(Photo: Robina Weermeijer/Unsplash)A recent discovery in the medical application of AI has the potential to change how we treat spinal cord injuries. A team of researchers led by Rutgers University have found a way to use AI and robotics to formulate therapeutic proteins which, after setting off a domino reaction, help to degrade scar tissue formed after a spinal cord injury, or SCI. As we touched on , scar tissue resulting from SCI can act as roadblocks preventing the successful regeneration of nervous tissue. While the scar tissue serves a purpose in that it protects the trauma site, it reduces the injured person’s control over some or all of their body.
The latest leaks on the video card front contain a mix of good news, and the usual bad news. The good news is that it doesn’t look like Nvidia’s upcoming Lovelace GPUs will be the 850W nuclear reactors that were previously reported. Instead, the GPU will likely max out at around 600W or so per the latest ATX 3.0 PCIe cable news (more on that below). The bad news is that even at 600W, that’s almost double the amount of power required by a card like the OG RTX 3080, which is a 320W GPU. Nvidia will continue to ship cards for these lower TDP segments, but the company may be preparing to expand the upper range of its hardware by quite a bit.
Back in 2020, AMD launched its Threadripper Pro lineup. Prior to this launch, AMD’s Threadripper line was essentially a scaled-back Epyc server chip with half as many DRAM channels. Threadripper Pro equalized the two platforms and gave AMD an eight-channel workstation platform. The new WX-series Threadripper Pro 5000 CPUs are based on the Zen 3 core and offer several upgrades compared to older models. Meet the Threadripper Pro 5000 AMD’s non-Pro Threadripper family remains based on Zen 2, so these new Pro CPUs will be the fastest chips AMD offers in its workstation and server lineup. The new CPUs are expected to deliver the ~15 percent IPC uplift that Zen 3 featured over Zen 2, thanks to the improvements and efficiency gains AMD introduced in that CPU core.
We have become very good at storing data with hard drives closing in on 20 terabytes, but even our best 21st-century engineering can’t come close to the elegance and density of DNA. Most of the cells in your body contain a complete genetic copy of what makes you a human being, and DNA is surprisingly durable compared to chips and spinning platters that will probably end up in a landfill inside of a decade. DNA might even be viable for storing digital data, but we’re not limited by the way human works. Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have expanded the capabilities of DNA data storage by .
(Photo: Towfiqu Barbhuiya/Unsplash)In response to sanctions restricting software such as Microsoft 365 and Oracle business tools, Russia has devised a new plan for allowing its citizens to operate as normally as possible. The plan? To legalize piracy. A new document by the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia details an attempt to circumvent other countries’ sanctions by making the crime of software piracy non-punishable. If the measures outlined in the are passed, a new federal law will allow citizens to download and use software published by copyright holders in sanction-supporting countries. Citizens will be released of legal liability for such actions as the government supplements its criminal code with “the possibility of compulsory use of unlicensed software under sanctions restrictions [sic].
“Begun, the price war has,” according to a famous swamp-dwelling eacher. On the heels of AMD’s recent announcement of price cuts for its mid-to-high-end CPUs, a new leak suggests AMD is now escalating its feud with Intel by releasing new CPUs. The rumored launch will include three new models in addition to its previously announced CPU with V-Cache, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. This latest salvo seems to represent AMD’s latest counter-offensive against Intel, which will probably carry it through until Zen 4’s launch later this year. There are some holes in AMD’s seven-CPU Ryzen 5000 lineup compared to the 22 CPUs Intel has released as part of its Alder Lake platform.
Cloud storage provider Backblaze is known for its quarterly hard drive reliability reports, which are based on the failure rates of the hundreds of thousands of hard drives it has spinning away in its storage pods. Like most companies that run data centers, Backblaze’s primary storage needs are still handled by conventional hard drives. At the end of 2018, however, the company started adding SSDs to its storage ecosystem to serve as boot drives for its HDD-equipped servers. Now that the company has several years of data to pore over regarding its SSDs’ performance, it has released the first reliability report for the handful of drives it’s been using.
(Photo: עמית גירון/ Wikimedia Commons)Today’s wars take place in cyberspace as well as on the ground, and those with an influence on the virtual world are in a frenzy to determine their role in the Russia-Ukraine war. Among them is Microsoft, which has outlined a series of steps it’s taking to respond to the conflict—one of which is to suspend all new Russian sales. Microsoft President & Vice Chair Brad Smith originally in late February that the company would be taking a four-pronged approach to its response to the Ukraine invasion, with new initiatives focused on preventing Ukraine-targeted cyberattacks, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, roadblocks related to humanitarian assistance, and harm to its own employees.
(Photo: Sebastiandoe5/Wikimedia Commons)The BBC has elected to resurrect shortwave radio broadcasts after its own websites were blocked in Russia. Millions of Russian citizens have turned their trust toward BBC since the beginning of the country’s most recent conflict with Ukraine. BBC web pages written in English received 252 percent more Russian traffic during the last week of February than is typical for the site, according to the organization itself. A Russian language page with live reporting on the conflict racked up 5.3 million views in the same timeframe, making it the most visited web page across all of the BBC World Service’s non-English language services.
