Lifeboat Foundation

Austin-based Silicon Labs has sold its infrastructure and automotive business for $2.75 billion to California-based semiconductor maker Skyworks Solutions. Plans for the all-cash deal was initially announced in April.

Silicon Labs primarily designs semiconductors and other silicon devices. CEO Tyson Tuttle said the deal will allow the company to focus on its growing Internet of Things business. Internet of Things, or IoT as it is known in industry shorthand, refers to a range of non-computing devices —from kitchen devices to security systems — that connect to the Internet.

Silcon Labs’ IoT business already serves tens of thousands of customers and works in thousands of applications, but the deal narrows Silicon Labs focus exclusively to that technology.

Earth’s core was formed very early in our planet’s 4.5 billion-year history, within the first 200 million years. Gravity pulled the heavier iron to the centre of the young planet, leaving the rocky, silicate minerals to make up the mantle and crust.

Earth’s formation captured a lot of heat within the planet. The loss of this heat, and heating by ongoing radioactive decay, have since driven our planet’s evolution. Heat loss in Earth’s interior drives the vigorous flow in the liquid iron outer core, which creates Earth’s magnetic field. Meanwhile, cooling within Earth’s deep interior helps power plate tectonics, which shape the surface of our planet.

As Earth cooled over time, the temperature at the centre of the planet eventually dropped below the melting point of iron at extreme pressures, and the inner core started to crystallise. Today, the inner core continues to grow at roughly 1mm in radius each year, which equates to the solidification of 8000 tonnes of molten iron every second. In billions of years, this cooling will eventually lead to the whole core becoming solid, leaving Earth without its protective magnetic field.

AlphaFold 2 paper and code is finally released. This post aims to inspire new generations of Machine Learning (ML) engineers to focus on foundational biological problems.

This post is a collection of core concepts to finally grasp AlphaFold2-like stuff. Our goal is to make this blog post as self-complete as possible in terms of biology. Thus in this article, you will learn about:

Risky business.

With chip shortages ongoing, some companies are having to change their plans, but could these gambles really pay off?

A fizzled example of a gamma-ray burst, the most powerful kind of explosion known in the universe, suggests these outbursts can be surprisingly brief, researchers say.

When it comes to turning a raw block of metal into a useful part, most processes are pretty dramatic. Sharp and tough tools are slammed into raw stock to remove tiny bits at a time, releasing the part trapped within. It doesn’t always have to be quite so violent though, as these experiments in electrochemical machining suggest.

Electrochemical machining, or ECM, is not to be confused with electrical discharge machining, or EDM. While similar, ECM is a much tamer process. Where EDM relies on a powerful electric arc between the tool and the work to erode material in a dielectric fluid, ECM is much more like electrolysis in reverse. In ECM, a workpiece and custom tool are placed in an electrolyte bath and wired to a power source; the workpiece is the anode while the tool is the cathode, and the flow of charged electrolyte through the tool ionizes the workpiece, slowly eroding it.

The trick — and expense — of ECM is generally in making the tooling, which can be extremely complicated. For his experiments, [Amos] took the shortcut of 3D-printing his tool — he chose [Suzanne] the Blender monkey — and then copper plating it, to make it conductive. Attached to the remains of a RepRap for Z-axis control and kitted out with tanks and pumps to keep the electrolyte flowing, the rig worked surprisingly well, leaving a recognizably simian faceprint on a block of steel.

Electrons in metals try to behave like obedient motorists, but they end up more like bumper cars. They may be reckless drivers, but a new Cornell-led study confirms this chaos has a limit established by the laws of quantum mechanics.

The team’s paper, “T-Linear Resistivity From an Isotropic Planckian Scattering Rate,” written in collaboration with researchers led by Louis Taillefer from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, published July 28 in Nature. The paper’s lead author is Gael Grissonnanche, a postdoctoral fellow with the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science.

Metals carry electric current when electrons all move together in tandem. In most metals, such as the copper and gold used for electrical wiring, the electrons try to avoid each other and flow in unison. However, in the case of certain “strange” metals, this harmony is broken and electrons dissipate energy by bouncing off each other at the fastest rate possible. The laws of quantum mechanics essentially play the role of an electron traffic cop, dictating an upper limit on how often these collisions can occur. Scientists previously observed this limit on the collision rate, also known as the “Planckian limit,” but there is no concrete theory that explains why the limit should exist, nor was it known how electrons reach this limit in strange metals. So Ramshaw and his collaborators set out to carefully measure it.

A two-hour launch window opens 2 a.m. ET (0600 GMT; 6 p.m. local New Zealand time)

Rocket Lab will launch an experimental research and development satellite to low Earth orbit tomorrow (July 29) for the U.S. Space Force. The mission will demonstrate the feasibility of large deployable sensors.

New CEO Pat Gelsinger says a “torrid” pace of innovation helped convince Amazon and Qualcomm to pay Intel to build future processors.