(Photo: Nate Isaac/Unsplash)Apple is introducing a way to stay connected to first responders in emergency situations by way of satellite. According to a source who to Bloomberg about the development, the company is focusing on creating two safety features that will allow iPhone users to send emergency texts and report crises in areas without cellular service. Those close to the project say the hardware necessary for satellite connectivity could be included in the iPhone 13 releasing this fall—but that doesn’t mean users in spotty service areas can rest easy just yet. The features themselves, which could always be deprioritized or done away with prior to release, are more likely to become available in or after 2022.
(Image: NASA/EASA/G. Bacon)The sun won’t consume the earth for another few billion years. This is either good or bad news, depending on how you look at it. But in the meantime, we can look at other sun-like stars and see what they’ve been up to – and even what they’ve eaten recently. Spoiler: a lot of planets. A new of sun-like binary pairs published in Nature gives the odds of a star ingesting one or more of its planets at around one in four. You can tell a lot about a star by the lines of its spectral “fingerprint,” starting with what chemical elements it must be made of.
As part of our investigation into the consumer SSD market, we’ve reached out to multiple manufacturers to better understand the practice of shipping different versions of an SSD under the same SKU. Over the past 10 days, we’ve learned that at least four manufacturers — Western Digital, Samsung, Crucial, and Adata — have engaged in this practice in the recent past. The net effect of this behavior is that the drives that go out for launch day reviews and the drives that consumers later buy may offer very different performance. This sabotages trust between readers, reviewers, and manufacturers to the detriment of all three groups.
Earlier this week, we reported that ARM China had seized IP belonging to ARM, its parent company. The author of the story we linked apparently did not fully understand the context of the situation, however, and we inadvertently magnified an article with some misapprehensions in it. We have spoken to ARM and done some follow-up investigating of our own, and want to set the record straight. Not everything in the was incorrect. ARM is currently in a legal fight with ARM China and Allen Wu. Wu was voted out for reportedly using ARM China’s resources to procure orders for his own company.
The Windows Insider program is usually a good way to see what’s next in the world of Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system…unless you’re trying to run Windows 11 without the right hardware. As the date for Windows 11 grows closer, Microsoft is standing firm on the new software’s spec requirements. In fact, anyone running the beta on unacceptable hardware is being booted from the program, and their only option is to accept defeat and reinstall Windows 10. Windows has traditionally accepted all comers. Even a toaster with a sufficiently powerful CPU could run Windows, albeit slowly. With Windows 11, Microsoft is narrowing its focus to newer hardware.
(Photo: University of Washington)Try as we might, the most advanced synthetic materials pale in comparison to super-strong biological compounds like spider silk and muscle fibers. On that second count, researchers may be that can be used in place of fabrics like cotton, silk, and even Kevlar. This could lead to clothing made from real muscle. That might sound like an unsettling option, but the fibers aren’t what you’re imagining. Animal muscles are jam-packed with proteins, which is why eating muscle provides so much dietary protein. The most common muscle proteins are myosin and actin, both of which are essential to the motor functionality of muscles.
When news began to break three and a half years ago regarding a pair of new security flaws, Meltdown and Spectre, it quickly became apparent that plenty of eyeballs were laser-focused on Intel’s security implementations. There was nothing wrong with this, as such — CPU security deserves to be scrutinized — but in many cases, far more attention was being given to Intel over AMD. The question of whether AMD CPUs were more secure than Intel CPUs was widely debated in the enthusiast community, but to no clear conclusion. While far more vulnerabilities were found in Intel chips, the researchers investigating these flaws often acknowledged that they either did not have access to AMD hardware to test or that the limited tests they had run on AMD kit using techniques known to disrupt Intel processors had not worked.
Over the last two weeks, we’ve written multiple stories about SSD manufacturers who have shipped SSDs with different real-world performance levels than the drives initially debuted with. On Monday afternoon we sat down for a discussion with Crucial regarding its SSD policies in general and the P2 in particular. Here’s what we found out. First, regarding the P2 specifically: The 1TB and 2TB versions of this drive have always been QLC drives with large SLC caches. They were never produced with TLC NAND like the smaller capacities were. Crucial does not seem to have communicated this distinction to the press, however.
Everyone loves a tech upgrade. Buying a new computer and setting it up is one of life’s simple pleasures, almost as good as using the new device for the first time and discovering just how much better it is than the old one – faster, smoother, clearer. What’s not a joy of life is transferring all your data and files from one computer to the next. Often there seems to be no simple way to do so, with only clunky systems or expensive professionals to help you out. But now there’s a bundle of products specifically designed for just such a purpose, making your life easier when you upgrade or switch your devices.
