Month: November 2022
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‘Gaslighting’ is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2022
Gas lamps illuminate St. Louis’ Gaslight Square on April 2, 1962. “Gaslighting” — mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful — is Merriam-Webster’s word of 2022. Credit: AP Photo/JMH, File “Gaslighting”—behavior that’s mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful—is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Lookups for the word on merriam-webster.com increased 1,740%… Continue Reading News Source: phys.org
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The Ultimate Transistor Timeline – IEEE Spectrum
Even as the initial sales receipts for the first transistors to hit the market were being tallied up in 1948, the next generation of transistors had already been invented (see “The First Transistor and How it Worked.”) Since then, engineers have reinvented the transistor over and over again, raiding condensed-matter physics for anything that might…
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The State of the Transistor in 3 Charts
The most obvious change in transistor technology in the last 75 years has been just how many we can make. Reducing the size of the device has been a titanic effort and a fantastically successful one, as these charts show. But size isn’t the only feature engineers have been improving. In 1947, there was only…
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New AI Speeds Computer Graphics by Up to 5x
On 20 September, Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, Bryan Catanzaro, went to Twitter with a bold claim: In certain GPU-heavy games, like the classic first-person platformer Portal, seven out of eight pixels on the screen are generated by a new machine-learning algorithm. That’s enough, he said, to accelerate rendering by up to 5…
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Glimmers of movement, hope at COP27 – Harvard Gazette
Climate negotiators from around the world recently wrapped up talks in Egypt that were by turns frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters and movement to address climate-related damage to the…
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Climate Change Will Make El Niño and La Niña Stronger by 2030 — 40 Years Sooner Than Previously Thought
During a recent trip to the Galápagos Islands, I eagerly plunged into the equatorial waters, hoping to snorkel with sea turtles, sea lions, and maybe even penguins. The possibility of swimming with penguins should have tipped me off that the toasty, tropical swim I was anticipating wasn’t actually on offer. In fact, before too long,…
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Robot Gift Guide 2022 – IEEE Spectrum
It’s been a couple of years, but the IEEE Spectrum Robot Gift Guide is back for 2022! We’ve got all kinds of new robots, and right now is an excellent time to buy one (or a dozen), since many of them are on sale this week. We’ve tried to focus on consumer robots that are…
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1,700-year-old remains belonged to the Americas’ first captive monkey
A sacrificed spider monkey is shedding new light on an ancient Mesoamerican relationship. The remains of a 1,700-year-old monkey found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan outside modern-day Mexico City suggest the primate was a diplomatic gift from the Maya. The find is the earliest evidence of a primate held in captivity in the Americas,…
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The U.S.-China Chip Ban, Explained
It has now been over a month since the U.S. Commerce Department issued new rules that clamped down on the export of certain advanced chips—which have military or AI applications—to Chinese customers. China has yet to respond—but Beijing has multiple options in its arsenal. It’s unlikely, experts say, that the U.S. actions will be the…
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Kelp Farming Could Help Clean up Polluted Waters
This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. For most of the Shinnecock Nation’s history, the waters off the eastern end of Long Island were a place of abundance. Expert fishermen, whalers and farmers, the Shinnecock people lived for centuries off the clams,…