Anyone who works as a freelancer these days has to be at least a bit familiar with techie things. But it isn’t just that. When I was a kid and those vaguely SF puppet shows were on the television and all the other kids wanted to be Greg Gogetem or Steve Savetheuniverse, I wanted to be the guy in a white coat and glasses called Doc or Brains. Here are some technology-related feeds I find useful and/or entertaining.
New Scientist – News » Oral vaccine prevents recurring UTIs for nine years
An oral vaccine in the form of a pineapple-flavoured spray prevented recurrent urinary tract infections in 53.9 per cent of clinical trial participants [Link]
Slashdot » Linux Continues To Be Above 4% On the Desktop
According to StatCounter, Linux on the desktop has continued to rise and remain above 4%. GamingOnLinux reports: First hitting over 4% in February, their March data is now in showing not just staying above 4% but rising a little once again showing the trend is clear that Linux use is rising. Slow and steady wins the race as they say. … [Link]
Slashdot » A Breakthrough Online Privacy Proposal Hits Congress
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Congress may be closer than ever to passing a comprehensive data privacy framework after key House and Senate committee leaders released a new proposal on Sunday. The bipartisan proposal, titled the American Privacy Rights Act, or APRA, would limit the types of consumer data that companies can collect, retain, and use, allowing … [Link]
Slashdot » Intel Says New Gaudi 3 AI Chips Top Nvidia H100s in Speed and Cost
Intel on Tuesday unveiled its new "Gaudi 3" AI chip that the company claims is over twice as power-efficient and can run AI models one-and-a-half times faster than Nvidia's H100 GPU. "It also comes in different configurations like a bundle of eight Gaudi 3 chips on one motherboard or a card that can slot into existing systems," adds CNBC. From … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Australia’s Indigenous people were making pottery over 2000 years ago
An excavation on an island in the Coral Sea shows that Indigenous Australians were producing ceramics long before the arrival of Europeans [Link]
New Scientist – News » Peter Higgs, physicist who theorised the Higgs boson, has died aged 94
Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died aged 94. He proposed the particle that gives other particles mass – now named the Higgs boson and discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012 [Link]
Slashdot » Fairphone's Fairbuds Are True Wireless Earbuds With Repairable Design, User-Replaceable Batteries
Fairphone, the Dutch smartphone maker known for its user-repairable smartphones, is bringing its ultra-repairable design philosophy to their "Fairbuds" wireless earbuds. Liliputing reports: The Fairbuds have the sort of features we've come to expect from premium earbuds. They're noise-cancelling Bluetooth 5.3 earbuds with support for wind noise reduction and an environmental noise-cancelling feature that sets noise reduction depending on your … [Link]
Slashdot » Intel Investigating Games Crashing On 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 Processors
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Owners of Intel's latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. It's happening in games like The Finals, Fortnite, and Tekken 8, and has even led Epic Games to issue a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K … [Link]
Slashdot » The World Doesn't Need More Journal Apps
We're seeing a boom in journaling apps as safer, easier ways to ease us back into posting everything online. From a report: Last year, Apple released a journal app with iOS 17. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just unveiled a photo app called Shine, which is made to share photos and memories with a select group of people. Today, Retro … [Link]
New Scientist – News » One of the biggest mysteries of cosmology may finally be solved
The expansion rate of the universe, measured by the Hubble constant, has been one of the most controversial numbers in cosmology for years, and we seem at last to be close to nailing it down [Link]
Slashdot » England Could Produce 13 Times More Renewable Energy, Using Less Than 3% of Land
England could produce 13 times more renewable energy than it does now, while using less than 3% of its land, analysis has found. The Guardian: Onshore wind and solar projects could provide enough electricity to power all the households in England two and a half times over, the research by Exeter University, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FoE), suggested. … [Link]
Slashdot » Cruise Robotaxis Are Back in Phoenix – But People Are Driving Them
Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post. The catch? The cars will be in so-called "manual mode," so they won't be driving themselves. From a report: Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Northern white rhino could be saved from extinction using frozen skin
We have enough genetic material to bring back the northern white rhino, but doing so won’t be easy [Link]
New Scientist – News » Prosthetic hands are easier to control using unrelated muscles
Random-seeming hand gestures seem to help people control prosthetic hands better than ones that mimic their ordinary muscle movements [Link]
Slashdot » Peter Higgs, Physicist Who Discovered Higgs Boson, Dies Aged 94
jd shares a report: Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died. Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on Monday. … [Link]
Slashdot » Internet Traffic Dipped as Viewers Took in the Eclipse
As the moon blocked the view of the sun across parts of Mexico, the United States and Canada on Monday, the celestial event managed another magnificent feat: It got people offline. From a report: According to Cloudflare, a cloud-computing service used by about 20 percent of websites globally, internet traffic dipped along the path of totality as spellbound viewers took … [Link]
Slashdot » Meta Platforms To Launch Small Versions of Llama 3 Next Week
Meta Platforms is planning to launch two small versions of its forthcoming Llama 3 large-language model next week, The Information has reported [non-paywalled link]. From the report: The models will serve as a precursor to the launch of the biggest version of Llama 3, expected this summer. Release of the two small models will likely help spark excitement for the … [Link]
Slashdot » Insurers Are Spying on Your Home From the Sky
Across the U.S., insurance companies are using aerial images of homes as a tool to ditch properties seen as higher risk [non-paywalled link]. From a report: Nearly every building in the country is being photographed, often without the owner's knowledge. Companies are deploying drones, manned airplanes and high-altitude balloons to take images of properties. No place is shielded: The industry-funded … [Link]
New Scientist – News » The multiverse could be much, much bigger than we ever imagined
A new way of interpreting the elusive mathematics of quantum mechanics could fundamentally change our understanding of reality [Link]
Slashdot » Beeper Took On Apple's iMessage Dominance. Now It's Been Acquired
Late last year the messaging app Beeper raised the ire of Apple when it found a way to recreate Apple's infamous "blue bubble" messaging on Android. Apple later hobbled Beeper, but it's not an entirely unhappy ending: The startup has been acquired in a deal valued at $125 million. From a report: Founded three years ago, Beeper is being snapped … [Link]
Slashdot » EPA Limits Pollution From Chemical Plants
More than 200 chemical plants across the country will be required to curb the toxic pollutants they release into the air [non-paywalled link] under a regulation announced by the Biden administration on Tuesday. From a report: The regulation is aimed at reducing the risk of cancer for people living near industrial sites. This is the first time in nearly two … [Link]
Slashdot » Google's Gemini Pro 1.5 Enters Public Preview on Vertex AI
Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google's most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google's enterprise-focused AI development platform. From a report: The company announced the news during its annual Cloud Next conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google's Gemini family of generative AI models. … [Link]
Slashdot » Google Announces Axion, Its First Custom Arm-based Data Center Processor
Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion. From a report: Based on Arm's Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances. … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Physicists created an imaginary magnetic field in real life
Researchers have used quantum light to create a magnetic field with a strength that is measured in imaginary numbers [Link]
Slashdot » With Vids, Google Thinks It Has the Next Big Productivity Tool For Work
For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. From a report: Google Vids is very much not an app … [Link]
Slashdot » US To Award Samsung Up To $6.6 Billion Chip Subsidy For Texas Expansion
The Biden administration plans to announce it is awarding more than $6 billion to South Korea's Samsung next week to expand its chip output in Taylor, Texas, as it seeks to ramp up chipmaking in the U.S., Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources. From the report: The subsidy, which will be unveiled by Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo, will go toward … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Dumping green sand in shallow seas could let them absorb more CO2
Releasing 1 gigatonne of ground-up olivine on coastal shelves each year could help lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, find researchers, but questions remain over the ecological impact [Link]
New Scientist – News » March 2024 is the 10th consecutive month to break temperature records
Every month since April 2023 has been the hottest on record, as climate continues its record-breaking streak [Link]
Slashdot » San Francisco's Light Rail To Upgrade From Floppy Disks
Those taking public transport in the tech hub of San Francisco may be reassured to know that their rides will soon no longer be dependent on floppy disks. From a report: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin told ABC that the city's automatic light-rail control system is running on outdated tech and "relies on three five-inch … [Link]
Slashdot » The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island
By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation's history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity. From a report: Aruba has long been a special place for Stacy Argondizzo. For years, her family has vacationed on the tiny Caribbean Island every July. More recently it's been … [Link]
Slashdot » Magnets Are Switching Up the Keyboard Game
Magnetic switches are emerging as a potential game-changer for mechanical keyboards. By using magnets instead of physical contacts, these switches allow users to adjust the actuation point of each key. While still a nascent technology lacking standardization, magnetic switches could bring a new level of customization to keyboards, TechCrunch writes. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot. [Link]
New Scientist – News » Eclipse 2024: 5 of the best pictures of the total solar eclipse
On 8 April, a total solar eclipse passed over Mexico, the US and Canada – here are some of the most stunning images [Link]
Slashdot » 'Social Order Could Collapse' in AI Era, Two Top Japan Companies Say
Japan's largest telecommunications company and the country's biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative AI, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked. From a report: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in … [Link]
Archive
30 Apr 2024 29 Apr 2024 28 Apr 2024 27 Apr 2024 26 Apr 2024 25 Apr 2024 24 Apr 2024 23 Apr 2024 22 Apr 2024 21 Apr 2024 20 Apr 2024 19 Apr 2024 18 Apr 2024 17 Apr 2024 16 Apr 2024 15 Apr 2024 14 Apr 2024 13 Apr 2024 12 Apr 2024 11 Apr 2024 10 Apr 2024 09 Apr 2024 08 Apr 2024 07 Apr 2024 06 Apr 2024 05 Apr 2024 04 Apr 2024 03 Apr 2024 02 Apr 2024 01 Apr 2024 31 Mar 2024 30 Mar 2024
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
You must log in to post a comment.