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Category: computing

Are we there already?

Less than a year has passed since we saw Pager play Ping-Pong using Neuralink. The company’s owner, Elon Musk has now said that he is confident of testing the chip in humans next year.

Founded in July 2016, the company is busy building an implantable chip that will allow the human brain to interact with computers directly. The company made headlines when its experimental macaque played Ping-Pong telepathically, without the help of a joystick. The company seems to have made rapid progress in its technology since its founder is quite optimistic about human testing.

Although there is no official communiqué from Neuralink, a stock investor on Twitter quoted Musk to say that the company was planning to test the chip soon. The tweet that tagged both Musk and Neuralink said that Musk was “cautiously optimistic” about restoring full-body functionality for tetraplegics & quadriplegics.

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SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is just going to get busier shuttling astronauts in the coming years.

NASA announced it intends to issue a sole-source modification to SpaceX’s long-term contract to send astronauts to the International Space Station. This follows an agency call for proposals back in October for more flight options to send people to space.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which is the other major system, is not quite yet ready for humans following a difficult uncrewed test flight in 2019 that never saw the spacecraft reach the ISS. Starliner has spent some time fixing computer glitches and other issues (including a valve problem that delayed an expected 2021 launch) and is now expecting a second uncrewed test flight by 2022.

The October solicitation, NASA noted, confirms SpaceX is the only viable choice for the time being, given the agency’s safety requirements and the need to keep the space station staffed continuously in the coming years.

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It’s an information age gold rush!

On December 2nd, we brought you the news that Microsoft Research developed a new method that allows it to read and write much faster in DNA format. In the last month or so, three other new developments have popped up in DNA storage.

Scientists at the Center for Synthetic Biology from the Northwestern University, Illinois, have revealed a demonstration on DNA storage encoding that manages to fulfill three bits of information in an hour, according to Technology Networks. This new method “relies on an enzymatic system.”

Then, a team from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has devised a microchip that can significantly improve the speed at which data can be written in DNA form, according to the BBC. The team expects a 100x improvement over current technologies for DNA storage.

Finally, a team in China at Southeast University in the country’s Jiangsu Provincemade has been reported to be engineering a new process that could produce the first mass-market DNA storage device, according to TechRadar.

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As part of its plan to go carbon-neutral by 2030, Microsoft is considering replacing its diesel backup generators with hydrogen battery storage. The company has successfully kept part of one of its datacenters online for 48 hours on hydrogen power alone.

Datacenters are massive facilities that are usually full of servers and any variety of other computer or telecoms equipment. They might house the daily or even hourly backups from financial institutions and other high-demand users, because the wrong kind of disaster could wipe out a bank’s entire internal network.

Dive deeper. Read the most in-depth science and tech features, solve life’s biggest mysteries, and get unlimited access to all things Pop Mech—starting now.

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“Alder Lake,” Intel’s family of 12th Generation processors, has arrived—and with it, a new CPU paradigm. Intel’s Core i9-12900K desktop CPU ($589) leads the pack of the company’s 12th Generation processors, and brings with it a whole host of upgrades and innovations to the desktops of now and tomorrow. These tick-ups include support for the new, high-speed DDR5 RAM standard, as well as an upgrade to PCI Express 5.0, on the first new motherboard platform to support the latest chips, the Intel Z690. Intel also worked closely with Microsoft to optimize the new CPUs for Windows 11, adding new scheduling features that intelligently load up the Core i9-12900K depending on which cores are being used where, and for what.

Alder Lake and the Core i9-12900K indeed impress, but our relationship with the CPU…is complicated. For all the outright wins we saw in our benchmarks (and there were many), the added cost of upgrading to yet another new motherboard platform won’t outweigh the win percentages for many shoppers. Intel’s older-yet-still-reliable “Comet Lake” Core i9-10900K kept itself in the race during several benchmarks, while the eight-core, rather cheaper AMD Ryzen 7 5800X ($449 list price, but currently snipe-discounted to $386 on Amazon and Newegg) proves itself a worthy contender on performance-versus-price in PC gaming.

The high cost of a new Z690 motherboard (the cheapest are just under $200, per our Z690 motherboard guide) and DDR5 adoption, along with Intel’s insistence on upgrading your system to Windows 11, are all front-facing considerations for anyone who’s considering 12th Generation Core as their next big desktop upgrade. That—and a not-insignificant problem in which our test platform, and several prebuilt Alder Lake PCs, could not launch certain popular games that use specific DRM—temper Alder Lake with a bit of wait-and-see caution. Our initial Alder Lake takeaway is “Intel’s on the upswing, with some caveats.” But read more about our findings below.

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Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory have discovered an unusually massive black hole at the heart of one of the Milky Way ’s dwarf satellite galaxies, called Leo I. Almost as massive as the black hole in our own galaxy, the finding could redefine our understanding of how all galaxies — the building blocks of the universe — evolve. The work is published in a recent issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The team decided to study Leo I because of its peculiarity. Unlike most dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, Leo I does not contain much dark matter. Researchers measured Leo I’s dark matter profile — that is, how the density of dark matter changes from the outer edges of the galaxy all the way into its center. They did this by measuring its gravitational pull on the stars: The faster the stars are moving, the more matter there is enclosed in their orbits. In particular, the team wanted to know whether dark matter density increases toward the galaxy’s center. They also wanted to know whether their profile measurement would match previous ones made using older telescope data combined with computer models.

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Quantum computer and many other quantum technologies rely on the generation of quantum-entangled pairs of electrons. However, the systems developed so far typically produce a noisy and random flow of entangled electrons, which hinders synchronized operations on the entangled particles. Now, researchers from Aalto University in Finland propose a way to produce a regular flow of spin-entangled electrons.

Their solution is based on a dynamically driven Cooper pair splitter. In a Cooper pair splitter, two near a superconductor are used to generate and separate a pair of entangled electrons known as a Cooper pair. When the Cooper pair splitter is driven with a static voltage, the result is a random and noisy process.

A by the Aalto team showed that driving the system dynamically with external gate voltages makes it possible to control the timing of the splitting process. As a result, exactly one pair of entangled electrons can be extracted during each splitting cycle, leading to a completely noiseless and regular flow of spin-entangled electrons.

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