Lifeboat Foundation

Formlabs, one of the few companies to turn 3D printing into a useful, real-world tool, is here at CES to show off two new printers. The Form 3+ and 3B+ are updates to the models it launched in 2019, with these units described as its “fastest 3D printers to date.”

New for 2022 include higher-intensity lasers, new material settings and faster, more durable hardware, with a promise of 40 percent faster prints. It also comes with the Build Platform 2, an updated deck for manufacturing that makes it easier to remove prints when they’re done.

At the same time, the company is showing off ESD Resin, enabling you to build components that dissipate electrostatic discharges. This should, Formlabs hopes, open up new opportunities for prints that can be used inside the electronics industry and other high-tech operations.

The ultimate mobile CPU.

Yesterday Romanian tech review site Lab 501 put up one of the world’s first reviews of Intel’s new mobile Core i9-12900HK (Alder Lake) processor. Packing Intel’s all-new hybrid core microarchitecture, the CPU has managed to beat AMD’s desktop Ryzen Threadripper 1950X in Cinebench R20.

The Core i9-12900HK will be Intel’s new flagship mobile part for the 12th Generation Core series. With specs including six P-cores and eight E-cores, 24MB of L3 cache, and a maximum frequency of 5 GHz, it’s a serious upgrade from Intel’s 11th Generation mobile parts on paper.

Continue reading “Core i9-12900HK Beats Threadripper 1950X In Cinebench R20 Benchmark” »

Areas like deep learning and large language models are set to be high on the AI research agenda this year.

This article was contributed by Valerias Bangert, strategy and innovation consultant, founder of three media outlets, and published author.

AI job automation: The debate

The debate around whether AI will automate jobs away is heating up. AI critics claim that these statistical models lack the creativity and intuition of human workers and that they are thus doomed to specific, repetitive tasks. However, this pessimism fundamentally underestimates the power of AI. While AI job automation has already replaced around 400,000 factory jobs in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, with another 2 million on the way, AI today is automating the economy in a much more subtle way.

The immersive tech could eventually allow park visitors to interact with Mickey Mouse and Elsa as images, not cast members in costume.

Disney is joining the metaverse party.

We aren’t talking online gigs or business meetings with avatars. Disney wants to enhance the virtual dimension of its theme parks with its Virtual World Simulator, new technology for which it was granted a patent in the U.S. on December 28.

Continue reading “Disney Patents Virtual World Simulator That Doesn’t Require Headsets, Goggles, Or Smartphones” »

New islands are being built in numbers and on a scale never seen before.

We are building more islands than ever before. In the latest edition of Anthropo-Scene, we explore the striking results of humanity’s attempts to colonise the world’s lakes and oceans.

A Cypriot scientist defended his assertion that a new strain of Covid-19 exists that combines characteristics of the delta and omicron variants.

Other scientists have speculated that Leonidos Kostrikis’s findings are a result of laboratory contamination. But he told Bloomberg in an emailed statement Sunday that the cases he has identified “indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event.”

SpaceX launched another batch of Starlink satellites to the fourth shell of the constellation for the first global orbital launch attempt of the year.

Lifting off from historic Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), the Starlink Group 4–5 mission lifted 49 Starlink v1.5 satellites southeastward from Kennedy into a 210 × 339 km low Earth orbit with an inclination of 53.22 degrees.

Continue reading “SpaceX conducts first orbital launch of 2022 with Starlink Group 4-5” »

NASA’s new X-Ray Observatory will unlock the universe’s most explosive secrets.

The IXPE mission could change our understanding of black holes, nebulae, and supernovas.