Humanity has existed for 300,000 years, give or take a millennium. That might sound like a long time when the average human lives at most a few decades, but it’s really just a cosmic blink of the eye. Even if Homo sapiens exceeds all expectations and survives both political strife and climate change, the sun will eventually turn Earth into a cinder. However, a new discovery from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii suggests there might be some hope for at least one planet to survive the future cataclysm. Around a distant stellar corpse, . Could that mean Jupiter is destined to survive the sun’s death throes?
AMD has launched its RDNA2-powered Radeon 6600 and taken the crown as the least-attractive GPU since Ampere kicked off the most recent product update cycle just over a year ago. That’s the overall opinion of the various publications that have spent time with the card. These lower-end versions of RDNA2 may be more affordable and at least slightly easier to find than the 6700 XT and 6800 XT, but they’re less attractive at MSRP, and even more unattractive at the stratospheric prices in the GPU market right now. At $329, the RX 6600 is ~14 percent less expensive than the .
(Photo: Unither Bioélectronique)The world’s first drone delivery of lungs has gone down in history as a success. Unither Bioélectronique, a bioengineering firm focused on organ transportation, recently completed a “proof-of-concept” flight in which a pair of human lungs were shipped via drone to the transplant site in about six minutes. The lungs were flown from the Toronto Western Hospital to Toronto General Hospital, where Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, surgeon-in-chief of Canada’s University Health Network, received the cargo at about 1 a.m. He needed the lungs for a transplant he was performing that very day on a male engineer who’d soon become the first transplant patient to receive his “new” lungs by drone.
To answer the big questions, sometimes we must look to the very small. Researchers at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center’s Ultracold Neutron Source, within Los Alamos National Lab, have been passing the cryo-baton for more than a decade, working at ever colder temperatures in order to study the behavior of neutrons. Now, an international collaboration of scientists has announced the most precise measurement ever taken of a free neutron’s lifetime, within an uncertainty of less than two tenths of a percent. Neutrons are the simplest particle that is radioactive, which is to say that they break down into other particles.
Again with the accidental discoveries! It’s the unexpected within six weeks. This time, the good news was born from debris in a hunk of Dominican amber. The researchers were studying ants from the Miocene period, trapped in a piece of amber. A closer look at the “debris” inclusions, however, revealed an even greater prize than the ants. What researchers had thought was just a fleck of dust was in fact a fossil tardigrade, frozen in time for sixteen million years. “It’s a faint speck in amber,” said Phil Barden, a senior author . “In fact, Pdo. chronocaribbeus was originally an inclusion hidden in the corner of an amber piece with three different ant species that our lab had been studying, and it wasn’t spotted for months.
HTC’s presence in the smartphone market has all but evaporated, but it’s still a presence in the world of VR. Facebook’s Oculus is way out in the lead, but HTC hopes might attract a new kind of VR enthusiast. The lightweight headset is styled more like a pair of glasses, making it easier to pop them on to watch Netflix or play a simple game. However, you’re going to need an external power source, and the Flow headset isn’t cheap at $500. Don’t let the head-on images fool you — the Flow is not as compact or convenient as a pair of sunglasses.
Epic and Apple are not on the best of terms after the former sued, claiming the iPhone maker was abusing its monopoly by locking developers into its app platform. The court disagreed, handing Apple a win on nine out of ten counts. That last one, however, could be a thorn in Apple’s side as it . So, Apple has , which it previously called a “resounding victory.” The company wants to upgrade that to “total victory,” it would seem. Epic was looking for a lot of changes when it sued Apple, all of which stem from the treatment of Fortnite on the App Store.
The Nintendo Switch has been a massive success ever since it launched in 2017, but despite critical acclaim the handheld has been plagued with dubbed “Joy Con drift.” The issue is caused by the thumb sticks, which can register inputs when you’re not even touching the controllers. Unfortunately, all current Switch models are susceptible to this phantom input, and Nintendo is now saying that the issue might be unavoidable. The company is trying to fix it, though. Reports of Joy Con drift began cropping up soon after the original console launched. As annoying as it was, one saving grace was the fact that the Joy Cons are detachable, so it was easy to replace defective sticks without having to send the console itself in for repairs.
(Photo: Souvik Banerjee/Unsplash)Yet another problem for Facebook’s PR team has come to light, this time in the form of an interaction with a single user. Louis Barclay, a developer who created a browser extension called “Unfollow Everything,” has reportedly been banned from using the social network going forward. According to a written by Barclay for Slate, Unfollow Everything was designed to unfollow every Facebook friend, group, and page, resulting in a completely blank News Feed. Though the concept sounds a little backwards at first, Barclay says he realized a few years back that the News Feed wasn’t necessary to utilize and enjoy Facebook—in fact, it mostly served to keep users on the app longer, thus eating into their free time and negatively impacting their overall well-being.
