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This desk microphone makes it painfully clear whether you are muted or not

It’s amazing how simple designs can save you from hours of frustration and embarrassment, even virtually.

Work and School from Home arrangements have forced many people to get used to video meetings, virtual classrooms, and online presentations. As if those weren’t stressful enough already, the horrors of discovering that you have been speaking for the past 10 minutes to half an hour when you’re mic has been on mute all the time only adds to feelings of dread. Unfortunately, computers and software haven’t adjusted yet to these new demands on life, lacking clear indicators on the status of the mic. While there might be some sophisticated and complicated software that could try to guess whether you actually need to be muted or not, it actually takes a dead-simple idea to give that peace of mind at very little extra cost.

Designer: Yaman Gupta

Glimpses of quantum computing phase changes show researchers the tipping point

Researchers at Duke University and the University of Maryland have used the frequency of measurements on a quantum computer to get a glimpse into the quantum phenomena of phase changes—something analogous to water turning to steam.

By measuring the number of operations that can be implemented on a quantum computing system without triggering the collapse of its quantum state, the researchers gained insight into how other systems—both natural and computational—meet their tipping points between phases. The results also provide guidance for working to implement that will eventually enable quantum computers to achieve their full potential.

The results appeared online June 3 in the journal Nature Physics.

AMD Updated EPYC Roadmap: 5th Gen EPYC “Turin” Announced, Coming

As part of AMD’s Financial Analysts Day 2022, AMD has provided updates to its Server CPU roadmap going into 2024. The biggest announcement is that AMD is already planning for the (next) next-gen core for its successful EPYC family, the 5th generation EPYC series, which has been assigned the codenamed Turin. Some key announcements include various segmentations of its expected EPYC 7,004 portfolio, including Genoa, Bergamo, Genoa-X, and Siena.

Decoding a key part of the cell, atom

Whatever you are doing, whether it is driving a car, going for a jog, or even at your laziest, eating chips and watching TV on the couch, there is an entire suite of molecular machinery inside each of your cells hard at work. That machinery, far too small to see with the naked eye or even with many microscopes, creates energy for the cell, manufactures its proteins, makes copies of its DNA, and much more.

Among those pieces of machinery, and one of the most complex, is something known as the nuclear pore complex (NPC). The NPC, which is made of more than 1,000 individual proteins, is an incredibly discriminating gatekeeper for the cell’s nucleus, the membrane-bound region inside a cell that holds that cell’s genetic material. Anything going in or out of the nucleus has to pass through the NPC on its way.

Nuclear pores stud the surface of the cell’s nucleus, controlling what flows in and out of it. (Image: Valerie Altounian)

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