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WTF?! On Thursday the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) reported that they had shut down a cryptomining operation in the city of Vinnytsia, seizing over 500 GPUs and 50 processors — and a bunch of Playstation 4s. Consoles built on 2013-era technology might not be great at mining, but they don’t need to be when you have 3800 of them.

Although the market for GPUs is starting to improve, and dedicated ASICs might be on the way to relieve demand, it seems that one group of enterprising cryptocurrency miners have turned to last-gen console hardware to get things done.

From the photos provided by the SSU, it looks like these consoles are of the PS4 Slim variety, the 2016 refresh of the original console from three years prior. Mostly obsolete for newer games, it’s not at all surprising that so many could be sourced en masse so easily.

A rare group of humans known as “superagers” can grow up without their minds growing old.

Even in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, a lucky few maintain incredibly youthful memories, recalling new experiences, events, and situations just as well as people decades younger.

New research now suggests that’s because their brains have somehow resisted the march of time.

The size of a tennis ball. The mass of the Earth.


But that could change soon.

Current gravitational wave observatories are sensitive to the mergers of stellar-mass black holes. We’ve observed a few mergers involving neutron stars, but most have been between black holes on the order of tens of solar masses.

We can’t yet observe the gravitational waves of supermassive black holes in other galaxies, nor can we observe those of planet-sized worlds. Proposed detectors such as eLISA will allow us to observe the former, but it will take a novel new idea to detect the latter.

A new laser that generates quantum particles can recycle lost energy for highly efficient, low threshold laser applications.

Scientists at KAIST have fabricated a laser system that generates highly interactive quantum particles at room temperature. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to a single microcavity laser system that requires lower threshold energy as its energy loss increases.

The system, developed by KAIST physicist Yong-Hoon Cho and colleagues, involves shining light through a single hexagonal-shaped microcavity treated with a loss-modulated silicon nitride substrate. The system design leads to the generation of a polariton laser at room temperature, which is exciting because this usually requires cryogenic temperatures.