Virtually every person with a cell phone has sent a text message by now, but just one person had done so. That’s when engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS, on December 3rd, 1992. What started as a curious implementation of existing cellular standards eventually grew into a huge part of our daily communication. Now, what comes next as the influence of SMS wanes? On that fateful day just over 25 years ago, Papworth composed a message on a computer that read “Merry Christmas” and sent it over the Vodafone UK cellular network to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis. According to Papworth, he had to use a computer to compose the message because no phones at the time had the necessary keypad elements to input that much text.
2017 has been a banner year for CPU launches. AMD’s Ryzen debut in March kicked off its own aggressive hardware ramp, with the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 families following in the spring and summer, and Raven Ridge debuting in the last few weeks. Intel’s Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X launched in June, with Skylake-X offering faster performance and higher core counts for the same price than Intel had previously shipped. AMD’s Threadripper debuted in August with 16 cores at the same price as a 10-core Intel CPU (), and Intel’s 18-core Skylake-X retook the performance crown (though not the price/performance ratio) in September.
The value of Bitcoin has skyrocketed over the past year, putting past price spikes to shame. A single Bitcoin is now worth more than $11,000, but the drive to accumulate Bitcoins has also driven energy consumption to mind-boggling levels. Mining Bitcoin now consumes more than 30 terawatt-hours of power globally, which is higher than the individual energy usage of 159 countries. According to analysis blog , energy consumed by Bitcoin mining now exceeds what is used by countries like Ireland, Hungary, Oman, and Lebanon. Bitcoin uses about as much power as the entire country of Morocco and slightly less than Bulgaria.
Several years ago, security researchers began sounding the alarm about Intel’s Management Engine (IME). IME support allows the laptop to run an entirely separate OS with what amounts to backdoor access to the entire system. It’s invisible to the main operating system, which means there’s no way for Windows or Linux to tell you anything about what IME is doing on your machine. Intel has defended the system as being both secure and a useful way to perform various remote administration functions. Researchers, however, have found several that punch holes in that argument. It seems OEMs agree — Dell just became the first major OEM to ship systems that don’t use IME at all.
Is there life out there among the stars? No one knows for sure, but we’re constantly finding new that have some potential to harbor life. Astronomers don’t currently have the technology to examine these distant objects directly, but we may be able to learn about their atmospheres. This could help determine if there’s life present, but a new analysis suggests an exoplanet’s atmosphere . Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany created simulations of multiple nearby exoplanets that have the potential to support life, including Proxima b and . Like many exoplanets, these worlds are tidally locked to their stars.
Ideally, a makes things go up instead of down, but a Russian Soyuz launch last week did very much the opposite. The rocket’s payload of 19 satellites failed to reach orbit for previously unknown reasons. Now, reports indicate that it was a programming error that led to the loss of the payload. Instead of releasing the satellites on an orbital trajectory, it sent them back down into the atmosphere. Oops. The 2.1b rocket is regarded as a reliable launch vehicle, but it didn’t launch from the usual Baikonur facility as most Russian missions do. This was only the second launch from the troubled Vostochny Cosmodrome in far eastern Russia, construction of which won’t be complete until sometime next year.
The new comes with a fancy sensor array capable of scanning and recognizing your face. It’s all part of the new Face ID system, which replaces Touch ID on Apple’s most expensive iPhone yet. The early response to Face ID has been mostly positive, and it does seem to be hard to fool. However, some privacy advocates have over how much access apps have to Face ID. It could actually be kind of a privacy nightmare. The key to Face ID is in the iPhone X’s conspicuous screen notch, that patch of bezel that intrudes upon the otherwise edge-to-edge display.
When Faraday Future launched in 2014, it promised to leapfrog other companies in bringing cutting-edge EVs (electric vehicles) to market. Instead, there’s every sign that the company is circling the drain. In the past two months, Faraday lost both its CFO and CTO, its supply chain manager, and its director of interior design and brand. Now, Richard Kim, the VP of design responsible for the FF91, has quit as well. Losing Kim is a particularly nasty blow for Faraday, given that he was one of the original five founders and spent more than a decade working on highly touted BMW designs before leaving that company.
Before Cassini or Galileo, there were the Voyager probes. Launched in August and September of 1977, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 continue to communicate with Earth via the Deep Space Network. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than Voyager 2, due to differences in their missions and trajectories, at an estimated 141 AU from Earth (1 AU is the distance between Earth and the sun). On Friday, NASA engineers were able to successfully fire Voyager 1’s backup thrusters — for the first time in 37 years. These small backup thrusters use hydrazine propellant and could be vital to extending Voyager 1’s mission.
