Computing
IBM Has Unveiled Chip Technology That Could Help Extend Moore’s Law One other DecadeSophia Chen | MIT Technology Review ($)
“To suit more transistors on a chip, engineers across the industry are eyeing a pivot to an approach familiar to urban planners: construct up. On Thursday, IBM announced it has created a chip that uses this strategy. The brand new architecture, generally known as a nanostack, vertically stacks transistors in two layers on a silicon chip.”
Artificial Intelligence
AI Is Designing Radio Chips That Humans Couldn’t Even ImagineKaushik Sengupta | IEEE Spectrum
“A few of the…chips look more like modern art than circuit layouts. Yet in lots of cases, the physical prototypes bested state-of-the art circuits when it comes to performance. The true achievement, nevertheless, is that it took the AI orders of magnitude less time to conceive a working design than it might a human designer.”
Science
A Dark Dimension Could Link Two of the Universe’s Great UnknownsSteve Nadis | Quanta Magazine
“Regardless that scientists have assumed that dark energy and dark matter ‘don’t have anything to do with one another,’ said Tim Tait, a particle physicist on the University of California, Irvine, ‘you possibly can imagine a case where one influences the opposite. And it might not be surprising if [they] were manifestations of a form of unified theory of the dark universe.'”
Biotechnology
Latest Effort Will Get Genome Sequences for Entire Endangered Species ListJohn Timmer | Ars Technica
“Over 2,300 plant and animal populations remain on the [endangered species] list, requiring ongoing government intervention. On Thursday, it was announced that every one of those species would see their genomes sequenced and tissue samples preserved to assist future conservation efforts.”
Future
AI Was Imagined to Kill Engineering Jobs, but Latest Data Suggests They’re the Most ResilientMarina Temkin | TechCrunch
“Software engineering, in theory, is the skilled field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. Nonetheless, researchers at enterprise firm SignalFire say the hiring data tells a special story. ‘The rationale given for a lot of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of nevertheless many engineers prior to now,’ said Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research. ‘What we’re seeing on the bottom is slightly inconsistent with that.'”
Computing
This Flying Solar-Powered Platform Could Deliver Higher Web From the AirRachel Courtland | MIT Technology Review ($)
“As soon as August, a large silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to achieve the coast of Japan. Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the Latest Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface, in a wispy-thin layer generally known as the stratosphere. Then it should use a custom-built antenna to complement Softbank’s 5G network, a test that can include beaming data straight to devices.”
Computing
A Latest Paper Argues Microsoft Exaggerated Its Quantum Claims a Yr AgoSophia Chen | The Verge
“A critique published in Nature Wednesday calls the essential technology behind Microsoft’s ‘breakthrough’ quantum computing chip the Majorana 1 into query. …In a peer-reviewed article, Henry Legg, a physicist on the University of St. Andrews, reanalyzed Microsoft’s data on their device and argued that the corporate’s researchers didn’t conclusively reveal a working topological qubit in the primary place.”
Artificial Intelligence
The AI World Is Getting ‘Loopy’Russell Brandom | TechCrunch
“‘Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We began to transition so agents write the code. And now we’re transitioning to the purpose where agents are prompting agents that then write the code,’ [said Claude Code creator Boris Cherny]. ‘As big because the step from source code to agents was, loops are only as essential and as big a step.'”