Sometimes, in the pursuit of efficiency, we can make big gains by taking cues from nature. Wing design is one place where nature excels, and we’ve been cribbing its notes for everything from wind turbines to boat propellers to control surfaces on planes. Now a team of scientists, led by John A. Rogers from Northwestern, have put biomimetic wings on a microchip, creating the smallest flying structure that humans have ever made. “Our goal was to add winged flight to small-scale electronic systems, with the idea that these capabilities would allow us to distribute highly functional, miniaturized electronic devices to sense the environment for contamination monitoring, population surveillance or disease tracking,” Rogers “We were able to do that using ideas inspired by the biological world.
Apple was one of the first to go all-in with USB Type-C on laptops, but it has been stubbornly reluctant to move to USB-C on the iPhone. It might not have any choice before long. The European Commission has to move forward with legislation that would force all smartphone makers, including Apple, to ship devices with USB-C. Apple, predictably, does not like this idea one bit. According to the European Commission, the proposed rules would cover all consumer electronics in select categories. Currently, the commission plans to include smartphones, portable video game consoles, portable speakers, cameras, and wireless headphones.
Today you can get a highly versatile laptop from Dell with over $800 marked off the retail price. This system is perfect for work, but it also has a 100 percent sRGB compatible display for editing images and a GPU that’s powerful enough to keep the average gamer happy. Intel Core i5-10300H 15.6-Inch 1080p Laptop w/ Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti GPU, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256B NVMe SSD for $819.00 from Dell (List price $1,712.86) M.2 NVMe SSD for $99.99 from Amazon (List price $149.99) 1536×1536 Wired for $111.00 from Amazon (List price $149.99) Wireless Earbuds for $199.00 from Amazon (List Price $249.00) 240Hz 1080p 24.5-Inch Gaming Monitor for $323.69 from Dell with promo code SAVE17 (List price $524.99) GPS AMOLED Smartwatch for $267.98 from Amazon (List price $349.99)
Windows 11 is just around the corner, and Microsoft is not playing games when it comes to hardware requirements. It has limited which CPUs and security features you need before upgrading to , and the PC Health Check app has been the primary way to know whether your system is supported. The app was light on details when Microsoft announced the new OS, but it’s been updated with more info and ways you might be able to make it compatible, Ars Technica. Microsoft’s narrower hardware support for Windows 11 is a departure for the company. In the past, if a PC was physically powerful enough to run the new software, it would get the update.
(Image: Ted E. Bunch et al/Nature)People have been in the valley of the Jordan River for a long, long time. Long enough, in fact, that we’re aware of a strange gap in the physical record of human history there, beginning with the mass abandonment of almost every city, village, and settlement in the area, around 3,600 years ago. When the entire population of a twenty-mile-wide metropolitan center just vanishes all of a sudden, there has to be some cause. Now, as the culmination of fifteen years of work, an interdisciplinary team of experts has presented an exhaustive catalog of evidence for a mammoth cosmic airburst over the plains of Jordan, not far from the northern shore of the Dead Sea.
When AMD announced it had added Smart Access Memory support to its older RDNA GPUs, we weren’t sure how much benefit gamers could expect to get out of the feature. RDNA and RDNA2 are quite similar, microarchitecturally speaking, but there are some significant differences in memory latency, cache design, and available VRAM bandwidth. Overclock3D the 5700 XT through its paces on a range of games and confirmed that the GPU sees an impressive uplift in some games. We were curious to see how the 5700 XT’s gains compared against RDNA2-equipped cards in general terms, so we consulted 35-game test of Smart Memory Access.
Concerns about artificial intelligence and its impact on work are not new, but as more companies deploy these solutions we’re seeing decided snags in the process. One point many of these conversations take for granted is that AI-powered tools work. What happens if they don’t? The pandemic has fueled an explosion in semiconductor sales and a significant rise in the number of employees who are kept under surveillance by their employers. In some cases, people aren’t just being watched — they’re being graded. This might not be a problem if the AI tools in question were robust enough to do the job, but all available evidence suggests they very much are not.
(Photo: Taun Stewart/Unsplash) US safety officials are asking Tesla to pump the brakes on its full self-driving (FSD) feature, which the company on releasing to a wider range of drivers in a matter of days. They have good reason to worry. According to a new MIT , drivers become “inattentive” while engaging Tesla’s . It’s the latest in that confirms what we all basically already knew. Researchers analyzed glance data from 290 human FSD disengagement epochs to determine whether drivers using the capability focus their gaze less on the road and more on, well, anything else. They found that off-road glances lasted longer when drivers had FSD engaged, and that non-driving related glimpses downward and toward the center stack area made up a majority of total glances.
Pull out your red-and-blue 3D glasses: Ingenuity’s latest, ground-hugging flight has delivered an of the Martian landscape. Its mission was to take color images of a specific geological target: a 30-foot hunk of craggy orange rock that the Perseverance team has nicknamed “Faillefeu,” after a medieval abbey in the French Alps. The Mars helicopter made the flight at its lowest altitude ever: 26 feet (8 meters). Faillefeu is part of a heavily eroded series of rocky ridgelines in the South Seítah region of Mars’ Jezero Crater. It seems pretty forbidding at first glance. These photos feature a lot of unwelcoming sand and rocks ranging in shade from dusty orange to orangeish dust.
