Lifeboat Foundation

Apple has reportedly secured all available orders for N3, TSMC’s first-generation 3-nanometer process that is likely to be used in the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro lineup as well as new MacBooks scheduled for launch in the second half of 2023.

According to a paywalled DigiTimes report, Apple has procured 100% of the initial N3 supply, which is said to have a high yield, despite the higher costs involved and the decline in the foundry’s utilization rate in the first half of 2023. Mass production of TSMC’s 3nm process began in late December, and the foundry has scaled up process capacity at a gradual pace with monthly output set to reach 45,000 wafers in March, according to the report’s sources.

When forming an image of an object, such as a photograph taken by a cell phone, light that has interacted with the object and either passed through or bounced off it is captured by the detector in the phone.

Some 25 years ago, scientists devised another, less direct way to do this. In the conventional form, information gathered from two detectors are instead used, by combining information from one capturing the light that has interacted with the object and one that has not interacted with the object at all. It is the light that has never interacted with the object that is used to obtain the image, though, resulting the technique taking on the name “ghost imaging.”

When entangled light is used, the quantum properties can be exploited to do this at very low light levels which can be a large advantage when looking at light-sensitive samples in biological imaging where too much light can damage or change the sample and thus destroying what one wishes to look at—this being quite a conundrum in the field.

In modern electronics, a large amount of heat is produced as waste during usage—this is why devices such as laptops and mobile phones become warm during use, and require cooling solutions. In the last decade, the concept of managing this heat using electricity has been tested, leading to the development of electrochemical thermal transistors—devices that can be used to control heat flow with electrical signals.

Currently, liquid-state thermal transistors are in use, but have critical limitations: chiefly, any leakage causes the device to stop working.

A research team at Hokkaido University lead by Professor Hiromichi Ohta at the Research Institute for Electronic science has developed the first solid-state electrochemical thermal transistor. Their invention, described in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, is much more stable than and just as effective as current liquid-state thermal transistors.

Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature’s age-old solution for information-storage—DNA.

In a new study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable.

DNA is an ideal storage medium because it’s ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from the bones of a 430,000-year-old human ancestor found in a cave in Spain.

AirTag competitor Tile today announced a new Anti-Theft Mode for Tile tracking devices, which is designed to make Tile accessories undetectable by the anti-stalking Scan and Secure feature.

Scan and Secure is a security measure that Tile implemented in order to allow iPhone and Android users to scan for and detect nearby Tile devices to keep them from being used for stalking purposes. Unfortunately, Scan and Secure undermines the anti-theft capabilities of the Tile because a stolen device’s Tile can be located and removed, something also possible with similar security features added for AirTags.

On Wednesday, Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) unveiled the semiconductor industry’s first advanced-ready 5G modem-RF chip that can be used not only in smartphones, but mixed reality headsets, 5G networks and other areas.

Led by CEO Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm (QCOM) said the Snapdragon X75 5G Modem-RF chip utilizes artificial intelligence thats two-and-a-half times faster than previous AI used and better software to bring faster connections to devices, while also allowing them to get better signal strength, data speed and coverage.

Qualcomm (QCOM) added that the chips can also be used in vehicles, an increasing component of the company’s business, as well as PCs, factories and fixed wireless access networks.

A single drop of blood from a finger prick. A simple electronic chip. And a smartphone readout of test results that could diagnose a Covid-19 infections or others like HIV or Lyme disease.

It sounds a bit like science fiction, like the beginnings of the medical tricorder used by doctors on Star Trek. Yet researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have taken the first step to showing it can be done, and they’ve published their results in the journal Small.

Postdoctoral fellow Neda Rafat and Assistant Professor Aniruddh Sarkar created a small chip that harnesses the fundamental chemistry of the gold-standard lab method but uses electrical conductivity instead of optics to detect antibodies and indicate infection.

Google was referring to its dominant position in the search market. In the early 2000s, several search engines existed in the market, but Google now has 90 per cent of the market. It is also not the pioneer of Android, though it purchased it at an early stage. At that time, the market was dominated by Blackberry and Nokia custom OS (operating systems), but today, Android has the largest mobile OS market share.

In the email, Pichai reportedly remained optimistic and said that AI has “gone through many winters and springs”, adding that the “most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly.”

Continue reading “Sundar Pichai tells Google employees to spend 4 hours with Bard to make it a worthy ChatGPT opponent” »

ChatGPT and other AI systems are propelling us faster toward the long-term technology dream of artificial general intelligence and the radical transformation called the “singularity,” Silicon Valley chip luminary and former Stanford University professor John Hennessy believes.

Hennessy won computing’s highest prize, the Turing Award, with colleague Dave Patterson for developing the computing architecture that made energy-efficient smartphone chips possible and that now is the foundation for virtually all major processors. He’s also chairman of Google parent company Alphabet.