You might remember ‘Oumuamua, the very first interstellar visitor astronomers ever detected in our solar system. This object is , but it does have an extremely bizarre elongated shape. Now, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Santa Cruz have put forth a hypothesis that could explain how ‘Oumuamua . Astronomers spotted in October 2017 when it was already on its way out of the solar system. Its orbit and high speed confirmed it could not have come from any source inside our solar system, but it was impossible for any spacecraft to catch up to the mysterious space rock.
The past six weeks have seen a lot of unprecedented activity across the globe, most of it bad. One bright spot in the gloom — though of course, a rather conditional one — has been the sudden explosion in computational power being flung at analyzing and understanding COVID-19. It wasn’t that long ago we were reporting on the Folding@Home network’s record-breaking 1.5 exaFLOPS of performance. Now, the system has broken 2.5 exaflops. At that speed, it’s reportedly faster than the sustained performance of all Top500 supercomputers combined. With our collective power, we are now at ~2.4 exaFLOPS (faster than the top 500 supercomputers combined)! We complement supercomputers like IBM Summit, which runs short calculations using 1000s of GPUs at once, by spreading longer calculations around the world in smaller chunks!
In the face of global events, there’s never been a better time to think about big career moves. Despite fear and uncertainty over the future of the job market, there’s also an opportunity for those unsatisfied with their current career paths to start forging new trails, leaving them ready to capitalize once the world reopens for business. If your bliss is video gaming, this downtime is an open door to turning that love into a profession. That can start with the training in available now for This collection is made up of 10 courses that can offer inexperienced coders the knowledge and guidance to learn the tools of game creation and start fashioning entire digital worlds of their own.
The question of how the Moon formed has fascinated astronomers and geologists for decades. Currently, the prevailing theory is that the Earth was struck by an approximately Mars-sized impactor very early in its life. This impact catastrophically changed our planet, re-liquefying the surface and hurling an enormous cloud of debris into orbit. Eventually, that debris coalesced into the Moon. We’ve known for a long time that the newly formed Earth-Moon system was very different from the one we have today. The Moon would have been orbiting just 8,000 miles above the surface of the Earth, while the Earth day might have just been 2.5 hours long.
Cheating is a scourge in multiplayer games. A single cheating player can ruin the fun of 10-20 other people in a competitive match, and while teams of pro gamers have repeatedly demonstrated they can smash cheaters in live play, most ordinary mortals don’t have much of a chance. Riot Games has every reason to work to keep cheaters out of Valorant, its new multiplayer team shooter, but how the company is doing it has raised security concerns. While the anti-cheat client only launches alongside Valorant, there’s a kernel-mode anti-cheat driver that loads as soon as your operating system boots.
WARREN, Michigan – If General Motors is to successfully challenge Tesla for supremacy in EVs, the battle starts with better battery technology. Research, prototyping, and testing take place here at the company’s Global Battery Systems Lab 20 miles north of Detroit. They’ll go into new GM EVs late this year or in 2021, and the batteries will have their own name: Ultium. “We’re trying to wear out the [test] batteries,” says Douglas Drauch, lead engineer at the battery lab. GM has the largest battery test lab of any automaker anywhere. This one has been expanded to 100,000 square feet – the size of a Home Depot or a big Walmart – inside the Estes Engineering Center on the 710-acre GM Technical Center, which has 38 buildings.
Lovers of small phones have cause to celebrate today — after years of rumors and speculation, Apple has . The display is just 4.7 inches, making it much more comfortable than other modern smartphones, and it’s Apple’s least expensive iPhone since the last SE. You can pick one up for a mere $399 with 64GB of storage. The current flagship iPhones have 5.8 and 6.5-inch OLED displays, which are larger than some would prefer. The new iPhone SE has a much smaller 4.7-inch LCD panel. Apple is notorious for skimping on actual specs, so we don’t know what the resolution of that screen is, but reports claim it’ll be 750p.
Once upon a time, Microsoft announced a massive 4K update for Minecraft. Then the company canceled it. Then Nvidia announced its massive ray-tracing update for Minecraft and didn’t cancel it. The Minecraft RTX beta starts on April 16 for those PC gamers who own Nvidia cards and the Windows 10 version of Minecraft. All image and video assets below provided by Nvidia. So what’s different? Like Quake II, Minecraft implements a fully path-traced pipeline, to fairly impressive results. We’ve featured some of Nvidia’s world art before, but there are some additional images available now as well. Nvidia has announced it will upload for players to explore, and you’ll have the option to create your own from scratch.
OnePlus started as a scrappy upstart making cheap but powerful phones. Over the years, it has moved upmarket and started to take on the major smartphone players. finally addresses the last few missing features in OnePlus phones, but it’s pretty spendy. There’s also a slightly cheaper that’s lacking some of those fancy new features. The two phones look almost identical with curved glass on the back, and a big curved screen on the front. OnePlus always uses the fastest flagship ARM processors available, so these phones both have the Snapdragon 865, and that means they’ve got 5G. There’s only support for sub-6 5G on the unlocked phones, but that’s more useful than millimeter wave anyway.
