell disaster for the entire amyloid theory — and for Aduhelm.

‘Unmistakable differences’

Schrag himself carefully avoids the use of the word “fraud.” Without the raw data, he says, he can’t prove misconduct. “I focus on what we can see in the published images, and describe them as red flags, not final conclusions,” he says. “The data should speak for itself.”

And speak it does.

Science conducted its own investigation of Lesné and his work. When its findings corroborated Schrag’s suspicion of tampering, Science reached out to top Alzheimer’s researchers and independent image analysts. They, too, concurred with Schrag’s report.

The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” said Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and forensic image consultant who worked with Schrag on the Science investigation. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Science‘s investigation also worked with Harvard neuroscientist and amyloid expert Dennis Selkoe, who called the situation “worrying” and “highly egregious.”

“We need to declare these examples,” said Selkoe, “and warn the world.”

‘There is no other explanation’

Jana Christopher, another image analysis expert, identified other suspicious blots and images Schrag had missed. Selkoe, who had himself coauthored a paper with Lesné, dug through Lesné’s work for signs of manipulation. And the findings were grim. “There are certainly at least 12 or 15 images,” said Selkoe, “where I would agree that there is no other explanation.”

In total, the investigation found more than 20 suspect Lesné papers. Ten of them concerned Aβ*56. But one of the suspect papers was Lesné’s original 2006 Aβ*56 report.

Lesné’s work is important to the amyloid hypothesis as a whole. So it’s especially troubling that his amyloid research should fall apart under scrutiny. Biogen developed Aduhelm using data from Lesné’s original Aβ*56 paper.

When Science broke the news of their investigation, Nature parked a warning at the top of Lesné’s 2006 article.

Deflect, Deny, Distract

Science approached Karen Ashe, one of Lesne’s frequent coauthors, for comment. Ashe declined to be interviewed or to answer Science’s written questions. But shortly afterward, she took to PubPeer to defend the work.

Ashe’s post includes portions of the original images from her 2006 work with Lesné. The images don’t show the cut marks from Schrag’s report — which would suggest that the marks were just publishing artifacts. But in those images, Schrag and Selkoe found still more “unequivocal evidence” of tampering. Despite the lack of obvious cut marks, multiple bands were copied and pasted.

So far, Lesné and his collaborators have published two corrections. One, which concerned a 2012 paper in The Journal of Neuroscience, replaced several images that the Science investigation had flagged as “problematic.” Lesné wrote that the original versions had been “processed inappropriately.” But Schrag says even the corrected images still show signs of tampering in the DNA bands. In one paper, someone appears to have completely replaced a blot.

Ashe’s solo work passes authenticity checks, which suggests she’s innocent of misconduct. But this still appears to be a major ethical lapse. Even if Ashe herself didn’t do the dirty work, she was the senior investigator. “I don’t see how [Ashe] would not hyperscrutinize anything that subsequently related to Aβ*56,” said Selkoe.

Lesné did not respond to requests for comment.

Correctile Dysfunction

Lesné and Ashe were the first and senior authors, respectively, of a 2013 Brain paper which also received extensive correction in May of this year. Schrag had flagged multiple images in the study, which showed “negligible” levels of Aβ*56 in children and young adults, increasing steadily after about 40 years of age. The paper concluded that Aβ*56 “may play a pathogenic role very early in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease.”

The study authors said the correction had no bearing on the study’s findings. But Schrag isn’t convinced. Among other problems, one corrected blot still shows signs of tampering.

“I still have faith in Aβ*56,” Ashe told Science, pointing out her ongoing work studying Aβ oligomers. “We have promising initial results. I remain excited about this work, and believe it has the potential to explain why Aβ therapies may yet work despite recent failures targeting amyloid plaques.”

And Joseph Smith blamed the printer for the fact that he couldn’t reproduce the first chapters of the Book of Mormon.

Citation Needed

Science is facing a global reproducibility crisis. One 2021 analysis estimated that half of American psychology research reports can’t be reproduced. America has its trailblazing fraudsters. Theranos and its very public implosion come to mind. But the situation is at least this bad overseas. In a damning internal report, the Chinese FDA estimated that fully 80% of the new drug registration applications it receives are “fraudulent or substandard.”

If the amyloid hypothesis falls, Biogen’s stock price will fall with it.

Meanwhile, Schrag is betting his career on these bombshell allegations. Calling out influential researchers and journals could come back to bite him. But he says it’s worth it.

“You can cheat to get a paper. You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant,” says Schrag. “[But] you can’t cheat to cure a disease. Biology doesn’t care.”

Now Read:

• Scientists Testify in Holmes Trial: Theranos Tech Was Downright Bad
• Amazon Seeks to Reinvent Health Care With Purchase of One Medical
• Researchers Believe Alzheimer’s Could Be Genetically Linked to Gut Health

July 27th 2022, 4:07 pm

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 Press Renders Have Leaked Ahead of August Launch

ExtremeTech

Samsung has settled into a predictable cadence in the last few years — S-series smartphones in the spring and foldables in the fall. We are expecting to see the company’s 2022 foldables revealed at the upcoming Unpacked event on August 10th, but there’s less to reveal after the latest leak. We now have what appear to be official renders of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 smartphone. If you’ve seen the Flip3, you’ll know what to expect. 

While we might see more foldable and rollable form factors in the future, there are really only two designs in the market right now: flip phone and tablet. The Fold3 is an example of the latter, expanding into a small tablet when you pop it open. When closed, it’s a nominally pocketable smartphone. The Flip3 is a flip phone with a large internal foldable OLED and a small external “cover display.” The new renders, courtesy of noted leaker OnLeaks and GizNext, show the Fold4 looking very much like its predecessor. 

The Flip4 in the renders appears to have the same shape and proportions as the Flip3 — even the size and shape of the three glass panels on the exterior look the same. The cover display is not illuminated in the images, but you can make out the outline if you look closely in the black section. It appears to be roughly the same size and ratio as the Flip3. Inside, the Flip4 has a very tall foldable OLED panel. There are also still just two cameras on the back, but you can use them as selfie shooters when the phone is closed. 

Perhaps the most notable thing we can learn from the leaked renders is the selection of colors. The Fold4 will come in Graphite, Pink Gold, Bora Purple, and Blue. Sadly, the cream color from the Flip3 is nowhere to be found. The green colorway is also gone, replaced with a more mainstream blue. Samsung offered a “Bespoke Edition” Flip3 that allowed buyers to mix and match colors to create a custom design. It’s unclear if that will be an option for the Flip4 at launch (or at all). 

The renders don’t make this clear, but we can only assume the Flip4 will have upgraded internals for 2022. That means a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor and the latest 5G bands. The Flip3 retailed for $999, a drop of several hundred dollars from the previous model. I wouldn’t expect a similarly large drop for this one — Samsung is reportedly working on a mid-range foldable that will debut in 2024. 

Now Read:

• Samsung Says Foldable Phone Shipments Were Up 300 Percent Last Year
• Report: Samsung Plans Mid-Range Foldable Phones by 2024
• Samsung Rumored to Begin 3nm Mass Production Next Week

July 27th 2022, 2:24 pm

Micron Cracks the 200-Layer NAND Barrier, 200TB SSDs Could Follow (Eventually)

ExtremeTech

Micron has become the first NAND flash company to introduce a TLC design with over 200 layers. Last year it made headlines with its 176-layer NAND, now it’s surpassed that with 232-layers. This allows Micron to achieve 2TB of capacity per NAND package. This increase in density will boost more than capacity though. Micron says it’ll allow up to 50 percent faster data transfers than on its 176-layer design. It will also offer 100 percent more write bandwidth, and 75 percent more bandwidth for reads. This is also not “coming soon,” but is in volume production right now.

Micron says the development of 232-layer NAND is a watershed moment for the company. In addition to offering the most layers, it’s also the first six-plane NAND in production. That equates to the most planes-per-die. Each individual plane offers independent read capability to the controller. Micron says the move to 232 layers affords an increase in density of 35 to 100 percent compared to competing TLC designs. It’s also the highest density ever seen in a NAND die, at 14.6 Gb/mm². For context, Tom’s Hardware notes Samsung’s 200-layer TLC has a density of 8.5 Gb mm².

Increased density let Micron shrink the package to 11.5mm x 13.5mm. This is 28 percent more compact than previous Micron NAND designs. Naturally, a smaller package allows for a “diverse set of deployments” including mobile, edge, etc. Micron is also pioneering the use of NV-LPDDR4 memory. This low-power solution reduces the amount of power required by the drive by approximately 30 percent. The company says it’s currently shipping the 232 layer NAND from its Singapore fab. It’s shipping it in component form and through its Crucial SSDs product line.

The architectures features 1Tb per die, and 16 dies per package equate to 2TB capacity. The package is created by fusing two 116-layer dies together. Tech Radar notes this development could pave the way for vast jumps in capacity in the not-too-distant future. As an example, the highest capacity SSD available now is 100TB. It achieves that capacity with just a single 64-layer MLC design though, so you can imagine the possibilities. Also, that 100TB drive costs $40,000 so you should scratch it off your upgrade list.

Previously, in 2020 Micron’s CEO previously predicted 200TB and 400TB would arrive by 2021 and 2023 if density gains marched onwards. Sadly, that progress was disrupted by the pandemic. With the announcement of 232-layer NAND though, it seems like the company could be back on track with its roadmap.

This is a pretty exciting announcement, not just for Micron but for the solid-state industry as a whole. Unfortunately for consumers it’ll be a few years before the benefits trickle down to us and our gaming rigs. This type of bleeding edge, high-capacity technology will be used in data centers and applications where budgets, and capacity needs, remain high. In about five to 10 years it might result in an affordable 100TB SSD, but we wouldn’t hold our breath. It’ll certainly light a fire under Samsung’s behind to leapfrog Micron in layer count, if it can.

Now Read:

• NAND Prices Expected to Drop 8-13 Percent in Q3
• Move Over GPU Shortage, Here Comes the CPU Materials Shortage
• Western Digital Loses Six Exabytes of NAND Flash Due to Contamination

July 27th 2022, 2:24 pm

Some Pixel 6a Phones Can Be Unlocked with Unregistered Fingerprints

ExtremeTech

Google’s new Pixel 6a smartphone has only just started shipping to those who pre-ordered, but some reviewers have noted a potentially serious bug. According to multiple reports, the latest Google phone can be unlocked with a fingerprint — any fingerprint, even if it’s not the one you registered or one that belongs to someone else entirely. 

The Pixel 6a has an in-display fingerprint sensor, which is still a relatively new technology for Google. It first offered this feature on the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, which launched in late 2021. There were no reports of this multi-fingerprint bug with those phones, but they were sluggish to unlock. The Pixel 6a, which uses a Goodix optical fingerprint sensor very similar to the Pixel 6, is much faster. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. 

Optical fingerprint sensors are essentially high-contrast cameras that sit under the screen. Your device’s OLED panel lights up above the sensor to illuminate your fingerprint. The way it’s supposed to work, as you might expect, is that tapping the sensor with a registered finger unlocks the phone, but an unregistered print should be rejected. Several YouTubers and reviewers have now reported that their Pixels will unlock with unregistered fingerprints. One even showed it working with a fingerprint from someone else’s hand. This is a major security issue, but not a unique one. 

Several years back, Samsung began using ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensors. The Galaxy S10 mistakenly interpreted the patterns in some screen protectors as elements of the user’s fingerprint. Over time, the algorithm would get confused and allow anyone to unlock the phone because it could still see the screen protector patterns no matter who tapped. It’s hard to get this stuff right, and it appears Google still has some work to do. 

That said, I’ve been testing a Pixel 6a for several weeks, and I have been unable to reproduce the error. The phone only unlocks with my registered fingerprints, and yes, it’s a bit faster than the Pixel 6 in that regard. I have no doubt Google will investigate the issue, and there will be an update that addresses the lax security. Whether or not that makes the Pixel 6a’s sensor as lethargic as the Pixel 6, only time will tell.

The Pixel 6a is still available for pre-order at the Google Store, where it can be yours in black, white, or green for $449. It’s unlocked for use on any carrier.

Now Read:

• Google Reverses Course on Play Store Permissions Change
• Why You Should (Or Shouldn’t) Root Your Android Device
• Google Announces Pixel 6a And Pixel Buds Pro — Teases Pixel 7, Pixel Watch, and Pixel Tablet

July 27th 2022, 12:35 pm

Uber Avoids Criminal Charges by Admitting to Data Breach Cover-Up

ExtremeTech

The breach occurred in October 2016 when a group of hackers used stolen credentials to obtain an internal access key, which they then used to gain hold of approximately 57 million user records. These records included users’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers, as well as about 600,000 driver’s license numbers. Though the hackers didn’t obtain any Social Security numbers, credit card details, or trip details, how Uber responded to the breach is what brings them to their situation today.

Uber reportedly paid the hackers a $100,000 ransom not only to delete the data they’ve obtained, but also to keep the breach hidden from regulators and the media. Dara Khosrowshahi had just replaced the infamous Travis Kalanick as CEO and was navigating the company through a series of federal investigations, most of which focused on separate alleged privacy violations. Under the terms of the investigations, Uber was required to inform regulators of any “unauthorized access to personal information.” It didn’t comply.

Uber successfully hid the breach from regulators for over a year before Khosrowshahi publicly acknowledged the breach. In November 2017, the freshly-appointed CEO wrote a statement detailing the company’s “failure to notify affected individuals or regulators” and promising to notify affected users. The statement coincided with a “damning” Bloomberg report about the breach and its subsequent cover-up.

The news of the cover-up sparked a new investigation involving the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), state attorneys general, and foreign and domestic regulators. Up until last week, it remained possible that Uber could be held criminally liable for concealing the breach and violating its agreement to disclose security issues to regulators already investigating the company. But the company has avoided criminal charges via a non-prosecution agreement, which it entered into last Friday.

The agreement acknowledges that since Khosrowshahi’s appointment, Uber has “invested substantial resources to significantly restructure and enhance the company’s compliance, legal, and security functions.” It also publicizes a 20-year agreement between Uber and the FTC, in which the rideshare company promised to uphold a comprehensive privacy program and disclose any future consumer data breaches to the agency. According to the agreement, Uber settled any civil liability concerns through a $148 million settlement with the attorneys general for all 50 States, as well as an agreement to implement various internal security and review measures.

Violating any of these terms across the next two decades will put Uber back at square one, where it might face criminal prosecution all over again. But the company has surely learned its lesson…right?

Now Read:

• Amazon Sues Thousands of Facebook Group Admins Over Fake Reviews
• Apple Sued for Antitrust Violations With Apple Pay
• Twitter Successfully Fast-Tracks Musk Trial, Now Set for October

July 27th 2022, 12:35 pm

Rumor: Nvidia Preparing 800W Titan-Class ‘Beast’ GPU

ExtremeTech

Here we go again. Just when rumors about Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs’ power consumption had returned to sanity, now they’re going in the opposite direction. This time, it’s rumored Nvidia has a moonshot GPU waiting in the wings. Its job is simple: make sure AMD doesn’t take the top-speed crown this generation. This will be a “no holds barred” GPU with a ludicrous 800W total board power (TBP) and 48GB of GDDR6X memory. No, that is not a typo.

The latest rumor comes from notorious leaker kopite7kimi on Twitter. According to their sources, Nvidia will be returning to its old launch model with Ada Lovelace. That means it will offer a true “flagship” GPU with Titan branding. In other words, a halo product with outrageous specs and pricing. Titan GPUs always sport a lot more VRAM than their GeForce counterparts since they’re made for creators/computation, not gamers. This card will be no different, offering a wallet-busting 48GB of 24Gb/s GDDR6X memory. That’s twice the amount in the current RTX 3090/Ti, and 3X what AMD is offering in its RTX 6950 XT.

It’s also a return to form for Nvidia, as the line between Titan and GeForce has become blurred with Ampere. Instead of a Titan card it launched the RTX 3090 instead. It had Titan-level VRAM with more than twice the amount of the RTX 3080, but was still a GeForce card. The last Titan card Nvidia offered was for its Turing architecture, since the 3090 fills that role for Ampere.

Copious VRAM will also contribute to the card’s outrageous 800W of power consumption. Previously, Nvidia GPUs peaked at 450W for the RTX 3090 Ti. Some of the add-in board (AIB) partner cards pushed that a bit further though. However, Nvidia seems prepared to push that power envelope door wide open this time around, all other concerns be damned.

It remains unclear how it expects to manage all that heat. However, given the numbers involved a hybrid cooler seems likely. Nvidia has never taken this step though, as it has never needed to before. AMD has added 120mm AIO coolers to some of its GPUs in the past, but that’s probably not sufficient for 800W. Its current RTX 3090 Ti card is being sold with a 360mm AIO from EVGA, and that’s only a 450W GPU.

Finally, this “beast” GPU will reportedly sport 18,176 CUDA cores. That’s a hefty 69 percent more cores than the RTX 3090 Ti. Though that’s a sizable increase in GPU cores, it’s not unprecedented. Nvidia more than doubled the CUDA core count going from the RTX 2080 Ti to the 3080 Ti. Now it appears it’ll be doing it once again for Ada Lovelace.

What’s notable about this latest rumor is it lines up with previous rumors. Previously, it was thought there would be three TDPs for the RTX 4090: 450W, 650W, and 850W. So if the 850W model is present, what about the 450W and 650W? That is what is now being reported as the launch schedule for the RTX 4090.

It will allegedly be offered in a 450W Founder’s Edition, with partners allowed to crank it up to 600W. Also, according to Wccftech, the RTX 4090 will be priced lower than the RTX 3090 Ti, which costs $1,999. It might also be the only 40-series GPU Nvidia launches in 2022. Nvidia needs to clear its existing 30-series inventory from the channel before it launches equivalent GPUs. It will still launch its flagship, but it might postpone the rest of the stack until there’s room in the channel for it.

Now Read:

• Nvidia Seems to be Slashing Prices on Its High-End GPUs
• Nvidia to Crank Power up to 600W on The RTX 4090, 375W For Pro Cards
• Nvidia Reportedly Prepping Two New RTX 3050s, One with Just 4GB of VRAM

July 27th 2022, 12:35 pm

NFT Group Blocked from Minecraft Vows to Make Its Own Version of the Game

ExtremeTech

Minecraft developer Mojang announced earlier this week that it was banning blockchain and NFT technology from the popular block-based game. The general response from the community has been positive, but the purveyors of NFTs are feeling the sting. NFT Worlds, which has made a business of selling crypto-infused Minecraft content, is in search of a new path forward and may have to pivot by creating its own NFT-based version of the game. 

The freedom to build your own world in Minecraft has been appealing to NFT groups, offering plenty of opportunities to create blockchain products. NFT Worlds has generated over $75 million in transaction volume selling what it calls “world seeds.” Like other NFTs, these products are unique, and they can be bought and sold with blockchain backing. The owner of the NFT can use the seed to create a world using the Minecraft client. 

In announcing the blockchain restrictions, Mojang said NFTs “create models of scarcity and exclusion that conflict with our Guidelines and the spirit of Minecraft.” Before Mojang’s announcement, NFT Worlds were selling for 3 Ethereum, or roughly $4,500. After Mojang decided to ban blockchain tech from the game, the value of the NFTs dropped to 1.4 Ethereum ($2,100), reports Vice. The NFT Worlds crypto token also plummeted in value by about 70 percent. 

We've just shared the following announcement on our Discord regarding the current @Minecraft & @nftworldsNFT situation. pic.twitter.com/ARbKABRK4A

— NFT Worlds (@nftworldsNFT) July 20, 2022

NFT Worlds says it is currently attempting to contact Microsoft (which owns Mojang) to seek clarification on the change and seek an “alternative outcome.” That seems unlikely, but NFT Worlds says it has an alternative: it’ll just build its own NFT game. It wouldn’t be the first, but most of these titles are still barebones and not very popular. I question whether it’s even possible to build a game around overpriced digital assets that is actually fun to play. 

Mojang has not said it will forever ignore blockchain technology but the current exclusionary model of NFTs will not be permitted. That’s not to say that NFT Worlds and other groups are out of options. They could continue to sell NFTs with Minecraft seeds — there’s nothing stopping people from manually inserting seeds into the game client. However, NFT Worlds won’t be able to use the Minecraft API to send and receive crypto payments for the NFTs inside the game. That’s the sort of feature a game built from the ground up for NFTs would have, but good luck finding one that’s as enjoyable as Minecraft.

Now Read:

• Bill Gates Says He Wants Nothing to do With Crypto, NFTs
• Limewire Is Coming Back as a Musical NFT Marketplace
• Most Game Developers Hate NFTs

July 27th 2022, 12:35 pm

New Teslas To Require Paid Navigation Subscription After Eight Years

ExtremeTech

Up until this summer, all Teslas came with Standard Connectivity, which drivers could enjoy throughout the lifetime of their vehicle. Standard Connectivity is the brand’s name for its basic tech package: basic maps, navigation, and music streaming are available via Bluetooth, but all other features (Sentry Mode, Caraoke, video streaming, and more) must be conducted over Wi-Fi. Drivers had the option to upgrade to Premium Connectivity for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year if they wanted to enjoy these features without a Wi-Fi connection. Now, however, it seems Tesla has found a way to eke regular payments from all of its new customers.

“Standard Connectivity is included in your vehicle, at no additional cost, for eight years beginning on the first day your vehicle was delivered as new by Tesla, or the first day it is put into service,” Tesla’s Connectivity web page now reads. Anyone who’d like to use Tesla’s most basic tech features after their vehicle’s eighth birthday will have to initiate a paid subscription. A quick scroll toward the bottom of the Connectivity page clarifies that vehicles ordered on or before July 20, 2022 will still have a lifetime’s worth of Standard Connectivity features at no cost; after this date is when the eight-year timer comes into play.

The change comes just days after BMW’s $18-a-month heated seats debacle. The German automaker’s quiet shift toward requiring some drivers to pay to use individual luxury features, like adaptive suspension, steering wheel heating, and the vehicle’s full sound system, created quite the stir, and for good reason. Most drivers who spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car would like to enjoy the features the car is known for having. On top of that, few drivers expect to incorporate multiple subscription-based features into the cost of vehicle ownership on top of insurance, gas, and upkeep.

It’s unclear how much Standard Connectivity will cost once seasoned Tesla drivers deem it worthy of a monthly or annual subscription. (It could be that Tesla is biding its time, since no one will need to subscribe to Standard Connectivity for quite a while—or that it’s hoping drivers will give in to a Premium Connectivity subscription.) Unless Tesla adds support for third-party options like Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, drivers won’t be able to skirt the subscription situation by seeking out popular alternatives. And we wouldn’t hold our breath for that, either.

Now Read:

• Elon Musk to Tesla Employees: ‘Come Back to The Office, or Else’
• Elon Musk Thinks Optimus Robot Could Be Bigger Than Tesla
• Tesla No Longer Includes a Charger with New Vehicles

July 27th 2022, 12:35 pm

Motherboards are Getting Updates for Unannounced Raptor Lake CPUs

ExtremeTech

At this point in mid-summer, Intel still hasn’t officially said anything about Raptor Lake’s launch date. We don’t know when it’s coming or what pricing will be. All we know is that it will arrive this year, most likely in the fall. Despite this situation, motherboard manufacturers have already begun making their motherboards compatible with Intel’s 13th generation CPUs. Raptor Lake is an upgraded version of Alder Lake, so both platforms use the LGA 1700 socket.

You might not have noticed, but in the past month all the big motherboard manufactures issued BIOS updates adding Raptor Lake support. This includes MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock, according to Ars Technica. These updates apply to all Intel-based chipsets, including Z690, B660, H610, and H670. However, since Raptor Lake isn’t released yet, these BIOS updates won’t let you use the CPU like you would normally if you somehow got your hands on one. Asus’ update has this footnote, “Note that the initial BIOS version is for power-up purposes only and is not suitable for performance testing. A full-function version will be made available when the new CPUs are launched.”

This is certainly good news for those who are looking to upgrade to Raptor Lake from an older platform. When Intel’s 12th generation chipset debuted, people were shocked by some of the prices, especially for Z690 motherboards. That was at the end of 2021, when we had a chip shortage. We also had a DDR5 memory shortage, so most people who made the leap likely bought DDR4 to save a few bucks. At the time, the cost of a Z690 board with DDR5 memory was ludicrous.

When Raptor Lake launches though, it’s quite possible those same Z690 boards will be a bit more affordable. As long as they support Raptor Lake, which all 12th generation boards will at some point, it could be a winning package. That’s provided you don’t mind missing out on whatever Z790 brings to the table. Intel has yet to discuss those features, but there was a recent leak showing what the platform would look like (image above).

The launch of Raptor Lake will complete LGA 1700’s lifecycle, as it was promised to support two generations of CPUs. That is a far cry from what AMD delivered with its AM4 platform, obviously. AMD launched AM4 in 2016, and it’s still supported even today for AMD’s latest processors. We will have to see if that continues with AM5, and the same goes for whatever socket follows Intel’s LGA 1700. This is long been a pain point for Intel users, and AMD has been wise to offer a better alternative.

Raptor Lake is rumored to be launching on October 7th, according to Videocardz. Like with Alder Lake, it’ll unveil its high-end CPUs first, with non-K (unlocked) SKUs debuting at CES in January. Launch models will allegedly be the Core i9-13900K/KF, 13700K/KF, and the i5 13600K/KF. One of the big changes with Raptor Lake is upgraded memory specs. DDR5 will go from JEDEC 4800 to JEDEC 5600. However, like Alder Lake it will support both DDR4 and DDR5 memories.

Now Read:

• Intel Rumored to Cut Alder Lake Prices as Recession Fears Increase
• Intel’s Raptor Lake to Support Both DDR4-3200 And DDR5-5600
• Intel Shows Off Tile-Based Meteor Lake, Ponte Vecchio CPUs at Vision Event

July 27th 2022, 6:07 am

Man Who Lost Crypto Fortune in Landfill Wants to Use Robots to Find It

ExtremeTech

Imagine realizing that you accidentally threw away a winning lottery ticket. You’d probably be digging through the trash, and if the jackpot was high enough, you might even toy with paying a visit to your local landfill. This has been a reality for a UK man named James Howells for the past decade, only instead of a lottery ticket, he’s looking for a hard drive containing the keys to millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. His latest plan to find his buried treasure involves robot dogs, because of course it does. 

Today, mining bitcoin is a complex, energy-intensive process because the proof-of-work calculations get more difficult over time. But a decade ago, Howells was able to mine about 8,000 bitcoins on a modest home computer before the crypto boom. Even after the recent collapse in cryptocurrency prices, Howells’ lost fortune is worth about $166 million. All he needs to claim the money is the passcode saved on the hard drive he mistakenly tossed in 2013. 

Howells — a former IT worker and current crypto trader — has been working on schemes to find his fortune ever since he realized his mistake.  The problem, the local landfill in Newport, Wales has since been sealed and covered with earth. According to an interview Business Insider conducted with Howells, he has devised a plan costing $11 million to excavate the landfill. He’s reportedly gotten funding from venture capitalists Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wendeborn, but he needs some robots to get the job done. 

The plan calls for several Boston Dynamics Spot robots, which would march around the landfill in search of the hard drive. Trash excavated from the landfill would be sorted at a nearby pop-up facility with the help of human workers and AI systems. Even if Howells could find the hard drive in a mountain of garbage, there’s no guarantee it would still work. If the data is unsalvageable, his bitcoins are still lost. And lets not forget this hard drive has been sitting in a dank pit for the last decade. Garbage water isn’t good for hard drives (or anything, for that matter). 

The elements aren’t the only thing standing between Howells and his fortune. The local city council has always been skeptical of Howells and his schemes. They weren’t interested in his offer to share 25 percent of the recovered crypto, noting that digging up the landfill could incur millions in costs to the local government, and there are real ecological concerns when opening a landfill near residential areas. Howells apparently hopes his new plan will get the council to change its mind, but that seems unlikely after all these years. Howells has not, however, ruled out filing a lawsuit to secure the rights to root around in a big pile of garbage. There are probably easier ways to make $166 million.

Now Read:

• New York Passes Moratorium on New Crypto Mining Operations
• Cryptocurrency Lender Celsius Pauses Trading Activity, Bloodbath Ensues
• Minecraft Bans NFTs and Blockchain Technologies

July 27th 2022, 5:36 am