Chromebooks started as low-cost machines that relied on the cloud to do everything. Little by little, more powerful processors and faster storage have made their way into these machines, and now Chromebook makers may be gearing up to give them more gaming cred with RGB keyboards. There’s only one reason to do this: Steam-enabled gaming Chromebooks are on the horizon. Google has been talking about bringing Steam to Chrome OS for the last few years, but the so-called “Borealis” project has yet to bear fruit. However, the groundwork is there. Google controls Chromebook platform hardware much more stringently than it does on the Android side.
Computers used to be luxury devices that only the wealthy could afford, but now you can carry a phone in your pocket that’s many times more powerful than the computers that sent men to the moon. However, even the cheapest phones are still $50-100 thanks to the cost of licensing and cellular components. Developer Brian Benchoff wanted to see just how cheap a functional computer could be. He came up with the Minimum Viable Computer, a pocket-sized Linux box . Depending on what you expect a computer to have in order to be “viable,” you might be pleasantly surprised or completely uninterested in the MVP.
Supersonic air travel has been off the table for almost 20 years, but it could be making a comeback thanks to a US military contract. The Air Force has just to Colorado-based Boom Supersonic to support its airliner development. When complete, the company’s Overture aircraft could carry dozens of passengers at speeds up to Mach 1.7. The three-year contract under the military’s Strategic Funding Increase (or STRATFI) program will help Boom turn its engineering concept into reality. the company recently tapped Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, North Carolina as the manufacturing site of its first full-scale Overture aircraft.
The African clawed frog. (Photo: Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute)Biological engineers have found a way to help African clawed frogs regrow lost limbs. According to a new study published in the journal Cell Reports, scientists applied topical drugs to amputation sites, resulting in the growth of a “leg-like limb.” The African clawed frog is predisposed to regeneration, able to regrow severed limbs throughout much of its youth. But this ability dwindles as the frog reaches adulthood; at a certain level of maturity, attempts to regrow limbs result in cartilaginous spikes with little practical value. Biological engineers at Tufts University, Harvard, and the University of Florida saw this shift as a valuable opportunity to learn how regeneration could be manually encouraged using topical steroids.
Microsoft is on something of a buying spree. After picking up game publisher ZeniMax in 2021, Microsoft is now working toward a massive $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard. The publisher’s games will no doubt beef up Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass service, but Sony won’t be left entirely in the cold. A new report says that Microsoft will continue releasing Call of Duty games on PlayStation… at least for now. Currently, Microsoft expects to complete the Activision Blizzard acquisition in its 2023 fiscal year, ending in mid-2023. Microsoft could also seal the deal earlier, which would leave it in a sticky situation.
(Image: PCMag.com)Nvidia’s “budget friendly” Ampere GPU has finally arrived in the form of the RTX 3050. It’s intended to deliver both ray tracing and DLSS support to the mass market. The swan song for Ampere will officially go on sale January 27th, and reviews went live today that show the card offers great 1080p performance for its $249 MSRP. Unfortunately that’s not the price it will be sold for, assuming you can even find one in stock. For a refresher the RTX 3050 is essentially a cut-down 3060, and uses the same GA106 die from that $329 GPU. Despite being a watered down version of its big brother, it still has decent specs for an entry level GPU.
(Photo: Meta)Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is working on what it says will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the world with the goal of advancing into a new generation of AI. Known as the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), it’s already among the fastest AI supercomputers in operation. Meta’s goal with the supercomputer is to use AI to power real-time interactions, such as the impressive feat of helping “large groups of people, each speaking a different language… seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together.” Speech recognition, computer vision, and neuro-linguistic programming are among the tech giant’s top priorities.
Astronomers in the Australian outback have discovered something new. Three times an hour, it becomes one of the brightest objects in the sky. The team that discovered it thinks it’s a magnetar — and it’s right in our cosmic backyard. As the mysterious object rotates, highly polarized or twisted beams of radiation shoot from its poles. Every 18.18 minutes, for 30 to 60 seconds, a beam crosses our line of sight, and the object starts to flash. “It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that,” said team leader Dr.
As of today, Facebook slash Meta has made another step towards jettisoning its baggage of yore and rebranding itself completely into a Metaverse-first company. Though Facebook is officially called Meta now, and has been for several months, we were waiting to see what the company would do with its Oculus brand of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, and now we have the answer: all forthcoming VR products will come with the new branding of Meta Quest. The company announced the change in a tweet that stated, “New name. Same mission.” The Twitter account that made the tweet, @oculus, no longer exists, and has been transferred to , as noted by .
