Monthly Archives: September 2022

Room-temperature superconducting claim is retracted

Enlarge / Illustration of magnetic levitation using a high-temperature ceramic superconductor. A paper that claimed to provide the first evidence of superconductivity at room temperatures has been retracted by the journal Nature, even as the paper’s authors say they still have confidence in the results. The decision appears to come down to an issue of…

Bitcoin’s steep environmental costs go beyond its hunger for energy

Even creative solutions to power Bitcoin mining, such as this site in Texas using methane waste, can’t eliminate the currency’s severe climate impacts. François Picard/AFP via Getty Images Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are notorious for their massive energy consumption, relying on power sources that emit greenhouse gases responsible for climate change. But even if digital…

Meta’s Make-A-Video AI is Dall-E for video clips

Everyone’s favorite text-to-image generator Dall-E has a new competitor from Meta: A video-to-text generator called Make-A-Video. The tool generates short, soundless video snippets based on the same type of text prompts you feed to Dall-E. But Dall-E is child’s play compared to Make-A-Video, at least according to Mark Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO noted in a…

See South Carolina live webcams as Hurricane Ian tracks new landfall

Tropical Storm Ian appears headed for South Carolina as of Thursday, after already dealing untold damage as it cut a path across Florida Wednesday evening through Thursday morning. During its landfall in Florida, it was a Category 4 hurricane, and forecasters are warning South Carolina that it is likely to strengthen into a hurricane once…

Lenovo ThinkReality VRX wants to help your business embrace virtual reality

Lenovo has released a business-focused mixed-reality headset as it looks to help companies of all sizes explore the possibilities of the metaverse. The ThinkReality VRX all-in-one headset boasts a Snapdragon XR platform, pancake optics, four front-mounted cameras with 6DoF tracking, and two high-resolution passthrough cameras.  “Our customers are looking for reliable, flexible and scalable gateways…

Google Chrome ad blockers live on after API changes postponed

Google Chrome extensions are set to see another year of support for enterprise use following the company’s decision to postpone their deletion from the Chrome Web Store until January 2024. The announcement on the Google Chrome Developers blog offers a stay of execution for sweeping changes to the Chromium engine that privacy advocates say will…