(Photo: Thought Catalog/Unsplash)Facebook will soon go by a different name. According to a for The Verge, the social media company is planning to change its name and rebrand. Its new name, along with the company’s visions for the future, will be touched on next week at Facebook’s 2021 Connect VR/AR conference (the for which is eerily futuristic, ambient music and all). CEO Mark Zuckerberg has before about wanting to transition from existing as a social media company to being known as a metaverse company. (If you, like me, are new to the concept of the metaverse, Reuters has written a handy in direct response to this news.
After 18 months of living with Covid, many of us have come to terms with working remotely. Since we couldn’t travel, that meant making the most of working at home. But now that we can move around, working remotely includes the possibility of making your home base a coffee shop, Airbnb, or even a tent in a campground (assuming there’s cell service!). Frankly, it’s an awesome choice of work venues, but each have some constraints on power and connectivity. So, we’ve dug into what your options are for taking your home office on the road. This is a subject that is close to my heart, because as a tech-journalist slash road warrior, remote work is pretty central to my job, and I also have had to learn how to stay in business even during power outages.
Many of us grew up hearing the tale of Columbus and his discovery of the “New World.” Never mind there were already people living there, it was new to Europeans at least. But was it? For decades, archaeologists have been poring over an ancient Viking settlement in Canada, but a firm accounting of its age has remained elusive until now. As , researchers used cosmic rays analysis to date the site to exactly 1,000 years ago, hundreds of years before that Italian guy set foot in the Americas in 1492. We now know that Vikings landed in Newfoundland at some point in the early 11th century.
There have been rumors of a new M1 processor practically since Apple kicked the M1 out the door. Today, Apple finally took the wraps off what it had planned. The M1 Pro and M1 Max pack a lot of firepower, at least as far as specs are concerned. We’ll see how they perform in the not-too-distant future. The M1 Pro packs up to 10 CPU cores (8 high-performance, 2 high efficiency) and pairs it with up to 16 GPU cores. There are 33.7 billion transistors in the product and the SoC offers 200GB/s of memory bandwidth across a 256-bit memory bus.
Apple began a major architecture shift last year with the debut of the ARM-based M1 chip for its laptops. That same chip has since appeared in the iPad Pro, but Apple is not slowing down. If the original M1-based MacBook Pros weren’t powerful enough for you to leave Intel behind, could do it. This device comes with the new , a better display, more ports, and a display notch. Yes, really. The centerpiece of Apple’s new laptop is the revamped M1 chips, which come in two variants. The M1 Pro and Max both have up to 10-core CPUs on the Pro and an automatic 10-core on the Max.
If you were worried about learning the hard way which games do and don’t suit the Steam Deck, Valve is one step ahead of you. “Deck Verified,” Valve’s new , will show gamers “at a glance” whether games make for a good experience on its upcoming portable console. By reviewing its 50,000-title library (yikes), Valve will be able to sort games into one of four categories: verified, playable, unsupported, or unknown. Verified means the game is fit for Steam Deck right out of the box, while playable implies the game may need some tweaking from the user’s end to be enjoyable, like a specific community controller configuration.
Even before launch, NASA talked at length about the suite of more than 20 cameras on the rover, but did you know it also has a pair of microphones? NASA has used these off-the-shelf components to record the sounds of Mars in high fidelity for the first time. Some of the team’s favorite eerie recordings are available for your listening pleasure, but they’re also of intense scientific interest as the recordings are the best audio ever captured on another planet. According to NASA scientists Nina Lanza and Justin Maki, the two microphones on Perseverance are commercial off-the-shelf items that anyone can buy on the internet.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Gutierrez NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is having difficulties with its solar panels. The spacecraft launched on Oct. 16th without incident, and sucessfully unfolded both its solar panels. But only one of its panels successfully latched into position. Telemetry via NASA’s Deep Space Network shows that Lucy as a whole is still safe, and its mission is not in jeopardy. All other systems are normal. Nevertheless, NASA’s mission engineers are already on the problem. In a , NASA announced the issue, and said, “In the current spacecraft attitude, Lucy can continue to operate with no threat to its health and safety.
For years, the conventional wisdom has been that you can’t just nuke an incoming asteroid to save the planet, no matter what Hollywood movies have told you. The logic is quite straightforward; blowing space rocks into pieces would cause an even deadlier rain of smaller astroids that would pelt the entire surface of Earth. However, a new simulation from researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) suggests that nuclear “disruption” of an asteroid , even if the expected impact is just months away. Of course, it’s only possible if you can deliver a spacecraft to the asteroid, which still requires a lot of planning.
