Some U.S. lawmakers have sent a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to “develop a comprehensive plan that will protect both consumers and the environment by addressing the lack of a common U.S. charging standard.” The letter continues, “We cannot allow the consumer electronics industry to prioritize proprietary and inevitably obsolete charging technology over…
Monthly Archives: July 2022
We’re alerted by news organizations now and then about an impending “massive solar flare” that might fry the Internet or even the electric grid. In theory, it’s possible, but there’s also a click-bait factor to this gloom and doom coverage. But first, what’s a solar flare? Solar flares are immense bursts, or eruptions, of electromagnetic…
Desktop workstation computers are usually bulky and heavy because they are optimized solely for maximum performance and expandability. The ThinkStation P360 Ultra takes the opposite direction and is primarily optimized for space. Lenovo tries to cram as much computing power as possible within that sub-4-Liters space. This computer is a Small Form Factor (SFF) workstation…
MediaTek has introduced the Dimensity 9000+, a new performance-kicker chip, to supplement the existing Dimensity 9000. As the name suggests, this new processor based on the Dimensity 9000 could be characterized as “the same, but a bit better.” We are primarily talking about a 5% speed gain for the CPU and 10% for the GPU….
Amazon has announced that the Alexa digital assistant can now technically imitate anyone’s voice based on a few clips, about 1 minute of recording. If it works as advertised, it would be a technical milestone as computer-generated voices don’t really fool humans and are still a poor choice for video voice-over, for example. You can…
When you encounter a single-cell bacteria visible to the naked eye, you know there’s something very uncommon going on. That’s what biologist Jean Marrie Volland experienced when he stumbled upon this bacteria specie that can be 20mm big! (the image above is an artistic rendering, Mangrove photo by Pierre Yves Pascal; Illustration by Susan Brand/Berkeley…
Samsung continues to announce ultra-high resolution camera sensors aimed at affordable markets. The company just launched the Samsung ISOCELL HP3, a 200 Megapixel camera sensor featuring exceptionally small sensing pixels. The thing is: smaller pixels aren’t always better, as their size makes it increasingly more difficult to gather photos. Each pixel is only 0.56 μm…
ETH Zurich has created a wearable muscle or “exomuscle” that can give additional strength to its wearer. It was primarily designed for patients with muscle impairments, but it can potentially help healthy people by providing extra motion endurance. Myoshirt is something people wear, and its artificial muscle fibers (a cable) run parallel to the wearer’s…
Mobile GPUs lag desktop GPUs by many years in terms of features, so they aren’t always conducive to exciting news coverage. However, hardware Ray-Tracing (RT) on an ARM GPU design is a milestone worth noting. In its new Immortalis-G715 (cool name btw) graphics unit, ARM delivers a 300% performance improvement over the previous software solution…
The upcoming Xiaomi 12S Ultra will feature a primary camera powered by the 1-inch type Sony IMX989 camera sensor. Previously, the Sony Xperia PRO-I smartphone and a few others also featured a sensor of similar size. Still, the IMX989 is a new sensor “built for smartphones,” and Xiaomi had some design inputs (including financial) according…