Lifeboat Foundation

“Alder Lake,” Intel’s family of 12th Generation processors, has arrived—and with it, a new CPU paradigm. Intel’s Core i9-12900K desktop CPU ($589) leads the pack of the company’s 12th Generation processors, and brings with it a whole host of upgrades and innovations to the desktops of now and tomorrow. These tick-ups include support for the new, high-speed DDR5 RAM standard, as well as an upgrade to PCI Express 5.0, on the first new motherboard platform to support the latest chips, the Intel Z690. Intel also worked closely with Microsoft to optimize the new CPUs for Windows 11, adding new scheduling features that intelligently load up the Core i9-12900K depending on which cores are being used where, and for what.

Alder Lake and the Core i9-12900K indeed impress, but our relationship with the CPU…is complicated. For all the outright wins we saw in our benchmarks (and there were many), the added cost of upgrading to yet another new motherboard platform won’t outweigh the win percentages for many shoppers. Intel’s older-yet-still-reliable “Comet Lake” Core i9-10900K kept itself in the race during several benchmarks, while the eight-core, rather cheaper AMD Ryzen 7 5800X ($449 list price, but currently snipe-discounted to $386 on Amazon and Newegg) proves itself a worthy contender on performance-versus-price in PC gaming.

The high cost of a new Z690 motherboard (the cheapest are just under $200, per our Z690 motherboard guide) and DDR5 adoption, along with Intel’s insistence on upgrading your system to Windows 11, are all front-facing considerations for anyone who’s considering 12th Generation Core as their next big desktop upgrade. That—and a not-insignificant problem in which our test platform, and several prebuilt Alder Lake PCs, could not launch certain popular games that use specific DRM—temper Alder Lake with a bit of wait-and-see caution. Our initial Alder Lake takeaway is “Intel’s on the upswing, with some caveats.” But read more about our findings below.

Zindi is all about using AI to solve real-world problems for companies and individuals. And the South Africa-based crowd-solving startup has done that over the last three years they have been in existence.

Just last year a team of data scientists under Zindi used machine learning to improve air quality monitoring in Kampala as another group helped Zimnat, an insurance company in Zimbabwe, predict customer behavior — especially on who was likely to leave and the possible interventions that would make them stay. Zimnat was able to retain its customers by offering custom-made services to those who would have otherwise discontinued.

These are some of the solutions that have been realized to counter the data-centered challenges that companies, NGOs and government institutions submit to Zindi.

These are the buzziest talking points and biggest developments in enterprise automation for the next year.

Blue Origin, Sierra Space, and others plan to build a new private space station in low-Earth orbit.

Blue Origin, Sierra Space, & others plan to build a new private space station in low-Earth orbit. NASA has chosen Orbital Reef for a funded Space Act Agreement.

This, combined with the esoteric rules of quantum mechanics, means that the spins are constantly in different positions at once. If you look at just a few particles, it’s hard to tell whether you have a quantum liquid or, if you do, what properties it has.

Quantum spin liquids were first theorized in 1973 by a physicist named Philip W. Anderson, and physicists have been trying to get their hands on this matter ever since. “Many different experiments…tried to create and observe this type of state. But this has actually turned out to be very challenging,” says Mikhail Lukin, a physicist at Harvard University and one of the paper authors.

The researchers at Harvard had a new tool in their arsenal: what they call a “programmable quantum simulator.” Essentially, it’s a machine that allows them to play with individual atoms. Using specifically focused laser beams, researchers can shuffle atoms around a two-dimensional grid like magnets on a whiteboard.

Digital tongue circa 2019.

“Electronic tongues” are devices that can analyze materials just by coming in contact with them — and they have near-infinite applications, from testing water quality to ensuring an expensive wine isn’t a counterfeit.

The problem is most fall into one of two categories: portable and specialized for only certain materials, or stationary and versatile. But now, IBM researchers have unveiled a new electronic tongue capable of bridging gap, making it easier to identify a range of liquids on the fly.

Continue reading “IBM Unveils New ‘Electronic Tongue’ to Taste and Identify Liquids” »

Circa 2017

An electronic tongue is a device made of sensors responding to some taste (soluble) of foods through the transduction of a signal or a pattern of signals thanks to a pattern-recognition software system.

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The US tech industry seems to be unstoppable. In fact, it is the most valuable tech industry in the world. According to CompTIA, in 2022, the US tech market will represent 33% of the global market share — or approximately $1.8 trillion. The European technology industry is a dwarf in comparison to America’s FAMANGs– Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Netflix, which are worth approximately $6 trillion. Europe’s tech companies as a whole are worth about 30% of any one of the Big 4 American firms. SAP, by far the largest European technology corporation, is worth around 14% of Amazon or Microsoft. Only SAP makes it into the Fortune 500 in the Technology sector. But why are we seeing this trend? What makes the US tech market so much more valuable than counterparts in European markets. Federal research labs and Government grants accelerated core research across the US that helped to create new technology companies which are still household names today: HP, IBM and Google’s Alphabet all have their roots in government sector funding. Full Story: