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Category: futurism – Page 796

This Mysterious Hammer is Alleged to be Millions of Years Old

Circa 2019

It wasn’t until 1947 that their son broke through the rock and uncovered what was attached to the wooden handle — an iron-headed hammer. For close to four decades, the hammer remained a local oddity and relatively unknown, until it came to the attention of Carl Baugh, a Young Earth creationist after an article was published on the artifact in the Bible-Science Newsletter in 1983. Baugh was influential in a form of creationism which believes that Earth and all its forms of life were created by a deity’s supernatural acts 6000–10000 years ago. He promoted the hammer as proof of an antediluvian discovery, which remains in an exhibit at Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.

Of equal interest to archaeologists, the London Hammer posed a scientific dilemma. What could possibly explain how a modern instrument was encased in ancient, prehistoric Ordovician rock from between 65–135 million years ago?

There are many who doubt where the hammer was supposedly found; others claim the rock formation is consistent with the minerals and sediments of the surrounding area, putting the claim of the rock dating back to hundreds of millions of years ago in doubt. Others claim that the hammer could have been discarded and the rock formation occurred through the natural process of petrification.

Zoom’s Immersive View could make video calls feel a bit more in-person

Virtual meetings that are a bit more meeting-like.

Zoom is rolling out a video background feature called Immersive View that could make video calls feel a bit more like an office meeting — or at least look a lot more like one. Zoom announced the feature last year at its Zoomtopia conference, but now it’s actually available for Free and Pro accounts attending meetings and webinars with up to 25 participants.

Immersive View builds on the virtual background features Zoom already has, but focuses on actually placing meeting attendees in a realistic-looking location, rather than just switching out a flat background. Meeting hosts can enable Immersive View from the same menu where you can find Speaker View and Gallery View; from there, Zoom will automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes like a board room or auditorium, or the meeting host can manually place them themselves.

Zoom says hosts can also resize attendees, move them around the scene, and upload their own scenes if they get bored of Zoom’s options. Theoretically any image could be used as an Immersive View background, but Zoom says matching the file type, aspect ratio, and resolution recommendations it has for virtual backgrounds will produce the best results.

Is a cheap ‘universal’ coronavirus vaccine on the way?

Two important sars-cov-2/covid-19 links.

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An experimental COVID-19 vaccine could potentially provide universal protection against future COVID variants as well as other coronaviruses—maybe even the ones responsible for the common cold. And it’s dirt cheap—less than $1 a dose, researchers say.

The targets a part of the COVID virus’ spike protein that appears to be highly resistant to mutation and is common across nearly all coronaviruses, said senior researcher Dr. Steven Zeichner. He is a professor of pediatric infectious disease with the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

In animal studies, the COVID vaccine protected pigs against two separate diseases caused by two types of coronavirus, COVID-19 and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), according to results published online recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mainstream DDR5 Memory Modules Pictured & Headed For Mass Production, Will Be Available For Next-Generation AMD and Intel Platforms Later This Year

DDR5 memory production is finally picking up speed as several manufacturers have finalized their mainstream designs for the next-generation standard. The DDR5 memory standard will be utilized by upcoming Intel (Alder Lake) & AMD (Raphael) platforms which are expected to launch later this year.

Jiahe Jinwei has announced that it has received the first batch of DDR5 memory modules from its assembly line based in the Shenzhen Pingshan factory. The memory modules are now being mass-produced and are expected to launch later this year with the next-generation platforms from Intel and AMD. Intel is said to take a lead in offering the next-gen memory support first on its next-gen Alder Lake platform comprising of the Z690 chipset-based motherboards as reported here.

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