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Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an emerging global pandemic that is threatening the viability of healthcare systems worldwide. The virus responsible for the disease is also known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and abbreviated as SARS-CoV-2. The eruption started in China on December 29, 2019 and by March 2020 it was reported that it had spread to several countries across the world.

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In the final days of 2019, Chinese doctors identified a number of similar cases of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in China. Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei Province in China accommodating 11 million inhabitants. Soon, it was discovered that the disease was caused by a new strain of virus which was named SARS-CoV-2.

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If you’re on the look out for a desktop PC that’s small enough to sit under a TV, Chinese brand XCY has a very small computer they’d like to sell you.

As Liliputing reports, the XCY X51 is about as small as you could possibly make a fully-featured desktop PC. It measures 2.4-by-2.4-by-1.7-inches and weighs a mere 121 grams. However, inside you’ll find a quad-core Intel Celeron N4100 clocked at 1.1GHz (2.4Ghz burst frequency) complete with UHD Graphics 600 GPU. The processor is complemented by 8GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 RAM, a 128GB M.2 SSD, and a micro SD card slot for further storage expansion.

It may be small, but the X51 is still capable of offering a full Windows 10 experience as well as playing 4K video.

Continue reading “XCY Squeezes a 4K-Capable Desktop PC Into a 2.4-Inch Case” | >

Nvidia Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire Arm Ltd., the chip designer that SoftBank Group Corp. bought for $32 billion four years ago, according to people familiar with the matter.

The two parties aim to reach a deal in the next few weeks, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Nvidia is the only suitor in concrete discussions with SoftBank, according to the people.

A deal for Arm could be the largest ever in the semiconductor industry, which has been consolidating in recent years as companies seek to diversify and add scale. But any deal with Nvidia, which is a customer of Arm, would likely trigger regulatory scrutiny as well as a wave of opposition from other users.

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In a study published earlier this month, a team of theoretical physicists is claiming to have discovered the remnants of previous universes hidden within the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Our universe is a vast collection of observable matter, like gas, dust, stars, etc., in addition to the ever-elusive dark matter and dark energy. In some sense, this universe is all we know, and even then, we can only directly study about 5% of it, leaving 95% a mystery that scientists are actively working to solve. However, this group of physicists is arguing that our universe isn’t alone; it’s just one in a long line of universes that are born, grow, and die. Among these scientists is mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, who worked closely with Stephen Hawking and currently is the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. Penrose and his collaborators follow a cosmological theory called conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) in which universes, much like human beings, come into existence, expand, and then perish.

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Researchers devise an on-off system that allows high-fidelity operations and interconnection between processors.

MIT researchers have introduced a quantum computing architecture that can perform low-error quantum computations while also rapidly sharing quantum information between processors. The work represents a key advance toward a complete quantum computing platform.

Previous to this discovery, small-scale quantum processors have successfully performed tasks at a rate exponentially faster than that of classical computers. However, it has been difficult to controllably communicate quantum information between distant parts of a processor. In classical computers, wired interconnects are used to route information back and forth throughout a processor during the course of a computation. In a quantum computer, however, the information itself is quantum mechanical and fragile, requiring fundamentally new strategies to simultaneously process and communicate quantum information on a chip.

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Looks like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found the root cause of the latest Salmonella Newport outbreak. And it’s not alien DNA or demon sperm. It’s onions, specifically red onions.

Yep, if you like red onions with your salads, on your pasta, in your burgers, or just all over your body, you may be shedding a tear. Eating red onions is the one thing that many people affected by this Salmonella outbreak seem to have in common. Well, that and diarrhea as well as all the other wonderful stuff that comes with Salmonella infections.

I first covered this outbreak eight days ago for Forbes. Back then, the cause of the outbreak, which had already affected at least 125 people in 15 states at the time, was unknown. The CDC couldn’t warn the public to avoid any specific foods, and avoiding all foods would not have been a practical suggestion.

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A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China and one in the U.S. has found that semiconducting crystals of indium selenide (InSe) have exceptional flexibility. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes testing samples of InSe and what they learned about the material. Xiaodong Han with Beijing University of Technology has published a Perspective piece outlining the work by the team in China in the same journal issue.

As the researchers note, most semiconductors are rigid, which means they are difficult to use in applications that require varied surfaces or bending. This has presented a problem for portable device makers as they attempt to respond to user demand for bendable electronics. In this new effort, the researchers in China have found one semiconductor, InSe, that is not only flexible, but is so pliable that it can be processed using rollers.

InSe, as its name implies, is a compound made from indium (a metal element often used in touchscreens) and selenium (a non-metal element). Selenium is also a 2-D semiconductor, and has come under scrutiny after researchers discovered that its bandgap matched the visible region in the electromagnetic spectrum. It has previously been studied for use in specialty optoelectronic applications. In this new effort, the researchers looked into the possibility of using it as a in bendable portable electronic devices.

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Breaking the lowest oxygen abundance record.

New results achieved by combining big data captured by the Subaru Telescope and the power of machine learning have discovered a galaxy with an extremely low oxygen abundance of 1.6% solar abundance, breaking the previous record of the lowest oxygen abundance. The measured oxygen abundance suggests that most of the stars in this galaxy formed very recently.

To understand galaxy evolution, astronomers need to study galaxies in various stages of formation and evolution. Most of the galaxies in the modern Universe are mature galaxies, but standard cosmology predicts that there may still be a few galaxies in the early formation stage in the modern Universe. Because these early-stage galaxies are rare, an international research team searched for them in wide-field imaging data taken with the Subaru Telescope. “To find the very faint, rare galaxies, deep, wide-field data taken with the Subaru Telescope was indispensable,” emphasizes Dr. Takashi Kojima, the leader of the team.

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