BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: PCI-SIG says PCI Express 8.0 will hit a raw bit rate of 256.0 GT/s, doubling what PCIe 7.0 offers. The spec is expected to be ready by 2028, and the goal is to support massive data loads from AI, machine learning, edge computing, and even quantum systems. The group says PCIe 8.0 will allow up to 1 terabyte per second of bidirectional throughput with a full x16 configuration. They're also looking at new connector designs, improving protocol efficiency, reducing power use, and maintaining backward compatibility.

Thingiverse, a popular 3D printing file repository, has agreed to remove downloadable gun designs following pressure from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who is pushing for stricter moderation and voluntary cooperation across the 3D printing industry. "However, it's unlikely to slow the proliferation of 3D printed weapons, as many other sites offer downloadable gun designs and parts," reports The Register. From the report: Earlier this year, Bragg wrote to 3D printing companies, asking them to ensure their services can't be used to create firearms. On Saturday, Bragg announced that one such company, Thingiverse, would remove working gun models from its site. The company operates a popular free library of 3D design files and had already banned weapons in its terms of use, but is now promising to improve its moderation procedures and technology. "Following discussions with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office about concerns around untraceable firearms, we are taking additional steps to improve our content moderation efforts," Thingiverse said in a statement. "As always, we encourage our users to report any content that may be harmful." [...]

At any rate, while Thingiverse may be popular among 3D printing mavens, people who like to build their own guns look to other options. [...] Bragg's approach to 3D printing sites and 3D printer manufacturers is to seek voluntary cooperation. Only Thingiverse and YouTube have taken up his call, others may or may not follow. "While law enforcement has a primary role to play in stopping the rise of 3D-printed weapons, this technology is rapidly changing and evolving, and we need the help and expertise of the private sector to aid our efforts," Bragg said. "We will continue to proactively reach out to and collaborate with others in the industry to reduce gun violence throughout Manhattan and keep everyone safe." But it seems doubtful that the sites where Aranda and other 3D gun makers get their files will be rushing to help Bragg voluntarily.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Trey had struggled with alcoholism for 15 years, eventually drinking heavily each night before quitting in December. But staying sober was a struggle for the 36-year-old first responder from Atlanta, who did not wish to use his real name due to professional concerns. Then he discovered Alterd, an AI-powered journaling app that invites users to "explore new dimensions" geared towards psychedelics and cannabis consumers, meditators, and alcohol drinkers. In April, using the app as a tripsitter -- a term for someone who soberly watches over another while they trip on psychedelics to provide reassurance and support -- he took a huge dose of 700 micrograms of LSD. (A typicalrecreational doseis considered to be 100 micrograms.) "I went from craving compulsions to feeling true freedom and not needing or wanting alcohol," he says.

He recently asked the app's "chat with your mind" function how he had become more wise through all his AI-assisted psychedelic trips. It responded: "I trust my own guidance now, not just external rules or what others think. I'm more creative, less trapped by fear, and I actually live by my values, not just talk about them. The way I see, reflect, and act in the world is clearer and more grounded every day." "It's almost like your own self that you're communicating with," says Trey, adding he's tripped with his AI chatbot about a dozen times since April. "It's like your best friend. It's kind of crazy." The article mentions several different chatbot tools and AI systems that are being used for psychedelic therapy.

ChatGPT: "Already, many millions of people are using ChatGPT on a daily basis, and the developments may have helped democratize access to psychotherapy-style guidance, albeit in a dubious Silicon Valley style with advice that is often flush with untruths," reports Wired. The general-purpose AI chatbot is being used for emotional support, intention-setting, and even real-time guidance during psychedelic trips. While not designed for therapy, it has been used informally as a trip companion, offering customized music playlists, safety reminders, and existential reflections. Experts caution that its lack of emotional nuance and clinical oversight poses significant risks during altered states.

Alterd: Alterd is a personalized AI journal app that serves as a reflective tool by analyzing a user's entries, moods, and behavior patterns. Its "mind chat" function acts like a digital subconscious, offering supportive insights while gently confronting negative habits like substance use. Users credit it with deepening self-awareness and maintaining sobriety, particularly in the context of psychedelic-assisted growth.

Mindbloom's AI Copilot: Integrated into Mindbloom's at-home ketamine therapy program, the AI copilot helps clients set pretrip intentions, process post-trip emotions, and stay grounded between sessions. It generates custom reflections and visual art based on voice journals, aiming to enhance the therapeutic journey even outside of human-guided sessions. The company plans to evolve the tool into a real-time, intelligent assistant capable of interacting more dynamically with users.

Orb AI/Shaman Concepts (Speculative): Conceptual "orb" interfaces imagine an AI-powered, shaman-like robot facilitating various aspects of psychedelic therapy, from intake to trip navigation. While still speculative, such designs hint at a future where AI plays a central, embodied role in guiding altered states. These ideas raise provocative ethical and safety questions about replacing human presence with machines in deeply vulnerable psychological contexts.

AI in Virtual Reality and Brain Modulation Systems: Researchers are exploring how AI could coordinate immersive virtual reality environments and brain-modulating devices to enhance psychedelic therapy. These systems would respond to real-time emotional and physiological signals, using haptic suits and VR to deepen and personalize the psychedelic experience. Though still in the conceptual phase, this approach represents the fusion of biotech, immersive tech, and AI in pursuit of therapeutic transformation.

OpenAI has designed features that would allow people to collaborate on documents and communicate via chat within ChatGPT, The Information reported Tuesday. The features would pit OpenAI directly against Microsoft, its biggest shareholder and business partner, and Google, whose search engine has already lost traffic to people using ChatGPT for web searches.

Whether OpenAI will actually release the collaboration features remains unclear, the report cautioned. The designs would target the core of Microsoft's dominant productivity suite and could strain the companies' already complicated relationship as OpenAI seeks Microsoft's approval for restructuring its for-profit unit. Product chief Kevin Weil first discussed and showed off designs for document collaboration nearly a year ago, but OpenAI lacked sufficient staff to develop the product due to other priorities.

OpenAI launched Canvas in October, a ChatGPT feature that makes drafting documents and code easier with AI assistance, as a possible first step toward full collaboration tools. More recently, OpenAI developed but has not launched software allowing multiple ChatGPT customers to communicate about shared work within the application.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from OregonLive: Together, the four founders of Beaverton startup AheadComputing spent nearly a century at Intel. They were among Intel's top chip architects, working years in advance to develop new generations of microprocessors to power the computers of the future. Now they're on their own, flying without a net, building a new class of microprocessor on an entirely different architecture from Intel's. Founded a year ago, AheadComputing is trying to prove there's a better way to design computer chips.

"AheadComputing is doing the biggest, baddest CPU in the world," said Debbie Marr, the company's CEO. [...] AheadComputing is betting on an open architecture called RISC-V -- RISC stands for "reduced instruction set computer." The idea is to craft a streamlined microprocessor that works more efficiently by doing fewer things, and doing them better than conventional processors. For AheadComputing's founders and 80 employees, many of them also Intel alumni, it's a major break from the kind of work they've been doing all their careers. They've left a company with more than 100,000 workers to start a business with fewer than 100.

"Every person in this room," Marr said, looking across a conference table at her colleagues, "we could have stayed at Intel. We could have continued to do very exciting things at Intel." They decided they had a better chance at leading a revolution in semiconductor technology at a startup than at a big, established company like Intel. And AheadComputing could be at the forefront of renewal in Oregon's semiconductor ecosystem. "We see this opportunity, this light," Marr said. "We took our chances." It'll be years before AheadComputing's designs are on the market, but the company "envisions its chips will someday power PCs, laptops and data centers," reports OregonLive. "Possible clients could include Google, Amazon, Samsung or other large computing companies."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SiliconANGLE: Hugging Face has open-sourced the blueprints of two internally developed robots called HopeJR and Reachy Mini. The company debuted the machines on Thursday. Hugging Face is backed by more than $390 million in funding from Nvidia Corp., IBM Corp. and other investors. It operates a GitHub-like platform for sharing open-source artificial intelligence projects. It says its platform hosts more than 1 million AI models, hundreds of thousands of datasets and various other technical assets.

The company started prioritizing robotics last year after launching LeRobot, a section of its platform dedicated to autonomous machines. The portal provides access to AI models for powering robots and datasets that can be used to train those models. Hugging Face released its first hardware blueprint, a robotic arm design called the SO-100, late last year. The SO-100 was developed in partnership with a startup called The Robot Studio. Hugging Face also collaborated with the company on the HopeJR, the first new robot that debuted this week. According to TechCrunch, it's a humanoid robot that can perform 66 movements including walking.

HopeJR is equipped with a pair of robotic arms that can be remotely controlled by a human using a pair of specialized, chip-equipped gloves. HopeJR's arms replicate the movements made by the wearer of the gloves. A demo video shared by Hugging Face showed that the robot can shake hands, point to a specific text snippet on a piece of paper and perform other tasks. Hugging Face's other new robot, the Reachy Mini, likewise features an open-source design. It's based on technology that the company obtained through the acquisition of a venture-backed startup called Pollen Robotics earlier this year. Reachy Mini is a turtle-like robot that comes in a rectangular case. Its main mechanical feature is a retractable neck that allows it to follow the user with its head or withdraw into the case. This case, which is stationary, is compact and lightweight enough to be placed on a desk. Hugging Face will offer pre-assembled versions of its open-source Reach Mini and HopeJR robots for $250 and $3,000, with the first units starting to ship by the end of the year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: [Last] week, it was announced that Docomo's emoji designs will no longer appear on any of the Japanese mobile network's devices. This marks the end of an emoji era that first began in 1999, even though the set hasn't been updated since 2013.

[...] Unlike these earlier systems, Docomo's emoji set in 1999 was explicitly tied to mobile internet use and would become the template for emoji standardization in the 2000s and 2010s, alongside emoji design sets implemented by Softbank and KDDI on their own versions of i-mode (J-Sky and EZweb, respectively). Docomo's set would receive several updates between 1999 and 2013, introducing color support and additional concepts to the keyboard. But now, as per this week's announcement, it will finally be discontinued. Spanning 26 years, it's undeniable that Docomo's emoji set played a foundational role in emoji history, even if its last incarnation remained unchanged for almost 12 of those 26 years.

Wisk Aero and NASA have signed a new five-year partnership to advance the safe integration of autonomous, all-electric aircraft into U.S. airspace, focusing on urban air mobility and regulated eVTOL flight. Electrek reports: Wisk Aero shared details of its refreshed partnership with NASA this week. The autonomous aviation specialist has signed a new five-year Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA) with the renowned space administration. Per Wisk, this new agreement focuses on critical research led by NASA's Air Traffic Management Exploration (ATM-X) project, which is centered around the advancement of commercialized autonomous aircraft travel under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the National Airspace System (NAS).

As a specialist in autonomous, zero-emission aircraft, Wisk intends to continue its research alongside NASA to help regulators determine future eVTOL flight procedures and capabilities in the US. Regulatory developments on the to-do list for the latest NRSAA include optimizing airspace and route designs for highly automated UAM operations, establishing critical aircraft and ground-based safety system requirements for autonomous flight in urban environments, and establishing Air Traffic Control (ATC) communication protocols and procedures for seamless integration of future UAM aircraft. To achieve these goals, Wisk said its research with NASA will more specifically focus on utilizing advanced simulation and Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) flight environments, which combine live flights with a simulated airspace to enable researchers to assess future operations.

The teams from Wisk and NASA already met last month, continuing their research while beginning to determine how instrument flight procedures and advanced technologies can work together to enable safe autonomous passenger flights by 2030. Wisk Aero is a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing based in California. The aerospace manufacturer said last year that it expects its pilotless air-taxi to begin carrying passengers "later in the decade."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Kotaku: One of the most striking things about Bungie's Marathon is its presentation. The sci-fi extraction shooter combines bleak settings with bright colors in a way that makes it feel a bit like a sneaker promo meets Ghost in the Shell, or as designer Jeremy Skoog put it, "Y2K Cyberpunk mixed with Acid Graphic Design Posters." But it now looks like at least a few of the visual design elements that appeared in the recent alpha test were lifted from eight-year old work by an outside artist.

"The Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs I made in 2017," Bluesky user antire.alâ posted on Thursday. She shared two images showing elements of her work and where they appeared in Marathon's gameplay, including a rotated version of her own logo. A poster full of small repeating icon patterns also seems to be all but recreated in Marathon's press kit ARG and website...

Bungie has responded and blamed the incident on a former employee. The studio says it's reaching out to the artist in question and conducting a full review of its in-game assets for Marathon ["and implementing stricter checks to document all artist contributions."] "We immediately investigated a concern regarding unauthorized use of artist decals in Marathon and confirmed that a former Bungie artist included these in a texture sheet that was ultimately used in-game," the studio posted on X.
"As a matter of policy, we do not use the work of artists without their permission..." their X post emphasizes.

"We value the creativity and dedication of all artists who contribute to our games, and we are committed to doing right by them. Thank you for bringing this to our attention."

While Amazon won FAA approval to fly beyond an operators' visual line of sight, "the program remains a work in progress," reports Bloomberg: A pair of Amazon.com Inc. package delivery drones were flying through a light rain in mid-December when, within minutes of one another, they both committed robot suicide... [S]ome 217 feet (66 meters) in the air [at a drone testing facility], the aircraft cut power to its six propellers, fell to the ground and was destroyed. Four minutes later and 183 feet over the taxiway, a second Prime Air drone did the same thing.

Not long after the incidents, Amazon paused its experimental drone flights to tweak the aircraft software but said the crashes weren't the "primary reason" for halting the program. Now, five months after the twin crashes, a more detailed explanation of what happened is starting to emerge. Faulty readings from lidar sensors made the drones think they had landed, prompting the software to shut down the propellers, according to National Transportation Safety Board documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The sensors failed after a software update made them more susceptible to being confused by rain, the NTSB said.
Amazon also removed a backup sensor present that had been present on earlier iterations, according to the article — though an Amazon spokesperson said the company had found ways to replicate the removed sensors.

But Bloomberg notes Amazon's drone efforts has faced "technical challenges and crashes, including one in 2021 that set a field ablaze at the company's testing facility in Pendleton, Oregon." Deliveries are currently limited to College Station, Texas, and greater Phoenix, with plans to expand to Kansas City, Missouri, the Dallas area and San Antonio, as well as the UK and Italy. Starting with a craft that looked like a hobbyist drone — and was vulnerable to even modest gusts of wind — Amazon went through dozens of designs to toughen the vehicle and ultimately make it capable of carting about 5 pounds, giving it the capability to transport items typically ordered from its warehouses. Engineers settled on a six-propeller design that takes off vertically before cruising like a plane. The first model to make regular customer deliveries, the MK27, was succeeded last year by the MK30, which flies at about 67 miles an hour and can deliver packages up to 7.5 miles from its launch point. The craft takes off, flies and lands autonomously.

At its Config 2025 event on Wednesday, Figma unveiled four new AI-powered tools -- Sites, Make, Buzz, and Draw, positioning itself as a full-stack design platform to rival Adobe, WordPress, and Canva. These tools enable users to build websites, generate code, create marketing content, and design vector graphics without leaving the Figma ecosystem. The Verge reports: Figma's first solution is Figma Sites, a website builder that integrates with Figma Design and allows creators to turn their projects into live, functional sites. Figma Sites provides presets for layouts, blocks, templates, and interactions that aim to make building websites less complex and time-consuming. Additional components like custom animations can also be added either using existing code or by prompting Site's AI tool to generate new interaction codes via text descriptions, such as "animate the text to fall into place like a feather." Figma Sites is rolling out in beta for users with full seat access to Figma products. Figma says that AI code generation will be available "in the coming weeks," and that a CMS that allows designers to manage site content will be launched "later this year."

Figma Make is Figma's take on AI coding tools like Google's Gemini Code Assist and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. The prompt-to-code Figma Make tool is powered by Anthropic's Claude 3.7 model and can build working prototypes and apps based on descriptions or existing designs, such as creating a functional music player that displays a disc that spins when new tracks are played. Specific elements of working design, like text formatting and font style, can be manually edited or adjusted using additional AI prompts. Make is rolling out in beta for full seat Figma users. Figma says it's "exploring integrations with third parties and design systems" for Figma Make and may apply the tool to other apps within its design platform.

Figma Buzz is a marketing-focused design app that's rolling out in beta to all users, and makes it easier for teams to publish brand content, similar to Canva's product design platform. The tool allows Figma designers to create brand-approved templates, styles, and assets that can be used by marketers to quickly assemble emails, social media posts, advertising, and more. Figma Buzz includes generative AI tools for making and editing images using text prompts, and can source information from spreadsheets to bulk create thousands of image assets at once.

Lastly, the Figma Draw vector design app is like a simplified version of Adobe Illustrator that creatives can use to make custom visuals without leaving the Figma platform. It includes a variety of brushes, texture effects, and vector editing tools to create or adjust scalable images and logos for product design projects. Figma Draw is generally available now for full seat users as a toggle in Figma Design, with some features accessible in Sites, Slides, and Buzz. It's not quite as expansive as Adobe's wider Creative Cloud ecosystem, but Figma Draw places the two companies in direct competition for the first time since Adobe killed its own XD product design platform. It also brings some new options to the creative software industry after Adobe failed to acquire Figma for $20 billion due to pressure from competition regulators.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's accelerated Android release cycle will soon deliver a new version of the software, and it might look quite different from what you'd expect. Amid rumors of a major UI overhaul, Google seems to have accidentally published a blog post detailing "Material 3 Expressive," which we expect to see revealed at I/O later this month. Google quickly removed the post from its design site, but not before the Internet Archive saved it.

It has been a few years since Google introduced any major changes to its Material theming, but the design team wasn't just sitting idly this whole time. According to the leaked blog post, Google has spent the past three years working on a more emotionally engaging vision for Android design. While the original Material Design did an admirable job of leveraging colors and consistent theming, it could make apps look too similar. The answer to that, apparently, is Material 3 Expressive.

Google says this is "the most-researched update to Google's design system, ever." The effort reportedly included 46 separate studies with hundreds of sample designs. The team showed these designs to more than 18,000 study participants to understand how the user experience would work. In these studies, the design team used a variety of metrics, including the following:
- Eye tracking: Analyzing where users focus their attention
- Surveys and focus groups: Gauging emotional responses to different designs
- Experiments: Gathering sentiment and preferences
- Usability: Seeing how quickly participants could understand and use an interface "The result of all this is an interface that appears much more varied than the previous Material Design," writes Ars.

You can check out 9to5Google's article, which preserved many of the blog post's visuals before they were removed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place. Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena.

The Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to transform or "self-assemble" in the air or underwater, exploiting natural forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack furniture.Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017, the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and aims to overcome their biggest limitation.

In the Maldives, the direction of the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is "omnidirectional," capturing sand year-round. "It's basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area," Tibbits says. The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral reefs. Most of the country's 187 inhabited islands have already had some form of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters.

"AMD processors were instrumental in achieving a new world record," reports Tom's Hardware, "during a recent Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics simulation run on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory."

The article points out that Frontier was the fastest supercomputer in the world until it was beaten by Lawrence Livermore Lab's El Capitan — with both computers powered by AMD GPUs: According to a press release by Ansys, it ran a 2.2-billion-cell axial turbine simulation for Baker Hughes, an energy technology company, testing its next-generation gas turbines aimed at increasing efficiency. The simulation previously took 38.5 hours to complete on 3,700 CPU cores. By using 1,024 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators paired with AMD EPYC CPUs in Frontier, the simulation time was slashed to 1.5 hours. This is more than 25 times faster, allowing the company to see the impact of the changes it makes on designs much more quickly...

Given those numbers, the Ansys Fluent CFD simulator apparently only used a fraction of the power available on Frontier. That means it has the potential to run even faster if it can utilize all the available accelerators on the supercomputer. It also shows that, despite Nvidia's market dominance in AI GPUs, AMD remains a formidable competitor, with its CPUs and GPUs serving as the brains of some of the fastest supercomputers on Earth.

In Delhi's Nehru Place and Mumbai's Lamington Road, technicians are creating functional laptops from salvaged parts of multiple discarded devices. These "Frankenstein" machines sell for approximately $110 USD -- a fraction of the $800 price tag for new models. Technicians extract usable components -- motherboards, capacitors, screens, and batteries -- from e-waste sourced locally and from countries like Dubai and China.

"Most people don't care about having the latest model; they just want something that works and won't break the bank," a technician told Verge. This repair ecosystem operates within a larger battle against tech giants pushing planned obsolescence through proprietary designs and restricted parts access. Many technicians source components from Seelampur, India's largest e-waste hub processing 30,000 tonnes daily, though workers there handle toxic materials with minimal protection. "India has always had a repair culture," says Satish Sinha of Toxics Link, "but companies are pushing planned obsolescence, making repairs harder and forcing people to buy new devices."

With the signing of HB25-1040 on Monday, Colorado now defines nuclear as a "clean energy resource" since it doesn't release large amounts of climate-warming emissions. "The category was previously reserved for renewables like wind, solar and geothermal, which don't carry the radioactive stigma that's hobbled fission power plants following disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima," notes Colorado Public Radio. From the report: In an emailed statement, Ally Sullivan, a spokesperson for the governor's office, said the law doesn't advance any specific nuclear energy project, and no utility has proposed building a nuclear power plant in Colorado. It does, however, allow nuclear energy to potentially serve as one piece of the state's plan to tackle climate change. "If nuclear energy becomes sufficiently cost-competitive, it could potentially become part of Colorado's clean energy future. However, it must be conducted safely, without harming communities, depleting other natural resources or replacing other clean energy sources," Sullivan said.

By redefining nuclear energy as "clean," the law would let future fission-based power plants obtain local grants previously reserved for other carbon-free energy sources, and it would allow those projects to contribute to Colorado's renewable energy goals. It also aligns state law with a push to reshape public opinion of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy proponents promise new reactor designs are smaller and safer than hulking power plants built in the 20th century. By embracing those systems, bill supporters claimed Colorado could meet rising energy demand without abandoning its ambitious climate goals.

MojoKid writes: Similar to Nvidia's recent desktop graphics launches, there are four initial GeForce RTX 50 series laptop GPUs coming to market, starting this month. At the top of the stack is the GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU, which is equipped with 10,496 CUDA cores and is paired to 24GB of memory. Boost clocks top out around 2,160MHz and GPU power can range from 95-150 watts, depending on the particular laptop model. GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs for both laptops and desktops feature updated shader cores with support for neural shading, in addition to 4th gen ray tracing cores and 5th gen Tensor cores with support for DLSS 4. The GeForce RTX 50 series features a native PCIe gen 5 interface, in addition to support for DisplayPort 2.1b (up to UHBR20). These GPUs are also fed by the latest high speed GDDR7 memory, which offers efficiency benefits that are pertinent to laptop designs as well. Performance-wise, NVIDIA's mobile GeForce RTX 5090 is the new king of the hill in gaming laptops, and it easily bests all other discrete mobile graphics options on the market currently.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm has reportedly filed secret complaints against Arm with the European Commission, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Qualcomm argues that Arm's open licensing approach helped build a robust hardware and software ecosystem. However, this ecosystem is under threat now as Arm moves to restrict that access to benefit its chip design business, namely compute subsystems (CSS) reference designs for client and datacenter processors and custom silicon based on CSS for large-scale clients.

Qualcomm has presented its case to the EC, U.S. FTC, and Korea FTC behind closed doors and through formal filings, so it does not comment on the matter now. Arm rejected the accusations, stating that it is committed to innovation, competition, and upholding contract terms. The company called Qualcomm's move an attempt to shift attention from a wider commercial dispute between the two companies and use regulatory pressure for its benefit.

Indeed, the antitrust complaints align with Qualcomm's arguments in a recent legal clash with Arm in Delaware. Qualcomm won that trial, as the court ruled that the company did not break the terms of its architecture license agreement (ALA) and technology license agreement (TLA) by acquiring Nuvia and using its IP in its Snapdragon X processors for client PCs. Arm said it would seek a retrial. However, Qualcomm seems to want to ensure that it will have access to Arm's instruction set architecture and technologies by filing complaints with antitrust regulators.

Besides administering standardized pre-college tests, America's nonprofit College Board designs college-level classes that high school students can take. But now they're also crafting courses "not just with higher education at the table, but industry partners such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the technology giant IBM," reports Education Week.

"The organization hopes the effort will make high school content more meaningful to students by connecting it to in-demand job skills." It believes the approach may entice a new kind of AP student: those who may not be immediately college-bound.... The first two classes developed through this career-driven model — dubbed AP Career Kickstart — focus on cybersecurity and business principles/personal finance, two fast-growing areas in the workforce." Students who enroll in the courses and excel on a capstone assessment could earn college credit in high school, just as they have for years with traditional AP courses in subjects like chemistry and literature. However, the College Board also believes that students could use success in the courses as a selling point with potential employers... Both the business and cybersecurity courses could also help fulfill state high school graduation requirements for computer science education...

The cybersecurity course is being piloted in 200 schools this school year and is expected to expand to 800 schools next school year... [T]he College Board is planning to invest heavily in training K-12 teachers to lead the cybersecurity course.
IBM's director of technology, data and AI called the effort "a really good way for corporations and companies to help shape the curriculum and the future workforce" while "letting them know what we're looking for." In the article the associate superintendent for teaching at a Chicago-area high school district calls the College Board's move a clear signal that "career-focused learning is rigorous, it's valuable, and it deserves the same recognition as traditional academic pathways."

Also interesting is why the College Board says they're doing it: The effort may also help the College Board — founded more than a century ago — maintain AP's prominence as artificial intelligence tools that can already ace nearly every existing AP test on an ever-greater share of job tasks once performed by humans. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI," David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board, said in a wide-ranging interview with EdWeek last month. "How do we make high school relevant, engaging, and purposeful? Bluntly, it takes [the] next generation of coursework. We are reconsidering the kinds of courses we offer...."

"It's not a pivot because it's not to the exclusion of higher ed," Coleman said. "What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

Slashdot reader Required Snark shared this article from Phys.org: In the realm of science fiction, [sun-energy capturing] Dyson spheres and ringworlds have been staples for decades. But it is well known that the simplest designs are unstable against gravitational forces and would thus be torn apart. Now a scientist from Scotland, UK has shown that certain configurations of these objects near a two-mass system can be stable against such fractures...

[A] rigid ring around a star or planet, as in Larry Niven's "Ringworld" series of novels, is also unstable, as it would drift under any slight gravitational differences and collide with the star. So [engineering science professor Colin] McInnes considered a restricted three-body problem where two equal masses orbit each other circularly with a uniform ring of infinitesimal mass rotating in their orbital plane. The ring could enclose both masses, just one or none... McInnes also investigated a shell-restricted three-body problem with the shell also of infinitesimal mass, again with the shell enclosing two masses, one or none.

For the restricted ring, McInnes found that there are seven equilibrium points in the orbital plane of the dual masses, on which, if the ring's center were placed, it would stay and not experience stresses, akin to the three stable Lagrange points where a small mass can reside permanently for the two-body problem... McInnes restricted this research to a planar ring (in the plane of the circularly orbiting masses) but says it can be shown that a vertical ring, normal to the plane, can also generate equilibria...

These results can aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, McInnes said, "If we can understand when such structures can be stable, then this could potentially help direct future SETI surveys." An important technosignature would be one bright star orbiting in tandem with an object showing a strong infrared excess. Shells around a sun-exoplanet pair or an exoplanet-exoplanet pair could also be possible. A nested set of Dyson spheres is also a feasible geometry.
In 2003 Ringworld author Larry Niven answered questions from Slashdot readers...