Toggle light / dark theme

😳!


A Chinese military analyst suggested that Beijing should develop countermeasures for the Starlink satellite system developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX — including ways to hack or even destroy the service during a time of conflict.

In a recent paper published in a China-based academic journal called Modern Defense Technology, analyst Ren Yuanzhen argued that China’s military needs to develop the capability of tracking each of the thousands of satellites set to comprise the Starlink constellations in the coming years.

Ren’s paper noted that Starlink could be a key resource for the US military, both as a means of providing internet connectivity for troops and as a source of intelligence through satellite imagery.

After a Sydney-based firm built the world’s first atomic-scale quantum integrated circuit.

Sydney-based firm Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) built the first integrated silicon quantum computer circuit manufactured at the atomic scale, in what has been touted as a “major breakthrough” on the road to quantum supremacy, a press statement reveals.

The atomic-scale integrated circuit, which functions as an analog quantum processor, may be SQC’s biggest milestone since it announced in 2012 that it had built the world’s first single-atom transistor.

Scientists in China say they have been able to run an artificial intelligence model as sophisticated as a human brain on their most powerful supercomputer, a report from the South China Morning Pos t reveals.

According to the report, this puts China’s Newest Generation Sunway supercomputer on the same level as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Frontier, which was named the world’s most powerful supercomputer earlier this month.

As a point of reference, Frontier is the first machine to have demonstrated it can perform more than one quintillion calculations per second.

Microsoft-owned GitHub is launching its Copilot AI tool today, which helps suggest lines of code to developers inside their code editor. GitHub originally teamed up with OpenAI last year to launch a preview of Copilot, and it’s generally available to all developers today. Priced at US$10 per month or US$100 a year, GitHub Copilot is capable of suggesting the next line of code as developers type in an integrated development environment (IDE) like Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs. Copilot can suggest complete methods and complex algorithms alongside boilerplate code and assistance with unit testing. More than 1.2 million developers signed up to use the GitHub Copilot preview over the past 12 months, and it will remain a free tool for verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects. In files where it’s enabled, GitHub says nearly 40 percent of code is now being written by Copilot.

“Over the past year, we’ve continued to iterate and test workflows to help drive the ‘magic’ of Copilot,” Ryan J. Salva, VP of product at GitHub, told TechCrunch via email. “We not only used the preview to learn how people use GitHub Copilot but also to scale the service safely.”

“We specifically designed GitHub Copilot as an editor extension to make sure nothing gets in the way of what you’re doing,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke says in a blog post(Opens in a new window). “GitHub Copilot distills the collective knowledge of the world’s developers into an editor extension that suggests code in real-time, to help you stay focused on what matters most: building great software.”

Researchers at the University of Central Florida are developing new photonic materials which may one day be used to enable ultra-fast, low-power light-based computing. The unique materials referred to as topological insulators, resemble wires that have been flipped inside out, with the insulation on the inside and the current flowing along the exterior.

In order to avoid the overheating issue that today’s ever-smaller circuits encounter, topological insulators could be incorporated into circuit designs to enable the packing of more processing power into a given area without generating heat.

The researchers’ most recent study, which was published on April 28 in the journal Nature Materials, presented a brand-new process for creating the materials that make use of a unique, chained honeycomb lattice structure. The linked, honeycombed pattern was laser etched onto a piece of silica, a material often used to create photonic circuits, by the researchers.