In just a few years, there will be legal adults who never lived in a solar system with nine official planets. There have been eight since the 2006 demotion of Pluto, but several years ago, Astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin theorized there might be . It’s proven difficult to confirm, though. A recent survey using the powerful Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile despite scanning a huge swath of the sky, casting even more doubt on Planet 9’s existence. All the evidence we currently have for is circumstantial. As observational technology has improved, astronomers have been able to map the orbits of small trans-neptunian objects (TNOs), which zip around in the vast emptiness at the edge of the solar system.
A former Tesla employee has been “dismissed” from the company after critiquing Tesla’s technology on his YouTube channel. John Bernal previously worked on Tesla’s Autopilot team, having been promoted from data annotation specialist to advanced driver assistance systems test operator during his approximately two-year tenure. With a Model 3 of his own, Bernal started his YouTube channel, , hoping to share his love of Tesla’s “potentially life-saving technology” with the world. Bernal made a few videos in which he reviewed other electric vehicles but mainly used his online presence to show off Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) beta feature.
It’s a sad day for overclockers the world over, as AMD has announced it will not allow overclocking on its newest gaming CPU, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. This was rumored to be the case pre-launch, but now it’s official. The news could mark the end of overclocking on AMD CPUs as we know it, at least in the traditional sense where clock speeds and voltages are involved. AMD says it will still allow overclocking of the chip’s infinity fabric and memory, however. The disappointing news comes via , who talked to Robert Hallock, AMD’s director of technical marketing. In the interview Hallock spilled the beans on the limitations, saying it will be voltage locked at 1.35V.
Apple recently unveiled its fastest SoC yet: the M1 Ultra. Its new flagship silicon fuses two M1 Max chips into a single component with “Ultrafusion” technology, and powers the new Mac Studio. When Apple unveiled it at its Peek Performance event recently, it included several charts to demonstrate its prowess. Now, we hope you are sitting down, because it turns out its charts weren’t telling the whole story. As we explained in our when it launched, when Apple displayed its performance charts it left out a few key details. Notably missing was the actual tests it performed to arrive at its conclusions.
(Image: Intel)Intel may be hard at work on its upcoming Ohio , but when it comes to chip making, it isn’t stopping there. This week, the hardware and software giant announced it plans to build a $19 billion megafab in Germany as it renews its investment in European manufacturing. The new facility, dubbed “Silicon Junction,” will sit at the heart of Saxony-Anhalt’s capital, Magdeburg. It will consist of two factories, both of which will use Intel’s Angstrom-era transistor technologies to help “balance the global semiconductor supply chain” as most of the world continues to rely on Asian fabs, which currently perform 80 percent of global chip manufacturing.
An inquisitive GPU modder who was experiencing insane memory temperatures has come up with a unique solution to the problem: tiny squares of copper. YouTuber DJ from DandyWorks recently published a video documenting his novel approach to heat dissipation. In the video he ditched the card’s thermal pads and replaced them with copper shims. Though he wasn’t sure if it would work, the results were an incredible 46C drop in temps while mining. Though you might be tempted to duplicate his efforts, know that it was not a simple project. Also, dismantling your GPU can be dangerous, not to mention removing your GPU’s thermal pads will likely void your warranty.
We don’t want to get your hopes up or anything, but it seems like GPU prices are finally — finally — starting to fall back to earth. There have been a number of reports over the last few weeks confirming this phenomenon. Now that it’s March, the trend has been continuing, indicating it’s actually happening as opposed to being an anomaly. The slow-but-steady drop in pricing seems to be a reflection of the volatility in the cryptocurrency market. It’s quite simple really; as mining becomes less profitable, GPU prices begin to fall. Less demand, more supply, in other words.
If it ain’t broke, why fix it? That’s what shoppers around the US are asking after being inundated with ads in the frozen food aisle of their local Walgreens. Along with a few other retailers, the national drugstore chain has begun installing digital screens where glass cooler doors once stood. The screens are supposed to display whatever’s in stock behind them, such as refrigerated beverages, frozen meals, or ice cream, while also offering key information like nutritional insights and pricing for those items. But there’s a slightly dystopian twist to this technology, and you can probably guess what it is: the screens also display ads.
When exoplanets come up, we’re usually adding to the total number of known worlds beyond our solar system, but not today. MIT astronomers applied the latest astronomical data to Kepler’s archive of , finding several that . According to the , there are at least three exoplanets among Kepler’s 5,000 finds that are actually low-mass stars. Identifying exoplanets from light years away is no simple feat because we can’t just look at them directly. A planet like Earth or even Jupiter is too dim to be visible next to a much brighter star, so Kepler and most other exoplanet hunters like TESS rely on transits.
