Astronomers have discovered a new asteroid, but unlike most newsworthy space rocks, this one is not notable because it’s threatening to hit Earth. The asteroid known as 2021 PH27 keeps its distance from our fragile blue marble. That distance varies widely, though. According to researchers at the Carnegie Institution of Science, 2021 PH27 is the fastest asteroid orbiting the sun. It takes , and it gets perilously close to the sun each time. Astronomers discovered the speedy asteroid using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is part of the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile. Lately, DECam has been focused on studying massive galaxy clusters many millions of light-years away.
Another year, another massive national coverage test over the entire United States. Our colleagues at PCMag have been rounding up data on how US wireless mobile network speeds compare, city by city, in its series for 12 years now. After a long run of near-total Verizon domination, an upstart has seized the title: T-Mobile. According to PCMag’s Sascha Segan: The carrier’s new mid-band 5G network is the only nationwide 5G that’s markedly faster than 4G, earning T-Mobile its first-ever PCMag award for America’s fastest mobile network. In our 12th annual test, drivers traveled a total of 10,626 miles, surveying 30 major US metro areas and six rural regions to find out the state of 5G from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
As a designer, engineer, architect, or construction expert, creating clear and consistent drafts can be a challenge – but it’s made far simpler if you have the right software for the job. Streamlining the design and drafting process, and thus making them much quicker, for people in such roles can make a job that much easier, which is always a good thing. There are many software options available on the market – what’s difficult is finding the fight software, which offers the optimal balance of functionality, ease of use, and affordability, as well as a painless path in figuring out how to use the software.
Today you can get a compact 13.3-inch Dell laptop with a Core i7 processor, a 1080p touchscreen display and a sleek aluminum chassis marked down to just $985.59. Intel Core i7-1165G7 13.3-Inch 1080p Touchscreen Laptop w/ Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 16GB LPDDR4x RAM and 1TB M.2 SSD for $985.59 from Dell with promo code SAVE12 (List price $1,549.99) Intel Core i5-10500H 1080p 120Hz 15.6-Inch Gaming Laptop w/ Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD for $749.99 from Dell (List price $1,218.99) Dual-Band Mesh Wi-Fi 6 Router System for $195.00 from Amazon (List price $279.00) External HDD for $99.99 from Amazon (List price $159.99) Intel Core i7-11700 Gaming Desktop w/ Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB NVMe SSD + 1TB HDD for $1,407.99 from Dell with promo code SAVE12 (List price $1,799.99) Intel Core i5-1135G7 13.3-inch 108p Laptop w/ Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB NVMe SSD for $679.00 from Dell (List price $1,355.72)
NASA’s new Perseverance rover hasn’t even been on the red planet long enough to get dusty, so everything it does is still big news. However, the Curiosity rover is still there as well, plugging along as it sojourns up the side of Mount Sharp. NASA recently released a new panorama image from Curiosity to celebrate the rover’s ninth year exploring Mars. The expansive snapshot shows where the robot has been as well as where it’s going. Curiosity famously touched down in Gale Crater on August 5, 2012. It utilized an impressive rocket sled to land gently on the surface, a technique that Perseverance used eight and a half years later to begin its mission in Jezero Crater.
When I wrote about Crucial’s decision to swap inferior NAND flash into its products without updating the reviewer community or announcing a separate SKU, I hoped the problem was a one-off. While this has happened before, it’s typically been the exception, not the norm. Guess that was too much to hope for. According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue — which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market — has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s (as measured ) to 390MB/s (as measured ).
AMD gave us more information about its upcoming V-Cache at Hot Chips this year, the annual conference where semiconductor engineers from all over the industry come together to crow over disclose details regarding their technical achievements in the past 12 months. Earlier this year, AMD that it would not advance directly from Zen 3 to Zen 4. Instead, it would iterate on the Zen 3 core by stacking a full 64MB of 7nm L3 cache vertically on the core. AMD claims this can improve performance by up to 15 percent based on 1080p gaming results. The improvement in other applications is unknown.
(Photo: Joey Banks/Unsplash)Apple is planning on releasing a higher-end version of the Mac Mini that will one-up its existing edition. The new drop will arrive within “the next several months” and will involve an updated design, both for aesthetic and utility purposes, according to Bloomberg’s newsletter. While Apple isn’t necessarily overdue for an upgraded Mac Mini, the rumor comes as no surprise given the company’s tendency to announce new products in the summertime and begin selling them in the fall. After years of centering around Intel hardware, the current Mac Mini (which was, true to form, released in the fall of 2020) is the first of its line to contain an Apple M1 chip, designed specifically for the Mac to be a one-stop-shop for CPU, GCU, neural engine, and I/O.
Settling in the learn something new about the world through a documentary is a great use of an afternoon, and one of the simple pleasures of life. While many streaming platforms, such as Netflix and Disney+, offer some form of a documentary feature film or series collection, what’s more convenient – if documentaries are something you particularly enjoy, is a streaming platform that offers you nothing but documentaries. CuriosityStream is just that – a dedicated streaming platform collecting all the world’s greatest documentaries into one convenient app. And available now is , offering you a lifetime subscription to CuriosityStream as well as a respected VPN service for the reduced price of $179, a wonderful saving of 60 percent off the full ordinary purchase price of $449.
