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The Apple Vision Pro launched on Friday, and I was the first person in part of the DC area to get a demo and buy the device.

As someone who has been working in the XR industry for a long time, I know this day was years in the making and will be a catalyst for future experiences to come.

After being quickly seated at the Apple store near me, I received the first demo of the day.

The physicists found that if electron transport alone is taken into account, the cuprates’ Lorenz number – their ratio of thermal conductivity to electrical conductivity divided by temperature – approaches the value predicted by the Wiedemann-Franz law. The team suggest that other factors, such as lattice vibrations (or phonons), which are not included in the Hubbard model, could be responsible for discrepancies observed in experiments on strongly correlated materials that make it appear as if the law does not apply. Their results could help physicists interpret these experimental observations and could ultimately lead to a better understanding of how strongly correlated systems might be employed in applications such as data processing and quantum computing.

The team now plans to build on the result by exploring other transport channels such as thermal Hall effects. “This will deepen our understanding of transport theories in strongly correlated materials,” Wang tells Physics World.

The present study is published in Science.

By better taming the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of an alternative to the semiconductor—one that transitions from electricity-resisting insulator to current-conducting metal—Nebraska’s Xia Hong and colleagues may have unlocked a new path to smaller, more efficient digital devices. The team reports its findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The semiconductor’s ability to conduct electricity in the Goldilocks zone—poorer than a metal, better than an insulator—positioned it as the just-right choice for engineers looking to build transistors, the tiny on-off switches that encode the 1s and 0s of binary. Apply some voltage to the control knob known as a gate insulator, and the semiconductor channel allows electric current to flow ; remove it, and that flow ceases.

Millions of those nanoscopic, semiconductor-based transistors now coat modern microchips, switching on and off to collectively process or store data. But as minuscule as the transistors already are, the demands of consumers and competition continue pushing to shrink them even further, either for the sake of squeezing in more functionality or downsizing the devices that house them.

This is the first good news I’ve heard from Intel in about 5 years. All they are doing here is gluing memory chips made by others to GPUs made by others, but it is something!


Nvidia will start using Intel’s Foveros packaging technology for some of its high-performance datacenter grade GPUs in Q2, according to a report.

An international team of linguistics experts has traced the origins of the most common modern sign languages using a computer model to compare them against one another. The research is published in the journal Science.

In this new effort, the research team noted that while studies have traced the linguistic history of written languages, little work has been done on the of sign languages. They state that there are more than 300 sign languages used by hearing-impaired people around the globe, and little is known about their origins or how they might have impacted one another.

Sign languages, like spoken and written languages, are unique to groups or cultures, with many corresponding to their written counterparts—there is a Spanish sign language, for example, and French, Spanish and Japanese.

There has been significant progress in the field of quantum computing. Big global players, such as Google and IBM, are already offering cloud-based quantum computing services. However, quantum computers cannot yet help with problems that occur when standard computers reach the limits of their capacities because the availability of qubits or quantum bits, i.e., the basic units of quantum information, is still insufficient.

One of the reasons for this is that bare qubits are not of immediate use for running a quantum algorithm. While the binary bits of customary computers store information in the form of fixed values of either 0 or 1, qubits can represent 0 and 1 at one and the same time, bringing probability as to their value into play. This is known as quantum superposition.

This makes them very susceptible to external influences, which means that the information they store can readily be lost. In order to ensure that quantum computers supply reliable results, it is necessary to generate a genuine entanglement to join together several physical qubits to form a logical . Should one of these physical qubits fail, the other qubits will retain the information. However, one of the main difficulties preventing the development of functional quantum computers is the large number of physical qubits required.