Nvidia is reportedly in the middle of dealing with some kind of cyber attack that has lasted two days so far, according to various media sources as well as the company itself. Reports indicate the attack, which is still being investigated, has taken out the company’s email systems and its developer tools, but it’s unclear if other components of the company’s business were similarly affected by the intrusion into its networks. It’s also not clear if the situation poses a threat to any of Nvidia’s partners. According to , one company insider said the unwelcome intrusion has “completely compromised” the company’s internal systems, but that portions of its email service had resumed operation as of Friday, the 25th.
Russian forces are flooding into Ukraine today, following a declaration of war by President Vladimir Putin. Airstrikes began on Wednesday, and ground troops are beginning to carve up the border regions as they make their way toward the capital. There’s an extra layer of danger in this war that most don’t have: a failed . Ukrainian authorities confirmed today that Russia has seized the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and that could have serious consequences for all of Europe. The Chernobyl nuclear facility was brought online in 1977, and for nine years it operated without incident. Then, in 1986 a series of technical errors during a safety test set the No 4 RBMK reactor on a path to meltdown.
(Photo: Lip Kee Yap/Wikimedia Commons)A recent study on the feasibility of a new GPS tracking device for wild birds found that Australian magpies engaged in “cooperative rescue behavior” to help each other remove the tracking devices. Scientists from the University of the Sunshine Coast and the University of Queensland originally set out to miniature backpack-like tracking harnesses on magpies, a type of passerine common to Australia. After allowing a group of ten magpies to adjust to the researchers’ presence over a few weeks, the team safely captured five of the birds and equipped them with tracking harnesses and colored leg bands for identification purposes.
According to sources involved with Apple’s supply chain, the company plans to launch its rumored mixed reality headset later this year. This flies in the face of earlier reports that the headset had been delayed until next year due to a variety of issues Apple was struggling with. This would not necessarily have been a surprise given that Apple hasn’t previously launched a product like this before. Sources indicate that Apple is far enough along in its production process that the unnamed headset has reached the EVT 2 stage, which stands for Engineering Validation Testing, phase 2. For those not privy to the ins-and-outs of Apple’s production process, this would mean the new device is about midway through its journey to final production.
One fateful day about 66 million years ago, a large object crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. The resultant firestorm and long, cold winter wiped out 75 percent of life on Earth, including most . Scientists have studied the so-called Chicxulub impact for decades but only on millennia timescales. For the first time, researchers have zeroed in on when the asteroid or comet walloped Earth, and they say . This could help explain why some species survived and others perished. The impact extinction was first proposed in 1980 by geologists Luis and Walter Alvarez, and is therefore known as the Alvarez hypothesis.
Russian forces are flooding into Ukraine today, following a declaration of war by President Vladimir Putin. Airstrikes began on Wednesday, and ground troops are beginning to carve up the border regions as they make their way toward the capital. There’s an extra layer of danger in this war that most don’t have: a failed . Ukrainian authorities confirmed today that Russia has seized the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and that could have serious consequences for all of Europe. The Chernobyl nuclear facility was brought online in 1977, and for nine years it operated without incident. Then, in 1986 a series of technical errors during a safety test set the No 4 RBMK reactor on a path to meltdown.
You might think our local gas giants are extreme — Jupiter with its gaggle of moons, and Saturn with the iconic rings, but they’re nothing compared to WASP-121b. This exoplanet caught the attention of astronomers a few years back when they realized its atmosphere was hot enough to . That’s on the day side. On the cooler night side, because that’s the kind of weather you get on a truly extreme world like WASP-121b. This is what’s known as a hot Jupiter because it’s a gas giant… and it’s extremely hot. WASP-121b was the first exoplanet to have its atmosphere characterized by the Hubble Space Telescope.
(Photo: Miso Robotics)White Castle, an American fast food chain famous for steaming its burger patties under mountains of onions, is adding a robotic line cook to one of its kitchens. Flippy, an AI kitchen assistant, will soon join the crew at a currently-undisclosed White Castle location in Chicago to test the feasibility of robotic kitchen operations in fast food restaurants. Flippy isn’t a two-legged robot wearing an apron and wielding a spatula, though. (Sorry to disappoint.) Instead, it’s a massive piece of kitchen equipment resembling a traditional fast food assembly line, stainless steel deep fryers and all. The difference is that Flippy can automatically dispense food from its own refrigerated or frozen storage bins into each of its fryer baskets, after which the robot’s arm individually moves the baskets into the oil to fry.
In what can only be described as a significant loss for AMD, Intel has successfully poached one of the company’s top discrete GPU architects to help the company with its upcoming line of Arc graphics solutions. Rohit Verma, who was formerly Lead SoC Architect for Discrete GPUs at AMD, is now Lead Product Architect at Intel’s Accelerated Computing Group. Verma was previously a senior fellow at AMD, where he had worked for a bit over three years in the company’s semi-custom business unit, according to analyst . The timing is notable as it includes the period where AMD rose from the ashes and started releasing competitive products, not to mention its success in securing the hardware wins for both next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft.
