Decoding

Adult and young of the ichthyosaur species Shonisaurus popularis chase ammonoid prey 230 million years ago, in what is now Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, Nevada, U.S.A. Credit: Gabriel UguetoFor many years, researchers have been studying a state park in Nevada, but despite their efforts, the reason for the high number of ichthyosaur deaths in the area some 230 million years ago remains a mystery.Blue and humpback whales, along with other marine giants of today, regularly undertake long migrations to reach waters where…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What fusion’s breakthrough means for clean energy The news: After decades of trying, scientists have reached a milestone in fusion research, finally running a reaction that created more energy than was put in to start it. US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced on Tuesday that researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had achieved what’s…

Semiconductor companies in the Middle East are striving to become global tech leaders Starting from 5G to the digital space, Middle Eastern companies are constantly planning to invest heavily in disruptive technologies to transform themselves into regional tech giants. Leveraging its economic capabilities, the UAE is entering into the semiconductor space as the predominant investor. Usually, the semiconductor industry is considered the most capital-intensive domain in the tech ecosystem, however, UAE’s strategic…

Scientists can now "decode" people's thoughts without even touching their heads, The Scientist reported.Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples' brains. The new method, described in a report posted 29 Sept. to the preprint database bioRxiv, instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).fMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain, and because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen, this information…

The developer of CapFrameX, a famous capture, and analysis tool, has published a performance comparison (opens in new tab) of AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT (RDNA 2), Intel's Arc A770 (Alchemist), and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 (Ampere) and GeForce RTX 4090 (Ada Lovelace) in AV1 video encoding in at 8K resolution. The results he obtained are pretty surprising.The best graphics cards, like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 or RTX 4090, offer formidable performance in demanding games in high resolutions, unlike Intel's Arc A770, which…

Apple’s next event is just around the corner, and die-hard fans have been scouring the latest invitation for clues about what new products and features may be in the cards. It’s a long-held belief that Apple hides things inside its event invitations, but we wondered whether this search for secrets ever bore any fruit (sorry) — and if it did, what sort of hints there are. To find out, we scoured every invitation over the past 21 years and compared them against the various products subsequently announced at each event.…

DATA JOBSWhere does this new role fit into data teams? And why should you care about it?Trying to fit in — Photo by SHVETS productionFor a few years now the term “analytics engineer” has been used in the field of data science to describe a new data role. For example in an article published in January 2021 Prukalpa Sankar mentions the emergence of new roles like analytics engineers. Is it to say that the range of jobs related to data is not set yet? Definitely. Should we consider that analytics engineer is the next data…

ESP known for its work in decoding non-human language has crossed yet another milestone in deciphering the animal language Animal farm, the satirical allegorical book written by George Orwell would have been different had we known how animals communicate, and the story ended on a happy note. Technology, as usual, has been put into work to decode the what, how and whys of animal communication for years. AI Animal translators, translating the oinks and whoofs of our pets have been on the ground giving pet owners an…

Scientists are deciphering the nuclear pore complex in incredible detail. Credit: Valerie AltounianMany of us learned the basic cell structure at some point and will recall components like the cell membrane, cytoplasm, mitochondrion, and nucleus. However, the structure of our cells is actually vastly more complicated than you may have thought. In fact, because we have been discovering so much over the years, we now know that cells are far more complex than even expert biologists realized not too long ago.One element of…