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An international team of astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has detected a rocky planet, about half the mass of Earth, in an extraordinarily short 7.7-hour orbit around its parent star.

It’s a reminder that the science of extrasolar planet hunting seems to enter bizarro land with each new discovery. Planetary scientists still haven’t figured out how our own tiny Mercury — which orbits our Sun once every 88 days — actually formed and evolved. So, this iron-rich ultrashort-period (USP) planet, dubbed GJ 367b should really boggle their minds.

It’s completely rocky, unlike most previously detected gaseous hot Jupiters on extremely short stellar orbits. As a result, the tiny planet is estimated to have a surface with temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt iron; hardly an Earth 2.0.

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As of Jan. 8, 2022, NASA’s (Washington D.C., U.S.) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team fully deployed its 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror, successfully completing the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments (including the 70-foot sunshield) since its Dec. 25 launch, to prepare for science operations. The telescope makes ample use of composite materials.

A joint effort with the European Space Agency (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Webb mission will explore every phase of cosmic history, from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe.

“NASA [has] achieved another engineering milestone decades in the making. While the journey is not complete, I join the Webb team in breathing a little easier and imagining the future breakthroughs bound to inspire the world,” says NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “The James Webb Space Telescope is an unprecedented mission that is on the precipice of seeing the light from the first galaxies and discovering the mysteries of our universe. Each feat already achieved and future accomplishment is a testament to the thousands of innovators who poured their life’s passion into this mission.”

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According to Intel the Meta’s vision of the Metaverse is impossible with the current Hardware limitations. But Intel said that they plan on increasing the performance of their CPU’s and GPU’s by close to 1,000 times in the hopes of reaching petaflop performance on regular consumer hardware to allow for photorealistic simulations inside the Metaverse.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Is the Metaverse the future?
02:36 What the Metaverse needs to work.
04:56 Privacy issues in the Metaverse.
07:42 Last Words.
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#intel #metaverse #meta

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Highly anticipated: Speculation around AMD’s new 3D V-Cache technology has swirled ever since Dr. Lisa Su gave us a sneak peek at Computex 2021. Since then, AMD and tech enthusiasts have remained cautiously optimistic regarding claims that the new chiplet-stacking approach can yield substantial performance gains with minimal impact to latency, responsiveness, and overall functionality. A recent test of an EPYC processor with V-Cache is giving early indication that AMD’s performance uplift claims may just hold true.

No one was quite sure what to expect when AMD announced their 3D V-Cache technology at Computex last summer. While some enthusiasts saw the substantial increase in cache as an exciting development, others in the community found themselves upset that the new offerings would not offer substantial increases in clock speed, improvements in power draw, etc. Last Friday tech news outlet Chips and Cheese published results of their initial testing with one of AMD’s new Milan-X processors with 3D V-Cache, the server-oriented EPYC 7V73X. And so far, things look promising.

According to the site’s summary, AMD has managed to substantially increase a processor’s cache size (768MB) in comparison to the previous Milan family of processors (256MB). Testing by Chips and Cheese reports impressive performance from the stacked CPU and much larger L3 cache without incurring any significant increase to cache and memory latency. Initial testing shows the latency penalty keeping the increase somewhere between three to four cycles.

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Apple’s digital car key feature might soon be useful for unlocking more than a handful of BMW models. In his latest newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claimed Hyundai and its upscale Genesis badge will support Apple CarKey “by the summer.” It’s not certain which models would provide the option, but it’s notable that some trim levels of the Ioniq 5 and other Hyundai cars include NFC for a (currently proprietary) digital key.

While remote lock controls have been available through smartphones for a while, CarKey (and its Android equivalent) treats the phone more like a physical key. You just have to bring your phone or Apple Watch to the door handle to unlock it, and you can even place your phone in a given area to start the car. People with ultra-wideband iPhones (such as the iPhone 11 and newer) can even leave their phone in their pocket when opening and starting the vehicle.

If the leak is accurate, Apple’s move could significantly expand the audience for digital car keys — you wouldn’t need to shop from one high-end marque to even consider it. A deal would also suggest the tussle over a possible EV collaboration wasn’t enough to deter Apple and Hyundai from exploring a CarKey team-up.

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A new technology solution that will provide low-power systems for use in bionic eyes, has been jointly developed by academics from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China and Northumbria University.

Working in partnership with a research group led by Professor PingAn Hu from the Harbin Institute, Northumbria’s Professor Richard Fu described their newly developed method for controlling the artificial synaptic devices used in bionic retinas, robots, and visual prostheses, as a “significant breakthrough.”

The team discovered that injecting elements of the soft metal, indium, into a two-dimensional (2D) material called molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), could improve electrical conductivity and reduce power consumption of the optical synapses used in the development of bionic eyes.

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Most toilet models flush away waste with gallons of water. Instead, the BeeVi toilet – a portmanteau of the words’ bee’ and ‘vision’ – use a vacuum pump to suck shit into an underground bioreactor, which means it uses less water. The energy-producing toilet system is much smaller than the existing flushable toilets, as it treats human excrement without using water.

The system utilizes a natural biological process to break down human waste into a dehydrated odorless compost-like material. Once these powdered feces are transferred to the Microbial Energy Production system, they can later be converted to methane, which becomes a source of energy for the building, powering a gas stove, hot-water boiler, and solid oxide fuel cell.

“If we think out of the box, faeces has precious value to make energy and manure. I have put this value into ecological circulation,” the inventor Cho Jae-weon said.

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